Oh my god, the exact same thing happens to me! If I hit “refresh servers” before I’ve joined a server already, it knocks out my apartment’s entire Internet connection for like 5 minutes.
I’ve heard of that. A surprising number of “budget” routers are so “budget” that they were designed with small routing tables and absolutely no handling for what happens when the table gets full - they just implode and reboot themselves. There’s a console variable you can use to reduce how many servers TF2 will query at once, but my googlefu is failing me at finding out what it is.
That does sound like what may be going on - if it’s taking down the whole house’s internet access, it’s not just your game or your computer screwing up. Refreshing the server list sends out hundreds of pings, and if your router is so crippled that it can’t handle the inbound connections, I guess it may just lock up. It’d have to be a really, really badly designed router, but that does sound like the most likely explanation.
I think if you put SDMB on your favorites and then just leave the favorites tab selected when you close the game, it’ll only refresh the favorites and not the entire games list, so you could at least avoid the problem when joining our server that way.
Ah, thanks guys. That wouldn’t surprise me, my router does suck. I’m smelling an excuse to upgrade…
I made a little video demonstrating what I’m always trying to get people to do when defending the cart or a capture point.
Good god-- someone in that video just flare-sniped a rocket-jumping soldier. That’s skill.
I had a cliff dancing fight with Heller that’s pretty cool.
So, how do you do team talk on the mic? It’s quite useful to let your team know important info without the other team also knowing it.
Oh right, sorry, forgot to post about it.
For the new people. By default, anything you say using the voice chat goes to everyone, including the other team, so they can hear you if you’re saying stuff about what spies look like or where sentries are. So we set up a mod where you could bind a seperate button to voice chat only to your team. So for general social stuff, you hit your normal voice button, and for team-specific stuff, you hit this new button.
You only need to set it up once, and it’s very useful.
Also, if you haven’t seen it, we have a stats page with all sorts of useful info. It doesn’t have a full listing of all weapons created recently though - I need to update it and reparse the data.
Ouch. I seem to be doing okay with the “setting people on fire” part. Not so much the “not dying” part.
The nicest thing that stat page had to say about me was that my karma is in good standing 
I’m #748! I’m #748!
Ditto. Though in the last month or so my Kill to Death Ratio has improved by leaps and bounds. (Though, really there wasn’t anywhere for it to really go but up…)
I’ve been getting hit with the dreaded kernel fault error in TF2; frozen video and looping sound unless I Ctrl-Alt-Del out and close it from the task manager. It doesn’t happen often but, when it does, I usually just call it a night. So my apologizes for times when I just disappear.
It seems to be a fairly common issue according to Google but I haven’t seen anyone actually say they’ve fixed it via the numerous posts to update this, that or the other. I am using the most recent nVidia drivers for my card.
Since the game went free, I decided to try it. Usually not being a fan of FPS or PvP, I wasn’t expecting much, but damned if I’m not having fun.
This is the first Tuesday or Saturday since grabbing the game that I’ve had free, so count me in for tonight’s game!
This used to happen to me alot (with all source games, not just TF2).
These days it just locks up for 30 seconds or so, then comes back with really weird corrupted graphics instead. Hitting control-alt-delete (to force the graphics to refresh or whatever, I don’t know) gives me another 30 second pause and everything’s back to normal. I guess it’s a step up, but it’s still annoying.
Try turning multicore rendering off (it’s in the options somewhere) - it didn’t solve it for me but it seems to help for some people.
I said I’d try to lay out a case for lack of engies in ctf.
In the original TF, CTF made up like 90%+ of the games played, the vast majority of the game was CTF. And it worked pretty well. But in TF2 ctf is relatively rare and it’s pretty boring.
