It is no secret to anyone that lately, the server has been on the decline. Ever since Valve made changes several months ago to the quickplay system that had players, by defualt, only playing on Valve servers, community servers, especially small ones like the kingdom, have suffered greatly. Valve has effectively put the nail in the coffin for community servers in their war against the minority of servers like Nightteam that give players pay to win hacks. I have no doubt that Valve could have easily found a better way of killing paytowin servers without negatively impacting well moderated community servers if they had really tried, but I digress, that is not why I am here typing this today.

At this point, there is 316 dollars and 79 cents in the Gameservers account for the Micspam Kingdom. The server has, for months, been steadily less and less populated, a far cry from the days when there was a waiting list to get in in the evenings. Lately it is rare to see anyone in the server at all. This has been very painful for me to watch. It's like watching a loved one succumb to illness, coasting by in life, waiting patiently for the day their body fails.

It seems a waste to use the money in the account on a server with no players in it, so at this time, I feel that the best course of action for me is to pull the plug. The money in the account (which is not withdrawable and only usable for Gameservers.com services) will hopefully, one day go toward funding servers for other games, or perhaps if Valve one day makes changes to TF2 that allow community servers to flourish once again, a new Micspam Kingdom.

Aliento's Micspam Kingdom will discontinue on September 14th. Community members will be hosting a wake for the server before then. Degroot suggested having one on the 30th of this month, so we will see if that can happen. Regardless, I would like to make the server's final few days some happy ones, so I encourage you to hang out on the server until then. I will also see about hosting an event of some kind myself on the final night of September 13th.

It's been a fun three years.

RIP Aliento's Micspam Kingdom
6/14/11 - 9/14/14