TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2)

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).

I rarely go on the steamforums, but today I was sent a link which sounded interesting enough for me to brave the cold, harsh steamforums. The link was for a rogue server blacklist, specifically for TF2. I was actually quite happy with what I read and instead of reading a bunch of bellyaching whiner posts I read happy ‘its about time’ posts (thats a shocker). If you too hate servers that have fakeclients, bad tags, mods that unbalance the game than you should check out the TF2 Server Blacklist Post. The configurability of the lists seems like a nice powerful feature, so you can remove only what you want to remove. Immortal-D of tf2maps.net is helping Pebr to verify that the reported servers really are bad servers – which I think is great. So if you know some bad servers that lie, please report them. TF2 Server Blacklist Live reporting / list page

Lets hope valve takes this idea and incorperates it into the client.

[Edit - The live generation of custom lists seems broken (it shows unverified servers in the list), I recommend using the lists that can be found @ http://tf2app.com/blacklist/lists.php until this is fixed]

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

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

Hello and welcome, its time for a update on the posts from ~10 days ago, which I’ll pretend was only a week ago.

First off the TF2Newbs 2009 TF2 Pumpkin Carving Contest is underway, I havn’t checked if we have any submissions so far, but I’m pretty confident that we’ll have a better turn out than last year (See last years TF2 pumpkin entries). We have decided via poll to allow craft pumpkins, which is good news for those of you who hate pumpkin guts, or wish to save their pumpkin to display next year. For the rest of the Rules for 2009 TF2 Pumpkin Contest check out the link just before these words. The tl;dr basic idea is that you (using a tf2 theme) cut a pumpkin or other pumpkin like thing, take a picture, enter into contest, and get a chance to win L4D2.

As far as L4D2 boycotters go it looks like the boycott movement is sliding even more. Previously when we reported on this, the numbers were at a 2% hypocrite level. This has swelled to 3.8%! As always, be sure to check out the official L4D2 Boycott Lulz Webpage that psychonic has blessed the world with. I’d also like to remind everyone to mark down tomorrow (Oct 18th) on your calendar as Master Server Day. There will be much rejoicing and booze.

Halloween is fast approaching us, and that can mean only one thing. That Valve is preparing to release a new installment of Left 4 Dead. It also mean that its time for the annual TF2Newbs.com Team Fortress 2 Pumpkin Carving Contest. The winner of this contest will win a preorder of Left 4 Dead 2 – (L4D2). Runner ups will get TF2Newbs.com t-shirts. As always if participation exceeds our estimates we will add more prizes. Everyone is welcome to enter, you don’t even need to have played on the TF2Newbs game servers before, as long as you can carve a TF2 Pumpkin (or other gourd).

In the meantime, feel free to check out last years entries and prepare yourself for the full contest rules post which should be coming shortly.

2008 Team Fortress 2 Pumpkin Contest Results

The full contest rules for The 2009 TF2 Pumpkin Carving Contest will be on this page, its subject to change over the next day or so. But I’ll set them in stone soon enough.

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">

TF2Newbs is proud to announce something badass and wonderful that makes the world a better place.

Newbs Daily – The TF2 Comic of win.

What we need -

Artists – Duh
Inkers – convert the hand drawn picture scans into vector images
Image Colorers – take the ‘inked’ image and add the coloring and shadows
Writers – Someone has to come up with the ideas and the jokes.  This can all be observations of trends, things that were said in game (that wouldn’t be inside jokes)

The Newbs Daily strip will be released at a frequency of.. Hmm, we are still working on that detail, it will depend on responses and how fast the scripting goes.  We would like to have several recurring artists that are interested in having their comic run at a regular interval.  We plan to also include guest artists in the rotation if outside people become interested.  The goal here is to have a fun time and have a funny / light hearted strip that can help bring some joy to the world.  The current plan is to rotate through the artists to keep things fresh and poppin’ and to remove any unnneeded pressure on participants :)   Artists will be able to do short series of strips on consecutive release days if they’d like to.

We are hoping for a healthy mix of styles and methods.  We don’t want to put limits on peoples creativity so if you have the skill to do hand drawn, computer drawn, machinima (think screenshots with word bubbles) creative work than we want you on board.

If you have any interest in being a featured artist or helping out with any of our other jobs please drop me an email: tf2_comics@tf2newbs.com  Be sure to put ‘Newbs Daily’ in the subject line so it isn’t considered spam, or hit us up on the TF2 Newbs Forums – TF2 Newbs Forums – Comic Helper Thread.

Stay Tuned – I’ll be posting additional information soon!

The August 13th Update brought joy, hate, and new hats to the land of Team Fortress 2. The goods news is that Valve fixed a hand full of problems, added a handful of features and gave all the classes 2 (and in some cases 3 if you count ‘no hat’) new hats. The excitement surrounding the release wasn’t nearly as wild as a typical class update, but I did see a bump in user counts and saw less bitching about the FaN.

Now onto the meh – Each afternoon I look at my friends list and think “oh wow, TF2 is poppin’ today” until I realize that its just a bunch of people idling for hats. So I began to think how I could save myself from this daily disappointment. After many hours, and countless reams of paper with scrawled notes and calculations I finally had achieved my goal. I had formulated a plan to make the world a better place for everyone. Well at least Newbs.

The plan is simple. Reward people who play on the servers with hats. Yup, you got it – TF2 Newbs is giving away the New Team Fortress 2 hats for free to players. But wait, theres a catch :( I know I know, you’re expecting me to say that you need to sign over power of attorney before you get the hats right? No? Oh.. Hmm. Anyways… So, the catch is that the hats ONLY work on the tf2newbs.com servers. Thats right, you can come in, hang out, borrow a hat, but when you leave you have to leave it with the coat room clerk.

I know what you’re thinking, how can I afford to give away hats to everyone? The answer is simple, I can’t. So I’m going to have to do this as a limited offer. How is this going to work you ask? After much consideration I decided that the lifeblood of the community are the players that are determined to play on a Newbs server, regardless of who is on, and even more importantly even if there aren’t other players on. Yup – I’m rewarding the true heroes of each day, the server starters!

From now until I say otherwise, the players that are on a server when the player count (on teams) reaches 6 will be rewarded with access to our new hats command ‘ !hatme ‘. So if you want hats, join an empty server, get 5 of your friends on, and BAM hats. The hats will be available to you by menu until you leave the server, or the map changes.

There are probably a few players out there that have played on other servers that do have ‘hats’ as a feature, some of them might even be available to everyone that joins, but they probably don’t have a feature that we have (Unless you’re on the nNn clan server). Our hats work on all classes. Yup, you heard that right – you can be an scout with an engineer hat, and you can be a demo with a ushka. Any combination works, and they mostly all look good :)

What you don’t believe me? Well heres some previews..

I’ll update in a couple days with some more pictures, maybe some without me taunting. Oh yeah, this offer is good on servers 3-8 + Arena currently, servers #1,2,2.5 and #10 will be added when possible.

Servers:
#3 24/7 Badwater 113.212.76.6:27015
#4 24/7 2fort (Octo-land) 69.12.98.121:27015
#5 24/7 2fort (Koans Kingdom) 69.12.37.15:27015
#6 Custom Rotation (Koans Kingdom) 69.12.37.16:27015
#7 24/7 Payload Rotation 69.12.37.14:27015
#8 Stock Rotation (Octo) 69.12.37.3:27015
Arena [Chicago] 69.12.91.12:27015

Forum Discussion: http://www.tf2newbs.com/forum/index.php/topic,3745.0.html