One of the big reasons for this is that engineers are more powerful. Or, I should say, classes have way fewer tools to deal with sentries. Engineer in TF2 is actually pretty boring to play - you build your gun and that does almost all the work. In TF, sentries were very vulnerable to everyone, and to be a good engineer you really had to fight alongside your sentry to support it. In TF2, you build it and sit back, or maybe sit behind it and whack the wrench. It’s totally different and significantly worse.
Anyway, they kept the basic design tendencies of TF (path to the flag room crosses an enemy spawn, defensible flag rooms, putting the flag deep into the enemy base) combined with easymode powerful engineers with most classes unable to harm sentries in most circumstances.
Which leads to a general lack of offense. And more than that - the difficulty becomes breaking your way into the flag room. Once that’s accomplished, it’s generally easy to score - the other team doesn’t have defense in depth, relying entirely on an impregnable flag room. Once that’s broken, it’s a relatively clear path back out of the base and to score.
To contrast that with TF, very often the enemy would break through and get ahold of your flag, but you’d have more people dedicated to defense instead of one or two people that can make the flag room a fortress. So they’d stop them on the way out. And you’d form a makeshift defense point around where the flag was dropped. And maybe you held them off, or maybe they grabbed it and advanced it 50 feet before you killed them again. Meanwhile your team is doing the same to the enemy - gradually moving the flag back towards your base, fighting all over the map in the process in ad hoc defensive positions. It was a much more fluid, more mobile ad hoc sort of game.
The criticism was that it just becomes a scout race to see who could run the flags back first. But that didn’t actually happen when we tried it last night. If the scout getting through was pretty much guaranteed, we’d have had matches that ended in 5 to 4 with one team barely outracing the other. But that’s not what we actually had - we had teams actually effectively guarding their flag so that no one touched it, they just had to dedicate actual people guarding the flag in depth rather than sticking one gun in the flag room. For the few matches we played the teams weren’t very balanced so we didn’t have an awesomely close game, but it certainly shows it’s not a guarantee that the scouts will always just get through. More emphasis is placed on people actually defending their flag. It’s an adjustment that we’ll need to make because so many people just sort of run out in the middle with no objective in mind because they’re figuring the 2 engies in their flag room have defense covered, whereas this style of play requires people to actually play defense and offense in a more deliberate way.
Another tweak could make too then would be to only allow 1-2 scouts on teams if that’s considered a problem.
Anyway, last night didn’t showcase how much better that style of play could be because we didn’t really get well balanced teams and only played one game of it. But give it a chance and see if you like it before automatically dismissing it. TF2 CTF sucks, and this is a way to making it better.
I’m going to turn highlander mode on tonight. I know some people don’t like it, which is why I’m running it on one of our off nights.
Highlander mode is where the game is 9 v 9 max, and each team can only have one of each class. So if the game is full, every class is represented exactly once on each team. Creates interesting balance and I like it. If you want to give it a try, pop on tonight at the normal time.
Well that went well, we got together 16ish SDMBers on a random off night and kept the server full. What did you guys think of highlander mode?
Personally I love it, I’d probably run my server as highlander 24/7 if it were solely up to me. It keeps the diversity high and makes for interesting balance. I don’t see much downside myself either, since I’m comfortable playing any class and I like the idea of people occasionally having to mix it up and get out of their comfort zones.
If people like it maybe we could make it into a weekly event? Take one of our Tuesday/Friday/Saturday games and turn it into highlander night?
I liked it although I was sometimes frustrated because the class I wanted to take was taken. Some classes just don’t fit well at all in some maps.
Also, I was a spy at some point and I’m pretty sure the sniper I kept backstabbing was getting tired of it. I think he would have liked to switch but couldn’t.
I think highlander should be added sometimes to spice things up. Say, every night for a map or two, we go highlander mode.
Is it possible to set up classes in other ways? Could we set up a game where it’s all heavies versus all heavies? I’m not saying it would be a good idea to have it like that always, but trying it once might make it interesting or amusing.
Just once, I’d like to play an all spy map with FF on. Call it Mass Paranoia mode.