Community Server Funding Contacts / Initiative

[DrPain]

Hello All,

Seeing as Games.saix.net is all but gone, and everything surrounding it is pretty much dead. It seems it's harder than ever to get a server going. At least, I don't have R1000.00 a month to spend on renting decent hardware to host a game.

Me and a couple of friends enjoy Insurgency, but there really is only the one server [GG-ZA] which is a shame because the game ROCKS!! And this comes from someone who has played almost everything. CS1.6, CSS, BF2, BF2142, BF3, BFBC. Well you get the idea. I know Giz does the community a great service by paying for and running this server, but sadly like tonight the servers are down. And a man likes to enjoy his weekend, so... Sad monkey on this side.

Does anyone know what the process is to request a server from one of the numerous ISP's which still offer dedicated game server hosting? Any contacts? [PM] if you have please, I would love to get this going. I think I contacted IS and WebAfrica a month or two ago, but that Black Hole man. Swallows emails, I tell you.

I would be willing to create a website seeing as I am a web-developer for a living to allow the community to donate money towards servers for games they enjoy. But I am not sure it would be worth it. Will people pay for the service, to be able to play the less common games they love? I was thinking of doing like a goal per server / hardware spec of about 1.2K, which is a quad core decent-ish server.

The website would be to show the amount of donations received, how much is needed for the next month to run a particular server, months paid up in advance. Showing and electing Admins who are active in-game, and the respective server admin details. But I don't really want to invest the time creating all this. If it's never going to be received by the community. It would be non-profit of course, purely to be able to community fund the server rental from the likes of IS or Hetzner, and maybe the R50+-/pm site hosting costs.

I would love to hear the community's thoughts on this? Seeing as this is kindoff the only active ISP / Gaming related forums I still know.

This is the same post I made on mybroadband.co.za:
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthre...4#post15169204

Regards,
Rudi

[HavocXphere]

Sounds like a good idea.

You suffer from a serious credibility problem though:

Join Date May 2015
Posts 1

There was a guy on mybb selling fake passports yesterday with identical stats...

Thats not to say that I'm accusing you of anything here...just saying your fund raising will be seriously hampered by the above lack of credibility in the eyes of the average mygaming member, regardless of how honourable you are in real life.

If you can outsource the handling of the cash to a long-standing mygaming member then I'd imagine people would be more willing to contribute.

The above sounds sceptical/negative...I know. Not trying to shoot it down unfairly...in fact if it takes off I'll contribute a decent chunk of cash myself just to support (despite not using ZA servers).

[DrPain]

I suppose it's valid points to be sure. I was a more avid gamer when games.saix.net was still around, and I would gladly have pointed you to my profile to check. For those that don't know me from here. These are some of my gaming aliases which you may recognise:

A Good Boy
DrPain_ZA
Dr. Pain [+]

I was the founding member of NFX in 2006 and well life got in the way of gaming, broken PC and no money to get a new one etc... etc... And yes I posted it on mybb, and they told me this is a better place to voice this. So sure I could be seen as a scammer. But I legitimately want to help the community, who has all but been dropped by all the ISP's and a dwindling PC gaming following. I can even see the decline in PC gaming in SA due to this lack of support from ISP's, just by looking at a price list from the likes of Frontosa, and such.

I want to provide a service for people like me who like games like Insurgency, which no ISP could be bothered with.

My name is Rudi Strydom, and here are some links:
http://nfx.co.za/ Founded in 2006, currently run by Rob (Vitblitz)
https://thatguy.co.za/about

I don't have R1k a month to enjoy a game like Insurgency, so this is the only way I can think of getting to a point where no one person is liable for the costs. Making it a community effort.

Otherwise if someone can point me to a contact person at one of the ISP who would be willing to sponsor an old blade server, then everyone's a winner??

[BeoTeK]

Surely https://www.gameservers.com/ would be a cheaper alternative, and a good option.

