TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2)

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