74 replies to this topic

[Peiper]

Martino, I believe you misread me regarding Steiner's willingness to put you all up on our teamspeak. It was discussed, and we certainly welcome various FRR officers to come check out our teamspeak and get a tour so you can see how we are set up. I agree, the problem with FRR units meeting on our hub would be a clone of your current problem - we'd be stealing each other's recruits.

I will ask one of our teamspeak admins to hop into this thread and explain how we run our teamspeak now. We've grown to the point where we need to rent a server in order to keep up with the bandwidth demand, but you don't need that to start if you have a guy with a secondary PC dedicating to running the TS out of his back room/basement/treehouse. I do not know the details of the necessary hardware, bandwidths and if those lines have to be dedicated.

I can tell you that if a guy does do this, he has to run it out of the goodness of his heart and to support FRR as a faction, not just to buff his own unit. That is, he should probably be one of the guys who is FRR first, and his unit second. This will help ensure that no ONE player or unit can monopolize the server or dictate terms over another. You gotta go into creating your hub with the right spirit!

Edited by Peiper, 08 December 2013 - 06:42 AM.

[martino2k6]

Ah, my apologies for misunderstanding. And thanks for asking someone to give us details.

I can understand that from the start it may be enough for one guy to have the server running on a machine from the basement, but having a rented server to begin with does offer a few advantages. There would be no need to move once the bandwidth/# of users starts becoming a problem, it's simply just a matter of moving to the next higher package. Not too mention the benefits with regards to reliability and quality of the server. Also, having a cost into which some people could chip in could potentially increase the sense and strength of the community between the users who would make this faction hub their home.

[Sarsaparilla Kid]

I'll chip in, if this looks like a feasible route to take...

[Jarl Dane]

If we had have the 80 people who showed up for the Yule Tournament all on one server regularly..

Could be a new era for the FRR.

[martino2k6]

Mech The Dane, on 08 December 2013 - 09:24 AM, said:

If we had have the 80 people who showed up for the Yule Tournament all on one server regularly..

Could be a new era for the FRR.

That's wishful thinking. It only happened since there was a special event. However, I wouldn't be surprised if we could get 20-50 people there on a regular basis. Imagine the 12-mans we could run!

[Surtr]

I know an average weeknight for the 1st RDR lately sees 8 to 15 pilots, and practice night usually sees 12 to as much as 20. I imagine the drakøns and isengrim see similar numbers.

[martino2k6]

Surtr, on 08 December 2013 - 11:43 AM, said:

I know an average weeknight for the 1st RDR lately sees 8 to 15 pilots, and practice night usually sees 12 to as much as 20. I imagine the drakøns and isengrim see similar numbers.

Thanks for the numbers. In the 5th we usually see 6-8 on most days. We don't have practice days, but we can peak at 12.

From what I read before the Isengim run 12v12 on some practice days, so I would guess they could peak a bit higher at 24-26. Of course, one of them could come here and shed some more light on the specifics.

As such, counting the 1st, Isengim, and 5th, we're peaking at just under 60. That's not counting any other groups that may be interested. There's a few other groups that don't have a strong presence on the forums, but let me know either by PM or in this thread if you would be interested and your average/peak numbers. Depending on this 100 may start to look like not enough.

Edited by martino2k6, 08 December 2013 - 12:01 PM.

[Malzel]

The issue with a rented server is that the number of slots we'd need to accommodate all of the FRR groups, associated mercs, lone FRR pilots, and potential recruits on a regular basis would likely be prohibitively expensive. Even if someone did find a good deal, crowdfunding it would be like herding cats, and keeping it paying the rent would be a constant source of worry and frustration.

If we go for the non-profit license, we would just need to find 1 person among the hundreds of FRR players with the hardware, connection, and willingness to host a 24/7 TS3 server. Of the two, I think this is the much more likely scenario and much more feasible possibility.

[martino2k6]

All valid points there Malzel. With respect to accommodating an increasing amount of members, the scaling of price is not as steep as for a lower amount of slots. In other words, with 200 slots the price/slot is lower than with a 100. And once the number of users increases, so does the crowd-funding potential. If the number of users goes up, it may become a bigger burden to host this on someone's home connection.

The way I could imagine crowd-funding to work in this scenario would be to have in the description of the entry zone channel a note about how the server is funded, with goal progress and a link to help out with this. Also since most groups have their own forums a sensible thing to do would be to request the respective groups using the server to post a sticky note to the crowd-funding site. Yes, there is a leap of faith required here -- but it is one I would personally be willing to try if there was enough interest between the groups (at least with the 100 slots for 3 months to begin with).

