JiF's Gaming Community

Hi Guys, This is just a suggestion, I've noticed that our #s are way down. I believe that if we go back to running just the reg. BF maps a couple times a week that this will change. Being that I have alot of time on my hands now and still love to play this game, I find myself going to other servers to play with humans, because so many dont have our maps. This is just a thought, but I believe it to be helpfull to the server and to people who want to play more often.

i absolutely agree with you blood, don´t misunderstand me guys, love what you´re doing and also like the new maps,- at least the one i can play, lol, but it´s getting really hard for me to play here since i can´t play the bf mode and some maps in the new rotation and i´ve noticed too, that a lot of players are just not willing to download the new maps... hey, i just want to play BF with you all, love this server and playing with you guys!!!

I wasn't going to say anything but I have to agree. I think it's great that you guys have been having fun with the new maps. But I'm not really into the newer maps myself for various reasons and since there are only a couple of people on at once it's not as fun as having more on while playing. I haven't been playing much lately because I've been playing BF2 and other games (BCB2 when it goes on sale too) lately but I would probably pop on more often if it was only the original maps.

100% up to you guys but just my 2 cents.

I have raised this to the map team last week and Shell thought it was only temporary but I have to agree that we should now pull the special maps and go back to reg vanilla only(BG42 mon and tue of course if mike ever gets the script working or gives other full admin so it can be finally fixed).

It was always a trial run to try and drum up more interest/revitalize the servver but looks like its just not working. Maybe a special map day like we used to have but no longer mixed in? Don't know.

Gib

I like the new maps but agree that since we have done this the numbers are WAY down.
Maybe with the BG map days we could add a special map day and then regular maps rest of week?

I totally agree I appreciate all the hard work Shell and co are doing but at the end of the day someone new tries to join the server gets MAP NOT FOUND and they move onto another server.
Why not have a BG42 monday then a custom maps tuesday, cos I'm guessing most folks play at the weekends.
I just don't want to see the server die.

This feedback is greatly appreciated guys so please keep it coming.

I think that it's important to recognise what is fact and what is theory in this situation.

It is indeed a fact that our player numbers have dwindled over the last 2 or 3 weeks.
It is also a historical fact that at certain times of the year including spring our numbers have always dwindled.
Based on the feedback in this post and by speaking with many other players it is also a fact that the vast majority of our players like the custom maps, of course not everyone likes all maps , custom or vanilla it's just a personal preference thing.

What is not a fact but at this stage only a theory is that our custom maps are the cause of the dwindling numbers.
If all the people who have so far posted in this topic (including myself) all turned up at the same time then we would have a great time and we wouldn't be so concerned about player numbers.
I take DaftGeordies point that some new players may get a map not found and go and play somewhere else, we don't actually know how many people have done this but for sure it happens.
We need to publicise the custom map packs in a better way. I think that we should provide info in our server name that is seen by gametracker and the in-game server browser so that people would at least know where to go to get the customs. It's interesting to note that there have been 112 clicks on the second custom map pack download page so that is a good indicator that a good number of people have downloaded. Of course it won't be 112 because some of the clicks may be revisits or aborted attempts or whatever.

Another interesting fact is that our BG Mondays/Tues have seen very low numbers too so are we to conclude that BG 42 is also a reason for the fall off?
It has certainly not helped that the BG 42 automatic switchover has not been working properly for a while and we are currently discussing this with Mike to resolve or workaround the problem so your patience is greatly appreciated.

I must admit that I have not played for about 3 weeks or so now due to heavy work commitments and using my free time working on the coop version of dambuster and preparing a new custom map pack.
I will make more of an effort to join the server because like you guys I don't want to see our server wither and die , that's why I tolerate the awful ping just so that I can be with a quite unique great bunch of guys!
If I truly believed for one second that the custom maps were the cause of our low numbers , I would ask for them to be pulled immediately , the maps are not as important as the playing community. Why I'll even play Berlin ctf (yuk) if it was with a bunch of Jiffers and regulars.

The map team will of course discuss this topic and would certainly appreciate more feedback from others. In the meantime , please be patient and bear with us.

Many Thanks
Shell on behalf of the JiF Map Team (Brick,Gib,Shell)

Bravo! Shell
BF42 Numbers are down everywhere

We are waiting desperately for your Dambuster coop Map!

