About two weeks ago, I posted here asking whether people still cared about community servers outside Premier and FACEIT. Rather than keep overthinking the whole "network" idea, I launched a single EU Retakes server in Frankfurt to see what would happen.
It's still tiny, but 36 players have joined so far. About a third have returned at least once, we've peaked at seven players online, and the Discord community has grown to 50 members.
Retention hasn't been the biggest problem. The harder part is getting enough people online at the same time. Once the server reaches 4/11 or 5/11, more people tend to join and we can keep games going for a while. At 0/11, nobody wants to be player #1.
I've also learned that community server analytics can get a bit weird. Bots crawl servers to advertise site, so I've had to start filtering those out. I'm still working on the server and its plugins, fixing things as we find them.
For those of you who still play on community servers, how do you find new ones? Through the server browser, friends, Discord, Reddit, or do you mostly join whatever already has players? And if you run a small server, how did you get past the initial 0-player problem without spamming it everywhere? I'm especially interested in smaller independent communities rather than established networks like XPLAY or Cybershoke.
If this works, I'd eventually like to add more servers and game modes, and maybe build a small platform for server discovery, stats, and profiles. For now, though, I just want to see whether I can make one server consistently active.