That would be unless there is someone else willing to give this a try on a spare machine with a good home connection and a forgiving quota. I'm sure I appear as being more inclined towards the rented server option, but I'm not against the home solution. The worry I have there is the reliability, and well, what happens once that person gets tired of the game or the responsibility. You wouldn't be able to have someone take over that machine/setup with ease. The migration process would be harder and longer, than a matter of passing the account details onto another person that would like to take over the responsibility of the rented solution.

Third alternative would be a VPS service. While some of these can potentially be cheaper on a monthly basis (not including a domain) compared to just a TS3 server, they would allow to run both a TS3 server (if the provider allows this) and also websites/forums. This area is however a bit grey to me, as it is somewhat outside of my SE/CS knowledge.

Edited by martino2k6, 08 December 2013 - 03:44 PM.

[Journeyman]

~Salute~ Greetings!

Forgive my interjection but I am one of the House Steiner Hub admins and currently host the TeamSpeak server over my cable internet. We've done it this way for years as Peiper mentioned. This has been a cheap and reasonable way for us to maintain static voice comms, but does require some energy, time and passion for it. I've found myself runing home from work at lunchtime to reboot the thing when we've had sudden service disruptions and such and spent some money on added peripherals such as a UPS to assure our guys the best quality experience we could offer at a shoesting budget. Someone from FRR could do the same, but the key from our perspective is impartiality. You are creating a community made up of different units and individuals. Not everyone wants to be in a unit, but we are careful not to exclude them. The idea is to provide an atmosphere away from these forums and more "public" servers where Steiners can simply be Steiners without the extraciricular content one must deal with here. Not all units are interested...they have their own space and they like it that way which is no problem. But some have found being a part of a greater community a benefit.

Due to our growth, we are looking at upgrading to a VPS as martino2k6 has mentioned. We can host our non-profit TS license there and run websites. We are compelled to again look at the best experience for our community. As an admin, I approach every unit with the same rights and priviledges as the next, including my own. My view is, healthy units make a healthy community and we can all benefit as a result. We are not perfect and we know it but we are constantly trying to improve.

We came to what felt suited to us when it came to our setup and our attitude given how MWO will be working with Community Warfare. Communication is benfitial. I'm no expert in any of it but I'd be happy to answer any questions or to have you drop by our server sometime. We are grateful to have people like Peiper who do a great job representing the spirit of our endeavour, and I'm sure you must have people of similar attitude in your faction as well.

Edited by Journeyman, 08 December 2013 - 05:31 PM.

[Sarsaparilla Kid]

Even if some FRR units wanted to maintain their own voice comm server for official practices and such, I would think that at other times when they are just hanging out and dropping for fun, that they would benefit from doing so on an FRR-centric hub as they have the potential of gaining new recruits from pilots that wander in after reading about the hub on the forums or hearing about it from other FRR pilots. Like it or not, the FRR border planets are not going to be won or lost by the efforts of one or two of our larger units, but by the combined efforts of all pilots wearing the FRR badge during the period that a planet is in contention. There are a lot of pilots out there that haven't committed, as evidenced by their Lone Wolf badge in drops, but if you factor them out, the ones that actually wear an FRR badge are fewer and farther between compared to Steiner, Davion or Marik. We would be wise to have an FRR hub and make it well known to the community before Community Warfare arrives, else the numbers could continue to increase against us as the Lone Wolves choose one of the other more organized factions.

I was just talking to my brother, whose company hosts websites using Host Gator. He mentioned running a VPS on that particular service provider would run $30/month, if that helps in considering the alternatives.

Edited by Sarsaparilla Kid, 08 December 2013 - 05:27 PM.

[Damon Howe]

If someone is willing to pay, or a few people pitch in, that'd be awesome. That is a lot of money though...not sure how many of us have that much to spare. 30 bucks a month is half a tank of gas, which I go through plenty of.

Still, its good to see ideas being shot around. Here's hoping we can come up with something that works for all!

[martino2k6]

Sarsaparilla Kid, on 08 December 2013 - 05:26 PM, said:

Even if some FRR units wanted to maintain their own voice comm server for official practices and such, I would think that at other times when they are just hanging out and dropping for fun, that they would benefit from doing so on an FRR-centric hub as they have the potential of gaining new recruits from pilots that wander in after reading about the hub on the forums or hearing about it from other FRR pilots. Like it or not, the FRR border planets are not going to be won or lost by the efforts of one or two of our larger units, but by the combined efforts of all pilots wearing the FRR badge during the period that a planet is in contention. There are a lot of pilots out there that haven't committed, as evidenced by their Lone Wolf badge in drops, but if you factor them out, the ones that actually wear an FRR badge are fewer and farther between compared to Steiner, Davion or Marik. We would be wise to have an FRR hub and make it well known to the community before Community Warfare arrives, else the numbers could continue to increase against us as the Lone Wolves choose one of the other more organized factions.