Good answer Shell.
Thanks again guys (Brick,Gib,Shell) for your efforts.

I'm sorry Shell, I did not mean to make it sound like the cause of our low numbers is the custom maps. I just believe that ( Newbees ) ( to our server ) would play more and get to know us and what fun we have on here if we had a few days of just Reg. maps. This might also incline them to download our custom maps.



Again I'm sorry if this came across wrong.

BG

Hey blood , no problem , I didn't take it the wrong way , I know what your good intentions are.

Don't forget though that most of our maps in the rotation are vanilla maps anyway so where are these people when a vanilla map is playing?
My guess would be that they are enjoying the spring sunshine or down the beach or sat outside the pub with a an ice cold beer!

The last time we changed the schedule was to switch to permenant coop mode because we didn't have enough players to play conquest, we lost a few human players by that switch because a lot of people don't like coop.

I also remember when we first introduced bg42 , our numbers soared and guess what , somebody posted in the forum saying that we shouldn't forget
good old bf 42 so what happened - we killed our bg 42 numbers and never got them back

These dips in numbers happen in cycles every year and of course general bf42 numbers are falling anyway. I just did an update to the in-game browser
and there were only 293 players playing on pb enabled non-password populated servers worldwide!!!!!

The best way to up our numbers is for Jiffers to get on our server (as you do regularly) then others will join in (boy I have been guilty for last 3 weeks of not playing)
Many times I have been playing alone on the server just to try and attract others to join in and I know that you do that also.
Reverting back to vanilla bf42 is imho not the way forward I beleive we need variety and excitement and jiffers / regulars to set our place on fire.

Be Happy
Shell

yo Shell, hope you didn´t get me wrong either, as i explained already i really appreciate what you and the map team are doing & i know this is a lot of work but i´ve just noticed several times, that when the rotation switches to a new map most of the players are gone, happend also yesterday after playing Husky. <It´s my problem, that i can´t play BG and some of the new maps, i know that - since i play on mac and it should be some kind of emulator problem i guess, thinking about buying me a cheap pc anyway just to play the bg mod, lol, hope to see you soon again cause i really miss playing with you too!!!

Hey curtis ,

No problem I didn't take you or anyone else's comments the wrong way either , in fact it's good to get feedback. Please can you pm me with a list of the maps that you are having trouble with and I'll see if I can help you with them.

Now regarding people who leave the server when a custom map comes up in the rotation , this is a situation where all us Jiffers can help. Here's what we can do .... if we see new players in a game we should send them an in-game chat message informing them that custom maps are at http://www.jiff.net" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. We could even do a !nextmap and if a custom map is next we could tell them. I don't know how many players left yesterday but I would imagine it wasn't very many because we didn't have many visitors anyway. As I said before we certainly need to publicise the custom maps in a better way and the map team will be working on this. Just think , on Mon/Tues we play bg 42 which is a massive 3gb download so a couple of relatively small free download map packs shouldn't be a big deal but we do need to publicise them better for sure. I am toying with the idea of providing links to every individual custom map in a sticky forum post that is easy for everyone to understand.

Once again , thanks for the feedback , it has been useful since I think it will make us do things better which has got to be a good thing. I also have missed playing with you and the rest of the guys and lo and behold I tried to get on last night only to find that I have got some wierd punkbuster issue which I hope to sort out today.

-Shell


-- Sun May 29, 2011 11:21 pm --

[JiF]Alexander theGreat wrote:Hi all

I noticed a dramatical decrease of players on our server for the last weeks/months. This is a sad thing, beacause often there are 0 to 1 players online, when I want to play a round.

I noticed that a lot of the non-jiffers are leaving, when the turn comes to a custom map and before ist was a standard map. I often looked with BFRM for the maps and when I knew that a custom map would be next I told the people that this will happen and if they don´t have the maps they should go to the forum and follow the download link. Not very much people answered me. When the map changed, most of them were disconnected.

Then I found out, when I only set standard maps mith BFRM that the server is "filling". New players come to play and so on. I did this yesterday morning and we were most time more than 6 players.

