I’d really like to join but it’s just a bit too late for me. I’m 8 hours ahead of Pacific time. I even reinstalled TF2 before I looked at the proposed times.
If anyone is on earlier and feel like playing just send me a message (I’ll suck as I’ve only played once before though). In fact I’m pretty open anyone inviting me to L4D2 or TF2 any time I’m on.
Maybe we should set up an SDMB Eastern Hemisphere Division.
Actually, when it comes to new people in TF2, I’d suggest you play Heavy or Soldier. Soldier is easily the most well-rounded class in the game and doesn’t require you can perfectly time your rocket jumps (or even know what those are) to be effective. And the Heavy’s weapon of choice is a minigun, what do you think you do with that? 
Depends on if you’re good at other shooter games or not. If you’re not very good at shooters and you want to ease your way into TF2 I think engie or medic is the way to go, but nothing in the game is too tricky (except spy maybe). Heavy is pretty much just point and shoot.
If you guys want to try to schedule games at weird (for people in the US) hours, I can use the game scheduling feature for you, just send me a message. You’re probably better off just seeing who plays at the same time with you and hooking up with them though - I don’t think we have a large user base that far east.
Just use the Steam commands to link people to it if it’s up.
Like, [****url=steam://connect/127.0.0.1:27015/password]click here to join.
We’re having such a strong showing that we need all the slots for SDMB players, so I locked pub players out by putting on a password. It’ll be “beef”. It’ll prompt you when you try to join.
That went surprisingly well. I set the server up to have 16 slots figuring it was unlikely we’d need more, but we filled that up and had people waiting, so next time I guess we could do even more.
The biggest issue is that I’m on the west coast and we have europeans, so the latency sucked for them. There’s not really any way to get around that unless we have access to an east coast server.
If there was enough interest to have regular games, maybe we could rent a server for a while. They cost somewhere around $1.30 per slot and they’d give us somewhere to play. If we split the cost 4 ways we could have a 16 player server for around $5/each per month, which might be pretty cool. Tell me if you’re interested in that.
I was only able to play about half an hour or so but I did have fun. I didn’t try out my new mic as I am full of a cold and didn’t really want to talk.
It sucked that I seemed to be unable to see the server or connect any normal way. Finally SenorBeef gave me a console command that let me connect.
Make sure at some point to add the server as a favorite. I don’t know if you can do it easily if the server is offline (if it was online, you could go to your server history and add it from there). Ask SenorBeef for his IP address and you can add it that way, though. Right click the Steam icon, click “Servers”, go to Favorites tab, and click “Add a Server.” Paste the IP address and you’re good.
As long as he’s hosting it locally, it should work.
Hm, I seem to recall that the servers are done by region, and since you’re in another country, the server might be filtered out of your server browser. If that’s the case, I’m sure there’s a way to include multiple regions.
It’s promising that we’ve had so many people playing. It would be nice if we could get a game going a couple times a week.
When I finished the game there was an option to add it to my favourites list. I went ahead and put it on in case that’s the same one we used in the future.
Looks like I’ll have to do some googling and see if I can find anything about regional filters. I asked but people seemed to think it showed all servers.
SenorBeef: I sent you a private message but I got a “database error” message and had to resend. Lemme know if you got it or not.
I got it, but I’m kinda secretive about my underwear so I’m not sure if I’ll reply.
So after checking out game hosting rental sites, I found velocity servers with a crazy deal (with coupon) for $.75 per slot public servers. Their Chicago servers seem to be the most geographically neutral. I asked around and west coasters ping 60-90, and Europeans ping 110-130. At that price a 16 slot server is only $12/month.
You can get better hosts with more features like free ventrilo servers and super fast direct links to tier 1 providers, as well as web hosting and fast redirect downloading of custom maps, but the prices are more like $1.50-2 per slot for those. We don’t need anything super hardcore so I’m leaning with going for the cheaper option.
At that price I don’t even really need to spread the cost around, but if people wanted to chip in a few bucks a month to split the cost, I’d give those players admin priviledges and a say in the maplist and mods and settings.
I was thinking 16 players would be a good server size - you can go up to 32 with TF2, but it gets pretty crowded/hectic on some maps when you get up past 20, and if you’re playing with a few friends (say there were 5 of us) it’s more fun to stick to a smaller game because you work together more rather than getting lost in the crowd. But at this price we could bump it up to 20 or 24 if people thought that was a good idea.
So anyway, this would give us our own server, a home base you could hang out on by default, a more geographically neutral and better ping server for our scheduled TF2 games, etc. Considering the price it seems like it’d be easily worthwhile, and we could continue having 2 games a week.
Any opinions? Suggestions? Pledges to cover a fraction of the cost?
Another option is XP servers. Still pretty cheap at $1.25/slot, they have a cool feature that lets you switch your server between various games on demand. So we could do TF2 one week, and CSS one week, and maybe some HL2DM or COD4 sometime… They also have servers in Chicago.
I went ahead and created a thread about our future TF2 server to notify interested people and get suggestions about the server configuration. Please voice your opinions on it there.
The server is up and running. If you have specific suggestions about the server, please post there. Otherwise keep an eye out for when people are playing TF2, put the server in your favorites, and try to use it as a home base. So far the traffic looks good. I’m looking at scheduling locked SDMB-only games on Wednesday and Saturday, but we can modify that to whatever works for people, otherwise we’ll just let games spontaneously form when a few people want to play.
We’re going to give it a workout tonight to make sure everything is good, so go ahead and find us. Add me to your friends list if you want to be notified when most games start.
I’ll be checking it out later tonight. If I can find time to play regularly, I’ll throw in something towards the server cost.
Was there a Ventrilo server as well, or some other voice chat program everyone uses?
Mumble is the new hotness in voip. It’s way better than everything else. The Source Engine voip is pretty usable though.
Just a reminder, we’re doing the first big scheduled SDMB TF2 game tonight. Based on past participation I’m hoping we can fill up our 20 man server with just us. So if you have even a half-ass interest in TF2, tonight is the night to try it with us. Starts in about 3 hours, at 8pm ET/5 PT.
Haven’t updated this thread in a while. The TF2 server thing has been very successful - we’ve regularly got 15+ SDMBers on playing together and plenty of people have generously donated towards operating costs so we can keep it going as long as we want without anyone paying too much.
Other games have been on the backburner lately with TF2 being popular and wanting to establish a player base on the server. We’ve done some group games of magicka but that’s about it. They’re releasing new l4d2 content sometime in the near future so we’ll probably start playing it again more then.
Thought I’d give you guys a heads up on a pretty awesome deal. For another 36 hours or so you can grab the ubisoft weekend deal pack featuring assassin’s creed, far cry 2, call of juarez: bound in blood, and rainbow 6 vegas 2 for $13. The reason I mention this here is that those last 2 games have coop so I figured we could play together. Call of Juarez is designed for 2 man coop but rainbow 6 can take at least 4.
I’ve still been meaning to get around to figuring out a way we could run Civ 5 games too, scheduling a few hours at a time.
If you want to try to organize your own multiplayer stuff through the thread, feel free. I can use the group scheduling feature for you too.