TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2)

You have been solicited to make a new TF2 Newbs logo.. I tempted you with everlasting fame, karma, and a reserved slot. This much I can give you.. But wait that’s not all folks! For the extensive participation, I’ll be awarding a special honorz icon to the top 3 entries!

How does this work? I’ll tell you. The anonymity of it all is pretty shot because you can just look at who posted the pics in the thread : ) so rather than making some funky number system to keep this from being a popularity contest.. We’ll just go on the honorz system. (HA.) No really. You guys seem to be pretty non partial and since all the people who posted stuff are badass as it is, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Check it out:
http://www.tf2newbs.com/forum/…

Jib…

This is a short post, just reminding everyone to get your pumpkin carved and submitted for the contest for a chance to win Left4Dead! Woo!   So far there have been 4 submissions in the competition, but I’ve been assured that there are more coming.  Remember that the contests closes Nov 2nd, so you MUST have your pumpkins sent in by then.    This contest is open to everyone, even if you have never played on the newbs servers.   Good luck everyone.

For additional details see: http://www.tf2newbs.com/contests/2008-Team-Fortress-2-Pumpkin-Carving/

-octo

Today the newbs servers accomplished something that it has not accomplished ever before.  We had all 8 of our servers 100% full.  This is a total of 192 players on at the same time.  Sure some of the larger server groups are full all the time, but this is a pretty big deal to me, especially since we just got done migrating to new addresses across most of our servers (and one of the servers was JUST added this week).

A large part of this success can be attributed to the die hard newbs, who try each day to start up the servers.  Today after the server updates came out (which I happened to be pretty quick on upgrading our servers for) I saw regulars joining the servers when they came back up, some of these servers filled almost instantly, a couple others took the usual 10-20 minutes of 1v1 to get going ;)

As for the server updates, here is the list, and my take on it…

Added rate limit for several client commands to prevent server spamming

^– I hope this addresses the bugs when poeple change class a billion times in a minute (I’m getting sick of banning people for it)

Added consistency checking for particle systems

^– yay, hopefully this fixes some of the see stuff you shouldn’t be able to cheats

Updated r_particle_timescale ConVar so it can only be changed if the server has sv_cheats set to 1

^– I’m guessing this was being abused in the clients?  (See teleport/cloak forever?)

Updated loading/disconnect dialogs so they’re easier to read

^– New font it seems, is easier to read

Updated Dustbowl, Granary, and Badwater Basin with several exploit fixes

^– anyone have any ideas what these were?

Updated Granary to remove the setup time and gates

^– yay.

-octo

Edit: If you are interested in promoting this contest, please link to and check out http://www.tf2newbs.com/contests/2008-Team-Fortress-2-Pumpkin-Carving/ which will have up to the minute information on whats going on….

Its not very often that you can kill two birds with one stone, and be eligible to get the chance to also kill a bunch of zombies too.  If you’ve been waiting for this kind of opportunity, today is the day for you.

The premise is simple, the results will be amazing, and there will be much rejoicing.
Lets cover this in a what you do, what you get format.

Stuff you do:

1) Acquire Pumpkin, Gourd, or Suitable Squash.
2) Come up with a really cool TF2 related design
3) Carve, Cut, Etch, Scratch, Skin, and maybe even paint this design on your vegetable
4) Take picture of your masterpiece.
5) Send picture to Jib or Octo.  Upload to forums, upload to the newbs_upload section, etc.
6) Sit back and wait

What you get:

1) Fame
2) Glory
3) Sense of accomplishment
4) Badass Pumpkin (or gourd/squash)
5) Chance at winning Left 4 Dead.

As you can see, this is a complete no brainer.  Many will enter, many will be marvelled at, kudos and happy warm fuzzy thoughts will rain down upon all that enter.
Unlike our usual contests, you do not need to be present to win.  Enter as many times as you’d like.

The grand prize winner will win Left 4 Dead - Courtesy of TheJib.  There will be additional prizes given out.  The categories have not been finalized but even if yours sucks, its worth sending in.  =)  

We will be running this contest (accepting submissions) until at least Nov 2nd.
If there is enough interest, then prizes will likely be added.  Lets make this our biggest contest yet.

