TheFreeCommunityProject

[sword134]

What is The Free Community Project?
 The Free Community Project is a Garry’s mod server project that looks to change the growing pay to win tendency that has been growing in servers. Many servers in Garry’s mod choose to make basic functions such as wire mod and basic jobs (DarkRP) donator only. This means you sometimes have to pay large sums of money in order to fully enjoy a server. I as many other people, believe that a server shouldn’t focus on generating capital, but instead focus on creating the best user experience. Therefore, some friends and I have started The Free Community Project in hope of making a DarkRP server that doesn’t have any donation elements and instead will be a server for the players where all features and jobs are unlocked.

How will The Free Community Project work?
 The Free Community Project will be a normal DarkRP server that will have no donation benefits. You will be able to donate to help the server stay alive, but there will be no new jobs/features or printers when donating. The server will rely on ads, but it won’t be of any notable scale, the ads will appear for 5 seconds upon death. We also want to ensure the best quality addons and will be open for help from coders, but more about that later. The server staff will consist of the people who have helped create the server from the beginning and we will be open for moderator application. We will enforce strict rules and will be logging the activity of every staff member. That means if a staff member doesn’t do his job, then he will be instantly demoted. To ensure players safety there will be strict rp rules to make sure RDMers and any other type of rule breakers will be dealt with, as quickly as possible and most likely result in a ban. This will help keep RDMers out and ensure the safety of roleplayers. While we do encourage hard-core roleplay it won’t be a rule, the project aims to be semi-serious, that way we will target a huge audience within DarkRP.

How can I help?
 We are looking for any kind of help. Whether it would be coders or common people. For the people that do not have the skills to code it would be amazing to spread awareness of the project and keep in touch (links can be found below). We will also need feedback how you would like to see this project turn out and whether you think the project is a good idea.
 For the coders it’s quite different. If you think this sound like an amazing idea, then we would gladly accept you onto our small team. We already have some ideas and concepts of addons and scripts that would need a coder’s hand. The addons are well described and should be easy for a skilled coder. If you wish to get in contact with us and jump aboard the train, you are more than welcome to check the links below.

Steam Group: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/TFCPgmod
Contact us: http://steamcommunity.com/id/DEAD_HUNTER123/

[Bytewave]

While I believe it's a noble concept, the issue with perk-free donations is just that. The average person (especially in Garry's Mod) is hesitant to shell out the cash for a server unless it provides them with some kind of reward. Sure, there are some generous people, but you can't trust that they alone will keep the server online. Nor can you guarantee that ad revenue will compensate for what the donors don't. While I like the model (I've even tried it myself), it just doesn't seem to work.

I'm not trying to smack you down or anything--if this works out for you, awesome--but I'm just warning you that it may not take off like you intend. It's unfortunate, but it's a fact of people.

I hope things don't turn out that way for you. If this takes off, I'd love to see it, even if I'm not much of an RP guy.

[JamminR]

Please see our guidelines for server advertising in the sticky post "About this sub-forum".
https://forums.ulyssesmod.net/index.php/topic,3263.msg47071.html#msg47071
Two main things we're missing we don't like having to search for, one more important than the next (but just as easy to add).
1) How do I go play on your server? I shouldn't have to go to another community page just to find out unless I like the server to begin with.
2) Please add a gametracker banner - makes it easier for us to maintain a clean community advertising list.

[MrPresident]

The thing is...

Large servers need to have dedicated hardware. Using shared hosts (the ones that charge you per slot) is certainly cheaper and makes running a server affordable but it's not viable for a large community or a large server.

Dedicated servers cost money.. a lot of money.
I pay $136 per month for my dedicated server, which I can run multiple game servers as well as a web server on.

I could never afford to run the server without a donation model, and so that's what I do.




All of that being said... my donation model doesn't give players anything that can't be obtained by non-donating members. Most of the things are cosmetic.

In my experience (which is about 10 years of running gmod servers) players will donate simply to stand out above their peers. you don't need to give them an advantage, just give them something that non-donors can't get.

Player models, hats, skins, a fancy colored name in chat... these are the things people eat up.



...continued...

As for ads... forcing ads on players will only drive them away. There is nothing more annoying. 10 times out of 10 I would disconnect from a server that displayed me ads.
And, unless you are experiencing hundreds to thousands of hits per day on a website, don't expect to make any ad money there either.

Also.... in case you've never worked with ads before (I have) you don't really make money off just displaying ads.. only if the user clicks through it and even then.. it's not much.
Ad based revenue is really only viable for very large websites with lots and lots of traffic.

