I like most people, see this as just an opportunity to put Pure Tremulous at the top of the server list so that you can tell new players what the proper gaming etiquette is and how the game is designed to be played. Do you notice how, PT which has hand picked admins through a rigorous process where all the admins started as or were mostly picked by MG members, is now a completely dead server? The thing was, no matter how you look at it, pure tremulous was too full of people telling you how you need to play and how you need to act when you play and now it has completely died. On the otherhand, the most popular "real 1.1" server AA in the US that Ozzy hosts is full of douchebag admins, abuse, swearing, and people just goofing off. Yet it has the most activity, the most intense games, and by far the biggest collection of skill regulating it. Do you know why? It's because people are allowed to play the game how they want, you don't get banned for trying out what is obviously a shitty base when your obviously should know how to build, or for shotgunning that faggot in the face that has been blasting you in the back all day. Sure it's not "polite" to kill him because he obviously is just new to aiming, but it sure does give him something to think about, and in 9 times out of 10 they'll apologize and say please don't kill me I'm sorry(in broken confusing english) and in that 10% where they react badly by deconning or going on an attempted killing spree, it just shows what kind of player they truly are anyway. There are reasons MG will never run a very popular server outside of their prime. 1, they're inactive. So inactive in playing its actually sad. Even in PT's high point, it was lucky to see even a handful of MG's(which basically ran the server) at any given point in time. Pop by AA now and then and see how many AoD members are on? Next, they pick admins that they respect, but also in turn almost never play. Then, they try and salvage that by picking active admins, such as shagarath, who god bless, has the fucking IQ of a rat. They consider niceness and calmness more important than intelligence when it comes to adminning. Where as Ozzy may pick douchebags, but guess what those douchebags know how to use the fucking !buildconfig and !revert commands properly. I during my playing saw 3 PT admins completely fail the process there, because the ones who know how to use them don't bother to play the game. Next PT and MG are built around a barrier of arrogance, now matter how you look at it. You can go read everyone of your posts on these forums, or check out your conversations in IRC. You guys just are elitists in a lot of senses. Now, obviously, you've done a lot of developing for this game, you've moderated the forums, and you were built from and were very involved in the community at one point but, you can't deny that because of this, you almost shelter yourselves from the rest of the community as some kind of higher life form. Whether or not its intentional, or whether or not you want to admit it. MG is kind of one of those special groups that sits above the rest. The reason you guys get along so well, is obviously because you agree on most things, otherwise you wouldn't be so tightly knit. Because of that though, you elect yourselves into the dev team, the adminning on the forums, and the officialy future of Tremulous. Which is just wrong, too much power has been placed into one opinion. Even if you ask for opinion on 1.2, in the end no matter how much bitching and screaming we make about hovels or this or that, you do what you feel will balance the game, based on your server that only plays public games with mostly the same people over and over.
Moving on since this is coming off as an assualt at MG which it is not meant to be. Nextly, PT died because it told people how you were meant to play on the server. How you had to play. All servers have rules, no deconning, etc, some even have no cussing allowed, but those are just basic guidelines to help keep the game fun. Outside of that we don't care how you like to play, if you'd like to have a friendly PK match with your teammates now and then, or if you'd like to try a way out there move once or twice, etc etc. PT had such a communistic playing feel of how MG wanted you to play, no real players ended up there. Just MG suckups(including myself at one point, *raises guilty hypocrit flag and says "oops"* and a few stragglers.
Bleh
tl;dr
Official pinned servers end up like PT and scare off new players who are here to actually... play... a game... like tremulous is... a game...
Inacitve MG or MG hand picked Admins
Ignorant hand picked admins are picked solely on attitude and not on balls to mute those who need to be muted or ability to actually even understand the admin commnads and how they work.
Biasm in general.
