No server with competitive maps/ configs has ever stayed populated, at least since quickplay came out.

These kinds of servers always die really fast

even star's server has had 0 people on it at times these days

Star_'s server is living proof that the formula works. In fact, the reason I even decided to try this is because of how disappointing that server can be. It has connection issues (despite my often single-digit ping), it's missing some essential features (like votekick).

I guess its success is thanks to Star_ being so popular among the community?

star marketed his server through his 500k+ view videos, as well as through other celebrities frequenting it (jerma, stabby, etc); they were basically regular pubs with no crits/minis and custom maps. even with that he can only really support one 24 player server, and it has been dying down from what ive seen

okay so im gonna throw in my 2cents to hopefully not have this die, as most "competitive focused" ones do. First just do normal Warmfront instead of warmerfront, as much as it isnt "competitive" some joke maps like trainsawlaser and wubwubwub sometimes garners more people to join.

dont use a whitelist, its a pub theyre going to do what they want, let them do what they want theyre gonna be upset if they cant run beggars because its their favorite weapon.

lower "pregame mayhem" to like 45 seconds. pubbers dont really find dm fun most of the time.

tftrue is a no-go, mainly because 90 v 60 fov is already strong enough, dont need to blow pubbers minds

besides that everything seems good. however, the biggest issue youre going to come around is maintaining a community. couple ways you can do this is try finding some friends, real, internet whatever and just sorta play on the server often, try to have a good pub environment. it will make people want to come back more often, and dont have shitty annoying ads.

Realize that youre probably NOT going to be making money from this.

edit: change sunshine from rc7 to rc8

Turbine and harvest. That's the key to success.

When it came to cp_coldfront variants, I went with what I thought was the "latest" version. I can switch to cp_warmfront if you think that's better. Not too big on the joke maps... I could always make this a quickplay server if I wanted it populated (is that a given?)

I would like this server to be the place the best pubstars and comp players go to, and to keep things balanced at high levels I felt like the whitelist was the right way to go. They're used by leagues for a reason, no?

I remember Reddit East had the pregame mayhem thing going on their server... I could turn it down to a minute. That's more reasonable. I thought people would love the pregame dm. I was even thinking of expanding it to be a dm server if the population is 6 players or fewer.

Still going to keep TFTrue, but I can keep the FOV at vanilla.

Also about money... don't worry about it. This is my personal server for other stuff besides games, too. It costs me a whopping $10/mo to keep going. It's hosted on DigitalOcean.

I haven't touched the big blob of custom maps yet since May, I should probably update those too.

:(

But yeah, again, would doing quickplay keep it populated, even though I'm limited to vanilla maps?

Quickplay doesn't get you many players anymore in my experience. You need like 16 already in server to get a lot of quickplay ppl