Anything above 9-10 players per team feels like way too much on these maps. It enables the marines to do the massive lmg marine rush right at the start and win more likely then not. I'll be leaving my server at 16 even with the increased performance.
Currently, my processor will handle 8 public with 1 reserved. It's small, but it seems to be pretty balanced. The aliens have a bit of an advantage, but the marines players I get seem to be pretty coordinated, and that makes up for it. I'l looking forward to the increades performance, to maybe up the limit to 10. (12 if I'm VERY lucky)
It's kinda sad. I have a surplus of bandwidth, but only a celeron 533 processor. (the other processor runs windows) sigh.
I'm a big fan of 14 or 16. I don't like playing any games over a 16 player limit, it seems to push the game too far in favor of the marines. I think it would be rather cool to take statistics to see which team tends to win when graphed against team size.
I run 2 servers at 18. A third server I have been bouncing around a lot. I started at 30 but the CPU was a tad high so I dropped it to 26. Ran fine there but I found a new problem:
Idiots
Apparently every idiot in the world refreshes their (insert HL server search tool here), then sorts by size and joins the largest one with slots. The maturity level on my 18 person servers is decent (much better than CS), I got so fed up with the crying and whining that I dropped my 26 person server to 18 before putting it back up to 22. Its been fairly quiet ever since.
Thanks for the feedback seems that 18 is the magic number. We run our server at 18. I was was wanting to bump it to 24 or so, but i think i will leave it at 18. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
For now i'm using 26 as max. It's always full but i can't incrase this number until v1.1, i need beter cpu loads. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->
Comments
over 20 imo marines tend to win a lot.
and yes i'm going to put 16 slots when NS 1.1 comes out.
i host 14. if the round starts 7v7 it is very balanced.
Seems balanced in all respects, move to 18 and marines get res much faster.
It's kinda sad. I have a surplus of bandwidth, but only a celeron 533 processor. (the other processor runs windows) sigh.
For a good game you need at least 5vs5 imho.
6vs6 is how we play in Clan-Matches.
7vs7 up to 9vs9 can be a lot of fun, too.
A third server I have been bouncing around a lot. I started at 30 but the CPU was a tad high so I dropped it to 26. Ran fine there but I found a new problem:
Idiots
Apparently every idiot in the world refreshes their (insert HL server search tool here), then sorts by size and joins the largest one with slots.
The maturity level on my 18 person servers is decent (much better than CS), I got so fed up with the crying and whining that I dropped my 26 person server to 18 before putting it back up to 22. Its been fairly quiet ever since.