While I can see and understand the need to have the servers as packed as possible, something has to be done about the lag. The other day, I was curious, and I went to several random servers with high populations like Reg Office's at peak time (as I wanted to know what was causing the steady increases of lag I've been seeing over the last few months), and I didn't lag anywhere (relatively speaking, anyway), except one place (but then again, that particular server had almost 50 people, I had a ping of almost 400, and I think it was located in Malaysia)- and even then, the one round I *was* able to play on that server before getting kicked was equivalent to the lag I see with 30 people on Reg Office (and I have an average of a ping of 50 there, I think). Mind you, I tested this on my computer, not Scribe's.

When Scribe and I were setting up our server, I did some reading up (as we were trying to do some optimization), and one issue that causes server lag is the caching of people's sprays, and that purging this cache every now and then would free up system resources... might this be part of the lag that's seen? I mean, as many regulars and random pubs that visit daily, I could imagine it to get quite huge...

Thing is... is quality needs to take priority over quantity. I don't know about anyone else, but if nothing about it can be fixed, I would prefer to see 2 Reg Offices, each with 30 people (or even 20 people) where no one with a half-decent computer sees lag, than 1 40-man Reg Office where everyone, even those with top-of-the-line computers, complains about how bad the lag is. ...What good is a 40-man server, when all the regulars have left, and pubs don't become regulars, because the lag is too intolerable? ...imho, it is better to be "best" as opposed to just "biggest" (of course, being both is good too... ^_~).

Edit: As for all-talk, I wouldn't have a problem if people would just follow the rules. However, people don't. And then there's certain people who never seem to die, but don't know when to stop talking either... and because it's generally about in-game issues or otherwise relevant, I can't very well mute them either... and to make it worse, they tend to talk to the dead, and the dead can't really reply in text to the living, so that's a rather sucky dilemma... and the people in D2 are asking for team-chat/dead-chat to be turned back on again (and as much as people in there incessantly talk, I don't blame them one bit)... I think that, if there was a way an admin could still retain or toggle all-talk (hearing and being able to speak to both teams, as well as both the living and the dead... mayhaps, team while alive, all when dead... could something like this be made as a plug-in or scripted?), it would be better to have team-chat/dead-chat as opposed to all-talk. That way, we'd only have to deal with people who won't STFU period and music spammers (who really are relatively few and far between), as opposed to people who won't STFU while dead (which everyone who uses a mic regularly has been guilty of, at one point or another).