-octo

Update:

You need not be an active player on the TF2 Newbs Server, just be sure to send in your submission with enough information so I can track you down.  Prizes will be awarded as ‘Gifts’ on Steam.

Entries can be submitted the following ways:

Posted to Forum (Requires registration, registration limited to Players from #4/#5): http://www.tf2newbs.com/forum/index.php/topic,1102.0.html

Email: pumpkin_contest@tf2newbs.com

Website Upload (like photobucket) - http://www.tf2newbs.com/newbs_upload  (please name the file in a way that we can contact you back, putting your steam community id would be great (its a number that starts 765…..)

Its the day we have all been waiting for, the last 2 newbs servers have changed ips!  wooo! Yay, go team..  Hmm, yeah I know, its hard to get excited about having to change favorites (again).  As I think I mentioned before, I wasn’t real excited about having to move things, since it takes time, energy, and a lot of annoying the users with notices, reminders, handwritten letters, phone calls during dinner - all to remind them that they should go to the new addresses rather than the old addresses.   Some people thankfully look up the newbs servers in the server list, which means they have no problem moving.   Others (like me) just look at their history.  These people take time to get back, so if the server seems like its empty for longer, or filling up slower than it was a couple days ago, thats probably why. 

I’ve noticed that theres a few of you that have been doing a real nice job trying to get the servers populated, sometimes sitting there mostly alone for 30+ minutes.  It makes me sooooo happy everytime I see it.  I’m going to name names, but I gotta go back over my list so I can try not to leave anyone out, so maybe i’ll list em out next blog post.

=)

And the new addresses are:

69.12.37.15:27015 Newbs TF2 #5 (24/7 2Fort) [Koans Kingdom]

69.12.37.16:27015 Newbs TF2 #6 (Custom Rotation) [Koans Kingdom]

-octo

So yesterday there was quite a bit of lag on #4, after being alerted I hopped on and saw that indeed, lerp was going into the yellow or orange, the color is hard to tell on my screen. Anyways, I contacted the hosting provider and they offered me a solution, move to a newer better machine on a faster connection. YAY! But wait…. You have to change ips (again). :( Sad Cakes for all.

So, I could choose between keeping the ip:port we have, and get reports of lag that I can’t do much with (except open a ticket) and all they’ll tell me to do is move, OR get to start from scratch as far as favorites/history goes and try to advertise the new site.

I chose the new machine. But, I had a really GOOD idea. Rather then wait until some future date where it became a problem, I also asked that they also move #7 (since so far it hasn’t got a huge following). They graciously did, and even left the other ones up for the night so I can try to tell the users whats up. I thought this was very nice of them.

So what does this mean to you? It just means that we all need to add the two newer machines to your favorites, the previous #4 and #7 go byebye tonight/tomorrow so better to be prepared, then to be like ‘wtf - where everyone go?’.

The new addresses are:
69.12.37.3:27015 Newbs TF2 #4 (24/7 2Fort) [Octo-land]
69.12.37.14:27015 Newbs TF2 #7 (Rotation) _NOCRIT_ [Devil Link]

Hopefully they stay at these new addresses for a long time, because I for one am tired of having to beg people to change to a different server, or to ask them to favorite new servers. =)

Oh, in other news #1, #2, and #3 may or may not be going away, I thought they were dead dead, but then it got postponed, and now may have been completely taken off of the table. Be aware that those machines do sometimes get a little laggy, but they do have a solid following so they do fill up quickly.

Oh, also I’ve been keeping track of which people start up servers, so don’t think your efforts are going unnoticed, I’m just saving up kudos to unleash all at once.

-octo

Respawn times are one of those necessary evils of the world, well unless you want a more death match style game, but I don’t think games like Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2 are aiming for that sort of pure dm style. I personally think Valve handled the respawn times pretty well overall. Not everyone agrees with it though, take this recent player for example:

Why is the respawn so long on this server? Just to be annoying?

