This is such a good idea, big up Paw.Another idea / More brainstorming:
My guess is that there isn't anything really wrong/bad with the gamemode itself (Though new maps are always a nice addition to see), but instead the players themselves which find it more fun joining a full/close to full server rather than one which "barely" has 30 players or less as it makes the gameplay very unbalanced. Either it gets really slow (Zombies hiding, Large maps etc..) or the rounds are over "too fast" (Humans getting lucky with their spawns being able to corner up the zombies one by one or opposite with the zombies having lucky spawns giving the humans no chance no matter how fast their TMP/Shotgun can reload). That's the issues I know of on V3 atleast when the amount of players isn't optimized.
Assuming when someone is looking for a server they will usually pick a server from gametracker among top 15 (At this page: https://www.gametracker.com/search/css/ ) and V1 is ranked 57th as I'm writing this and highest past month is 25th (Since 15 is the default amount of servers/items shown per page and people will rarely go the next page unless they are looking for some specific server.).
Maybe a bit early, but consider making an event (Or wait until it's time for another event and add it as a "second prize" which is "V1 ONLY" or something like that) with a prize to the player(s) with most playtime (I know it might sound stupid giving away something based on how much you've played since it's possible to just "farm" hours by being afk/inactive/spec, but try to look on the positive side assuming I'm right:
+ Server ranking will go up, because of the increase of "players" which will then again increase the number of actual active players joining from gametracker or other sites the server is listed on (Which was the main intent of this thread.).
+ The frequent players will find it more likely to join as well seeing the server "full" making them want to play again.
Negatives:
- The event/prizes aren't promoted enough or in good time to make enough players want to participate in the contest.
- The server might get full of specs/AFKs (Though I doubt it.) which could be a problem for the "normal" players trying to get in, but if it should get to the point of 20+ specs I think the admins should have the chance to be allowed to kick some specs assuming the server is full of course (Even though it isn't allowed unless a fellow admin is trying to join according to our knowledgebase.).
Considering I'm not that familiar with V1 I could be wrong, but I find it worth a shot though, since the amount of players on V1 could also have an effect on V3 over time.
We can easy bypass the “negatives” example, if people are in spec all the time we can easily disqualify them by just looking at their hlstatsx sessions, maybe not right away but I was thinking when the even is done we can look it up etc.
Maybe we can edit a couple of maps to put in let’s say some pictures around the map that says Event and the link to the forum where they then can navigate and search for the event thread themselves. If this worked we could just add the same maps every time we have an event and people will know there’s and event and they will see the forum link from ingame on walls so i think they will visit forum more.
I was talking to Paw about the prices but idk if my idea is good or not, I was thinking maybe we can use 100€ from donations or something and then have maybe amazon gift cards as price or something, I think that would motivate people to play even more.
But idk really this can maybe be discussed or something.
But the whole idea of this event seems very very good and we should give this a try, tho I don’t think we should reset the stats because people tend to get pissed about it.