MoronYard
General => News & Announcements => Topic started by: nonSENSE on November 01, 2017, 04:20:09 PM
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It has been over a year since the servers officially shut down, and I have received dozens of questions about the future of the community, requests to re-open the servers and offers from people who were interested in taking over / buying the community.
I wanna take the time to answer a few of these questions and give an outlook of what the future might hold for MY.
Why did the servers have to shut down?
A few reasons:
- Donations were dipping to a point where I had to pay for almost 80% of the server costs out of my own pocket in the months prior to the shutdown.
- Lack of motivation to develop new features and provide new content on my end saw the number of updates and events fall to an all-time low.
How much were the server costs?
At the peak of activity in the community, we ran 15 servers on a single dedicated host, which maxed out resources on said machine. Here's a short breakdown of what the monthly server costs were
- Dedicated host: 250€
- Windows license: 15€
- Database + Web server: 60€
- Various licenses + software: 20€
- Additional traffic on gameserver: 10€-20€
This leaves us at roughly 350€ / month to run all of the servers.
Why didn't you just keep a single server running?
The aforementioned sum sadly does not scale down very well to a single server. While we can run 15 servers for 350€, running server costs more than 350€ / 15 = 23.3€. In fact, this is a breakdown of what it would cost to run 1 server:
- Dual core / 2 GB /SSD - Virtual Machine, serving 20 players: 15€
- Database + Web server: 60€ (could potentially be scaled down to 30€)
- Various licenses + software: 20€
The components which are essential and can cover up to 15-20 servers (DB) will likely stay the same, which brings the cost of a single server to around 65€- 80€. From there, adding another server only costs 15€, and it scales upwards.
What does this mean for MoronYard?
Donations for Garry's Mod communities are usually a hard thing to come by, and we have been very blessed to have such a loyal and generous core of active players in our community, which kept the community up and running for many years.
In order to commemorate our Halloween Event tradition, I have decided to start up a Virtual Machine running an instance of Smash. The server will remain online for at least this week.
You can find the server at the following IP:
66.150.121.31:27015
I am currently evaluating if we can get the community going again. In order for that to happen, we need to have active players, donations and motivation on my end.
Please let me know in here, or in the steam group (http://steamcommunity.com/groups/moronyard) if you want the community to come back or if you are willing to support us.
Thanks, and happy Halloween everyone!
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YES! Bring back moronyard!
I love smash, i love the inventory system, i love sanctuary, i love the lobby. Bring them all back!
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I would love to see the return of moronyard, ive been praying for this to happen.
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If we were to start donating to the point where goals were reached, would MY be officially brought back?
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Barring that, i would like to request more donation methods, this way i can help moronyard without having to have a paypal, as all i have is a card
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If it meant the community/server staying alive I'd happily donate.
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I will give you all my money. Please keep it open.
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For the sake of making this community stronger and allowing the ease of access, I am creating a discord server for Moronyard for anyone to join. I will do all I can on my own until a staff member wishes to lead the server for us. I am hoping to use this as a chance to rally our community in hopes of bringing Moronyard back to life, albeit smaller than its former self. If you have any questions for me just PM me here or message me on discord and I will attempt to reply within a few hours as long as it is a reasonable time. (EST time zone) Discord Server Link: https://discord.gg/bsB5E59
Be sure to spread the word before it is too late.
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For the sake of making this community stronger and allowing the ease of access, I am creating a discord server for Moronyard for anyone to join. I will do all I can on my own until a staff member wishes to lead the server for us. I am hoping to use this as a chance to rally our community in hopes of bringing Moronyard back to life, albeit smaller than its former self. If you have any questions for me just PM me here or message me on discord and I will attempt to reply within a few hours as long as it is a reasonable time. (EST time zone) Discord Server Link: https://discord.gg/bsB5E59
Be sure to spread the word before it is too late.
I made one https://discord.gg/abMHnxK
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Barring that, i would like to request more donation methods, this way i can help moronyard without having to have a paypal, as all i have is a card
This is a very good point and I will be offering payment through Stripe, which allows you to use credit cards.
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Awesome! You have my full spectrum of skills at your dispense, shoot me a message if you ever need help with anything. MoronYard is definitally one of the most original, creative, and content-rich communities I've ever seen and I would love for it to grow in to something big.
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Why dont use free ubuntu and all free packages with it? Empty ubuntu takes around 50mb RAM and like none CPU usage..
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Why dont use free ubuntu and all free packages with it? Empty ubuntu takes around 50mb RAM and like none CPU usage..
While getting rid of the license cost for windows is nice, the overhead on the windows server is not that high either. Furthermore, we ran Smash on a Ubuntu 14.04 distribution for a couple of days and noticed some strange behavior in physics as well as certain map just being broken. To add onto that, some of the modules we use internally for our addons and gamemodes are not working properly on linux and would have to be replaced.
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Would definitely love to see the servers come back as I've mentioned before, but from an Admin perspective I can completely understand the problems faced.
