Interesting thread. I won't be commenting with my actual opinion, but I can address some of the statements both sides of the argument have made.
Look at the player count; where it used to peak at 10,000+, at launch 4 years ago; now the peaks are literally as big as the low times of before, with the low times now averaging around 300-350 players at best.
As far as I'm aware, MCGamer has
never hit the 10,000 mark. Although we don't have statistics from before MCSG v2 (mid-February 2013) as the system that was in place before I was hired didn't keep track too well, the highest number of players we've ever hit since then is about 6,600.
Chad always keeps track of the servers. When a server goes down for any reason he's always the first to catch it and notify the devs.
The first thing to notify us is usually our monitoring system, which catches a lot of issues within seconds of them happening. From there, staff are usually our second source of notification, due to simple math: it's far more likely that one of our ~100 staff members will be online than it is that one of the developers (or Chad) will be online.
The competition has a system where players automatically get their donator ranks upon processing; it's all done by plugins and code. Would MCG think of doing something like that? Nope
Actually, we do have a system where premium members get their rank automatically upon processing, done entirely in code. It's not 100% perfect, and sometimes purchases will need manual processing, but for the vast majority of cases it works fine.
You have to remember, though, that MCGamer is not a business.
From a fundamental standpoint, this is incorrect, and it's something we've never tried to hide. MCGamer is a business at its core, because if it weren't, we wouldn't survive. Although MCGamer isn't made for profit, that doesn't make it any less of a business.