You'll make a couple dollars a month.. maybe..
Also.. (I feel like I'm rambling, I just want to save you from the negative experiences I've had) I believe with google Adsense, you can't even withdraw the money until you've earned a certain amount.. ~$100-200.


In conclusion: You're better off sticking to a donator model like everyone else if you want to support your server through money that isn't coming from your own pockets. What can set you apart from the 'greedy' servers is what you offer (or don't offer) donators.

[MrPresident]

@JamminR - From what I can tell, he doesn't have any servers running yet. He's just advertising a community that he's trying to get off the ground to run servers with a specific philosophy in mind. This might not be the best forum for that.

[sword134]

The thing is...

Large servers need to have dedicated hardware. Using shared hosts (the ones that charge you per slot) is certainly cheaper and makes running a server affordable but it's not viable for a large community or a large server.

Dedicated servers cost money.. a lot of money.
I pay $136 per month for my dedicated server, which I can run multiple game servers as well as a web server on.

I could never afford to run the server without a donation model, and so that's what I do.




All of that being said... my donation model doesn't give players anything that can't be obtained by non-donating members. Most of the things are cosmetic.

In my experience (which is about 10 years of running gmod servers) players will donate simply to stand out above their peers. you don't need to give them an advantage, just give them something that non-donors can't get.

Player models, hats, skins, a fancy colored name in chat... these are the things people eat up.



...continued...

As for ads... forcing ads on players will only drive them away. There is nothing more annoying. 10 times out of 10 I would disconnect from a server that displayed me ads.
And, unless you are experiencing hundreds to thousands of hits per day on a website, don't expect to make any ad money there either.

Also.... in case you've never worked with ads before (I have) you don't really make money off just displaying ads.. only if the user clicks through it and even then.. it's not much.
Ad based revenue is really only viable for very large websites with lots and lots of traffic.

You'll make a couple dollars a month.. maybe..
Also.. (I feel like I'm rambling, I just want to save you from the negative experiences I've had) I believe with google Adsense, you can't even withdraw the money until you've earned a certain amount.. ~$100-200.


In conclusion: You're better off sticking to a donator model like everyone else if you want to support your server through money that isn't coming from your own pockets. What can set you apart from the 'greedy' servers is what you offer (or don't offer) donators.

I have tried ads on a gmod server before and it was recieved ok and actually made money enough. With a big enough playerbase the ads can pay for the server. I also had the idea of a chat tag that says Donator or something fancy like that, but thats about what the only thing you get when donating.

[roastchicken]

I agree with Mr. President here. No-perk donations rely on generous people, and unfortunately the Garry's Mod community doesn't have many of those. I also hate servers that have a pay-to-win mentality and give donators huge benefits, but it's simply not practical to run a server on ad revenue and the occasional goodwill donation alone.

Having donators be able to buy items that don't effect gameplay (rank tags, playermodels, PAC3 or pointshop items, etc.) is a good way to get donations while still keep a fair server.

Another idea that I've had (although I've never tested it and I'm not sure how fair it would be in practice) is to have a set of time-based ranks with perks, and players have the option to donate instead of play on the server to earn those ranks.

However one thing that I have to disagree with Mr. President on is the cost. I ran (technically still do) a server that regularly had (maybe still has, I'm not sure) a peak of 20+ players daily. The server rarely experienced any lag*, only when players deliberately tried to lag it by way of piling a bunch of weapons on top of each other. This server ran on a VPS that cost me $5/month.

Server hosts that specifically sell Garry's Mod Servers (charge per slot) are usually a ripoff. Last time I checked, NFO charged $17/month for a 20 slot server. While they might be running better hardware than my $5 VPS, it's certainly not that much higher quality as to justify the $15 price hike. Even if it was, why bother when a cheaper server can run 20 slots just fine.

To start out with all you really need is a small (<20 slot) server, not a dedicated beast that can run multiple servers. I strongly encourage you to host your server on a VPS. Sure, it might be a bit difficult if you aren't very technically oriented. But it's definitely worth it for the cost and just a better understanding of how your server works so you don't need to rely on third parties such as a Garry's Mod Server Host's support team. There are plenty of online resources for learning, for example there is a pretty good tutorial on the wiki and if you host with Vultr (my server's host) they have their own guide for running a Garry's Mod Server on their VPS.

Anyways, that's it for my rant. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, and I hope you take our recommendations into account.

* I think it's important to point out that I was running a jailbreak server, and I assume DarkRP servers are more resource expensive due to all the props and just the usual larger nature of DarkRP servers. So maybe you might only be able to get 10 slots on a $5 server, but I'm no expert so I suggest starting out with a $5 server and upgrading if you need to.