Hello. It seems the servers have ran into an issue where a recent update to one of the custom campaigns started causing the servers to infinitely crash.

I have tried to be very lenient in what custom campaigns to allow on the servers, but unfortunately that seems to have caught up with us now.

So from here on out, I'll be a lot more selective about which custom campaigns to allow on the server, based on how well-known they are and so forth.

Sorry for the inconvenience this may cause to anyone.

Hello again everyone.

Thanks to Sir doing 95% of the work, we've been able to deploy a respawn plugin to the servers. The plugin took a lot of work, making it from scratch to truly do what I wanted.

The respawn plugin will do the following:

• Attempt to respawn you with your previous weapon loadout
  
• Attempt to respawn you to the survivor furthest to the back.

The purpose of this plugin is to allow users to play more challenging custom campaigns, specifically troll/puzzle campaigns, on the server without constantly having to restart or play with someone dead. I often get really demoralized when I bring a new friend into a campaign like Shenmejb, they die at the beginning, and I basically either have to complete the map with them dead and them watching, or just suicide and restart the chapter.

The plugin comes with the following commands:

• !respawnvote - This command will allow players to start a vote to allow !respawn during the chapter.
  
• !respawn - Allows players to respawn themselves.

The plugin will NOT work in any mode that allows PvP (versus), or survival. If you run into any kind of problems, please let me know.

• The first corpse of the first map will not be despawned.
  
• Melee weapons on death might have issues with giving them back to survivors.
  
• Going idle can cause issues with the player getting back their equipment.

https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=334463

We have been testing it on a handful of custom campaigns on the "admin" servers. Everything seemed to work out well.

The plugin seems to be responsible for fixing issues with old or poorly coded maps. Reducing the amount of data being sent from(?) the server to clients. Drastically reducing lag due to more consistent tickrate.

Notable maps that seemed to have improved with this:

Kokiri Forest Map 2
Space Jockey (Mob Stadium) series

If you see any issues while playing on the servers please let me know. Since we have so many custom campaigns it would be very difficult to test them all.

After a couple weeks of testing and learning, I've deployed a new firewall using NFTables (as opposed to IPTables) onto the machine.

If you run into any issues connecting to the servers please let me know. Thanks.

I am currently updating the servers and will be starting them up shortly.

However, the new update might have fixed the (D)DOS attack methods that were being used by attackers. This means that people will likely stop using third-party servers as much.

If the (D)DOS attacks are fixed, I will likely scale down the amount of servers I am running for this group. I'll still keep some in case people want to play, but the steamgroup has essentially ran it's purpose once the (D)DOS attacks are fixed.

If you notice any issues with the servers please feel free to contact me.