DFS: Now and Beyond

Hey everyone, it's been quite a while since our last announcement so I'm here to bring in some excitement and fresh air to the DFS community


We're still here, we've been listening to a lot of feedback and working hard behind the scenes for fresh new changes.

Before I get more into that, I'd like to mention that I am officially coming back out of retirement back to my ownership role and will once again be giving my full support to DFS to make sure it continues striving as one of the most fun TF2 communities out there!

No matter the state of the game as a whole, we're still committed to supporting DFS to make it feel as fresh and exciting as long and much as possible:


Not only do we have a new major update in the works, but we also want to share information on a bunch of major changes, revamps and neat additions we're planning to bring into the servers soon, starting first with donations, donation deals and their incentives

It's no secret that keeping DFS running on the high-spec machines we use and paying all our developers for their hard work costs money, and your generosity helps keep the lights on.

We're making some big and important changes to the way we handle donations to be more transparent about where your money is going and want to continue showing our gratitude to those who support us by adding in new goodies and feats/commands for donors, while trying to be less restrictive wherever possible on exclusivity of commands and content.

Here's a quick overview of the changes we're aiming to make:

• Memberships will be changing and membership prices will be decreasing to allow more people to enjoy the perks of Gold and Platinum for supporting us
  
• New perks will be added for donors to ensure the donor ranks remain worthwhile
  
  • We'll be working on adding awesome new plugins/commands for donators to use, a fine upcoming example of this will be being able to ride and fly an Arwing around the map freely just like in Star Fox!
    
  • EXP boosts depending on amount donated/milestone reached
    
  • We're also looking forward to adding more bigger bonuses and features to donators, we're working to make sure donors are enjoying their time in the servers and that their donations feel worthwhile as much as possible. We'll keep the details a surprise to be revealed in the future!
• Some donor-exclusive perks will be made available for all players, and some Platinum perks will be made available to Gold players to make the fun of DFS feel hopefully less restrictive.
  
• No more time-restricted items or perks:
  
  • We're working on a new chat based DFS system that will allow all users to set their custom tags and chat colors at will anytime they'd like
    
  • Donation deal-exclusive content such as pets and more are going to be added to the Shop and drop system, allowing all users to be able to obtain them without donation or time restrictions
• We're hoping to add a donation goal bar on dfs.tf in the future that will allow players to see what donations are going towards

Donations are used to pay for high-end server machines, dfs.tf webserver machine and developer commissions/payments to allow for creation of new content/updates and all sorts of new additions for DFS.
Your support truly means a lot for us, if you'd like to support us please consider donating to us at https://dfs.tf/donate!


Now to server related changes & additions:

Sandbox will finally be going out of Beta!
Thanks to your feedback, plenty of improvements and new features are coming to Sandbox! We'll be able to share more information soon, but rest assured we're taking on board your feedback.
A couple of the biggest changes are aimed at players having limited resources to build with and the placement of props being too clunky to work with:

• A Physgun is being added to make moving and placing props much easier
  
• New building materials and props are being added
  
• And much more to be revealed in the future

We'll be able to share more detailed information as DFS Sandbox develops further but we hope the changes so far sound promising to you!


Next, let's take a look at DFS' maps and gamemodes. We've seen that friendly maps are still played much less often than other gamemodes, due to them not being as enjoyable for some players. We're hoping the improvements to Sandbox and other upcoming changes that we'll share more information on soon can help remedy that and help more people find fun in friendly maps!

We're also happy that our new Ultimate Map Chooser plugin has been well received for the most part, but not being able to nominate gamemodes and maps has received common critique from a lot of players which we're aiming to address soon. We're also reviewing how we curate our map pool, bringing new additions to it and changing up how we remove maps from it.

• Nominations will be integrated into the Ultimate Map Chooser, giving some more control back to players to choose what gets played
  
  • All players will be able to nominate gamemodes and maps anytime before the vote begins
    
  • Certain gamemodes will not be selected for map votes or available for nomination until a minimum number of players is reached in order to avoid situations where gamemodes are picked without enough players.
    
  • Nominations will be subject to gamemode and map cooldowns in order to prevent excessive repetition of modes/maps
• We're planning on adding a lot of new maps to DFS to allow for even more map variety and less of the same maps being played over and over again.
  
• We're also working on making it so voteable sub-gamemodes on Competitive maps are more appealing as a choice.
  
• Cooldowns for individual maps will be added to the Ultimate Map Chooser, aiming to encourage more diversity in maps played for each gamemode
  
• We feel that map removal polls have historically targeted overplayed maps due to players being tired of them. With these measures to promote variety in maps played, we'll be suspending map removal polls, and you can expect to see some old favorites returning to the map pool.

And this is only the beginning!
We hope you all look forward to these upcoming improvements, we have so many more changes, new content and additions that we're keeping under wraps for now coming in 2021!

Unfortunately I haven't been too active in DFS as of late, priorities and work aside some of you may be aware that my personal health hasn't been doing too well as of a while, worry not as I've been thankfully doing much better now and should be able to continue supporting DFS.
I'm happy to be able to contribute to DFS once again and will try to do my best. As long as all of you guys are still sticking with us we'll do what we can to continue supporting this community as much as possible.
Thank you for still being with us, we can assure you DFS is not going anywhere as long as you guys are still around.


If you happen to have any suggestions for DFS updates, feedback/criticism or bug reports of any kind we'd love to hear it out anytime on our GitHub page as it greatly helps us out with improving the servers!
We're also rewarding users who contribute a badge of honor and a community crate as a token of our appreciation for helping us out!

We are also looking to welcome fresh faces into our staff team, if you've ever been interested in applying to become a part of the DFS staff team: You can apply to be a Server Moderator, a Developer or a Discord Moderator anytime you like by creating a thread at https://dfs.boards.net/board/7/staff-applications!

Did you know we also host a Discord server for our community to hang around and shitpost in? We host giveaways and events in our Discord server often as well.
Feel free to join us through https://dfs.tf/discord if interested! We're currently hosting a free Gold and Platinum Voucher giveaway that you can take a part in pretty easily!


We're still going to be around to make sure DFS improves more, there are still problems and DFS is definitely not perfect but I guarantee we are looking to resolve any issues and improve our servers as much as we can. It's all thanks to the support of our entire community that we're still able to continue on.

Thank you once again for being a part of this community and still sticking with us. DFS started as a fun project/hobby of mine, and I am so glad that we were able to gather such a big community and capture so many fun moments and memories together.

Here is to hoping for many more years and memories in DFS, I hope you enjoy your time in the servers as always!

-Disp

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