I was just talking to my brother, whose company hosts websites using Host Gator. He mentioned running a VPS on that particular service provider would run $30/month, if that helps in considering the alternatives.

Considering that the cost would need to be shared, ideally, between the different units it may be harder to achieve crowd-funding if they don't use the hub for pretty much all of their activities and spend the time there. If you can count on them staying there then you can also better estimate the number of slots required for the server.

$30/month is a bit steep I think. I've seen cheaper ones, although this depends a lot on the bandwidth that we would require. Just to be clear from my previous last post, I wouldn't be against the VPS solution -- it's not just something I've worked with before.

[martino2k6]

Damon Howe, on 08 December 2013 - 05:40 PM, said:

If someone is willing to pay, or a few people pitch in, that'd be awesome. That is a lot of money though...not sure how many of us have that much to spare. 30 bucks a month is half a tank of gas, which I go through plenty of.

Still, its good to see ideas being shot around. Here's hoping we can come up with something that works for all!

That depends on how many people you have. $30 between 40-80 potential crowd-funders wouldn't be that much. Even better is if you go for the packages where you pay on a 3-monthly basis. You'll pay more in smaller chunks, but usually they give you discounts when you buy in bulk. Let's say $80 for 3 months wouldn't be a hard sum to put together I imagine between a few dozen people. And I've previously specified I wouldn't mind making the initial investment, or paying any remainder values (unless they'd get too high). It's just a matter of picking the best solution for what we might need.

Edited by martino2k6, 08 December 2013 - 05:47 PM.

[Sarsaparilla Kid]

martino2k6, on 08 December 2013 - 05:42 PM, said:

Considering that the cost would need to be shared, ideally, between the different units it may be harder to achieve crowd-funding if they don't use the hub for pretty much all of their activities and spend the time there. If you can count on them staying there then you can also better estimate the number of slots required for the server.

$30/month is a bit steep I think. I've seen cheaper ones, although this depends a lot on the bandwidth that we would require. Just to be clear from my previous last post, I wouldn't be against the VPS solution -- it's not just something I've worked with before.

Yes, ideally, every FRR unit would want to just make the hub the place to go for everything, but...seeing as how some of the FRR units are fiercely independent...kind of a character flaw for Vikings...I think it would be unrealistic to expect 100% of the voice comm activity to occur only on the hub.

[fluffypinkbunny]

I would use the hub.

[Jaxwen]

Sarsaparilla Kid, on 05 December 2013 - 04:45 PM, said:

Col. Peiper is an honorable pilot and I've been lucky enough to have been given the opportunity to hang with his group and have some fun on the House Steiner Hub comms, which is why I brought up the whole subject for the FRR to consider. What I've heard so far indicates that while there is an area on the Comstar servers to accomplish something similar to the House Steiner Hub, most FRR units prefer to use their own private comms and, well, remain private. I guess that's just the way of the Viking...stubbornly independent! Yar!

I think this may more a matter of miscommunication and logistics than lack of desire to sync up. Like Surtr's sentiment early in the thread, it is always nice to game with some fellow Nordic oriented mechjocks. There is a strong sentiment along those lines with a lot of us. Our unit members currently use Comstar NA or NGNG so that we can interact with gamers from other units and the lone wolves.

The bigger challenge is that community TS servers like Comstar NA have a user limit that has necessitated a splintering off of larger units to use their own TS servers. If there was a FRR based Comstar NA server, I'd donate to cover costs of running it so long as we need/want/actually use it.

Off-topic, I'm really saddened when I see negative sentiments and comments posted about other FRR units. Really wanna see this faction loyal member base come together as an effective combat capable faction that surprises the rest of the community in CW if we are permitted to have a player driven future unfold from it. There is no way we are stopping the Clan invasion on our own if we can't work together in some kind of Nordic brotherhood. We'll put up a valiant fight but be preyed upon. Please consider building each other up.

Semper Fi,

[ODIN] Jaxwen Ω

Edited by Jaxwen, 08 December 2013 - 09:15 PM.

