We have capacity to run Day-Z, Rust and V-Rising servers with decent slot counts. Unfortunately, we don’t have the administrators.

We are also open to working with an administrator on our Minecraft server, however we have a couple of preferences with this one that would require a discussion.

Games we really want to adopt

Definitely interested in

Kind-of interested in

Another Ark Cluster

I have said this a few times in the past, but I will also add this here.

I know that a few PVE communities have buckled under the cost of running a 12 map Ark cluster. I would prefer for one of those administrators to bring their active community over to Oceania Gamers and continue their moderator duties as they did before.

I do expect you to pay for your cluster and I can discuss the intricates with you over Discuss. The TL;DR is that monthly hosting cost for a 12 map cluster will run you $80/month. Less if you pay 12 months in advance; this is about 1/3 the cost of running the server over 12 months.

Expectations for all servers

Branding

Your servers will be run under Oceania Gamers branding. A listing will be placed on this website with a guide to connecting and the servers rules. Server titles will follow the same fomratting currently used for our Ark cluster. Your community will run out of the Oceania Gamers Discord channel, with a sub-channel for your specific game created and access granted via automatic roles (in-house developed Discord bot providing react-for-role).

Co-contribution is welcome and available for graphics as needed. We do not have a strict branding guide and do a lot of it ad hoc but in-house.

Moderation

You’ll be expected to have a presence in our Discord community. We prioritise listing player communities, streamers and boosters in our member listing however you will be given your own role which members can use to tag you.

The Discord community is largely self-moderating, so you’re not expected to trawl through every message ever posted and ban/mute/kick people. The ‘oceania way’ of moderation can be discussed privately.

You’ll be expected to maintain a presence in your game server as well; helping players and preventing major community issues from arising around the place, but still allowing players to just play the game and not face nazi-admins.

Servers

Boosting/Rates/Mods

When it comes to boosting, rates and mods, we have made our decisions based entirely on what’s best for the player base.

For example, our PVP Ark cluster runs 5x resources to maintain that ‘grind’ aspect of the game, 10x boosting to assist players breeding hundreds of dinos for mutations, 2.5x XP to make level 80-120 viable and hexagon payout boosting to encourage playing of missions that benefit the whole server with additional buffs. We run vanilla, unmodded servers because they cause less problems for accessibility (long story) and it makes the cluster available to both Steam and Epic players, who don’t get access to modded content. PVP was selected because PVE causes base locking problems across the cluster, locking players out of locations even after tribes have left the title.

You’ll be expected to build your rates and mods based on what’s best for the community, and what provides the maximum amount of accessibility. That said, I don’t mind requiring custom launchers as is the case for Day-Z and Minecraft sometimes.

How they run

Not so technical version

@J4Y will handle hosting your server on hxst’s infrastructure. I’ll create some super techy way of automatically deploy configs and bringing the servers online; all you’ll have to do is provide config edits and mod lists.

You’ll get rcon and spectator if available and if you feel it’s required. Personally, I don’t even have spectator on our Ark cluster because RCON is good enough.

I’ll explain everything to you so that you can easily push your config edits through to the servers; it’ll be easier than FTP!

Very techincal version

All servers are run in Docker containers on a Debian docker host. I’ll build a Docker image for the title which will be a publically available image in the https://gitlab.com/dxcker repo. I’ll have a HXST-based image which uses that public image, expands upon it, and deploys your config out to the Docker host via Gitlab CICD.

I can arrange shell access to the host but only if it’s absolutely neccersary. Typically speaking, everything is immutable so there should be no requirement for system access for anything (it’s all containers anyway).

You’ll have access to the Gitlab repo to make your edits to configs; you can either use git over ssh or the online GUI to make changes. When you submit a change, the config will be automatically pushed out and the servers automatically restarted to apply them.

You can see how the process works here: [https://gitlab.com/hxst/servers/ark]

Like I said, I’ll handle all of this technical stuff. We’re just looking for people to run the community. I’ll also be available over Discord for outages or pushing config changes.

Getting involved

You can get in contact with me (J4Y/kprotato) over Discord if you wish to start something.

We’ll have an open ended text-based discussion about how you wish to run the servers, to make sure that we’re on the same page. If we’re vibing on things then we’ll work out a time to jump into a VC and properly talk about how you want the community to function, and we’ll start making plans.

After that, we’ll just keep in touch about things happening with the clusters.