15th humans vs bots would be the most popular server had it not been for their awful admin staff. Seriously i do not understand the benefits from perm banning people for minor rule breaking. I understand that you want to keep out the trolls but also understand that at this point you have basically banned half of your original community. I am not kidding you. I was perm banned a year ago and i can promise you i am not a troll, i host events now. From what i've seen, many of the people here asking to get unbaned are not trolls, they just messed up, a lot of the time on accident. The way you treat the people on your server has even hurt your regiment's reputation because that server is what youre known for. I'm not suggesting that you unban everyone, but atleast accept some of the unban requests. If you don't youll just continue to lose players, your regiment will have less recruits, and youll continue to encourage this negative reputation against yourself.
If you decide not to listen to what i have to say, then at least have the decency to follow this.
1. WARN FIRST, if this does not work then
2. TEMP BAN SECOND, if this does not work then
3. PERM BAN
Way too many of your admins go straight for the perm ban, even for minor issues when the problem could have been solved simply by giving a warning. The only instance i can see a perm ban being used first is if someone joins the server and immediately starts TKing people. Verbal abuse in my opinion should be a temp ban but its up to you if you want to perm for that.
Perming for destroying defenses that they themselves built? That it outright ridiculous and your admin staff should be ashamed of themselves. Give warnings more, for christ sake.
So wait. If we have banned half our original community, that means there is only a total of 8,000 IDs or so that actually could/do play, with several hundred IDs belonging to multiple people? Explains a lot.
Now, I'll give you a few stats. We have over 4,000 ban IDs. This is not individual people. We also received hundreds of IDs from other groups. We also probably lost at a few times hundreds of IDs when the overall server running our server crashed.
Also, we haven't been a regiment for a while. We just host servers. We have 2 admins now, 4 in total but the other 2 don't admin much so really the 15th is just 4 people. Now most people, only get temp-banned now. Why? Because they don't read the game rules. 5 commanders, hundreds of lines of text from people complaining why people can't follow this simple rule, I read daily.
Now admins, with just 2 we just don't ban. Sappers we watch, we see who builds what. The last sapper I banned used out of the start 150 build points, with 45 or so already used another 66 points of explosive crates. Now it states in the game rules, no explosive crates by defenders. So already a rule always there, that can be seen was broken twice with explosives used and in a large amount. A sapper I watched 2 days ago, built some defenses, then declared, "These defenses I built suck, I'm destroying with my sapper axe". I continued to watch, defenses destroyed, points returned to the team and better defenses built. No admin actions taken.
Teamkilling is not a problem on our server, as since November 2012, teamkilling has never been on other than the few minutes after the server has been restarted and then turned off. Although that hasn't stopped I believe at last count 174 people mainly on steam asking for an unban for teamkilling someone.
Now for chat, more often than not, 2 warnings are given out. First is nicely asking for certain convos to stop, 2nd is pretty much saying stop fucking typing or get banned. Most stop, others believe they are entitled to say whatever they like as if it was a blog. Only convos I just ban without warning are ones that usually involve 1-4 people who begin chatting about a large genocide of jews needs to occur again and soon.
Now all I am gonna say now is, you really are uninformed about the going-ons with our server. But we really don't care about being popular, we only have Napoleonic Roleplay getting higher pops now. 33rd and 63e Sieges have all but disappeared. Even Minisiege has upped their limit from 64 to 80, so they stay at 100% capacity for most of NW-EU primetime.
People or random people don't really care about how servers are run, they go where the pop is. When the main servers crash, people go onto the next available server and stay there till it crashes or the natural flow of time makes people close the game. Then if the server they usually play on is back the next day, they go there again.
We only have people bitch because most were punished as regiments, now most bitch because they get punished with temp-bans for not reading. Its pretty rare to get perma-banned anymore, yet people still find ways, especially funny with the people who WANT banned, then contact me on steam saying something like, "Thanks, it took a bit longer than I thought but now I'm banned!". Heck, I've had probably 50+ people on Red Orchestra 2 tell me they tried to get banned or their friend tried to get banned.