Yay a Team Fortress 2 Update – Oh no it broke a bunch of things :(
Posted on: February 17th, 2009 by octo dhdToday there was a new TF2 Server update released -
- Ultimately reduces damage done by sticky bombs to enemies <512 units from the Demoman
- Added a warning dialog to the loadout screen telling clients when the server they’re on could not get their loadout
All of these things are great, and I’m glad that Valve also fixed some other bugs/exploits (‘Protected several more commands from client exploitation’). Unfortunately they also changed one other item which has a much broader impact than any of these other fixes. The decided to update players STEAM_ID’s to be like the L4D Steam IDs. I’m sure theres a great reason for this update (maybe its required for use with the new steam cloud stuff) but unfortunately they didn’t give any sort of warning that they were going to make this change. On the surface it seems like a pretty innocent / simple change but the impact is far reaching.
Lets use my steam_id as an example:
Until today it was STEAM_0:1:5809658 after this update it was changed to STEAM_1:1:5809658 (notice the 0 changing to a 1). This seems pretty insignificant until you realize that a lot of things that happen on a server are tied to this identifier, and until recently a lot of these were hardcoded for the STEAM_0:x:XXXXXXX format. One of the major things that this disrupted were bans. The ban list is just a text file with a list of steamid’s in it. Now that the ids have changed (even a little) makes the old bans not match any longer – effectively unbanning everyone. The solution to this of course is to update the list so it uses the newer notation, and to update other software like HLstatsX CE, Sourcebans, sourcemod (used for admins, reserve slots, etc) to newer versions which matches people based only on the x:XXXXXXX portion of their steamid.
So if you noticed the stats down for a little while earlier, or that there were some banned players on, or that your reserve slot not working, or your admin abilities suddenly disappeared this is why. I have upgraded most everything, so heading forward there shouldn’t be any more problems. =)
. Octo