The REAL cost of running HLL servers

[AGGR3SSOR]

BLUF: Cost is calculated many ways from monetarily to efforts in the form of dedicated man-hours, but in most cases server owners are volunteers and HLL players receive an enormous number of services for no cost except the initial purchase of this fantastic title.

Monetarily speaking:
I believe HLL can only be rented from two services currently; Nitrado and Gportal. The cost varies depending on what level of service you are looking for and whether you want your server to have dedicated RAM. I believe the difference is between $80-$195 USD.

Cost to the server owner: $80-$195 depending on expectations
Cost to the player: zero

But that's just the monetary cost.

Unless you want to play HLL by yourself, you have to attract players to your server. This is where the REAL cost is calculated.

1. The largest cost: Build/join a community. Hell Let Loose is better with friends, as nominated for the 2019 Steam Awards, and building or joining a community is a great place to garner support for your server. Recruiting, advertising, moderating, and retaining enough community members to operate a 100-player server is a massive undertaking. The desired size of your player-pool will depend on how much effort will be required to maintain the community. But you can't expect to have a community of 100 players and then conduct 100-player matches every day. Not everyone is available, not everyone is in the same time zone, and while it might seem unfathomable to some, HLL isn't the only title gamers play. Granted, some of the time zone discrepancies are mitigated by server location, but HLL can effectively be played, literally, worldwide. Australian players routinely play on US East servers, or vice versa.

Cost to the server owner: 20-60 hours per week
Cost to HLL players: zero

2. Recruit a cadre of staff to assist you. Staff in this case are defined as a group of people, usually unpaid volunteers, who provide staff-work in the form of creating content for recruiting and advertising, moderating your community, collecting donations (optional), processing giveaways (optional), etc.
Do you want your server to have active admins? What kinds of boundaries will you put on the admins? The vast majority of gamers want to play HLL as it was meant to be played, uninterrupted by distractions like cheating and toxicity. You can only monitor the health of your server with a group of admins, for which you must provide direction and incentive to participate.
Does your community want merchandise to represent? Choosing a vendor, design, price point, delivery (incl. overseas), etc. all this requires staff.
Does your community want to play other games with each other? Take this article and double, triple, quadruple, etc. What about your online presence? Does your community have a website? Web design, maintenance, feedback response, etc.
Recruiting and retaining the right staff members from a community of online players who will represent you and your server is priceless and requires a lot of invested time.

Cost to the server owner: 10-40 hours per week
Cost to HLL players: zero

3. Promote your server. There are various platforms available to promote your server. Some common platforms are the HLL Discord, Steam forums, Reddit, etc. However, posting a few bland lines about your server is not going to convince people they should play there. Effective server advertising means that you offer something that the other already-established servers do not.
Will your server provide special organized events? Who will organize all 100+ people into teams (accounting for no-shows), choose an appropriate time/date, advertise the event, lock/unlock the server? Will your teams have pre-planned strategic battles, or just another pub match in a locked server? Will you coordinate with other HLL teams? Teams outside your time zone? All of these things require a dedicated staff (see: #2).

Cost to the server owner: 5-20 hours per week
Cost to HLL players: zero

4. Seed your server. A single player in a server cannot spark a 100-player game. You need multiple players willing to volunteer their time and resources to attract other players into your server, especially when you are first starting up. It's not fun playing 1 vs 1, or even 5 vs 5 -- and that's not how the game is meant to be played. But in order to fill a server, it starts with one...unless you have a community. But how do you incentivize people to seed your server? By providing a server that has active admins, a community with numerous players, and the teamwork of dozens of volunteers.

Cost to the server owner: varies based on support
Cost to HLL players: zero

5. Don't feed the trolls. Occasionally you will be forced to ask people to leave your community because they don't share the same values as your community, in many cases they become upset. That's frequently when the public flamespraying starts. Depending on your success, it's likely that you as a server owner don't have the time to comb through all of the comments on all of the platforms that relate to your community, if you even have the desire to. But inevitably someone will forward the negativity to you. When this happens, remember all of the effort you have put into the community -- all of the (free) services that the hundreds or thousands (or tens of thousands) of players have received because of your generous efforts and ignore the negativity. The HLL community appreciates your efforts, even if a few trolls are in need of public attention and want to use your efforts to offset their inadequacies.

Cost to the server owner: zero
Cost to HLL players: Trolls lose their dignity

6. Finally, the HLL Developers (Black Matter) and Publishers (Team17) are very active in the community, and especially with the server owners. They frequently request and receive feedback for improvement and help the dedicated teams promote a friendly and inviting gaming atmosphere. This trajectory was established at the title's launch and has no indications of waning. Well done, and thanks to BM and T17.

TL:DR Server ownership is hard work. It's not for everyone and it requires significant and long-term dedication. Consider this article when you complain about a HLL community and don't be surprised when they don't take the time to respond to your public complaints.

