why large blockland servers suck

[Blockomaniac]

his siege was rly fun tho

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[Master Matthew²]

This is why I miss the times before everyone could run a server.
It used to take port forwarding and a lot of effort to run a server,
meaning this was a form of quality assurance.

Now anyone jacking off on their keyboard can make a server.

[Shift Kitty]

my favorite part of the bigass bows vs guns thing was how the team that capped all the control points would often lose the game because a guy could just walk past all of them into their empty home base and grab the flag and run

Yeah, the only use of the capture points was providing a launching point for grabbing the flag or spawning there to intercept the flag carrier. Both of which were meaningless if the flag carrier was good.

Edit: come to think of it, the entire TDM was pretty much determined by one guy grabbing a flag. Little teamwork required.

Much better than it used to be. It used to just be "Red wins until the 'blue captain' joins the server".

This is why I miss the times before everyone could run a server.
It used to take port forwarding and a lot of effort to run a server,
meaning this was a form of quality assurance.

Now anyone jacking off on their keyboard can make a server.

Port forwarding wasn't much of a bar. The same stuffty servers existed back then, too.

[Master Matthew²]

Port forwarding wasn't much of a bar. The same stuffty servers existed back then, too.

And you're right.
But the amount of the same stuffty servers were under control.

AND, on top of that, even if you did forward your server, sometimes the user would screw stuff up and
then no one could connect.

Albeit this could mean good servers could die too, but usually people who were stuff at following directions were stuff at making servers.
This is the reason a 10 year old me couldn't run a stuff BL server in 2009.
I was always loving irritated with the Forwarding system.

Now a days though this is more of a teen to adult community running the game, so It's a bit weird thinking this game once had a stuff ton of kids playing at one point.

[Tezuni 2.0]

People play online to engage others and be social, I've always thought this was common sense.
Large maps aren't very conducive to that end.

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

"stuff" servers dont get players and dont appear far up the server list so im not sure how they could possibly be a problem

[Shift Kitty]

"stuff" servers dont get players and dont appear far up the server list so im not sure how they could possibly be a problem

stupidly huge walking simulator TDMs
DRPG
City RPs

[patton360]

Woke island is a lot of fun above 15 players

[Alkatjo]

No one knows about scale. If you're planning to have a huge ass map maybe you shouldn't take references in account for how big your map actually will be. Say if you were in the process of developing a huge city map for a custom gamemode, don't make the roads going from A - B super long (unless the map absolutely requires a substantial form of extension) and don't separate everything. Remember this is a game where the majority of the playerbase is clueless as to what's going on half the time.

Heed's map is a good example because they're usually point a to point b architectures. It's a straightforward shot for everything and unless you're drowning yourself in chromosomes, there's no way you'd get lost or lose sight of the goal. Heed's maps also work against themselves because of this simplicity though. His canyon deathmatch was just a canyon and a couple of custom tanks, i don't remember enjoying it as much.

[PhantOS]

Bigger is not better. More is not good. Use what you need and don't go overboard.

A big ass map is good for something like a vehicle deathmatch or a tank TDM, while small maps are good for regular TDMS, really small maps for just deathmatches.

I see a lot of people trying to go overboard on their server and essentially go 'extra'; adding way too much content than needed, which ends up bringing the server quality down. If your server works well with 10 guns, adding more guns is just going to ruin the game.

[QuadStorm]

The latter could be rectified by adding bots, but you'd need way more bots than what the maximum limit allows to make it plausible.

so even a hundred bots wouldn't be enough (considering the player/bot limit is 200 apparently)?

[Conan]

its simple - design your gamemode around your expected playercount, -5. very often smaller maps work just as fine if not better for big servers, except for things like challenges where it just ends up too crowded

prison break is one of the few servers that pretty much absolutely requires a full server since the balance hinges on there being enough prisoners to be able to overwhelm the guards with enough coordination. im working on ways to make it more accessible to prisoners when the player count is low (< 18 players).

its up to the host to figure out how to make things work on a small scale and have it scale up well as well. unfortunately most hosts dont write their own scripts or servers from the ground up, and/or have little game design sense to make use of their playercounts and attract and keep players.

[Wesley Williams]

Wicked's Legends of Blockland RPG was a good example of a server with a huge map that was still fun at low player counts. Wicked made enemies spawn as you walked around and managed to keep the gameplay interesting. Same with Jorgur's RPG, but people don't make these types of RPG servers anymore.