Originally Posted by mr. pie

Don't Keep
Alien Upgrade Information - Outdated, unnecessary
Loading CATBUS - Unnecessary
NS_BHOP Config - Unnecessary
Stripper2 - Unnecessary
AMX Tagline - Unnecessary
Territory - wiki says it's already disabled anyways
Points Manager - Outdated, unnecessary
Team Resources Display - Outdated, unnecessary
AMX Auto Demo - Unecessary, I used it though
Auto Gestate - Unecessary, doesn't add aynthing
Forums Speak - If this is the thing show recent forum topics, it's 100% useless. If it is what always reminds you about checking NS as an active game it's really annoying and useless, too.

Not Sure
STEAM ID PENDING Removal - Does this do anything?
Tooltips - Never seen an admin use this.
Marine Extra - If this does anything, it's not much.
WhichBot Manager - I don't find bots fun at all
Bot Level - I don't find bots fun at all
HLTV Listen - Not overly useful, people are rarely in htlv
HLTV Hud - It's nice, but how often are people on hltv anymore?
HLTV Connect Per Game - This is only important for admin reviews, so it's up to them

From this post, I just wanted to address three things. First, from the description I think Forums Speak is what sends all the text ?'s see. To me, this makes it a possible culprit for increased lag because of the increased proportion of ?'s we have nowadays, but I would not want to get rid of it entirely, or we wouldn't get new people ever reading the primer.

Second, Marine Extra seems to be what we generally refer to as Oddman, meaning this is what causes the extra player to join marines. If you've played much on other servers, you've probably frequently seen the extra go aliens, which tends to wreck games. On TG, we would still eventually get the extra to rines, but it might wind up being someone other than the new joiner, and will always cause extra headache. I think if we gave this up we'd be screaming for its return within a week.

Lastly, as to the two bot plugins, I have to address this same question to anyone who wants to remove them: how often are you the first person on the server? I don't enjoy bots either, but it gets people to join faster (because the population appears higher), and it's better than staring at the wall in the readyroom. Essentially, giving these up will mean you see a full server less often, regardless of how often you personally use them. Also, I would assume it only affects the server during co, and therefore shouldn't be causing lag during NS (I would hope).

So unfortunately, I've just argued in favor of keeping all three, which won't help reduce the lag at all. We may need to make some painful sacrifices to get this fixed, I just want to make sure we understand what we're giving up beforehand, since we might not be able to get these changes reversed anytime soon.