Monthly Mod Event Thread

While there are many good mods out there today, an unfortunate plague infects quiet a few of them. Many of you know what plague I'm speaking of and have experienced it before. The plague I'm speaking of is desertion. There are many good mods out there that people simply Do Not Play. While the following suggestions are bold you can take them as you please.

I know ModDB has been doing everything in their power to give modders the spotlight they need to get their communities started and I think thats awesome, but something ModDB could do is possibly introduce a new system where ModDB picks a mod every month, and hosts an event where everyone joins an officially hosted server for that mod (and non-officially hosted server of course) and they all get together and play that mod. Think of it as a ModDB condoned, "Lets all go play this mod for a day" event. Not only do I feel that this would cure most of the problem, but many people would end up trying mods that they might have never played before. Think of it as a community-wide get-together.

While this is a simple summary of how it would work there would obviously be more details involved and problems that come with it such as server hosts, etc. If the idea was used by ModDB or at least organized by the community itself then those issues could be solved fairly easily and an event could be organized and ran flawlessly.

Pros Summarized:

• Certain old mods would be played again boosting that mods community.
• A lot of the people who play that mod may stick and stay in that mods community as a player

Problems Summarized:

• Someone would have to organize it
• Someone would have to make sure there is at least 1 server host.

the idea has been tossed around in our virtual office before and there is always that butt that keeps it for happening here are some examples

1: Moddb is a universal site ie more then one region makes up our member ranks so hosting a server to cater to a few is something i think we would like to avoid
2: Servers cost money to host, that being said unless we start charging you guys for our service not a lot can happen.
3: The staff is made up of mostly people who give there time voluntary, running servers takes man power.

once those major issues are sorted out then we can look at the finer details.

I fully support this proposition. I think it would be a great idea to help promote the underdog. If marketed correctly and with enough effort, I'm sure it'll work out beautifully.

@ Henley -- Simple -- the mod creators would be the ones to host the dedicated server. That's what they are supposed to do, anyway, and modDB would focus only on those with an active team. You wouldn't have to run anything, but just participate. The mod teams would vie for the community's attention, and a staff member would go through sort of a checklist to decide if it's up to code with being able to handle an event such as this. That takes care of 2 and 3. I don't really get #1, since you would be catering to more than a few. You'd just have to come up with multiple times over a weekend to take care of different time zones, if that's what you mean.

Edited by: Karuto

I like the idea but this has been done before. Moddb hosted a Dystopia server for a long while and no one played sadly.

Hopefully it will be different this time around.

Karuto wrote: I fully support this proposition. I think it would be a great idea to help promote the underdog. If marketed correctly and with enough effort, I'm sure it'll work out beautifully.

@ Henley -- Simple -- the mod creators would be the ones to host the dedicated server. That's what they are supposed to do, anyway, and modDB would focus only on those with an active team. You wouldn't have to run anything, but just participate. The mod teams would vie for the community's attention, and a staff member would go through sort of a checklist to decide if it's up to code with being able to handle an event such as this. That takes care of 2 and 3. I don't really get #1, since you would be catering to more than a few. You'd just have to come up with multiple times over a weekend to take care of different time zones, if that's what you mean.

i was talking about pings from different player locations, the thing is mods who can host servers would would have them up and mods that cannot host there own would possibly have a hard time doing so. So effectively we are not helping the underdogs at all. I believe there are better ways to promote mods ie overall awareness for the mods is a great start as about 90% of mods atm dont even get on the front page!

Well, I think that if ModDB sponsered the event, and got enough peoples attention... then the players themselves could host the servers. There are enough players out there that could host servers for each area solving the localization problem as well as the other issues. Or, if a small server host signup tool was written players could volunteer for server hosting and gain ModDB Experience as a reward.

Game server solutions:

• Talk to server hosts and ask for a server sponser for the ModDB sponser event program. I'm sure a lot of server hosts would like the opportunity to donate a server for 1 day a month to help out mods, perhaps even throw them an advertisement in the announcement? This might still cause the localization issue because it depends how many donations of servers you get. However, I don't believe that you should just eliminate the idea because some people somewhere might not get great pings. The world is HUGE theres no way possible you can tailor to every single player that might play in every location.

• Why not have the players host themselves? I'm sure there will be enough players going to attend the event. You can also tie in the sites user experience system to give players a bonus who sign up to do so.

It won't work well for a two prime reasons, and thus isn't really the best thing to throw ModDB's funds at because;

1) The demographics of regular users at ModDB don't allow for enough players in a single place; there are not many users with similar enough geographical locations to make latency not be an issue, let alone times that people can play. Don't forget the difference between those still living at home, those that are students, and those that are in full time employment. All three groups of people will likely game at different times of day too.
2) The majority of the regular users do not work with the same games, and might not own the same games - that small selection of regular users may be thus separated further.

ambershee wrote: It won't work well for a two prime reasons, and thus isn't really the best thing to throw ModDB's funds at because;

What funds do they have to throw at it? No one said they had to pay for a server the only manpower involved is putting the post up online and picking a game along with some other minor decision making. It's a ModDB condoned get together, it doesn't have to be an officially sponsored paid for event.

ambershee wrote:
1) The demographics of regular users at ModDB don't allow for enough players in a single place; there are not many users with similar enough geographical locations to make latency not be an issue, let alone times that people can play. Don't forget the difference between those still living at home, those that are students, and those that are in full time employment. All three groups of people will likely game at different times of day too.

