Game Tracker Page

One more data point for you: Frosty's averages 5.6 players at all times. We average 4.4 players.

That's a big gap to close. Let's see if we have what it takes.

Think of this as well--Frosty's has gone recently dropped to 26th, they were quite a bit higher. If they continue to lose ground and we can keep moving up, we could meet in the middle and trade spots somewhere in the 32-34 range. Then we'd be the undisputed #1. Not that anyone could dispute it now, really. But hey.

We have moved up two slots today. We are now 38th overall and Frosty's has held its ground at 26th. The gap is now down to 12 slots! Keep populating the server. If you are online and the server is below 5 players, join for a couple of rounds until it gets back up to 7-8 and then step aside when things are in control.

If we can keep our average above 6 players for the short term, we will gain ground!

We have moved up another 2 slots today! We are now 36th. Frosty's moved up one slot to 25th. That makes the gap 11 as of today.

It will be a slow climb and we will need to be diligent and patient and spend as much time as we can gaming on PG4 in order to surpass a server like Frosty's TSS Hell.

While it's not critical that we surpass them, I think it would be a great challenge and accomplishment to beat the most popular mindless, blast away co-op server. It would show that the community has enough people who like to use their head as much as their trigger finger.

Let's stay on this!

More forward progress to report on our quest to catch Frosty's TSS Hell! We have moved up 1 slot to 35 and Frosty's has dropped 1 slot to 27th--a record low for them. The gap is now 8 slots! We are getting it done.

Remember, in order to crack into the 25-30th slot, we need an average of over 6 players in the server 24/7. Our problem there is we have several continuous hours every day where we are empty. Once we start to see the server populate, it's busy until very late in the evening.

I think we can scratch and claw our way to about 32nd before this down time will completely stop our advance. From that point, we either need to find a way to keep the server populated during the overnight hours, or we need to hope that Frosty's drops to a record low for their popularity. I doubt the latter will happen because their ranking is very steady within a narrow range.

At any rate, good work guys!

We seem to have stabilized in the 33-38 range for the time being. SAS Proving Ground 4 remains the premier destination for SWAT 4:TSS co-op team play. 34 of the 35 servers currently ahead of us are adversarial mode servers. The only other co-op, Frosty's TSS Hell, is not a team-based tactical experience. It's for lone wolves looking to kill an absurb amount of tangos or use tons of launched grenades to stun and arrest tangos.

Thank you to all the tactical-minded gamers out there in support of game play like you find on SAS Proving Ground 4.

I don't see it possible to be much higher than about 30th...ever. Adversarial is just too popular. We did manage to get up to 33rd, but this week has seen a spike in adversarial play and we dropped as low as 38th before we rebounded 2 slots to our familiar 36th position.

Let's make 30th our stretch goal and with any luck Frosty's will come down and join us

GT changed the tracking data last week. Instead of taking samplings each hour of how many people are on the server, it scans every 1 or 2 minutes and it considers duration of time spent now by each player and more heavily weights the past 7 days of play.

We had a very light week and fell back to the mid 40s and we continue to slide backwards.

Play has definitely fallen off and we need to ask ourselves why. Not only for ourselves, but why do others leave? Do we have dominant public players who are scaring people away or trying to impose their will on the other public players?

I figured I'd give this a bump.

FYI--no one visits my gametracker page, but if you did, you would see that the top 10 co-op servers for SWAT 4:TSS are:

20 Frosty's Playhouse TSS Hell (not really tactical...they play free for all lone wolf)
56 SAS Proving Ground 4
58 ETS Tactical Gaming PRO
62 Sog-team #1
66 Sog-team PRO Lethal
83 ETS Tactical Gaming
90 Frosty's Playhouse Non Lethal
102 Sog-team PRO House
126 SEK Tactical Co-op
133 AST Tactical Server
This all means that we are still number 1 among tactical co-op servers, but the race is getting very close. ETS and Sog are also very popular, we need to make sure we continue to offer the best and most realistic experience at all times. Good work so far. Keep it up!

FYI--TG2 is ranked #199.

Other information:
-the top 19 servers are either adversarial or plain SWAT 4
-those ranked 21 through 55 are more of the same being mostly adversarial servers that can fit between 12-20 players so they are getting more average players per hour than we are. It's unavoidable. As long as we compete within our audience group, we are all set.

I just don't know how Frosty's stays so far up top. They must use bots or there are more noobs and rambos in the world than I could have possibly imagined.

It's been a few weeks since I've updated this thread. As of this post, 29 Jan 2012, we are ranked 50th (our highest ranking in 30 days) and still first in team-based co-op.

The top 10 cooperative servers are:
Rank -- Name -- (rank range past 30 days)
19 Frosty's TSS Hell (19-24)
50 SAS Proving Ground 4 (50-69)
69 PGO Public Poland (69-242)
75 ETS Tactical Gaming PRO (56-75)
79 Frosty's Playhouse Non lethal (69-96)
95 DOA Coop Server (89-224)
96 ETS Tactical Gaming (75-98)
100 Sog-team.com PRO-House (86-157)
101 UTF Pro Tactical Server (53-139)
106 Sog-team.com PRO-Lethal (52-150)

We get these numbers even with 3 admin-reserved slots. I think it's a good balance between allowing just the right number of non-SAS players into the server so that trouble-makers can be easily voted out if there is no admin around on xfire or webadmin. I would suggest we leave it at 7 public slots/3 reserved slots for the time being.

The UTF, PGO, and DOA servers are trending up, while the Frosty's servers that are ranked below us are trending to go down further.

I think Sog could do much better if they had fewer servers. They never have full teams on any except TSS Hell. If they combined all the players in all of their servers, they could support a second strong server. Of course, I will never tell them that.

I have also written blogs on all of the other top 10 co-op servers. While advertising is prohibited in the blogs, I politely suggest that if they find that particular server to be full and are looking for great co-op to check out SAS Proving Ground 4. I have no idea if it helps at all, but I guess it can't hurt.

I was hoping that more people would contribute posts to the gametracker page for sas22evr, but that has not happened.

That concludes my update for now.

The function of reserved slots is not just to have room for members. The quality of play goes down with each public slot. When there is more influence by boneheads, people leave. I watch the server a lot via webadmin. More than 7 public players with no SAS in the game and you get the same results we see in PG2. One SAS member is not going to effectively handle more than seven noobs. You have eight or nine noobs in a server and it's chaos. I think we have good balance and we're #1.

We can try taking it down to two reserved slots, bjt we have to monitor it closely. If we start losing our ranking, we'll have to act quickly.

We're up to 49th. A new high point in the last 30 days.