TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2)

My GSP has informed me that while attempting to fix a ‘minor’ problem they managed to lock them and myself out of the machine that is hosting 4 of our servers (#3, #5, #6, #8).  They’ve stated that they plan on completely reinstalling the machine.  This is all well and good, but will be a pretty significant outage for us, since we have 4 game servers on that one machine.  In the meantime, we have an update coming out in 20 minutes which I’m unable to apply since we’re locked out of the box, so the servers will be up but probably wont be usable :(  Also when the servers crash I can’t restart them.

I’m not sure the time table on them fixing this, I’m at the point where I want to send them emails every 5 minutes, but I dont think that will help them get anything done…

On to the good news -

98.158.146.158:27015 NewbsTF2.com #01 24/7 2Fort (Los Angeles)  NO CLASS LIMITS

I’ve added a new West Coast 24/7 2fort server..  I am thinking about adding a Chicago based 24/7 2fort server also (thats in another post)
while our servers are down, we still have some other fun servers we can hang out on

208.43.15.128:27015 NewbsTF2.com #09 STOCK-MAPS RTD [SMACKworld]  – this servers a little +lols but not so much that you need to be suffering from major head trama to enjoy.  The flavor and format of this server may change around a little bit, but we have a _GREAT_ person donating this server to us, and he can do all the customization and cool modifications we could ever want – so check out Psychonics server and give it a go round.  I think his round times are too short, but what do I know, I’m a 24/7 2fort player.. :)   This server is in DALLAS

tf.packhead.com:27015 NewbsTF2.com #11 — Chicago’s Payload  Server | HLXCE – I don’t think many people know, but we do have something real special here.  We have The Pack[head].  The Pack offers great VPS hosting to people at a reasonable rate, and even offers discounts to TF2Newbs Members.  Besides being one of the most on the ball hosting providers I’ve ever talked to he runs a great Payload rotation server in a datacenter in Chicago.  He needs a bit more love from us, since I’ve been slacking and not working to help get this server populated.  If all goes well the Pack can do waht the Pack can, which is a lot – which means more servers and more fun.
If you’re sick of all the normal payload and 2fort crap our community seems to want to serve up, we also have 2 crazy funhouse servers bringing such hits as cyberpunk, and cyberpunk…

74.53.203.12:27015 NewbsTF2.com #10 Crazy CmptrWz’s Insanity [Dallas]
216.6.231.134:27015 NewbsTF2.com #10.1 BAN’s Ice Cream Party (AllTalk|RTD|FastDL)

Sorry about servers being the bust, but at least we have some options

I posted this on our TF2 Community Steam Group:

Now usually I’m not into petitions, but a recent policy change by Valve impacts our community. So I have decided to pass this along to everyone so they know whats happened, and can maybe help change this policy.

Valve in their recent updates made entities that are ‘parented’ to a player invisible. You may be wondering how this effects you. If you’ve ever been on the Newbs servers (which I assume you have been since you’re in this group) you know that we have ‘extra’ hats that you can wear while on the servers. Some of these are just fun items to see someone have. Examples of these are our traffic cone, the pale rider, and devil horns hats. The way these work is we parent the entity (which has the model we want to show) to the player entitity, then as you run around people see you ‘wearing’ a hat or a cape or whatever we decide to attach to you. With this recent change this no longer will work – the item will be invisible.

All we want is the ability to parent items to the player – I frankly don’t care if they let us use the ‘real’ hats or not, but I would like to be able to put cones on peoples heads or put funny hats on people when its their birthday.

Please be civil if you decide to leave a comment after signing, I don’t know if Valve will even give a crap about this petition or not, but I do know if its full of idiotic comments it will mean even less to them.

https://secure.voogru.com/petition/

…

That said, lets look at some possible reasons why they may have made a change like this. I can think of three different possible reasons why Valve suddenly took away our ability to parent an item to a player (well technically you can still do it, its just invisible).

1) Support costs – Everytime someone lodges a complaint with tech support, or emails Robin or any of the other developers complaining about idlers or server ops, or how unfair people having caps is it costs valuable time, and this spent time has a price associated with it. If the current staff can not at least read all of the emails sent each day then they need to add more staff (or decrease services). This is even worse if the people that are programming or creating content are getting bogged down by emails. Maybe servers using TF2 Equipment Manager were generating a lot of hate mail and they decided to try to decrease the butthurt email.

