Redirect server

Jameless did a test yesterday by deleting all the custom hats from his client and connecting to the orange server. It took him 5 minutes to connect to the server because of all the hats that had to be downloaded! This will prevent new players from connecting because they will cancel when they see it takes so long to get on the server.

We worked with a redirect server Jamless made available for downloading the custom hats and maps but it turned out we could only get a 600kbps download rate from it.

You can imagine that if we get more donators we will get more custom hats that have to be downloaded and thus making our server less and less attractive for new players to connect to.

So we tried out a redirect service from our current gameserver provider. We now have a fast download location in New York for all our servers. As soon as we upload any file to our gameservers it will be mirrored to the fast download server and be compressed to bzip2 format. As soon as a player connects to any of our servers and needs to download a file it will come from there. This service costs only $5 per month so we thought it would be a good investment.

You can test the speed of the server here: http://redirect.ny.gameservers.com/speedtest.dat

It would be nice if some of you could try the speedtest and report back here. Make sure to close off youtube, torrents or any other thing that uses bandwith when doing the test or the testresult will be worth shit. The file is just a worthless file of 100MB, it's not an application. The idea is that you look at the speed you are getting when downloading it.


Jameless said that after deleting the hats again and connecting again it now took him only 3 minutes to connect.

Took less than a minute, experienced the FiOS .

Katkong did it in 1:30 minutes. Looks like a nice speed so far.

1.5 mb/s, lightning fast here.

45 seconds. wow tht is really fast.

650 kb/s average
2 minutes

Why do I fail

Do it again Ninji, see if you get a different result.

It started out a bit slow but after 30 seconds he was downloading a full megabyte every second which is normal for a US server. Still took me 2 minutes tho.

Anyway, are there any special ways for us to reduce the time except for a faster server (which we now have)? Maybe we could put a limit of custom hats a person may own or something?

http://forum.pulpfortress.com/donations-f28/pulp-premium-members-hat-rewarding-policy-t467.htm

Yes i changed our policy so people can have a maximum of 5 hats. Every donation on top of that they can trade-in their hats for others.

All I know is I don't even want to try. I've got average internet but my PC is crap, it freezes right after I get to sending client info and I take at least 15 minutes to connect.

Come august I'll have an upgrade for sure, however.

To contribute a little more, the server has been high population very consistently lately. Download times don't really seem to stop people, so I don't see much reason to go to great lengths to reduce the download time.

If we can reduce the download time than why not? It only makes it faster for people to join. You should also consider that not everyone has 20mbit/s or more as their internet speed. Some people (outside big cities) have a very shitty internet coming close to dial-up.
Also most peopel just want to play the game. Me for instance hate it when I have to download a load of files just to play on a certain server. If it takes me longer than a minute to download those files (not counting maps) I press cancel and go somewhere else.

I agree with Sgt. Pepper. If I wanna play Dustbowl or something and I have to spend 5 minutes to download hats and things I'll just cancel it and choose another Dustbowl server.

If you're not burning money that would otherwise keep the server going, there's not a problem at all with what you're doing. I was just pointing out that the server's been full very often lately so download times don't seem to be stopping too many people.

Even if it doesn't stop people from joining it doesn't take away how annoying it is to wait when you want to play a game Also, I'm pretty sure we can spare the $5 extra a month for this.

I am amazed at the ease we seem to fill the server lately but i do see a shift in the regular crowd. Players we had a half year ago are not here anymore and have been replaced by others so gradually the pool of users changes. This means getting new people to connect easily is important.
On the other hand custom hats are important too to reward donators.
So this means a redirect server is important! And it's only $5 a month so no big deal. Don't forget that it also helps with downloading the custom maps for the rotation server.

And another thing is that orange is pretty filled during the EST evening hours but during the morning and afternoon it's not filled or even empty. Look at the bottom right graph at gametracker: http://www.gametracker.com/server_info/63.211.105.54:27015/

Fook yea gibbo and greasy, I'm number 3 on server behind coxkhead and dingdongpi

Vital wrote:Fook yea gibbo and greasy, I'm number 3 on server behind coxkhead and dingdongpi

lol vital.i'm in the top20 3 times on game tracker

well when i looked i saw pi was #1 on the offline and offline above eraser...101!

Still better then you at sniping with my over 9000 footlong hat that spams the hell out of the server console lol

i must admit that is the best custom hat i've seen so far

lol why didn't i see that hat in action

btw those ranks at gametracker change everytime you change your steamname so they suck. I am in those ranks 4 times myself i think.

edit, it's 6 times: http://www.gametracker.com/server_info/63.211.105.54:27015/top_players/?query=eraserhead&Search=Search

Gibbo: http://www.gametracker.com/server_info/63.211.105.54:27015/top_players/?query=gibbo&Search=Search

Vital vagina: http://www.gametracker.com/server_info/63.211.105.54:27015/top_players/?query=vital&Search=Search

Vitalcorny is rank 18 in reality: http://pulpfortress.clanservers.com/tf2stats/ranking/player

There's another good hat that I'm gonna try and get eraser to approve of it, the camper trailer hat!!!!!!

I already tried to setup that hat but can't get it to work. I could retry it though. But i think it will be a massive download. I'm also still working on gibbo's Jaratehat which gives me some probs.

Massive download for a massive epeen type of guy, right James????