Jokes aside, here's a small little guide on how to start a new community in your community server

Starting your own quickplay community server is a great way to get people back in playing on community servers instead of Casual. During the Quickplay era, there used to be a lot more servers and a lot more choices (compared to today) and was one of the reasons why people kept playing TF2 for so long. However, there's some stuff that you need to know when starting your brand new community server.

Creating a new server itself is relatively easy. It's making it populated that's hard. Ideally, you start a new server using a dedicated server so it doesn't shut down when you are offline. Listen servers (servers you make using the Create Server button in-game) are fine but they're mostly temporary and is limited by how good and reliable the server hoster's computer is.

The most difficult part in creating a new community with your brand new community server is creating that community who regularly plays the server in the first place. This very fact is what makes servers thrive or die.

Based from my experience, there are a couple of stuff that you can do to make a new community that regularly plays on your servers, but they usually take time (even months) to build.

0. Turn off round limits, and use a server map timer. People are tired of Casual Mode. and go to Community servers to avoid Casual Mode.

1. Have your friends on your friends list help seed your server. Just make a goal of having at the very minimum 7 or 10 players on your server.

2. Play on a vanilla map that is relatively popular in your region. Your goal is to attract randoms to your new server.

3. Regularly play on the server every day, and try sticking to a server schedule and make that schedule known to your friends and to other randoms. Expect to do this for months.

4. Get a YouTuber or streamer with a good enough subscriber base to play on your server. If your server is moderated to be streamer friendly, you have the advantage for this. This is the fastest way to get a lot of players (potential regulars) to play on your server.

5. Have a gimmick or feature/s on your server that makes it stand out from the rest of the servers. For Castaway, its the weapon reverts (check out the plugin here![github.com]). For Skial, it's the free items. For Uncletopia, its the competitive-like rule sets. You get what I mean by this. However, make sure that gimmick does not stray too far from old vanilla quickplay TF2 or randoms aren't likely to join. Having a gimmick isn't a requirement. It's just there to help.

6. Get some friends who are tired of playing on one server to play on your own server instead. Think of this as branching off from another server.

7. Use a Steam group chat (or whatever popular social platform there is) to annouce for play session schedules

To be extremely honest with you, making a community server populated in the first place is extremely difficult.
For a case example, let me tell you the story of how Castaway started:

Bot crisis was in full swing (June 2024)
There were no servers that had the quickplay rules set
Server owner made Castaway as a response to the bot crisis
First few months they had trouble filling up
Server tries out play session schedules
Active YouTuber with a decent subscriber base comes
More players and more regulars started to join slowly but surely in the span of around 6 months because of regular play sessions
More servers in other regions are created (Asia, my home region)
I relentlessly asked my active friends in my friends list to seed the server, as well as get the existing Castaway community to seed the server too
There are some days where the Asia server was just dead, but that shouldn't discourage us
Keep playing on the server regularly, keep finding more avenues for advertisement
Server becomes active
Repeat this ad infinitum

Other than the ramblings I wrote above, here are some things I know that kill community servers:
1. Going the way of saigns .de (pay to win stuff) (just don't do this)

2. Moderation that easily slides into subjective power-tripping by server admins and moderators

3. Votekick raids (can be prevented by admins and mods via bans or plugins)

4. Cheaters (again with mods and admins, also StAC to a certain extent)

5. Constantly voting for maps that are unpopular (voting a bad map mindlessly then not rtv-ing on map change)

6. Not using the in-game voice chat. You want randoms to feel welcomed. Using Discord or third-party VoIP apps outside of the in-game voice chat can make outsiders feels unwanted and eventually leave your server. Don't make it feel exclusive, make it feel inclusive, even if they're literal aliens and have different opinions. They could have interesting stories to tell.

7. Curbstomping fresh installs on the server, team-stacking using Discord, forcing team-stacking by preventing vote scrambles, playing the game as if it was ranked matchmaking (go to Casual, Overwatch or any other comp game for that instead). Don't forget that vanilla TF2 was originally designed as a casual game, not a competitive game. Don't forget too that old community servers used to have anti-team stacking plugins to prevent server death!

8. Annoying server ads

9. Server costs. Whenever you run a TF2 server, you will never gain a profit from it. It will ALWAYS be an expense because you love the game. Based from what I've seen, lack of funds tends to be what kills community servers during the Quickplay era.

10. Powertripping by server donators (if you do set up server donations, be very careful so that it doesn't slide into powertripping)

11. E-Drama. Anything that causes friction can fracture a community and kill it.

This is all based from what I've observed since the quickplay era. I think it's usually money and lack of motivation that kills servers. This isn't really an in-depth guide, but more of stuff that was immediately in my head that I think people should know about.

This is all based from what I've observed since the quickplay era. I think it's usually money and lack of motivation that kills servers. This isn't really an in-depth guide, but more of stuff that was immediately in my head that I think people should know about.