Just updating everyone on the MOTD (message of the day) now being used for advertisements. For anyone who doesn't know, the MOTD is the page that appears when joining the server. For the last 8 to 12 months we have displayed the forum which was a great way for us to get announcements across to the player base with the sliding banners. I have chosen to begin using an advertisement service as the pros outweigh the cons. The main turning point was the fact that they now offer 100% silent advertisements, which was the main reason I decided never to use a service as it would have been disruptive upon joining the server.
As you probably know, it's not cheap running servers. With the new MOTD page, it will give Killzone Gaming more financial stability now and in the future. We have always been a non-profit gaming community and always will be, so with this change, it will only benefit the community in more ways than one. It will allow us to improve our servers, website and much more. I had initially planned to run banner ads on the forums for guest accounts only. This would have allowed our forum to stay as the MOTD and also generate some extra funds. The banner would have only displayed when you were not logged in. Something similar may be trialed one day.
What do we have planned? We have started working on moving our website/s from a VPS to its own dedicated server. Soon after, our primary database will move to a dedicated server with NVMe drives which will provide it with superior read/write speeds. Expect also to see all the private surf servers and any new ones have their own dedicated server which will provide performance, stability and auto updates as the OS will be now Linux. Minigames will be moved to a new dedicated server (once v2 is complete) and eventually have some new servers alongside it. The list goes on and on.
Pros
More giveaways
More events with prizes
Improvement to current servers
More CSGO servers
Expansion into other games
Hiring developers
Cons
Ugly MOTD upon joining the server
Less forum activity
How do we plan to combat the cons?
The MOTD appearance is currently out of our control but it is being developed to look and perform a lot better than its current state. We also have options available which we may decide to test in the future.
We plan to develop a new chat message/ colored hud advertisement system which is manageable from a web panel. This will allow us to easily update and change messages to appear on one server or across all servers. We can keep the community updated on events, giveaways and another else instead of me having to custom edit 20+ servers chat advertisement messages.
I am also about 1/3 done creating the members' store. If you haven't seen yet (don't look yet, it's not finished) the member's stores currency creating topics, posting, status updates, giving reactions, receiving reactions, joining clubs, adding images to the gallery, adding videos, signing up, referring friends and more. What can you do with these points? Once I'm 100% complete, you will be able to do a lot... You'll even be able to cash out points for such things as skins, steam gift cards, games or forum store credit. As well as even being able to bank them so that you can gain interest on your points for keeping them safe in the bank. Eventually, some groups will also earn weekly salaries as points.
We also have a few new features coming to the forums. Such as; A brand new custom theme, discord integration, gameme ranking integration, raffle tickets integration (view who wins and how much % they had & more). Also, more statistics being displayed on your profile, such as how many raffle tickets you have, your play time on any particular server or all Killzone Gaming Servers as a whole and much more!
Anyway, I've rambled long enough. If you have any suggestions for any of the above just let me know.