TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2) Blog

Step up to get your rep up.

If you’re currently a member of [N] and would like to become a part of the Newbs admin team here’s your chance. The process is quite simple, yet only few will survive.

-Change your tag from [N] to /N/

This helps us distinguish you from our casual clan members.

-Find out what you can do to help.

There’s tons going on behind the scenes of Newbs that we could use help with from time to time.. Keep your eyes open for opportunities to shine (IE helping with the website, graphic design.. Etc..)

-Bring your friends.

If you’re playing with someone who frequents the servers and seems like a cool cat, tell them about the website. If they end up joining [N], tell them to post who sent them here in their application.

-Help starting the servers

Quite possibly the easiest way to get noticed. Some of our servers start without us lifting a finger, while other take some prodding. When you want to play some 2fort, don’t join the one that’s full.. join the one that’s got 3 people playing and help it grow. Better yet, join the empty 2Fort (or payload for that matter) and invite your friends.

-Be a team player

There’s nothing worse than an admin with a bad attitude. Someone famous once said give a man power and see the true content of his character.. Or something like that. Basically if you’re a jerk without the ability to slap people around the map, it will most likely be worse if you’re given admin. While some are quite dedicated to the cause, they are overlooked due to their bad attitudes.. Keep this in mind, as Crap has a log on each and every one of us (myself included ; ) and he’s pretty good at bringing out that time you were plastered dropping profanities in front of the childrens on #4.

-Let us know.

If you’re interested, let us know here. Hang out in the steam chat. Can’t stress this one enough. Great way to get servers started, as well as getting to know your fellow Newbs.

Newbs makes no promises. As stated before, we only choose the right man (or woman) for the job.. But if you’re here reading this, you’re probably on the right track.

JiB

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/The_Essential_Accessories

Yup, we got socks and matching sweatbands.  If I didn’t love my octopus treasure hat so damn much, I’d complain and say that TF2 is now a full fledged FPS Doll & Accessory simulator.   But, I guess the old tall GI Joes had different clothes which increased their killing ability, so..  Yay for new items!

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.

I’m sure everyone reading this is fully aware of the drama that has surrounded Valves release of the Halo aka the Cheaters Lament. Well to add a little bit of fun to the mix Daimao has released a skin/model replacement which turns it into some devil horns. This model combined with our hat plugin means that anyone with access to !hatme can now wear fun happy horns (If you want to check it out yourself I recommend that in the morning you help start a server, when the client count hits 6 everyone gets hatme access for the session). Unfortunately TF2′s system for downloading particles is lame, so if you want to fully experience them you will need to download Devil Horn Particles and place the particles directory in C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\YOURuserNAME\team fortress 2\tf\ otherwise you’ll not see the little red circle glowing particle effect.

A couple bad screenshots I took of myself can be seen below..

In other news, I’ve made a more stylish looking image to show the real time stats on how many players were idlers / not idlers that hav ecame to my server since the afternoon of September 3rd 2009.

If you’d like to use this somehow, feel free to hotlink to the image so that it continues to update where ever you put it. The link is:
<img src="http://tf2newbs.com/haloVSnohalo4.png" border="0">

According to the official tf2 blog post yesterday around 4.5% of the user base of TF2 would be effected by the removal of items for manipulating the item system (using the idler). I just couldn’t believe it, because most of my friends list was idling every day, so 4.5% seems awful low. I started logging players that had the halo in their backpack vs players without the halo (people I assume were idlers since they didn’t have a halo). Right now its sitting at 35.61% of my users having ‘no halo’ :) If you’re interested in tracking my servers ratios, check out http://tf2newbs.com/haloVSnohalo.png or if you want a text version http://tf2newbs.com/haloVSnohalo.php

Meanwhile Daimao (famous hat modeler) has suggested an alternative system to valve – he proposes That the ‘cheaters’ should be forced to wear devils horns / have a health penalty for a period of time as punishment. I think it’d be great if the devil horns did come out (officially or unofficially) but I’m not sure valve would want to be seen as penalizing the already super angry faced crowd of idlers who think that its just not fair that they lost their ill gotten gains already.