Monthly donations are always still welcome

I'm really thankfull for the F2P and new vanilla servers, the last year has been a constant struggle to keep the 1 server going and keeping people interested, and now its just such a reward to have 8 fucking full servers and people enjoying a still very awesome game!

It's awesome, BUT I CANT GET IN THE SERVERS ;_; (sadpinky)

Buy.a.reserved.slot.you.penishoofd!

They're all full!
Awesome.

I'm guessing SpA servers haven't seen such an increase in activity for a long time? Making the game F2P might've been the best step they could make?

Anyway, just wanted to say it's pretty cool the new people can easily play in SpA now.

Does this increase the needed monthly donations too? Or it doesn't matter?

Extra players require extra bandwidth, so it does cost some extra money.

The most money however is required to upgrade our hardware, which is nearing it's 3 years of age. If TF2 remains popular like it is now in let's say a month, we'll put another machine in the datacenter to launch even more servers, or to make space for new games. We still have hardware for this machine, however if we fully want to upgrade our entire environment we're looking at a small sum of around 2500,- euros.

So keep those donations coming, and we'll keep the servers & fun coming!

Text ads in servers probably wouldn't help much? I'm just curious, is there any kind of service that puts image ads on map walls in the server? Like real life outdoor print advetising, but inside the game somehow, on map walls as posters. I'm sure it's possible, but has this been done already? Each server sees hundreds of people a day, couldn't it be used for our advantage by selling ads somehow? If not, would there be a point in developing such a service? Game Ads or whatever?

Not that I'd like to see the place cluttered with ads.

Ingame advertising has been forbidden by VALVe and is not an option unfortunately.

Ingame advertising has been forbidden by VALVe and is not an option unfortunately.

Ingame advertising has been forbidden by VALVe and is not an option unfortunately.

Correction then....

Advertising for profit is not permitted ingame...

Correction again

^^

We did a game once for the national guard in america, the whole game was free, but equally the whole game was one big billboard.

Hmm, okay so no in-game adverting I already came up with some great ideas how to get players to join our service, download a script that automatically changes their sprays to ads etc..

Okay, so we need more people to come to the forum from the servers? In which case maybe the first spam message a player sees by the server should be a bit more visible? Something like:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Join our forum and get a reserved slot in our servers, you never have to wait again! |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|

that is a great idea, because some people do still have to wait so getting them to sign up would be awesome! using ** and --- stuff does really help break up the spam text box and help messages catch the eye better, the green colour stands out alot too! the red's and blues seem to get lost amongst normal game text.

Also, only non-members could see the ads, I'm assuming there's a way to separate the forum users from other players, because of spapoints and all that. So In essence we could cheerfully spam them without ruining anything for us.