With Halloween coming around, came the Halloween update to the game server I run. Up until now, the server has only seen at most 16 players at a specific time of day. As soon as I updated to the new map and system, mostly because it was new stuff, my server was so full that I couldn't even join myself.
But with this update, meant I needed to update all of my client side modifications. My server was crashing me and people trying to join! Some of my modifications were outright outdated. I ended up having to redo the process of piecing together all the different modifications because my attempt at updating the core of it all made it impossible to even join the server without crashing the entire thing. It took me a few hours, but it is up and working now.
This is a good step however. It's been months since I had to really make such a big update. I finally got around to adding reserved slots for example. Reserved slots allow me to give special permissions to people, such as myself, to join the server even if it is full. And with my server now on equal grounds with any other server running the same new map, people are more likely to join mines. This has given me the incentive I need to focus on setting up a donation system and benefits. I'm also working on putting up some better advertisement of my own community through the server. I haven't so much as considered putting in a welcome message that explains what community the server is from and some of its basic rules.
After getting all this to work for my server, I would also have to figure out how to add a page to my website that links to paypal and see if I can get a friend to make a bot or something to update people's statuses, because until that I would need to manually approve everyone.
I'm also considering expanding my server. Right now I only host one type of game. But there's another game type that I'm particularly well known for amongst a few gaming communities. It takes a lot more work to set up, but is also a much more popular game mode. The problem being, I didn't want to just trade out my first game server for this, I'm busy with college, and it would double my server expenses to do so.