As for localization, it's simply not an issue if you read my above thread. There are so many user hosted listen servers on the internet with decent ping. The pings aren't bad enough to the point where you just alienate people from other locations. If someone is getting a too high ping, then they can just go host their own and have the other people from their local area join.

As for times, something could be easily worked out. It doesn't have to be "You have 1 hour to play" deal. It could run all day solving that problem completely.

ambershee wrote:
2) The majority of the regular users do not work with the same games, and might not own the same games - that small selection of regular users may be thus separated further.

While I see your points, I don't agree at all. The majority of users DO own similar games and play mods with. Obviously the person who choses the mod wouldn't chose a mod from some obscure game that not many people own. Many users here own quiet a few of the games this event could apply to, and even if there are only 6 or 7 people on one of the selected games for that month then I don't see a problem with that. Hey you just got 6 or 7 people to try a new mod they might not have tried before or at least play. Of course, I'm sure the turnouts would be much higher.

Theres a solution to every problem, you can't just alienate possible suggestions because of such minor issues. Imagine if I quit writing software because I ran into a bug?

Edited by: NullSoldier

as I have said there are a few staff members who do site related activities. Let me give you an idea. Ryan (Stenchy) basicly runs the content on the site, emails a heap of people to outsource and that takes up a majority of his time, not to mention he helps run the modcast with me. My main duties are to help with news authing, forum management, modcast videos and orginising and the monthly spotlight. There are a few other dedicated members of the staff who do do more around the site ie management etc and other related things to moddb. Running a gamesever takes time, energy and most of all it means you have to be there most of the time or be on hand to run the damn thing. I would know because ive run popular aussie halo pc servers and its more taxing then its worth.

The next question would be are you willing to run a project similar in size, that means everyweek contact (without fail i might add) a vast majority of mod developers and arange for them to give up there dedicated servers in order to run a sposored event in order to please members of a site they themselves might not want to have any affliation with? Chances are they will tell you to bugger off as its there server that they pay for, why would they give it up?

If your worried about a dedicated server. I have a dedicated Fios 20/20 server in Florida which I believe would be able to handle a good amount of east coast gamers. I've tried to stress all you need are players who'll host the servers themselves. Thats why the listen server functionality is there.

I understand the issues with taking time out of the ModDB staff to run the event. I would have no problem organizing the project myself, the only problem is that without much official support and a front page news article I don't think I would grab the attention of many people.

Well, I'd be willing to help run it, but I got on the bad side of one of the (in)active staff members of the site, so I don't think I'll get the chance to come back on staff. Perhaps if you had multiple people helping to organize the event without the too-many-chefs-in-the-kitchen problem, it could work.

I don't think you should run it every week, but maybe once a month, like with the Mod of the Month. I think that's really approachable, and a lot easier to market. Having it every week may be taxing due to the difficulties associated with it.

I don't think there are any mod developers out there that don't want to be associated with modDB, especially due to the fact that this would be free press! This is why you'd ask the developers themselves to compete for the chance instead of just running around asking them. It should be a privilege.

Edited by: Karuto

It's a good idea, we even did this for a while it lasted 2 - 3 weeks then public lost interest.

It breaks down to the fact the monthly mod event would not cater for everyone’s taste and the people it does cater for may not be intrested in playing, so cutting 30% to 50% of possible players out of the small number that play some mods will result in empty servers.

Henley isnt saying your idea isnt good, it has merit and you have the drive and enthusiasm we like to see then trying to get a idea off the ground.
It's just its been tried with moddb staff running it, and dedicated ones at that and it didn’t go very well.

When it was mentioned in the forums 4 pages of people saying yay awesome and news posts with the same appeared.
They thought it was awesome but didn’t really make use of it, reasons, ping, no admin, and the aforementioned reasons, taste and selection of mod.

Kick the project off, make up a good news piece and we can get it authed, there no harm in retrying the idea.

Just don’t expect any miracles, or heaps of players to take it up.

If you're talking about the dedicated server the staff put up, it got little to no advertising. We should've posted it on the front page with its own block and even a banner, but instead, it was in recluse to a news posting and a thread on the forum that didn't get much activity. If you actually had the staff members of modDB really get behind it, it'd certainly do a lot better. Not to mention, we mainly focused on Half-Life 2 instead of spreading the love to other games, so with something like this, we'd be able to cover a much wider spectrum of the fanbase. It's obvious why our last attempts failed, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to try this out.

Just would like to step in here and say that everything that ends up on the front page in terms of release directly correlates to how much effort mod teams put into their release posts. There are some instances where we contact teams and say "Hey, congrats on the release - beef up your release post if you want more coverage." However, people that take advantage of the system we have put in place benefit the most.

This is a community site first and foremost. We'd like to see these ideas community run - just like the mods on this site. That way we can focus on bringing you guys bigger and better things