TOPIC: Regarding the Maintenence

I have already posted this is a reply to another thread however to increase the spread I will make this a seperate announcement.

I am going to give everybody a rundown of the maintenance, I am going to do my best to go into specifics however there are some points I am not personally fully clued up on, however I believe I know enough to give some information to people that is easy enough to understand.

Point number one, the difference between east and west coast.

The connection difference between the two locations is approximately 30ms, having the server positioned in either location would have made no noticable difference to anybody. The reason the west coast location was chosen was due to the available choices being better from a hardware perspective and more current.

Point number two, the reason the US location was chosen.

The reasoning behind choosing a US host this time around was due to servers having a much greater chance at finding players when based in that region. We were already aware of this information howerver, Sinz helpfully made a thread earlier containing the below image, this image clearly shows the not insignificant difference between different locations and the active players and owners of Garry's Mod in the past two weeks.

It would be a no brainer for us to listen to the community who for years at this point and make a very significant change in an attempt to bring in more players, this was the main driving force behind the decision. Moving an entire server of our size to a different location and to a completely different host company is not cheap, talking financially or in terms of the work required to make sure everything switches over and smoothly as possible.

This isn't a discussion that was had on a whim, we actually had talked about this extensively for multiple weeks and even used the host on the test servers for a long enough period of time to decide that this move would be suitable for the community.


Point number three, this is probably the most important point; the Valve Master Server browser.

This isn't something we would expect your average player to notice or even pick up on, although as it is a big part of the reasoning behind the switch, it needs to be bought up. IN short the Valve master server browser does not operate as it should. This list is what Garry's Mod and many other games utilize to display the servers to you when you're selecting what to play.

The idea of this list is that it'll query the servers based on your region FIRST, in an ideal world it'll display your closest and most optimal servers first however it was not and was doing this in reverse, meaning that people who went to the DarkRP multiplayer list for example would not see ZARP listed unless they waited up to or beyond a minute.

This was a massive reasoning behind the Prop Hunt server suddenly losing it's very active and consistent player base. It is why favouriting servers you enjoy is a good idea and probably a reason why dedicated active players never picked up on this issue. We will always encourage you to add ZARP servers to your favourites list, it is very easy to do and is extremely time saving.

The Valve master server query is something we have reported to Valve and fingers crossed they sort something out, however this is the best fix we can offer until that happens. You can test this yourself by going to any server list on Garry's Mod, refreshing the listings and hitting STOP after 1 second. You will immediately see that the results shown given huge latencies of beyond 300ms. Again this is because the list is being pinged in reverse order.

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The finishing point is, it would have been impossible for us to please everybody. We went through all the pros and cons, weighing them up and with all the outcomes in mind, we were never going to be able to please everybody, this was something we all agreed on and we know this is never going to be a possibility.

We aren't expecting anybody to see immediate changes and some of these improvements will take a bit of time to become obvious, but they are there. I personally am UK based but was on team USA on the basis that I thought we should pick what is best for the future and believe that a slight increase in ping is worth what I believe to be an extremely positive change.

I am more than happy to answer questions on Discord, as is the rest of the Community Team.

I love the US

minority rule

Lyra wrote:
Well i've typically found the minority tends to shout the loudest.

Nafe wrote:
Does this mean Zarp will switch back to the previous server location if the Valve browser is patched?

Paladin wrote:
I can't personally promise anything for sure but I will say nothing is set in stone, we are just trying to do what is best for the community given the cards we have been dealt and the situation we are in.

How long will it take to revert the chosen location if the reason why it was changed in the first place doesn't make any difference ?
If there is no noticeable change in player count the server should be brought back in the UK imo..

To Be Honest wrote:
See the above reply, I appreciate his question is the same but worded differently. But again, nothing is set in stone.

Pretty sure prop hunts playerbase was all russian tho

I think I may know the reason why they aren't playing as much

Nafe wrote:
I hope I speak for a lot of people when I say I appreciate the work you and the LT has put in to this for the sake of the future of the community. The ping might be an issue for sure, but I think it's cool we got a noticable influx of player just hours after the relocation

Bring us server back and we are happy

sinzz wrote:
stfu

sinzz wrote:
dont talk on this thread if you're just not going to read it.

TLDR??

User 24823 wrote:
This just isn't true in the slightest, but i'll humour the comment by simply stating that this was spotted only about a month ago meanwhile the war has been going on for over a year at this point. If you view the screenshot you can see that they are still the second largest playerbase in terms of geography.

Nafe wrote:
I read it lad no worry and contribuate to the help of showing need to put back lad

Paladin wrote: how many will keep playing after a day or 2

The Violinist wrote:
The one's that can get into JayHouse

User 24823 wrote: And the rest might end up actually getting a suit to then get baited into using and losing to a rand Jay house member

Sorry but you cannot compare pings for west and east coast when you’re from the EU, because that’s where it begins to actually matter.

If you had moved the server to NYC for example, I’d most likely be sitting around 70-90ms which is an absolutely fine compromise to take from having 10 ping to the previous host. I am currently at around 140ms so this excuse is not good enough in my eyes.

Don’t set yourselves in stone with this host for the love of god, majority of players are based in the EU and the increase is just simply too significant and actually does effect gameplay.