[M. Bison]

Popular maps 1 - all weapons
Popular maps 2 - no awps/autos

I don't want to separate these two servers just yet. Popular Maps #3 is a blank slate. If an admin wants to play around with it, I'll happily give them access via server control panel.

This is actually a very good idea. Have one pop maps server with unrestricted weapons and let the consequent popularity of the server speak for the idea's merit.

That's not how it'll work out. The population between the servers shifts from one to the other, day by day and map by map. If one server experiences a substantial population drop (especially late at night), the population of both servers merge onto a single one. The exception is when the other server is on an undesirable map, in which case players tend to go to sleep or play elsewhere. If the servers are no longer identical, there's more factors to consider and the behavior may change somewhat.

3 seconds is a tad too long

This was a ball park number and not necessarily the number going to be used. All my plugins are periodically tested during the developmental phase. If an aspect of the plugin is problematic, it'll be changed around until a balance is struck. This occurs during the developmental phase and prior to it going live.

It takes less than 3 secs to leave spawn and it takes less than 3 secs for an non-Awping Rushing to have an advantage at long A.

You can't move during freezetime so that's completely untrue.

especially with advertisements.

What?

My worry is that you'll get some idiot who will see it and be like haha, I'm going to buy the awp to be a dick.

There's nothing stopping a player from doing that now. If it's already happening, it'll become worse as more people become aware of binds.

This is going to bring a severe decrease of users on our servers IMO.

I somewhat doubt this will be the case. I went through the top 250 gameme players for popular maps (by hand) and noticed the majority of users had a lower kills by awp percentage than my own. A lot of these users had so little kills with an awp, that the listing actually showed it as 0% due to rounding. I've scrimmed with some of these players before and they awp better than me. I was also very surprised that comparatively, I was in the top 10% of prevalent awpers with only a percentage of 7%. If you think I'm kidding, feel free to look through the gameme statistics before they're reset this August. I inflated the use of awp in my earlier posts because I skipped out on the vast majority of users with a % lower than my own, while listing everyone with a higher %. Joker, your % of kills by awp was only 6%. Not to pick on Mr.Tea, but I can't even fathom how his % of kills by awp is a staggering 42%. I've personally hit the restricted awp message a considerable amount of times while trying to purchase it, so I know exactly what silly is talking about. I personally thought this made a strong case that the awp is in fact being hogged by a select few users, and not necessarily the people most talented with it.

Stop making the servers noob friendly at the expense of how the game was intended to be played.

Why can't you just let people play with the weapons that they want to use? You're part of the problem.

The majority of "noobs" make up the server population. They're accustomed to the existing system and it is likely among one of the factors for them choosing to play here. The "noobs" are also one of the factors for enticing "pros" and other new players as the population count is considerable. I don't mind setting up a server for players to play without restriction, but I don't want to impose that change onto our existing user base. I know for fact that as it stands now, doing so will have negative effects on server population. At one point in the past, the weapon_restrict plugin broke for an entire day because I failed to update it properly on the day prior. The population of 24/7Dust2 on that day was extremely unstable and generally stayed pretty low. The failed update occurred very early the day prior (something like 3AM PST), and was resolved very late in the day (something like 11PM PST).

Although, it should be noted the player population of popular maps and the 24/7 servers are slightly different. For instance, it's pretty apparent there's a larger international presence on the 24/7 servers. This means a lot of them are non-native English speakers and it generally means it'll be harder for them to make bonds, especially when they don't have a microphone. This is important because people will generally play on a server when many of their friends do as well, even if the server has some undesirable qualities. There's also the factor of no-steam players. A lot of them play here for no reason other than having no alternative server to play on. If they get banned from war-lords many of them quit the game entirely. o_O

If the restrictions were never in place in the first place, our player base would've been different. That means there wouldn't be problems with unlimited awps. If we make this change now, the servers will have an unstable population for a while.

You're still both missing the point. It doesn't matter if you haven't individually experienced difficulty buying the awp on these occasions. The fact of the matter is that virtually only one person can have it per team; and granted that there are at least 3 or 4 people, on average, who want to use the awp on a team of 10 (probably an understatement) those other players are being consistently short-changed. I'm usually one of those players (despite being a fast buyer).

Indeed.