When I changed my webhosts I neglected to move over gatmhq.com. WHRY WOULD I DO THAT?!? Because I was trying to prepare and design a new site prior to the big move. Anyways, I did a complete website backup, including all MySQL information on Oct 17th… that was the last time I did it.

Then my old webhost got mad I didn’t pay them and suspended my account on the 28th, which is almost 2 weeks of lost forum data. I tried desperately to convince them (without paying them for another year) to give me access to my cPanel or at least send me the latest GATM forum database. They weren’t having any of it… it doesn’t help when your main domain is already pointing to a new webhost service 😛

Anyways, that was sort of the straw the broke the camels back… so to say.

GATM has been a frustration over the last 6 months. Its been a constant uphill battle trying to keep things running. Toward the end none of the members got along, the admins bickered and fought between themselves and our servers were usually empty.

Sandbox servers are the biggest pain in the ass to keep maintained. Every addon fucks up another addon, one thing breaks another, people want this… they hate that… add this… remove that… this map sucks… add that map… ARGGH!!

I had considered developing some custom games for the community and eventually shutdown the Sandbox server (or make it a lot more simple, easier to maintain) but then someone stole all our custom games and that sorta ended that idea. Plus, every time I tried to sit down and work on a new custom gamemode, I couldn’t focus on it because there was thread after thread with lists of the most minor bullshit they wanted fixed on the server… but 90% of them were issues because addons broke other shit and it wasn’t anything I could fix unless I just rewrote the entire addon myself.

Chad and I have been severely exhausted trying to keep up with everything and eventually we’ve just ran out of fuel. Scripting for gmod is extremely boring and monotonous now… we can’t find anything that keeps our attention. It used to be fun and exciting developing new stuff, but the recent versions have added such tremendous problems that we have to come up with three workarounds to fix one feature we want to add, but then it isn’t stable and it turns out being shit compared to what we had planned. We miss gmod9 🙁

People kept trying to offer to help but it seems no one had the technical skills to really take any of the workload off. We had to maintain the server hardware and system configuration, maintain and develop the website and forums, maintain and develop custom Lua scripts for The Arcadium and all Garry’s Mod servers, setting up and running other game servers (CSS, TF2, etc) and then deal with all the problems in between.

So after long consideration I’ve decided not to bring gatmhq.com back up, nor do we have any plans on supporting the server. I guess it will keep running, but its up to the less-than-active admins to keep that going.

Its ironic though… this Halloween would have been our 2 year anniversary. Oct 31st 2006 was the day I purchased the domain for PGM and made plans to start the community… which is what turned into GATM.

What’s next? Mostly enjoying playing games again… and overall having a good time instead of working on gmod shit non-stop. Chad and I have already started planning a new game… no not a gamemode, but our own game. We’ll keep you up to date.