[Sarsaparilla Kid]

Jaxwen, on 08 December 2013 - 09:15 PM, said:

Off-topic, I'm really saddened when I see negative sentiments and comments posted about other FRR units. Really wanna see this faction loyal member base come together as an effective combat capable faction that surprises the rest of the community in CW if we are permitted to have a player driven future unfold from it. There is no way we are stopping the Clan invasion on our own if we can't work together in some kind of Nordic brotherhood. We'll put up a valiant fight but be preyed upon. Please consider building each other up.

Agreed...

[martino2k6]

Journeyman, on 08 December 2013 - 05:00 PM, said:

~Salute~ Greetings!

Forgive my interjection but I am one of the House Steiner Hub admins and currently host the TeamSpeak server over my cable internet. We've done it this way for years as Peiper mentioned. This has been a cheap and reasonable way for us to maintain static voice comms, but does require some energy, time and passion for it. I've found myself runing home from work at lunchtime to reboot the thing when we've had sudden service disruptions and such and spent some money on added peripherals such as a UPS to assure our guys the best quality experience we could offer at a shoesting budget. Someone from FRR could do the same, but the key from our perspective is impartiality. You are creating a community made up of different units and individuals. Not everyone wants to be in a unit, but we are careful not to exclude them. The idea is to provide an atmosphere away from these forums and more "public" servers where Steiners can simply be Steiners without the extraciricular content one must deal with here. Not all units are interested...they have their own space and they like it that way which is no problem. But some have found being a part of a greater community a benefit.

Due to our growth, we are looking at upgrading to a VPS as martino2k6 has mentioned. We can host our non-profit TS license there and run websites. We are compelled to again look at the best experience for our community. As an admin, I approach every unit with the same rights and priviledges as the next, including my own. My view is, healthy units make a healthy community and we can all benefit as a result. We are not perfect and we know it but we are constantly trying to improve.

We came to what felt suited to us when it came to our setup and our attitude given how MWO will be working with Community Warfare. Communication is benfitial. I'm no expert in any of it but I'd be happy to answer any questions or to have you drop by our server sometime. We are grateful to have people like Peiper who do a great job representing the spirit of our endeavour, and I'm sure you must have people of similar attitude in your faction as well.

Hi Journeyman, thanks for the useful details.

I'm starting to incline myself towards VPS, as it offers much better scaling with respect to the price of the service. For a 100 slots a rented TS3 server may be cheaper, but at 150 it starts equalling out, and at the far end the gap gets even bigger in favour of VPS. This is not mentioning the ability to host websites/forums on the VPS in addition to the TS3 server.

Since I'm going to look at this in more detail, would you be able to provide any numbers of how much up/down network transfer did you use on a monthly basis and for how many users? Many services offer different packages based on the network transfer amount, so I wouldn't want to be looking for something that's far off from what we would require (RAM and CPU shouldn't be of much concern unless we would want to also put websites/forums there). Thanks

Jaxwen, on 08 December 2013 - 09:15 PM, said:

I think this may more a matter of miscommunication and logistics than lack of desire to sync up. Like Surtr's sentiment early in the thread, it is always nice to game with some fellow Nordic oriented mechjocks. There is a strong sentiment along those lines with a lot of us. Our unit members currently use Comstar NA or NGNG so that we can interact with gamers from other units and the lone wolves.

The bigger challenge is that community TS servers like Comstar NA have a user limit that has necessitated a splintering off of larger units to use their own TS servers. If there was a FRR based Comstar NA server, I'd donate to cover costs of running it so long as we need/want/actually use it.

Off-topic, I'm really saddened when I see negative sentiments and comments posted about other FRR units. Really wanna see this faction loyal member base come together as an effective combat capable faction that surprises the rest of the community in CW if we are permitted to have a player driven future unfold from it. There is no way we are stopping the Clan invasion on our own if we can't work together in some kind of Nordic brotherhood. We'll put up a valiant fight but be preyed upon. Please consider building each other up.

Semper Fi,

[ODIN] Jaxwen Ω

Would you guys actually be interested in using this, so far theoretical, FRR hub? You mentioned that you use NGNG/ComStar, which offer access to many different players and units that you can interact with. You probably wouldn't find the same on this hub, or at least definitely not at the start. It would be a community that we would all need to help to build, by encouraging fellow FRR units/wolves (or FRR affiliated merc units) to use.

And thanks to the folks from Shieldwall. It's good to know that there is another unit which would be interested in this.

Edited by martino2k6, 09 December 2013 - 03:27 AM.

[Malzel]

If it existed, the 1st RDR would most likely switch over. The total cost of the server and our expected contributions to it would be the largest deciding factor, but as long as that's reasonable, supporting the FRR community is one of our largest goals, so we'd want to be involved.