I doubt that all the non-jiffers out there are willing to download the custom map pack. I don´t know why because it is so easy and so much fun to play new maps. But I remembered myself in a similar situation. I was playing on our server for a longer time, maybe a year, very often. It was the time when monday was the "custom monday". I did not get the maps and decided not to play on monday. I really don´t know why

My suggestion is, to play the custom maps only an a special custom day, as we did before. I hope to attract with this more players to the server, like in good old times. People seem to be lazy and don´t want to change something on their pc. If they cant connect to our server, they are playing on another one.

I like the custom maps a lot and it was much fun to have so much new ones. It was a great job from shell and all the others who helped to create the map pack and also speacial maps. I hope you all understand, that I don´t want to bother anyone or something like that.

I am hoping, that there will be more players when we come back to the standard maps.

Now please give me your two cents!

Hi Alex ,
Thanks for your feedback , let's continue this discussion here in this existing topic.

I certainly can understand your frustration when people leave the server because they don't have the custom maps.
The dramatic decrease in the number of players for the last weeks/months is a normal seasonal occurence , this always happens no mattter what game/mod is being played.
Now regarding people leaving the server because they do not have the custom maps , this is certainly a problem that we need to fix for sure.

I have simplified the custom map download process and have posted a topic about this. The intention is to make this a sticky topic which is visible in a prominent position on our forum front page.
Unfortunately I do not have the privileges to setup this sticky but I have already PM'd Mike asking him to do this. We need this urgently because you did the right thing by asking the players to go to our forums but when they get there they cannot easily find a place to download them, we must help them on this. I have sent Mike a reminder and hopefully he will set this up soon.

I personally think that it will be a sad day if we remove the custom maps and a backward step for our server. The custom maps Monday idea I feel will not work , in the past Mondays was like a ghost town on our server.
We all love BG42 and we have two days of BG on our server but the numbers are really low , indicating that this is seasonal.

In summary then , I suggest that we give people a fair chance to find the map downloads and see how it goes. In my mind it's too much of a knee jerk reaction to simply say 'Let's drop the custom maps'
remember of course we had to switch to permenant coop mode because numbers were so low. There are so many new games available at the moment which are drawing players away (many Jiffers at that) although in my experience of these new games , they don't last , people get bored with them and hopefully they will come back and play some BF/BG 42 again.

I have been so busy at work lately that I simply have not had much time to play and I am also trying to get the dambuster coop map finished which I hope people will really enjoy.
We also have another custom map pack waiting to be deployed with about 6 new cool coops but we are holding off the release of this during this quiet season.

It would be great if people could feedback to this forum because if the vast majority want to drop the custom maps then we have no choice but to do so but my vote is to say - do not drop them , let's make it easy for folks to download them.

- Shell

Hi guys, finally made it somehow to get most of the custom maps running, some of them still in slow motion but that´s ok for me, since i´ve got time then for smoking a cigarette, lol... as i already wrote on this thread, i really appreciate what the whole map team is doing but i don´t think it´s due to the season anymore, that the number of players on our server is dramatically going down, since the other servers like CKUA or moongamers etc. have their usual number of players again... spent a lot of time waiting for someone to play with on our server the last few days and at least one or 2 Jiffers showed up,- but that´s it... i know that in general the numbers on all of the bf1942 servers are going down cause it´s a very old game and that´s just the way it is but maaaaannn: i love this game & i love our server & really would be glad to see more people playing here again, i really also think that it´s the way Alexander already explained: most people are just to lazy to download the custom maps, they just want to turn on their pc and start gaming & i also can understand that, cause i feel the same sometimes, good example: i´ve also an old pc (beside my mac which i play on) and especially on monday i feel a slight prickle to download the bg mode so i can play it with you but i found out i´m just to lazy for it, lol, made an agreement with myself to skip these two bg days:)) but most time i find myself playing on some deadly high ping japanese or russian server then which i honestly don´t enjoy and most time i quit after playing one map there again, hmmmm it´s difficult i know but i would also switch back to the regular maps again, at least for two weeks or so to watch the numbers of people playing then & hopefully it´s increasing then again...

Ok guys , since quite a number of you have suggested removing the custom maps from the rotation , I have done this. Let's run without the custom maps for the next 4 weeks and see if our numbers increase.
Thanks for the feedback everyone.