Unfortunately, its not my sick cruel sense of humor which drives the respawn time to seem ’so long’. I think I might even put in a trigger where ‘respawn’ and ‘long’ in the same sentence sends a message to the player saying ‘blame valve’.

I don’t blame valve though, I compliment them for the intelligent design of the respawning system. Like all good things, the parts I hate about the respawn waves also are the parts I love about the respawn waves. Generally it all comes down to if I’m doing the dying, or the killing.

Let me do a big massive quote from their blog post:

Respawn waves occur on regular intervals, based on the map settings. Most of our maps use a 10 second respawn wave time. That 10 seconds is then modified by the map state, generally reduced for the team that controls the most capture points. Each team’s respawn wave time is then scaled down if the team has less than 8 players in it, to a minimum of 5 seconds if team has 3 or less players in it. When you die, you are assigned to the respawn wave after the next one. So if the respawn wave time is currently 10 seconds for your team, you’ll respawn somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds from your death.

So, if you kill someone, they have to wait for a little bit, then they get to spawn with other people who died around the same time as them. This allows the soldier/medic combo that got mowed down by a heavy to spawn at the exact same time, and try to get back into the action together.

Now the bad part of this is that if you die RIGHT as a wave happened, you get bumped into the wave AFTER the upcoming one (which could land you with a 20 second respawn) - a portion of this respawn is ate up by the kill cam, but thats a completely different topic.

Very soon after Valve released TF2 the admin mod and sourcemod plugin folks hurried and added options for faster spawn, they accomplish this a variety of ways, either altering the map (or now server mp_) respawnwavetime or subverting the entire wave system and instaspawning, or simulating a delayed spawn (player dies, count 10 seconds and spawn). These servers appear to outweigh the stock servers, at least in popularity. This causes some confusion since the average player does not know the mechanics of the respawn system.

Now, the next question I usually get is ‘well why are they stock on your servers’. On the Newbs 2Fort servers they will likely always be set to stock for 2 reason:

1) Due to our server name, we do attract newer players, I firmly believe that new players should get a feel for the game as it came, and then if they prefer faster times they can find a different server to fit their needs. Its a lot harder to get used to a long wait than a short one.

2) The respawn wave is perfectly timed for 2fort intel runs. You kill a guy in courtyard, grab the intel, he spawns just in time to kill you at the top of spiral/straight. I actually enjoy this on both sides, since I know damn well they’ll be there when I got the intel, and I bank on it when I’m trying to defend as I get a little adrenaline boost while waiting in spawn to run out and set up an sg.

Hopefully that helps explain why the respawns seem so long.

Here is a collection of comments made on one of the servers, over the past 2 months:

Wow thats a long respawn
Why is the respawn so long on this server? Just to be annoying?
long respawn
longest respawn timer ever
man the respawn is WAY too long on this server >.<
nggaaaaaaaaaaa long respawn :oP love it
long ass respawn
jesus - could respawn take a little longer?
long respawn time ftl
damned long respawn times
very long respawn times
respawn is too long
wtf. god dang. this server has long respawn. i dont remeber it being this long.
why the long respawn time?
damn respawns are to long
that was a long respawn, yeesh.
such long respawn time T-T *cry*
long respawn times
these respawns times arnt long enough
respawn time takes too long
holy shit long ass respawn time
dammit david i hate this long respawn time
y does it take so long to respawn
takes too long to respawn
respawn is too long lol
uggg hate this long respawn
damn long respawns
i hate long respawn times
And why is respawn time sudenly so long?
gah! long respawn
Fuck this long-ass respawn >_<

We’re seeing big changes with the Newbs servers as of late, here’s the scoop..

Headshot + Grey Devils Server: Incentives are being offered for those who help to make this new server stronger. A rotation server that has a few tweaks for your slaughtering pleasure.. Crab battle sound effects during melee, Crits are off, FF at the end of the round WITH crits, Sudden death melee rounds, rock the vote.. Couple of tricks with the Newbs stamp of approval : ) 72.51.44.144 check it out.

Donations/Engineer Corps: I’m sure some of you have noticed some changes with the forums. Those who create content, and donate to keep our servers running strong are recognized on the forums and on the HLXStats. There’s a lot of developments in this area, so stay tuned.

