On Saturday Management had a meeting, mostly because for various reasons it looks like we'll have to move down from two server machines to one at some point. We talked about a load of stuff,
Green took some notes here.
Please read the full notes if you missed the Sunday meeting but the tl;dr in terms of games is -
- We're dropping the Red Orchestra 2 servers. The 2x64 slot servers take up a huge chunk of space on the machine, nobody from the SpA community uses them any more and in the two year they've been up as far as I can tell only one person that actually uses the servers has come here to say hi, so it doesn't make any sense to keep them around.
- Minecraft is being reduced from 16gb to 12gb of memory to help with the transition. This should have virtually no impact on performance.
- TF2 will go to 1 vanilla server and 1 MVM server, with the Events server coming in and out of hibernation as we need it.
So that makes the merge from two machines to one technically possible without having much overall impact.
Donations!
The other thing we need though is donations. Moving down to one machine reduces costs so we're looking at 120/euros a month total. Saint is happy to keep paying half of that, so we're aiming for
60 euros/month from donations, or in other words 10 people paying 6 euros/month (which atm is almost exactly £5/month), which we thought sounded pretty reasonable and achievable as a minimum. More would be better of course, particularly because the hardware's getting pretty old and it may or may not survive the transplant to a new data centre that's coming up somewhere down the road, so having a bit of cash spare for upgrade would be really handy for the future. Saint's looking into getting the finances sorted so we have an easy way to set up monthly donations for anyone who would like to help out, but if you've got any methods that you would like to use then let us know.
Questions we have for everyone!
Like I said, all the details are in the google doc (and if there's anything that needs clarification let me know) but to boil everything down to some questions we need to ask you guys:
- We talked about setting up a Discord for us to use: if people were active on it then it would be an easy way to get in touch with everyone at the same time. There seems to be some interest in this so far, so who else would use it?
- How can we make the baseline 60/euros a month thing work? What platform would you guys like to use to make recurring donations?
- What else could we use SpA for? Think of it less as an exclusively gaming platform and more as a webspace for people to use for whatever personal projects they wanted to run with. For example, if I keep making youtube videos for a year or so and I get a community forming on my channel then I might want to use SpA as a base for that community, or do a related blog here, or something. The possibilities are basically endless here and I think it's going to come down to what individuals want to do, but if there's anything that anyone wants to try out we'd probably be excited to run with it!
- Not so much a question as a discussion points: games tend to be moving away from community-hosted servers toward quickplay/matchmaking type things hosted on the developer's end. SpA used to grow (in MC still does I guess) through randoms joining a particular server and integrating into that server community. So we have to think about how people find and join the community in the future: for example in Overwatch, yeah we like to play games together and fill out a team of 6, but we should also look for opportunities to have people join our group and have wider connections forming. Zombakias is work on some marketing/advertising stuff, which the Clans are part of. We should also be looking for more opportunities to do things like Cards Against Humanity, Jackbox games and other stuff that doesn't require everyone having the same game installed to play, meaning the people who play different games aren't exclusively on their own little islands all the time and have a chance to hang out with the rest of SpA.
I think I got the most important stuff, if anyone else at the meetings spots anything I missed then please cover my ass
Cheers,
Byte Me who I guess is speaking on behalf of management