Thank you so much for the opportunity and possibilities Nonsense <3
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Would definitely love to see the servers come back as I've mentioned before, but from an Admin perspective I can completely understand the problems faced.
Thank you so much for the opportunity and possibilities Nonsense <3
Well, the people have spoken. We are covered for about 4 months of server uptime :)
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Would definitely love to see the servers come back as I've mentioned before, but from an Admin perspective I can completely understand the problems faced.
Thank you so much for the opportunity and possibilities Nonsense <3
Well, the people have spoken. We are covered for about 4 months of server uptime :)
Ayyy, that's promising.
It is my understanding that there were indeed other reasons the server went down such as your time to work on it, lack of support from others, etc. I know a lot can change in a year so I'm hopeful that maybe something amazing is going to happen with our community.
As always, if you need anything which I can help with then feel free to drop me a message. I'll probably talk to you later todsy about various things and so be ready for some Willdy!
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Haven't seen alot of MY since it went down, Ive talked alot with snowi though about ballrace on TU. Redownloading everything tomorrow to have that rush of nostalgia return. Welcome back MoronYard.
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I'll go and try it out, damn long time since I was here.
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I'll go and try it out, damn long time since I was here.
OMG PERSIOUS! <3
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I believe the only way to be able to cover monthly donations is by having a subscription based service, it should not be too expensive (no more than 5-10$ a month).
If every active player that loves this community pitches in monthly there should be no issue getting the monthly costs covered.
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I believe the only way to be able to cover monthly donations is by having a subscription based service, it should not be too expensive (no more than 5-10$ a month).
If every active player that loves this community pitches in monthly there should be no issue getting the monthly costs covered.
I disagree. I also fundamentally dislike the notion of subscription services being pushed everywhere. I like the system that is currently in place, where users can choose to support the server and receive a variety of features permanently.
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I disagree. I also fundamentally dislike the notion of subscription services being pushed everywhere. I like the system that is currently in place, where users can choose to support the server and receive a variety of features permanently.
That system does not work for a community this small, MY would either need more popular gamemodes that aren't buried in the server list or a large amount of people need to start playing smash and slope (won't happen)
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That system does not work for a community this small, MY would either need more popular gamemodes that aren't buried in the server list or a large amount of people need to start playing smash and slope (won't happen)
MoronYard is a game server, not a service. There should not be a disparity between "subscription" users and regular users. Donations for gold bars and VIP ranks are different as they aren't continually charged, and they're less off-putting. Not everything has to be packed into a subscription service; it's not the answer.
If I went to a community website for a game server on any game and saw that they were taking donations for some reasonable incentives for the sake of keeping the server alive, I would totally understand. It's reasonable.
If I went to the same site and it was trying to justify a subscription service that costs as much per month as it cost to purchase the game itself, I would never return to that website. Simple.
Subscription services are divisive by nature. Surely there are better solutions... If you look at the donation progress so far, after only a few weeks, I'd say we have more than enough time to work out the kinks of the system.
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That system does not work for a community this small, MY would either need more popular gamemodes that aren't buried in the server list or a large amount of people need to start playing smash and slope (won't happen)
MoronYard is a game server, not a service. There should not be a disparity between "subscription" users and regular users. Donations for gold bars and VIP ranks are different as they aren't continually charged, and they're less off-putting. Not everything has to be packed into a subscription service; it's not the answer.
If I went to a community website for a game server on any game and saw that they were taking donations for some reasonable incentives for the sake of keeping the server alive, I would totally understand. It's reasonable.
If I went to the same site and it was trying to justify a subscription service that costs as much per month as it cost to purchase the game itself, I would never return to that website. Simple.
Subscription services are divisive by nature. Surely there are better solutions... If you look at the donation progress so far, after only a few weeks, I'd say we have more than enough time to work out the kinks of the system.
I never meant removing the current system, although that may have been mistakenly implied.
In my mind I imagined more of a "save the server" subscription, like subscribing to a charity.
I'm not a fan of subscriptions being forced down our throat these days either, I was imagining an optional service here.
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This community is not a charity case. If we strengthen the viability of the servers, improve the systems in place, and make an effort to outreach to a new and growing player-base, there is no reason to do this "save the server" nonsense. That's like giving up from the start.
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This community is not a charity case. If we strengthen the viability of the servers, improve the systems in place, and make an effort to outreach to a new and growing player-base, there is no reason to do this "save the server" nonsense. That's like giving up from the start.
I agree with Mark here. If people were interested in a charity esque system, they can do it themselves by donating what they want every month themselves. By no mean do we need a system that forces monthly payments to obtain a benefit, as Mark stated too many companies are finding themselves doing this already. The system we have now is working efficiently enough to last us more than a year as is, and with the idea of a new series of relics i'm we'll have even more donations coming in. I think we're in a stable spot where we don't have to be concerned about the donation system for a good while.
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I'll do what I can to donate. It'd be nice to see this stay up.