…Can it? Below shows my opinion about the recent SA:MP happenings at 20th of April, 2008. As some things’ve changed, read below where it says update.
This is an interesting aspect which seems to have evolved of SA:MP now, or, to quote someone in particular not me, SA:MP goes weird - you can buy an official Server Rank.
Let’s have a look back at what happened.
In 2006, the SA:MP team released their multiplayer modification SA:MP 0.1 (and a month later, 0.1b) with an interesting feature called “Official Server list”. A couple of servers, chosen by the team, such as littlewhitey’s server, PartyServer, XII’s and Novocaine’s server were present at this time. The regular player count was pretty high, the servers might have lacked some decent admins actively watching for cheaters all the time.
The list of servers being official changed from time to time, at all giving an insight in a couple of modes which were played by more than 10 players at peak times (unless a lot of “Unnamed” or empty servers). In conclusion, I can say it was a bit balanced on what people wanted to play, and as a server has proven to handle lots of players with decent mode, they may have been added to the list - such as GamerX. LVP has been added because of Peter’s developer position, but nevermind, it is still a cool gamemode.
There hasn’t been much of a change until recently, almost the same servers, not much possibilities to get a new server there. SA:MP Team has decided to give the betatesters the right to decide over SA:MP’s new Official Servers, and there have been a couple of restrictions on it - Top 50 Game Rank on Game-Monitor.com, a dedicated admin team and not a lot of cheaters and hackers, at all.
A few servers made it into the official server list based on this new criteria, but it seems the effort was a waste, seriously.
As of yesterday, this has importantly changed. As you may have read on the forums, you can now buy official server rank, with a fairly high price of 40$ a month or 90$ for 3 months. Looking at the host comparison table I made up a while ago, found at sa-mp-hosts.com, it evidently shows you need to pay a lot more, especially with some servers with under 100 Players (being 20 € according to SA:MP Host’s current prices), it would sum up to something around 50 Euro for one month. Hardly cheap, in my opinion.
Speaking from my personal experience as of hosting some SA:MP servers, I would personally not buy a official server rank for my own (non-existant) server, I would rather buy another dedicated server and host some more servers on that, simply since it generates new money - whereas I am not sure an official server rank would get me a waste of new customers. Even if it would do, where shall I put them? On a non-existant server?
I’m not sure if it’s a step forward or not, some of the SA:MP team may support and like this new way for official server ranks, which surely donates towards their Servers, but I have to look on my own limited amount of money. Apart from getting special server builds, there’s nothing much interesting in the offer otherwise, and even this is not worth paying 40$, 30€ or such a month.
However, as I am hosting SA:MP servers, I have some kind of duty to offer them official server rank, we will see how much interest this idea will gain, especially regarding this price.
We’ll see what happens…
Update a week later, 27th of april.
At the time written, above was valid, but I’ve taken my time to get this post published to look at it after some days. Seems to be a good point proven for now.
Later that day (20th of april), SA:MP’s services have appearantly been DDoS’ed, which led Kye to the decision to close the official forums and the official master server list.
In result of that, we’ve started to - yet again - use Popz and Wacko’s fallback-forum in case anything like this would happen again. And here it is: forum.sa-mp.co.uk.
Now this is interesting: At the 25th, Kye decided to make a smaller version of the forums available, basically just for providing support for SA:MP and his new - whatever it may be - Grand Larcency… And no, a sub-forum exists but no information has been provided, at all. Gangs sections and screenshots/videos as well as server advertisement have been cut out, yet you can find them at our new unofficial forums at forum.sa-mp.co.uk.
On a side note, you may use my provided sa-mp loader to enable browsing official list too. You may obtain it from here.
Put it in your GTA folder (where samp.exe is), then you can either launch it before SA:MP and it will start automatically, or you can use it after you’ve started the browser and it’ll just put another address in.
cheers
mabako