Your ad here, right now:

Posts Tagged ‘team fortress 2’

Wild Team Fortress 2 Speculation – First they came for our hats..

Posted on: May 1st, 2010 by octo dhd

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.

Server #9 needs love too. Team Fortress 2 CTF Rotation

Posted on: March 27th, 2010 by octo dhd

BPN (psychonic) has graciously donated a server to the Newbs community. This server is a CTF rotation server. Please help us make this a success. :) I’ll post more details shortly on it. Be sure to add it to your favorites list -

Dallas – NewbsTF2.com #9 NO CLASS LIMITS (24/7 CTF) [SMACKworld]
208.43.15.128:27015

(2nd Annual) Badass TF2 Pumpkin Contest Winners – And an announcement about NewbsMas

Posted on: November 5th, 2009 by octo dhd

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).

Gearpunk

tf2_demo_pumpkin_winner

LlamaMaster

tf2_heavy_pumpkin_winner

kitty_tiky

medic_heavy_winner

TF2 Server Blacklisting Tool / List – Get rid of all those fake client servers

Posted on: October 31st, 2009 by octo dhd

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]

For Andy Is Great (Deadline Extended) – I Will Carve A TF2 Pumpkin For a Reserve

Posted on: October 31st, 2009 by octo dhd

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