Admins are asked not to change maps on their own w/o a vote unless the map is broken. In Fact nothing on VIPER should be changed w/o a vote. I thought I had emphasized that many times.
Yeah, it's EPIC where admins are free to change maps at will. VIPER is a little more democratic about it.
Quite honestly, from a longer perspective, I prefer mapcycle over vote. Vote makes it so that we were stuck with escort/RR/money/random crap classic map cycle for like 3 years now. Seriosuly, a cycle with varied map at least granted some map variety with at least some good amps in and while if one wanted to include some of the weaker maps in we were stuck having to play the again , at least there was variety. Vote gave power to the people and, imo, they've failed spectaculary. Sometimes I wish we were voting against maps rather than for.
I dunno, I've noticed VIPER admins changing maps more than EPIC admins within the past ~6 or so months.
do you expect a dumb playerbase to be able to type rtv and then choose the right map for their respective playercount? i'd rather have admins do stuff like that
OK, I am going to weigh in here and school you bitches on some truth; There is no silver bullet. EPIC has a map cycle: It provides more variety, which we all love, but it requires a solid playercount to make it viable. On lower playercount you can sometimes get a map people are not comfortable playing. If there are no admins then the server can die pretty quick because people cannot RTV. I'll never know why. -However good admins are always the ultimate solution. The correct maps are chosen & everything is peachy. VIPER has a map vote: Less variety, more repetition but vote is player count constricted so usually end up with "safer" choices - maps with established strats and roughly fitting the player count. Its not always the most exciting but it lends itself to consistency. Sometimes people vote terrible maps for the situation & cannot RTV. I'll never know why. -However good admins are always the answer. The correct maps are voted & everything is peachy. Anyway - my point is, whatever you prefer is coloured by what kind of player you are, who/how many are playing. In either case when server population drops you are going to need to fall back on good active admins. Fortunately there is a choice of servers, unfortunately there aren't enough people playing that you get to choose most of the time!
+1 Candles. Frankly, including myself, there isn't a single admin on VIPER, who has NEVER(or even seldom) changed a good stuff to "other" stuff, without/with a vote. "Being more democratic" is never really the way you distinguish VIPER admins. It's not really democracy if you force players to pick between rainbowroad and money, while the nextmap is mvalley.
I hear a lot of people moan about admins changing to rainbow road, etc. Hardly ever actually gets reported though. I rarely see it & I watch the server quite a lot when I am not playing with HLSW. I'm not saying it doesn't happen but I don't think it happens all the time. I recently installed some monitoring software on the server & I'm writing a custom sensor that will search the server log files every 60 seconds or so and e mail alerts for certain hits. So yeah, we'll soon see
I'm the main offender when it comes to changing the maps, sorry D: I usually do it when we have 8 or less players, and the next map is something huge because nobody ever bothers to nominate or check what they are voting for. 6 person forest gets pretty old. I will stop doing it from here on out.
Make it send and alert when !ADMIN! is called in general chat or something similar so we can get an admin online if we need one.
It's not so bad when it's late at night; if there's ten people on the server at midnight and the number is going down, then switching to a novelty map or a small map isn't a bad thing. The problem is admins changing the map when there's 20+ players on the server simply because they don't like the map or a minority of players are screaming for something like rainbowroad or money or because they threw up a map vote five minutes into the round. The moment that both teams start firing at each other, forcing a map vote becomes a very bad idea because people are most likely going to press a random number to decide on the map.
What Candles said. When it population drops really I really don't care what maps an admin chooses because realistically you only have 5-6 choices and chances are you already have played them & there is no chance to repopulate the server anyway regardless. Whole conversation is totally out of proportion anyway. @Viroman, no - It isn't the bloody bat-light! Its so I can monitor server errors and a handful of things I don't want and can gather some stats.
I dont know why my ADB+ keeps shutting down for no reason, but I finaly got to see some images on this board. Azk, why is your avatar a crude drawing of a dick?
Because when Devourawr came and stayed with me he jacked up my forum account and changed it. I never changed it back. I kinda like it now.
I agree, if there are 6 people on the server and a map the size of mvalley is next sure it is a good decision to set it to a smaller map w/o a vote. and yes late at night when there are only a few the players want some fun maps to play on sure I have no problem with that either, it is when there are enough players like 16 or more and an admin decides they don't like the map or rather play something else is where I have the issue with changing it w/o a mapvote. If there is enough players but they are sitting in spec, it tells the admin they don't want to play that particular map, then its a good time to put up a mapvote or if the server starts emptying because the players don't want whatever map is on, then yes a mapvote is in order, but one of the choices In a mapvote should be "Don't Change" Other than those 2 reasons I don't see a need for a mapvote to be initiated, unless I am overlooking a third reason.