2) Punishment / Justice – Just as people who idled were punished for gaming the system, people who installed a hats plugin were gaming the system. So smack them in the head and level the playing field.

3) Money grab – If you control the supply of hats, the hats have value. And as with all things with a value, you can charge people money for them – and the more exclusive they are (or appear) the more you (typically) can charge.

So is the Free Ride of TF2 content coming to an end? I would not be surprised if the crackdown on idling (which was more of a limiting of how many items you can find per week) was in preperation for ‘for purchase’ hats or weapons. I really hope I’m wrong and this is actually about #2, justice is cool – hell overzealous developer would be fine by me too :) I don’t want anyone to think I’m against Valve making money, I want them to make money, I spend more money than I like to think about each month just because I like TF2 a lot. Heck I buy games I don’t even plan on playing just so that I can test things or add support for them in HLstatsX:CE. Just please don’t ruin my almost ready to be released birthday celebration plugin because you’re afraid you might not make money off of selling me hats.

As I’ve told a lot of the people I’ve talked with on this subject, I don’t care if valve wants to keep the ‘official’ hats to themselves, thats fine by me – but let me put a traffic cone or bunny ears on or any of the other bajillion hats that the community has made.

-octo

PS. oh yeah, heres a thread about the selling hats idea – Steampowered.com – sell hats once again, I’m down for them selling hats, hell I might buy them all if they do – but please don’t limit our ability to do cool things. Oh also, thanks for the after the fact exception for prophunt – but really, would TF2 prophunt ever have happened if there was this restriction? Nope.

BPN (psychonic) has graciously donated a server to the Newbs community. This server is a CTF rotation server. Please help us make this a success. :) I’ll post more details shortly on it. Be sure to add it to your favorites list -

Dallas – NewbsTF2.com #9 NO CLASS LIMITS (24/7 CTF) [SMACKworld]
208.43.15.128:27015

I’m not sure if everyone has got a chance to check out our twice a week webcomic yet – if you havn’t please check it out @ http://www.tf2newbs.com/daily/ – Team Fortress 2 Webcomic. We have a handful of active script writers and a couple of active artists, but we could always use more. So if you’ve been trying to figure out a way to give back to the community a little bit, this is the perfect chance.

Even if you aren’t a great artist, and just like to doodle some we are interested in having you help – I will hand color your art in MS paint if thats what needs to be done. =) If you aren’t good at art, but are good at posing in GMod you can use that to create the strips.

There are no minimum per month commitments, so don’t worry if you don’t have a lot of time, we just want to have a healthy pool of talent to spread the load between.

All contributors will get full credit and acknowledgement for their contributions. On top of this I will offer any of our community based perks to contributors. This includes things like reserves, hats, advertisements for events or services, etc.

If you are interested in helping, join the Newbs Daily TF2 Webcomic Steam Group – or contact me on steam (Octodhd on steam) – you can leave a note on my comments and I’ll get back to you.

Just a quick heads up, the new Crab Spy Calendar is up and available just in time for most peoples New Years celebrations. A big thanks goes out to NFreak and all the people that gave him a hand in helping capture great images of Crab Spies in various environments. These folks contributions are detailed in the Credits in the actual calendar release and will be added soon to the official download page.

Go ahead and check it out – http://www.tf2newbs.com/build/crab_spy_calendar_2010/

Since the calendar was incredibly popular last year, be sure to spread the word so that no one misses out on it.

Also a quick update on Newbsmas, due to me not being able to dedicate the proper time to the contest I’ve extended the deadline until Midnight Feb 14th (Pacific). Be sure to get your holiday themed entries in with this extra time I should be able to get some ‘unique’ prizes in to hand out =)

As promised I’m posting the results of the 2nd Annual TF2 Newbs Pumpkin Carving Contest – This year we had 7 entries which is down from last year, but the entries were VERY good. I spent a long time evaluating the Pumpkins trying to decide who should win. I decided that in order to reward those who put the time and the dedication into making a pumpkin and submitting them that I would expand the prizes! So instead of one copy of l4d2 I gave away 3 copies! I had Jib send one to each of the three ‘winning’ pumpkins. The final odds of winning a grand prize in this contest ended up being a 3/7 which means that 42% of the entries won a copy of l4d2! You just can’t beat TF2Newbs odds.

