Then it went to dom_rust and everyone left (went from 22 players to 10).

On the up and up! It was a total blast!

Snooch..

Eh you are starting to sound like the 57 mapping projects I have tossed your way are starting to slow you down some? hehe.. I have no doubt and that is why I am very interested in trying to get some more mappers aboard. I just want you to know that Whut and I are aware of everything you have already done for us and we certainly appreciate it. This thing is just starting to grow by leaps and bounds and with it comes all sorts of new things that need to be done to keep it going. Need Need Need more new and better stuff to keep feeding these new friends of ours and keep em coming back.

This news on re demise is what you and I had talked about..Now that we are getting crowd sizes larges that fight club capacity we are getting into some uncharted territory with some of these maps.

What is the possibility on redoing demise on a larger scale? Broaden it out in width and depth and increase the number of spawn points. I am afraid as we get more and more crowded that spawn deaths will become and issue.

I think this has been mentioned before but I really need someone to fix NFS about now. I could really use something that size running at a fast pace without everyone going airburst mad.

Does anyone know Machinehead at all? I am seriously thinking about just asking him if we can bring a couple of his maps to the Tomb. I dont think he competes with us like we feel we gotta compete with him. He has so much demand for his 16 player server that I dont think he really needs to compete with anybody. Anybody out there know how he may feel about such a thing? Maybe he would like the chance to see even more people than 16 on his stuff.

Ultimately the map cycle is going to be able to do so much. I can design an excellant flow of maps for a small crowd. I can  design an excellant flow of maps for a large crowd. The problem is as you guys well know is that we dont always have one size or the other on the server at any one time.  I can move to a bunch of maps that would really be fun for a bunch of people to play but then these maps would be the pits in the late night early morning hours when we just wont have that many people no matter what we do. This would be akin to something like 2 or 3 people trying to play stone fort. It just never did go very well.

I have something in mind that is going to require a little bit of a change in philosphy from the way  that we have done things around here in the past. I need to get with Whut and go over some things to make sure I have everything accounted for before I go into too much detail. I will let on a little bit though and say that what I have in mind is alot like what I was experimenting with last week when the crowds starting picking up for us. What I was doing was judging the size and nature of the crowd we had and use that info to set the map flow on the fly. Even if you pick something wrong the crowd will usually start calling out their real desires and you get even an even better idea what they are in the mood for. You then end up driving a big ongoing ctf playing party pretty much for as long as you can stay with it. This goes toward one of mu ultimate goals of putting as much control as possible over the flow of maps into the hands of the people who actually come to this server. I beleive if we can give them what they want when they want it then they will keep coming back.

There is some potential for abuse here and that is why I want to talk some things out with Whut before this goes into a more wide spread practice.

Note to Whut: The practice is controlled by the maplist.txt file which you never seemed to use much. This expands and narrows choices available through the drop down menus in mani so there would be no need for command line commands and especially no need for RCON. I think that should ease your initail concerns about this but I do have some concerns of my own to talk to you about when I catch up to you again.