Sales Pitch

[VintagePC]

Vintage is correct, there is a great deal of background work to server maintenance a lot of people probably never see or understand the amount of frustrating time it takes to fix things especially after patches. There are only two people left that fix sourcemod after major tf2/css patches, a bit of a scary thought considering over 100,000 gameservers relying on it. A lot of the work ends up in the hands of the server operators to try and fix the issues, and test fixes to the wee hours of the night.

I think most people would be surprised at the amount of time I spend staring/poking/kicking at the back end of the servers - and it's not an "at my convenience" job either, it's an on-call type of job. I constantly have to be around/available, and when shit breaks, you have to fix it ASAP, I don't have the option to do it at my convenience unless it's a very minor thing. Fortunately they're reasonably stable now (until the next major update...)

 

[Reechard]

I hope everyone knows that we'd have no gameservers without Vintage (well, maybe minecraft...). I keep the webserver and gameserver backend up and running, do routine maintenance on the database and server versions, make sure we have backups of the site if something happens to the webserver's hard drive, and make sure everything is secure and stable. My job is relatively set-it-and-forget-it, and I've been doing it as a career for 6 years now, so working on it is second nature to me and is nothing I don't do 50 times a day already. Vintage, on the other hand, is a programmer. He's creating new things for us. He's automating tasks that I wouldn't have the first clue how to even start. He's written an updater program for our game servers to make it easier on himself.

Quite frankly, Valve is INFURIATING with its updates. I had given up on Source servers long before VF4. They regularly break things on our servers that Vintage puts hours into rewriting and debugging, and somehow every update we're one of the first people back online.

What I'm saying is, appreciate the hell out of Vintage.

 

[Tachyon³]

TIL trial is still a thing in the grand scheme of things


continue with your daily routinely lives and ponder that for a moment

 

[Reechard]

TIL trial is still a thing in the grand scheme of things


continue with your daily routinely lives and ponder that for a moment

......... TRIAL.