Hear ye, noble warriors of the Trollgame,
For over a decade, we have ridden side by side, through wars and triumphs, forging alliances, defending our strongholds, and capturing enemy castles. Our server has been the grand arena where we've spilled blood, sweat, and tears, battling valiantly on our steeds. It's been a realm of honor, camaraderie, and unyielding spirit.
Alas, dark clouds gather on the horizon. Our coffers, which have funded our grand battles and majestic feasts, are depleting. I must, with a heavy heart, lay bare the stark truth of our realm's fate. Without the gold from our generous patrons, the gates of our beloved server may be forced to close by the dawn of 2024.
Join the Rulers: If you're interested in becoming a partner and sharing the responsibility of our server, or if you have other proposals to ensure our realm thrives, I invite you to send me a private message here on the community forum. Together, we can decide the future and keep our world alive.
Share Your Ideas: Your counsel and strategies are invaluable. If you have suggestions to help or innovative ways to support our server's existence, please step forth and speak up. Again, you can reach out to me directly through a private message on the forum. Every voice matters.
So, to all our brave knights and noble warriors, let's come together. Let's make sure our battles, our friendships, and our stories continue for many more years.
Thank you for being part of our journey.
With respect,
William__Wallace
Hi, wanted to pm you but i thought it's better for it to be public, since this is a community-related topic thus they must be aware of what crucial, potential changes are being suggested (just imo, others can pm you if they want), since some of things i'll say, others might not like & in this way they'll have their chance to speak against these changes (you're the host so your decision at the end, but some suggestions are related to post-tgshotdown, which might make those specific choices more like everyone's decisions since you won't be hosting servers anymore). Also, so we can collect our ideas & buildup on eachothers' to hopefully find a better alternative than the full closure of tg or the disperse of the playerbase.
Apart from the obvious donating which's the ideal solution, got 3 solutions which are for if the donations still don't cover the monthly server costs.
Before starting with solutions, the forum's almost a ghost town so I wouldn't be suprised if none else comes to chime in. While here you did give us a clear notice of the future, I think this isn't being shared well enough in other places to make more people aware of it, & thus increase the chances of the shutdown being prevented or delayed. What can be done about that is:
1) You can (maybe twice a month) do "@everyone" in tg discord announcements channel, with a link to this topic & a concise message on what to expect. You can write for example something like "with the current insufficient support/donations, tg servers may shutdown in x months. For more info & to engage in this topic **forum topic link**. To help keep the servers alive **PayPal or BuyMeACoffe or both links**". You gotta write a short descriptive message like that, if you only put the topic link most people may not bother open it, thus stay in the dark longer.
2) Or if you want the public conversations (not the private ones through your pm) about this to be in discord instead (discord's more active), you can instead copy-paste this latest tg update message of yours into the "announcments" tab while doing "@everyone" (dont forget to mention paypal option too), and can also create a new channel there dedicated solely to the tg shutdown discussions.
3) You can also do both options above but anyways in all cases, there can also be a frequent, automatic in-game message in all tg servers (maybe whenever we join a server), that state something short like "tg servers may shutdown in x months. Visit **forum link** for more info or to help keep the servers up".
Possible Solutions:
Solution 1 - Afaik, the more servers hosted the higher the costs, right? You can already guess what this is about - maybe there can be a middle ground instead of either keeping all servers running or shutting them all down. Maybe sacrifice 1,2 or even 3 of least popular ones to keep the others alive. least popular ones would be duel, invasion & battle (not cpt battle). I play tg invasion frequently so i dont like this either, but desperate times.
Solution 2 - We open game browser, we see like over 80% percent of empty native servers that need inhabitants. Why do hosts of these servers keep them alive if there aren't players there? Isn't that a waste of money? If monthly funds still aren't enough to cover the costs of tg, maybe we have 2 options:
A ) The hosts of some of these servers redirect their servers' funds to tg servers instead, since their servers can't live without players & tg servers cant live without funds (and each has what the other needs).
Now obviously that's still 100% the decision of these hosts & if they still want to keep empty servers running, it's their money & their choice. I just think it would also be better for them to pay for something that actaully attracts players, isn't that the reason they keep their empty servers alive??
B ) Mass immigrating to these empty servers after tg shutdown. What I'm saying here is not saving tg servers themselves, but its playerbase, to prevent it from dispersing into other random servers/modules & to find new home for. There will be lots of problems with this, but at that point we won't have a better option. Some of these problems include (won't mention everything):
>> Neoeogk the trollpatch version, may not fully or even partially work in some servers. TPNeogk working is really important since it gives much life to the server, especially with the voicelines.
>> Probably not much info on how to contact the owners/hosts of these empty servers, also we'd need their permission to change server settings/maps to ones closest to the familiar tg ones, and make them compatibile with neogkTP (if that's possible, idk). If they just pay for their empty servers & forget about them, i think they wouldn't care much about us changing them to how we want & would allow it (if they themselves don't play).
>> The community dividing over which servers to join & therefore there'll be multiple servers with players (of same gamemode) but they'll have less players than 1 server having them all. They could divide over ping, server capacity, maps or any other reason. Therefore whichever servers we choose to move to, it has to be clearly announced on this forum & discord so everyone's on same page on where we're going. There'll be different opinions on where we should go with each server, but since (afaik) tg servers are one of the most popular in native (meaning most people prefere them over others), imo a generally accepted approach would be the servers we go to have to be the closest we can get to tg ones in the aspects of ping, capacity, settings, and ofc full neogkTP compatability.
I did some research on the ingame servers to find potential/promising ones for all gamemodes tg has now. Keep in mind i had the "compatibile with this module" filter checked while I was on latest NeogkTP, and the only things I took note of in those servers were ping & capacity only. At the time of writing, these are the results:
INVASION, BATTLE, DUEL: servers available with same ping & same or more capacity (in solotution 1#, if you shutdown any or all of those 3 servers to cut costs, these 3 new ones are probably the closest we can get to them. it's a good compromise imo). There's also the ludus server (duel) which is even more popular than tg duel.
SEIGE: available with around 5 ping-difference & 120 player-capacity (enough except for rare cases or events).
DEATHMATCH:
A ) Same ping & 128 capacity. That server (called HYPER_ARENA) has players sometimes so it may be alot harder there to make it as tg arena server.
B ) Around 10 ping-difference & 32 player-capacity.
C ) Around 100 ping difference & 64 player-capacity (100 higher in my case, like they're located in usa).
CPT BATTLE: No specific filter for it in server filters, so hard to recognize if there are any among the servers with gametype "battle".
Again, the best option that'd avoid all this, is simply if there are enough donations that they always cover the monthly costs - not just for few months then we're back to square one.
FInal edit in january/2024: some things i said might be obvious common sense, but it was just incase, since I've had countless experiences where ppl don't do/think the common sense thing in some situations, thus not taking full advantage of what they can do to get the best possible result