How to deal with the trickshotting server problem.

Buildershed

Ok, I know what some of you are going to say,
"I play on these servers all the time" "I love these servers" "why you shitting on the community."
I know that many of you like to play around with snipers in CoD but 3 quarters of the servers shouldn't be dedicated to trickshotting.

Before you all start to bullshit me out, you need to look at the player counts of 99% of these trickshotting servers, a majority have no players on and they say that there is a huge demand for these servers. My question is, why do people like shake pump out these servers so much if 99% of them are empty. It's even a problem in Europe too but not as bad. In NA(the continent I live on) there's only 2 tdm servers, which they barely have people on. I also realize that there are going to be people that will tell me "use awog" or "LOOK HERE ARE SOME NON TRICKSHOTTING SERVERS ARE YOU BLIND?", the thing about those are is that they either have overly high amounts of ping for being in Europe or they are empty. 175 ping isn't enjoyable worth of shit and neither are empty servers.

So, here's the solution.

I'm going to list 2 solutions, one is for the developers, and the other is for the community.

Patch the commands, mods, etc that are allowing the trickshotting servers to exist. This would certainly teach them and discourage any unneeded overflow of these servers.
Stop funding these people's kickstarters, paypal, etc. Many of these people like shake rely on sites like Kickstarter to pump their servers out. If they only pump out trickshotting servers and overload the systems and browsers with them, then stop funding and paying them and they will realize that nobody wants trickshotting servers anymore.

I'm going to drop some pics to show the problems.

The only domination servers
2020.02.23-14.49.png

The TDM servers https://imgur.com/7vaSU1t

All the Trickshotting servers https://youtu.be/WB11BMEDNOY

Pay attention to the current player counts, and the counts from a couple of months ago. These servers practically deterred a lot of players. Let me also stress that these servers also deter newer players from playing and console refugees because of the skill needed. It's not like a majority of players come from FaZe and ion warpzy.

Mr. Android

Hey,

First of all, I appreciate your structured post, I can see you're speaking from frustration.

In most parts the staff team agree with you, 95% of us are not trickshotters either. However - it needs to be recognised that the trickshotting community is what brought enough life to the project again for us to even bother trying to update it and get it off the ground again.

That's not to say we should focus on them though, infact we haven't - I'm not sure if you've checked our 2 progress update threads but they provide great insight into what is taking up our time, the latest one shows the main menu redesign we are working on, which IMO provides a much better solution, the ability to filter out various servers altogether. The entire idea of the Mod is to allow more modding, it's up to the community to support servers with mods they like or content creators they like. Or vanilla servers if thats what they want to see more of.

We need to cater for all our players and I feel this is the best way without making either side feel under represented.

In regard to server counts - the Staff Team are due to have a meeting this weekend so I'll raise the point of putting up some official Pluto TDM / DOM servers so we have a baseline of them to avoid the problem you are mentioning.

I may also try to help the problem further by suggesting the quickmatch options we are working on to prioritize Plutonium Official servers.

I have to disagree on your comment on Playercounts, the spike was due to trickshotters, I believe the biggest drawback at the moment is the lack of anticheat, which we are working tirelessly on bringing to reality along with IW5. I believe the next update and the one that follows will enable us to have a stable mod that we can begin to develop better features for and those updates will be enough to please both trickshotters and normal players, I doubt it will ever reach 2000 concurrent players again but i'd be happy with 400 normal players.

I'm not sure how much of Pluto's history that you know but in 2018 we put the mod into an 'offline' patch due to having no players, it sat like that for 18 months and then the trickshotters started making videos, we've been scrambling to get the next update ready ever since.

In regards to your point about not funding kickstarters etc, I fully agree with you, in the early 2010's people would share GSC code freely and help each other without the idea of payment, it seems in 2020 the community is used to being charged for tiny items like skins so fully expect to pay for basic features on servers. Sadly as you mentioned, that's entirely community based though, we try to provide area's here for people to get the help for free but most simply want something to work instead of doing it themselves.

You seem to be of the opinion that nobody wants trickshotting servers which I think is yourself being blinded by your opinion of them, they should be able to peacefully coexist, we just need some time to adjust our mod to accommodate both playstyles.

I'm gonna lock this, simply because I can't see other people responding with the same maturity as your original post. If you would like to discuss this further though I'm more than happy to chat via Discord DM's.
Mr. Android#9053

If you haven't read the progress updates then I suggest you do We all have jobs and adult lives that take up more of our time than we would like but we're getting there. Most of the Staff Team work within IT and right now CoronaVirus is forcing us to work from home whilst also ensuring all our coworkers can work from home, as you can imagine that takes it's toll.

https://forum.plutonium.pw/topic/37/a-small-update-on-what-we-have-been-working-on/
https://forum.plutonium.pw/topic/291/time-for-another-progress-update/

Xerxes

There is not much to say after Mr. Android's comment.

Besides that you paint the picture a bit too dark. There are more normal servers than you know of. AWOG alone has 3 more servers and you are for example are missing all Reaction Gaming, but that is no surprise as the PSU in their dedicated server died.

Let me assure you that there have been plenty of heated discussions internally and there won't be any difference in that during the next meeting but to effectively do something against them we need a newer back-end as we can only blacklist or rate limit based on the IP-Addresses of servers atm.

But as always good things take time.