Every 6 or so hours, the dread message comes: "Server will restart in 30 mins"
And from then on, it's every man for himself, more often than not.
It seems players are unable to cope with the awareness of upcoming discontinuity. (which is naturally perceived as a prophecy of doom and death for all mankind, this being the internet and all) - Disturbingly enough, too many react to this by acting like beasts gone on a rampage.
So, from first announcement to actual server restart, TKs and troll activity commonly overwhelm normal gameplay by sheer mob rule. No admin can react fast enough to deter the tidal wave of group misbehavior that follows. Vote-kicking isn't even worth considering in these conditions...
Alas, this means that for 30 mins of every 6 hours, the game becomes largely unplayable. Teamkilling becomes truly epidemic until the restart finally comes. Even some normally serious players degrade into behaving as children/animals after the Announcement of Grim Fate (aka: a minute or so of mild inconvenience) is made...
I find this a fascinating tell-tale to the nature of the minds of men; It says much of how our civilization would collectively respond to some apocalypse scenario being forewarned, as happens in many Sci-Fi stories. At least half such tales speak of mankind reverting to savagery as an immediate result of the awareness of their own doom. Then any such heralding of disaster becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if the disaster itself eventually never comes....
Anyways, here it seems we have some evidence to back up this theory.
But fascinating anthropology aside, we G.I.s in the jungle are left with a half hour of pure hell and childishness instead of our favorite game. For this to be remedied, I strongly suggest that:
The announcement of upcoming restarts must be limited to no more than 3 minutes before the fact.
I understand that there is some bug/limitation that requires players to log out before the server goes out on its own, lest they lose their ranks and such; For this I would propose that the last one minute features the "log out now before you lose your stuff" message popping up every 10 seconds or so. And every 30 seconds in the two minutes before that.
Obviously, one can only expect utter insanity from about half the people online during those minutes, but then at least it won't last for long;
Then those of us who don't wanna partake of the sad case that is the true maturity of our peers, can just leave as soon as the first "bell" tolls to our doom and come back to a perfectly sane, freshly started server after a quick visit to the latrine. No more need to go find something else to do for 30 mins while the kids ruin the server...
So really, the announcement of restart needs urgently to be shortened by a factor of 10. 3 mins to restart, no more. Else madness sets in too early in and we can't enjoy the game for the next half hour....
Thanks in advance,
Cheers