Hi everyone,
I'm really trying to figure out what's happening with the toplist system, I've used this many times before around 2017-2019 and this was a great feature that helped servers increase their visibility while being quite affordable. Usually you added your server to the list and maybe 70-100 servers were in front of you, but you know, people ended up not paying or overlooking this so the queue was much faster, maybe 15 days.
I believe it's been 160-180 days (so >160 servers) since I added my server to this system, still over 100 servers are in front of us, then I seem to see the same servers time and time again in the front page. I heard something about hosters abusing this system and adding the host to the toplist then selling a package with a higher price for the advantage.
6 months and god knows how much time is left, maybe an additional 6 months... it's too much time to look forward to, even more not knowing how much time there is left, at that point it's not really worth the hassle.
I don't know, I understand it's being successful, this is a lot of demand it seems, though I see you don't want this to happen as you tried to prevent this kind of abuse by hiding the server queue. This is also affecting the ones that don't abuse it, because personally I don't have hope I'll see a day when my server enters the toplist, or I'll just forget about it and miss the e-mail, it's always >100 servers, you might as well hide it completely at this point.
I'm a software engineer, I worked with PayPal and similar paygates, I know their APIs provide the tools necessary to at least authorize the payment then do it when the time comes, this could definitely help filter out filler servers and removing the need to be constantly attentive for the toplist e-mail (because after 6 months I'm pretty much checking the list every week or two), then maybe: increasing the price, expanding to 25-30 servers, blacklisting certain abusers (You're probably doing it but just in case), I'm sure you've talked about this and got more ideas, but the problem persists.
Personally I'm not that frustrated, the toplist alone is not nearly enough to make a server succeed, but luckily I had an old playerbase to start with, I can't imagine being a completely new 0-player server.
Thanks for reading this unnecessarily long essay >:),
DRW