(I am an NPA member and HLL server administrator since June 2019. NPA operates multiple public HLL servers from Nitrado, has over 8,000 members, and hosts organized public matches weekly. NPA.gg)

[Andy]

Originally posted by datCookie:

Originally posted by AGGR3SSOR DIXX:

BLUF:

Monetarily speaking:
I believe HLL can only be rented from two services currently; Nitrado and Gportal. The cost varies depending on what level of service you are looking for and whether you want your server to have dedicated RAM. I believe the difference is between $80-$195 USD.

You are correct on this. Nitrado and Gportal are currently the only two server providers for HLL. The hope is that we will be able to host our own dedicated servers in time. Removes not only a lot of financial burden, but the server performance issues as well.

Awesome summary. Here's hoping future server owners see this.

It doesn't remove the financial burden. The specs required to run these kind of games demand quite a substantial system. That's without running costs.

To look at PS specs, with only 80 players in the same engine

CPU: i7 7700k / i7 8700k / i7 6700k OC 4.5 or 4.4
Memory: 32GB Ram / 3200Mhz

[cdplayer906]

from someone who just plays w/e is open, all this back and forth (regardless of who is in the right) is a bad look from the outside looking in.

if anything it's shown me i don't really want to join a dixx server just relative to the drama attached, as this isn't the first string of interactions i've seen that are like this regarding dixx

[Andy]

Originally posted by cdplayer906:

from someone who just plays w/e is open, all this back and forth (regardless of who is in the right) is a bad look from the outside looking in.

if anything it's shown me i don't really want to join a dixx server just relative to the drama attached, as this isn't the first string of interactions i've seen that are like this regarding dixx

Once community groups go outside a small friend group. They can become a fairly sizeable organisation.
Someone suggested team DIXX had 3000 members. Not sure how true that is. But, they are quite a size.
Every group that size will have a few bad eggs. A few individual incidents, don't mean a whole community is rotten or run badly.
And, things are skewed further by the fact, positive interactions with DIXX servers aren't reported. Only negative ones.
So, you gotta take these things with a grain of salt, and judge for yourself.

I've had a small number of bad experiences on servers in this and similar games. But, the vast majority of the time it's been individuals, and they havn't represented the attitude of the groups to which they belonged.

[=7Cav=BG.Rob.Y]

Discourse is key in any organization, administration of servers, especially HLL with the vast limitations for what our admins can actually do, is challenging but not impossible. Feedback from the community is always welcomed, and once you have been around Team DIXX, 82AD, 2nd inf, and 7th Cavalry gaming communities, to name a few out of many, one will discover a ton of awesome people who are trying their best to make a great gaming environment on their servers. Almost all communities have a place to voice concerns for instance https://7cav.us/forums/issues-with-the-7th-cavalry.10/ and we all welcome feedback to improve the playing experience. As HLL grows, all communities will have to grow and improve with it, so I encourage everyone to do their part in keeping a fun exciting atmosphere and providing constructive feedback whenever you are able! Keep up the good work everyone

[BigRichie7]

This might sound bias with the fact that I have DIXX in my name and I'm and fairly active member on their severs and discord but their community has been nothing but good to me.

I joined them at a level 10 or 15 in HLL and I wanted to find some people that are willing to talk and form good tactics throughout the game. I asked on around on Reddit and eventually found myself on their discord. That was 2 months ago, since then I've been playing with people that just want the same things I did when I joined. The events they put together every week are very well run and having played in a few others, the ones run by DIXX are top tier. All I've found on their servers is good advice at a game I love to play, some friendly folks to squad up with and even just today I needed some help picking out a new monitor and got help with that too. If people want to find/start drama they will. I have experienced none of that in my time with them.

The effort the folks running DIXX put forth is unlike anything I've been apart of in my 20 years of gaming. I really do urge people any chance I get to check them out, from where I'm sitting these people just want to play games with decent folks and are passionate about it.

That's just my experience with them, and again I do have DIXX in my name so if you want take it with a grain of salt, do but I promise you if joined their discord your experience would be the same as mine.

[Octavian Giaus]

3816 is the accurate membership.

Dixx gets what 2 whiners posting a month?
They run 12-15 full games a day on 3 different servers.
@lowest estimate that is 3600 slots filled a day.
Over 100k slots in a month.

Originally posted by cdplayer906:

from someone who just plays w/e is open, all this back and forth (regardless of who is in the right) is a bad look from the outside looking in.

if anything it's shown me i don't really want to join a dixx server just relative to the drama attached, as this isn't the first string of interactions i've seen that are like this regarding dixx

It is your loss. You can get all the information you need by playing on the servers.
Then make a decision. Or you can listen to the 2 malcontents a month that "feel" they need to trash a community on the boards. Most who have issues, will have issues anywhere they go.
Try it, if you have issues don't go back. But to make that decision based on someone who lives in their mom's basement and wants to run ♥♥♥♥ is kind of silly.

I am a member. I do not play in discord, suck up, or know anybody in DIXX.
I joined to bypass the QUE and they give me my best ping.

[cdplayer906]

lol i've played on their servers plenty. even when they only had one. i'll take the loss to avoid a petty atmosphere. this post was just that. there are plenty of other servers to play on after all

[Imperial Patriot]

Can you set up a dedicated server on your own pc or your own private server?