Running a Team Fortress 2 game server costs money.  A lot of money.  In order to ensure the long-term viability of our little server project, we are asking those who enjoy our server and are pleased with what we're doing to help cover the direct costs of running The Glory Hole server and this website.

Before deciding, you deserve to know what our expenses are.  Below is a summary of our costs for the 2009 year.

We are currently writing an Action Plan to provide some explanation and detail into what exactly we intend to do with the Glory Hole.  As a summary, we want The Glory Hole to become a relaxed, user-customizable gaming environment and community.  Our key goals are:

• Development of a friendly and social environment with a relaxed competitive style of play.
• A broad selection of high quality and unique custom maps.
• An unprecidented level of ability for our players to control the gameplay environment.  Right now this is limited to a public map vote in leiu of a fixed map rotation as well as our admin's willingness to enable gameplay changes based on popular preference.  In the future, players will have direct access to the ability to call on public votes for things such as low gravity, all-talk, etc.
• A growing library of special features implemented through SourceMod.  In addition to installing serveral published plugins, over time we will develop a suite of custom-written features.  Examples include:
  • Jukebox: A streaming music system with a complete in-game interface that includes a search function, intuitive library navigation and user-customizable playback settings.  This plugin is already running on our server as a beta test and is continuously being improved.
  • Graffiti: Users will be able to populate the stock maps with permanent spray-like graphics, which will help characterize The Glory Hole.  Custom maps will be protected as we want players to be able to experience the original art in these maps.
  • Keyboard Hero: A karaoke-based game where players will fill roles in classic songs and compete for votes among the other players.  The winner shall receive gameplay awards.
  • Mass Media: Full time automatic demo recording using SourceTV.  The demo library will be available through this website.  We want to make it easy for people to share their fun experience on The Glory Hole, and this is how he intend to do it.
  • Back Door: Special ease-of-access for server supporters.  Unlike most servers with a feature of this type, our more balanced approach will be "pub" friendly and won't kick players to make space for connecting ones.
  • Proving Grounds: A simple suite of beta testing tools to help authors beta test their maps using statistical data and feedback/comments from players.  We feel that the custom map community receives inadequate support from server operators, so we're going to do our part to help that.

In the future, we intend to thank our supporters by granting extended access to features and server controls.  Since we currently don't have a way to identify players for this access, we can't offer any such benefits at this time.  Some examples of possible benefits include:

• Double or triple-weighted votes during map votes and other gameplay-influencing votes.
• Access to reserved server functions.  Play on our server and you'll get the idea.
  • When it comes to server-wide, gameplay-changing events, supporters will be able to call for a public vote and will have a higher valued vote, but democracy rules.
• Reserved slot access to The Glory Hole
  • Our implementation will differ from the norm and will be as follows: When the server fills to 24 players, a secret 25th slot will normally remain open for supports to connect to (using the 'connect' command in console).  Only supporters will be able to use this slot, as well as non-supporting admins if there is no other admin on the server.  The reserved slot will remain occupied until someone voluntarily chooses to leave the server, at which point the reserved slot will be available to supporters again.  This does mean that even our supporters will find the server to be full from time to time, but we are unwilling to accept the notion of kicking off players to make room for supposedly more important ones.  If you are the type of person to hang out with us and financially support us then you are likely the type of person to agree with our position anyway.  Occurances of this issue will be minimized by limiting the amount of supporters with reserved slot access to around 6-10 people.
• Privaleged access to whatever can be arranged as our server evolves.

Supporters will not receive administrative control over the server nor other players, including the ability to punish, mute or kick players.  Moderator positions are not sold but are offered by our administrators based on merit and community involvement.

We use the title "supporters" because financial donation is not the only kind of support we are hoping for.  Members of our community who support TEAM CHEESUS and The Glory Hole through other contributions are certainly supporters as well!  However, cash donations will be the primary means of support.

"Supporters" include anybody who:

• Provide cash donations via PayPal, either via one-time payments or via our subscription service.
• Our web site staff members (that is, the one or two people who will be providing top-level administration and art direction).
• Design and publish unique content through our community.
  • With regards to this, we anticipate people eventually feeling inspired to design maps with goals that completely ignore the design intent of Team Fortress 2, such as unique challenge maps or objective-free party or "community" maps that may not have a practical use on more traditional servers.
• Other circumstances as they arise, at the discression of the administrators.

For now, we just ask our users to help us cover our costs so that we can keep the server running.

Note 1: These payments are going to "Greg Peden", which is SirLamer's personal PayPal account.

Note 2: All subscription rates are quoted in Candian Domestic (CAD) currency.

Glory Hole Hourly Rates

Donate as much as you'd like!

 

The Rusty Glory Hole Package

Conveiently support the server with a $9 CAD subscription payment every 6 months (following a $3 fee for your first month).

 

 

The Taped-Laced Glory Hole Package

Conveniently support the server with a $18 CAD subscription payment every 3 months (following a $6 fee for your first month).

 

Thank you for reading about our server and considering supporting us!