How do you populate your server?

[EzRemade]

I've recently purchased a 20 slot 128 tickrate server, and I've had hardly any players join and play.

I've tried sitting in the server for awhile by myself on dust 2 (steam web browser is useful in this case), tried playing with a few bots, and have even tried playing with some friends - no one joins.

Do people only play on servers with gameME or HLStatsX?

It's frustrating to have a nice server all set up and have no one join

[Sim]

The problem with CS:GO is valve promotes "official" servers over community servers. No one will be sent to community servers unless they use community servers "quick-play" or manually search using the browser. If you don't have a big community that's into CS:GO, i wouldn't rent a public server.

We can thank the modding community for valve using "official servers". The modding community does nothing to keep plugins like fakeclient from annoying the community, what did they think valve would do to make sure people can play without being tricked into joining empty servers.

[crankypunk]

Only reason I got a server was more to play with friends and have control on what runs in the server.
Here and there people show up to play but most the time its dead.
Would be fun if server was full most the day when we dont use it but yeah seems dead most the time.
We want to get back into CS and maybe get into some league at some point.. we been playing fighting games for the past years and wanted some game on the side to open up our community towards more competitive games than just fighters.

[J-English]

I've recently purchased a 20 slot 128 tickrate server, and I've had hardly any players join and play.

I've tried sitting in the server for awhile by myself on dust 2 (steam web browser is useful in this case), tried playing with a few bots, and have even tried playing with some friends - no one joins.

Do people only play on servers with gameME or HLStatsX?

It's frustrating to have a nice server all set up and have no one join

same thing happend to me,fortunately we have a few buddies,soon as we play on our server they all join,and gets filled up it only takes a couple of people to trigger it off.

come join us - we could start something off

[finn]

There are already a ton of servers sitting on dust2 empty, if you don't have any friends to join you it will never fill up. You need to either break the mold or make some more friends to populate your server.

[EzRemade]

The thing is, the first two days I owned the server I had people joining no problem. Even sitting there by myself would eventually see someone join, and then it would expand quickly from there.

Now, it doesn't seem to happen at all. Which sucks.

I've hosted so many CS servers in the past, both 1.6 and CSS, and I could always populate them by myself, sometimes it just took a little while. To be unable to even get close to those results on a new game just sucks.

As it's been said, most of the players are on "match making", and since match making isn't very good (i.e queuing with friends, only to end up on different teams, or in a full game), I honestly wonder how successful this game will be long term.

[IcEWoLF]

Like they said, unless you got a bunch of players into your community that are looking to invest time on CS:GO, then renting a server is not a good idea.

[EzRemade]

My idea was to start a new community. If there's no hope for new communities, then the game is dead before it's even gone anywhere.

[IcEWoLF]

My idea was to start a new community. If there's no hope for new communities, then the game is dead before it's even gone anywhere.

Well the more established communities in CS:S moved on to CS:GO...or I should say extended to CS:GO.

Anyways, you will have to have a core group of guys to help you filling up the server and of course hope there will be regulars.

[LittleB]

The games still fairly new & a little buggy.It also doesn't hurt to have a website with forums & to advertise on other forums etc.

[IcEWoLF]

The games still fairly new & a little buggy.It also doesn't hurt to have a website with forums & to advertise on other forums etc.

This too, just need to make sure you have enough people dedicating time on a daily basis.

It would be hard to expect to see a server filling up without few dedicated players playing on your server.

[FlyingMongoose]

#1 way to populate, existing population.

I know catch 22 there, but the best way to get people to populate your server is to sit in it, whether empty or not, and wait, the most popular servers (DoD: Source and CS: Source) I ever ran were ones that I was able to play in when I had an extremely slow moving job, me and my buddy there would 1 on 1 for hours before population would begin to appear (this was on a daily basis) eventually the server began populating itself. It took 3 weeks (per server without interruption of our daily routine) before we had regulars self-populating.

That means you need to have yourself, and your team members, and your friends willing to sit in empty servers, on a daily basis every day.

[Cain]

You need three things:

1) A game with a good, dedicated population playing it.

2) An outstanding server with ample CPU cycles, preferable Network routing and maps and settings players like.

3) A dedicated group to sit in there when it is empty and spend hours committed to getting it busy.

Here at NFO you have 1 and 2, & 3 is up to you!

[Cain]

What do you guys use for round time??

Also, have you changed the default time for the bomb to detonate?