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So this is a post I've been meaning to make for a while, but never got really motivated enough to set aside the time and do so, but I feel particularly motivated, after being on the receiving end of some pretty nasty criticism. TL;DR at the bottom.
So as many of you who have been here for more than 3 months, we didn't have !ws, !knife, etc for over a year. For those of you oldschool folks who have been here since the beginning (2+ years ago), we actually did have weapon skins/knife plugins when they came out.
A bit of a timeline, for context:
So what do I do? Sit idly by while I lose players every day to shit tier servers, just because they have weapon skins? "But sneaK it's not about weapon skins if you have a good server they'll stay" - bullshit. I've experienced this first hand, with our community, and others. Lots of people just want to flip around cool skins all day. "If you can't beat em, join em."
Those are just my thoughts on the matter and the logic as to why we are one of those "bad servers". I used to hate them too, but I'm just tired of Valve wanting to be the judge, jury and executioner - but not communicate a damn thing. If Valve came up with a way that actually stopped servers from being able to hand out weapon skins/knives, or actually enforced their own rules, I'd be totally fine with it. In fact, I'd probably prefer it. People would actually play the damn game instead of playing with/focusing on skins. With how it is now, we lose out 9 times out of 10. Valve has forgotten that without mods and community servers, CS:GO would not exist today. Thanks for reading.
TL;DR - Valve has proven that they don't care about actually stopping the usage of weapon skins/knives, are money driven, and do not support community servers.
So as many of you who have been here for more than 3 months, we didn't have !ws, !knife, etc for over a year. For those of you oldschool folks who have been here since the beginning (2+ years ago), we actually did have weapon skins/knife plugins when they came out.
A bit of a timeline, for context:
- Beginning: Once we fired up back under the old gaming community 2 years ago, we had knife plugin. This was pretty standard on pretty much every community CS:GO server.
- Mid April 2015: The original weapon skins plugin came out. As you guys know, keeping a keen eye out for cool new plugins/features all the time, I hopped right on it and added it to the servers. I helped do some debugging with the plugin author, and completely refactored, organized, and added missing weapon paints to the config file - this is actually the basis of what you'll see on many servers.
- July 2015: An official request by a CS:GO dev was sent to the CS:GO Server Operators e-mail list, essentially a kind of nice 'cease and decist using these plugins'. Knife/weapon skins plugins were immediately removed from our servers. Shortly after, I implement !takeknife plugin, which abides by Valve's Game Server Operation Guidelines.
- October 2015: (I could be a bit off), Valve experimented with master list server IP bans for servers that still used these plugins. It was incredibly effective.
- November 2015: Valve got a lot of backlash from the community and GSP's, so they introduced a GSLT system - you can read more about it here.
- December 2015: I add custom knife models. The community had been really on my case about re-implementing !ws/!knife since no real action had been taken in a long time, so I had found a middle ground where I was sticking to the rules, while giving the community what they want. This plugin was also OK by Valve's Game Server Operation Guidelines.
- January 26, 2016: I receive a GSLT ban on my main account, despite not having weapon skins/knife/etc plugin (a nice late birthday present to me, thanks Valve!). To this day, I'm not sure if it was !takeknife or the custom knives (assuming takeknife). I emailed several members of the CS:GO team at Valve, finally got a very short response after a few attempts, and no explanation of the ban. I followed up the email with an explanation of how it works and how it is compliant - yet I was still banned, and never received another response. After quite some investigation, it turns out Valve implemented checks for certain functions and changes, that basically makes the server tattle on itself, and gets added to a list for a ban wave. Some of these functions have legitimate uses (i.e. giving you your skin on the opposite team, say your AK-47 Elite Build, but when you're on the CT team).
- August - October 2016: I've become aggravated by seeing more and more servers pop up using weapon skins and knife again. Obviously these servers get wildly popular, because they have cool skins, yo! I send out a series of emails to numerous CS:GO team members at Valve, no response to any single email. Here are the emails. At this time I have also been talking extensively to other community leaders (both large and small), and we all feel the same way. As you can see here, I'm pretty ticked, and I'm doing everything I can to play by the rules, without risking losing my community, as with the other community leaders I've been speaking with.
- February 2017: Since the start of this timeline, I've been adding cores to our existing VPS where the servers are hosted to support our growing community, I've added a dedicated database server & website, upgraded that as needed, and eventually I upgrade all of our servers to be on a single dedicated server to eliminate performance issues. All this costs $$, and while existing donations are nice, this ups my cost by ~40% since the final VPS upgrade. Leaves me in a bit of a pickle in how to attract more players.
- Early March 2017: I begin testing weapon skins/knife & GSLT ban bypass system on our rebooted KZ server - immediately we get more traffic in one day, than we ever had in a single day when it was up a year prior.
- Late March 2017: I add !ws/!knife to our most popular servers.
So what do I do? Sit idly by while I lose players every day to shit tier servers, just because they have weapon skins? "But sneaK it's not about weapon skins if you have a good server they'll stay" - bullshit. I've experienced this first hand, with our community, and others. Lots of people just want to flip around cool skins all day. "If you can't beat em, join em."
Those are just my thoughts on the matter and the logic as to why we are one of those "bad servers". I used to hate them too, but I'm just tired of Valve wanting to be the judge, jury and executioner - but not communicate a damn thing. If Valve came up with a way that actually stopped servers from being able to hand out weapon skins/knives, or actually enforced their own rules, I'd be totally fine with it. In fact, I'd probably prefer it. People would actually play the damn game instead of playing with/focusing on skins. With how it is now, we lose out 9 times out of 10. Valve has forgotten that without mods and community servers, CS:GO would not exist today. Thanks for reading.
TL;DR - Valve has proven that they don't care about actually stopping the usage of weapon skins/knives, are money driven, and do not support community servers.
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