Honorz on the forums: Honorz awarded to players who exhibit extreme abilities are now visible under your avatar on the forums. Thanks to octo’s pro coding skills.. Expect a lot more honorz to come.

and that’s what’s up.

Jib.

What a day. 5 solid hours of 6v6 play.

Started the day out with the [nes] fellas.. vs some guys off gamesurge on granary. Eh. Think we went 2-5. Wasnt the best start i could have hoped for but we played decent. Got some things figured out team work wise..

Then we carry over into a scrim vs [BS], whos working on getting their team together. Good times. [BS] put up a solid fight and will be a force to be reckoned with no doubt.

CEVO time. CP_Junction_pro. Ever played it? it’s actually pretty fun. a 3 point capture map.

Teh Lineup

Yellowfrog: Medic
Ggglygy: Pyro
Dondi: Soldier
Jib: Heavy (!?!)
Zeilo: Demo
Daedalus: Soldier

WHOA. we were warmed up and ready to go. After some stressful moments getting our 6th player in the game with the anti cheat on etc.. we were off. What a battle. I must say gggly is a madman. This was one of our most successful line ups. Gggly and i USUALLY play scout but, not this time. We dabbled a bit early on but it was obvious this battle was going to be won in close quarters. Our unorthodox lineup was bringing out the raeg in our opponents. Little sny remarks in between us steam rolling them. WHATEVS. we brought the heat. Luckily we’d been playing all day, when it came crunch time we were spot on. The communication was solid, no arguments.. not really many miscues even. First round was kind of close.. IMO the tide swung in our favor with me as heavy. We were working our new strategy of ubering the pyro, heavy comes in second with shotty and everyone else cleans up the mess. Worked great both times we were on offense. You got a pyro burning you up who’s invincible, and the next closest guy has 400 hp (buffed) .. They would just kinda run backwards shooting at the ubered pyro hoping he’d stop. and they learned quick.. GGLY DONT SOTP>. so yeah. steamroll insues on the third point. BOOYA

2ND ROUND. now let us not forget jibs not all about the rules.. and this being my first CEVO match and all.. I thought i might make some friendly conversation during setup. ya know? So I say ‘how many rounds?’ OH. they shit a brick. HOW DARE I. “ARE YEW SERIOUZS. CEVO DOCTRINE STATES:.. bla bla bla bla bla..” ooookay. Dondi quickly tells them ‘don’t listen to him’ and i say ‘yeah this is my first time playing’

BAM 2nd ROUND. I’m heavy. feelin it. we’re on defense on B. this map is crazy.. close quarters. guys comin in from all angles and my job is to spray. Sasha style. You dig? So i’m just, hitting people till they retreat.. and if they didnt i turned them into mush. fun times. Yellow frog did really well as medic. always does. Hardly ever dies with an uber ready to go, patient.. kept me healthy. big ups. Dondi. dondi at this point is mopping up on the opposite side of me. he’d catch the guys who were running from me with that last rocket and put them away. Zei’s locking down the door ways with stickies.. B’s kind of a weird capture point because they get respawn like exits that we cant get through.. They kept popping in and out, running for health.. Zei put an end to that with some well placed stickies.. So these guys are frustrated. they’re angry. Daedalus blue screens. WTF? we have 5 people on our team. oh g0d. remain calm. they dont notice and do anything crazy just yet.. well their next push we felt it. we all died except zei who was hopping around throwing stickies down just trying to slow them down until we respawned. We respawn, zei dies.. runn back have an EPIC friggin battle on B. I might have to dig up the demo for this part.. Straight out of rambo. flames rockets .. I knew i was going down but i brought 3 of them with me. -high five- .. Long story short they cant cap C 6v5. they’re UPSET at this point. SPEWING RAEG. So daed manages to hop back in right at the end of the setup for our last go at offense.. We put the nail in the coffin. [nes] goes 2-0 in CEVO.

fun times. big ups to the whole crew.. the BS guys for a good scrim.. good times

-JiB