We've been talking internally at eR33t about this idea for quite some time.
What is with the new trend of cutting out newbs? I doubt discriminating against Europeans will help Paintball 2 at all. Instead newbs and Euros, arguably a majority of our player base, would seek refuge elsewhere, leading to Paintball 2 to lose players but never gain...
Not that many who have posted in this thread have been here for a long time, but public servers used to be where about 10 people knew howto play PB2 decently (like actually capture a flag or rush to middle), and 2-6 didn't. These days NA servers are 4-6 players who have a good grasp on the game, and 10-26 players who don't speak english and have no idea what they're doing. I'm sure that the europeans have it easier since all the speed servers they have filter out all of the super-newb players, NA only has pub servers with traditional settings all over the place.
The current state of DP's pickup games are pretty pub-centric at the moment anyway. Someone decides to grab a server, /amsg the ip and password and players from IRC connect and disconnect at their leisure. Maybe a few maps get played, generally not the same teams but it is a nice change of pace to be playing with teammates who might recon, or might grab a flag every now or then. Lots of clans are abusing pickup games by grabbing matches from them (much like we used to grab matches from players in pub servers). Even pug organizers are flaking out on pugs two-three minutes into a game because two teams in the pug want to match and it wipes out half of the players. Not very fun. I'd rather have a
privatized public server where selected players can come and go as they please, play a few minutes or a few hours, whatever. 75% of the pugs I've been in recently have been killed by a clan match. 75% of the recent public games I've played have been ruined by clueless Brazilians who complain about the long respawn time.
Players just starting out are looking for the most play time possible. Why wait 60s when you can be instantly respawned? I think all of the speed servers are segregating this "community" more then a couple ranked servers where the good players play. These new players are also not going to stick around in a server where they die every round have have to wait 60s for a respawn.
How would new players get on this privatized public server? We'll we'd rely on guys like you and m7feettall who bringing these guys in, getting them on IRC and Vent, and getting them better at the game. I don't think it would be too hard to keep a 12 player server at 50% capacity during peak hours if we only gave 200-300 people access to the server. We used to public servers like this that were constantly packed, when the total active player base in NA alone was just 200-300 people.
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