A big thank you goes out to Control Point for featuring our little contest on their podcast, I think its really kicked things up a notch – Thanks again!

All people who participated won 1 years worth of reserve on the Newbs servers, a forum honorz (will be added tomorrow hopefully), and 1 year of !hatme access (enables you to wear any classes hat). If you participated and want the Newbs server rewards contact me on steam, most of the participants I couldn’t find in the stats db under their entry name so I don’t know their steamid :) I can be reached @ http://steamcommunity.com/id/octodhd

I would like to take this chance to announce the next Newbs Contest… (drum roll) The next contest is the – Newbs Team Fortess 2 Christmas and other Winter Celebrations Contest. All entries will be TF2 and winter solstice themed. Entries can be winter decorations, confections, other food stuffs, songs, snow sculptures, or any other creative work. I will be announcing further details very shortly. If you want to keep track of the latest Christmas contest news please join http://steamcommunity.com/groups/TF2Xmas/. I’m not certain on the prizes yet (looking for some sponsors) but I promise that it will be worth your time :)

Back to the Pumpkins…..

The participants (in alphabetical order) -

Winners:

• Gearpunk
• kitty_tiky
• LlamaMaster

Runner ups:

• binjin
• nfreak
• nil.kemorya
• odinspeed

These were the winning Pumpkins, I’ll be posting all entries in our hall of fame soon (which means by Christmas).

Andy Is Great Contest – Due to low volumes of entries this contest has been extended to Midnight November 15th. The basic premise of the contest is simple – write a < 200 word short essay about why Andy is great. If you believe that you can do the vast topic justice in a couple of sentences have at it - but if you want to get real detailed you have up to an entire page to cover the topic. The prize is a TF2Newbs.com T-shirt (Scout). Remember that we are all about having fun with these contests, so even if you don't think you can win you should still enter, its a small amount of time for a great amount of fun =)

Annual TF2Newbs Pumpkin Carving Contest - This contest is set to end on November 2nd - First place is L4D2. As always with the Pumpkin contest all people who enter will receive a prize (Reserve Slot on a Newbs server of your choice for a year) so its definitely worth the effort. So far we have 4 Entries and hopefully many more to come today - but if we don't then the odds of winning are VERY good :) Last Years TF2 Pumpkin Entries. Entering is very simple, just go to this link and Enter Your Pumpkin (tf2 themed) here for prizes

Today we got our very first entry in this years TF2 Themed Pumpkin Carving contest, hopefully many more follow shortly – remember the final date for entering the contest (grand prize a copy of L4D2) is November 2nd. Full Contest Details

In other Pumpkin News, a big atta-boy goes out to everyones favorite heavy, Scott Eats Bullets (And Arrows). Recently Scott sent in a letter to the Control Point podcast about our TF2 Themed Pumpkin Carving Contest and they read it during their broadcast! A huge thank you to both Scott and the folks at Control Point. People that help out others in the gaming community make up for a lot of nights dealing with idiots and griefers :) I know a lot of our regulars listen to the podcast, but incase you don’t usually check it out. Here Scotts Letter – it starts @ 37:49

The preview Demo of L4D2 comes out this evening (11pm Pacific) I’m sure it will be a good time for all (slow downloads, crashing, qq’ing, death, etc). Since L4D2′s release is fast approaching lets take a look back at psychonics L4D2 hypocrites page..

As you can see, the graph looks even more like pacman than it did before.

For full details, once again check out the man responsibles page L4D2 Boycott Lulz

There were piles of entries, and it took me a while to sort through them all…

Why are you looking at me funny?

…

Cut it out.

…

Ok, there were barely a handful of entries, and I went through them all in an hour or three. Happy? Moving on…
(more…)

As the title says, we will be having a short essay contest (roughly 250 or less words). The subject will be ‘Why Andy is great’. This contest is open to all people who know or are at least familiar with Andy. Andy has never won any tf2newbs prizes, but he has won an honorz for mic spam though. First prize will be a TF2Newbs T-shirt (available in Large and XL).

Contest ends November 1st – Midnight. Email entries to andyisgreat@tf2newbs.com

Private Steam Community Page
His Stats This Period