[VirtualForce]

I've played a bit of Insurgency, mostly offline against bots, once on a russain server, wasnt even aware there was one in SA...but that was a few months ago...I would love to support it but going through a rough spell atm, so cant commit to monthly payments.

Great idea BeoTeK! I wish they had a QuakeWorld (Quake 1 mod by id Software for online play) server....damn....that would be insanely awesome!

[DrPain]

Thank you for the link, I did check it out. Seems there is no availability in SA, Johannesburg or Cpt (Backorder):
https://www.gameservers.com/order/step2.php?game=218

I had a look at those prices and it's quite amicable!!! R100 per 8 players per month. The only issue is that there's no space left, and it's on Back Order. I have requested to be notified. It's a shame DigitalOcean doesn't have a CPT / JHB instance, those SSD's make for powerful little PC's, and they would happily run the game for the same money.

Otherwise it would be a question of how large the community is. If there are 40 active Insurgency players, who don't all play at the same time then 40 people * R25 would be enough to have 3 instances running on 1 quad code PC per month. I definitely will be looking into this more, if I had the money to spend I would gladly do it. But I myself can only really afford R300+- a month for something like this.

As a side note I contacted WebAfrica to find out about the WAGE servers of old, and whether they still do that, but was the response:

Hi Rudi

I have just received an update from on of our engineers.

We unfortunately do not offer any game servers any longer as this has been closed down about a year ago.

What I can suggest, though, is that you purchase either a VPS or dedicated server, and you should be able to install and manage your own game servers directly from your server.

We apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Have a great day.

It would appear the community is left to fend for themselves, and it's sad :-(. I will work on some designs, and see what we can do to be able to manage community servers. I just want to enjoy playing the game I really like :-/

[DrPain]

Hi All,

I thought I would update everyone. Afrihost.com responded with an application form for sponsorship and I am currently awaiting their answer on mine. And I have had a interesting reply from Mweb. Seems they do have 2 servers, which must have fallen behind on updates and no longer appear in the server browser.

Ryno from Mweb seems to be on the ball, and one is back already. I am quite pleased to see that not all ISP's have given up on us as yet. Big ups!! Further updates to follow.

[Edelweiss]

Sounds like a good idea.

You suffer from a serious credibility problem though:



There was a guy on mybb selling fake passports yesterday with identical stats...

Thats not to say that I'm accusing you of anything here...just saying your fund raising will be seriously hampered by the above lack of credibility in the eyes of the average mygaming member, regardless of how honourable you are in real life.

If you can outsource the handling of the cash to a long-standing mygaming member then I'd imagine people would be more willing to contribute.

The above sounds sceptical/negative...I know. Not trying to shoot it down unfairly...in fact if it takes off I'll contribute a decent chunk of cash myself just to support (despite not using ZA servers).

Exactly my thoughts..

[DrPain]

Afrihost.com came back with the following reply to a Dedicated Sponsorship request:

Thank you very much for your sponsorship application.

We are currently not providing new gaming related sponsorships, as we have found the return and reciprocal value on such sponsorships to be very difficult to measure. So unfortunately we must decline your application.

We will continue to support the gaming community in others ways, such as participating in rAge and other competitions we run.

We wish you the best of luck with your venture.

Kind regards

The Afrihost Brand Team

Oh well, what can you do?

[PsychoFish]

Unfortunately from an ISP perspective running a gaming server is always going to come out on a loss. Servers (even virtual servers) either cost money directly through either physical hardware and/or from a licencing perspective in respects of the OS licence if the server service cannot run on Linux or indirectly. Then the CPU, memory, disk and bandwidth utilization needs to be paid for in some way or shape.

Most hosting providers will also charge you per hour (nominal rates of course), but this will vary between R 0.25/h to R 9+ depending on the server specs and hosting provider (in monthly terms this quickly becomes R6k+ pm PER SERVER)

In essence you'll need some serious funding to get this going, the easiest way to fund is through advertising or possibly a subscription service.