I recently purchased a Team Fortress 2 server. It (at the time) featured mostly control points maps with a few maps intended to act as breaks mixed in (sd_doomsday, cp_gravelpit). Voting was enabled so if people wanted to skip these maps if they wanted.
I invited people I could, and eventually people started joining randomly. The best we got was 7 v 7 (it's a 24 slot server). Then the map changed to granary and some people left. After that, the map changed to cp_well and everyone left except for one guy who was trading for a vintage direct hit. After receiving said item he left.
After that I removed all non-cp maps and also removed well from the rotation.
What can I do to get people to actually join the server without inviting tons of people each time? I thought we would have had enough people to sustain the server, but well apparently killed it instantly, and we were losing people in granary, so I don't believe that would have been enough.
Best Answer
Map Voting might be a good start.
Personally I hate when servers have bots (and usually instantly blacklist them) but if your server looks like it has people in it and its a map they enjoy then they will join, so bots might help you, im not sure how you set it up but i have played on servers that have bots that dont appear as bots and the only reason i realised they were was their playstyle.