TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2)

Okay, this actually happened on the first day of beta, and I’m just real late at actually blogging about it.  We have a few servers up -

7 public tied to the tf2 newbs community group

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/newbstf

2 less public ones tied to the l4d newbs community group 

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/l4dnewbs

Also, if you’re a regular newb, and you’re serious business about l4d a few regulars have started up a group to make expert runs through the game.  Ask octo or spies about it if you’re interested.

We also have a new website, which doesnt have much on it other than a great walkthrough for the demo wrote by LeeTagger (http://l4dnewbs.com).  This websites main logo was made by headshot.

I’m sure I’ll follow up later with something more detailed, but those be the basics.

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…

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

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 >_<