Hah, I remember a pub saying that in our last game. I think it was the pub that ended up getting kicked.
That guy was a jackass. Seriously, just because you can talk doesn’t mean you should every then seconds.
No, that’s totally fine. I know a lot of people who play with us aren’t super veteran twitch gamers or anything, and some people have barely played the game. It’s definitely best to learn with us as opposed to the random public - who can range from pretty cool to total dicks.
In fact I thought about putting “newbie friendly” or something into the server name just because we’re going to be friendly anyway and helping people, so we might as well attract some more people that way.
TF2 is about as casual as a shooter game gets anyway, it’s not nearly as twitch skill dependent as most.
32 always seems too hectic to me except on a few maps. If you play with, say, 5 friends, then on a 32 man server you’d barely run into each other - you get lost in the crowd. I ended up settling on 20 players because I suspect that’s probably the most SDMBers we can expect to get onto the server at once and it’s just a good, well rounded number - enough to have a variety of classes without getting too lost in the crowd.
Soldier is okay, but one of the more twitch-skill dependent classes so it depends if the person is good at other FPS games or not. When you’re first learning, I wouldn’t be too concerned about minor differences in how useful you are to your team, since you’re probably blindly flailing half the time anyway. If you’re looking to be useful, medic is definitely the way to go - they’re usually in short supply, easy to play, and they can make a significant difference in the team’s effectiveness. Otherwise I’d just go with whatever is fun.
BTW, about half the people we’ve been playing with have been playing under names that don’t match their SDMB names, so I don’t know who they are. If your TF2/steam name is different from your SDMB name, why don’t you post about it so we know who you are? Or maybe when you play big SDMB games, temporarily change your TF2 name to have your SDMB name in parenthesis or something? That way we can know who everyone else.
Also, fix and/or buy mics people! Headsets cost all of $15 and they make the game much more social.
Also, I think I liked the game type we were playing before you got your server. It was a smallish map with an objective in the middle that either team had to capture. King of the Hill type deal I guess…
Yeah, those were king of the hill maps. Those maps work the best out of all maps for a small number of people, like 4 on 4 matches, since it focuses the action so much. It can get crowded/hectic when we have a 10v10 match, but they’re in the rotation.
BTW, the server will probably be empty at least half the time - at any given time half the servers in the world are empty. Generally, people filter out empty servers from their server browser results so no one has any reason to join them unless they’re joining with a few people.
But once the server has some people, it grows very quickly. Yesterday it was just 3 of us playing around, and within 20 minutes we had bout 8 more people join, and within 40 minutes it was full. So if you want to play on the server and it’s empty, just get 2 or 3 friends to hop in with you and the game will grow around you.
For that reason, you might want to add each other to your friends lists, that way you can see if anyone is up for starting a game. You can either use the steam group to make friends, or in the steam client you can go to view->players and see the players in all the games you’ve played with recently, and add people from the SDMB games.
Surprisingly enough, that game mode is called King of the Hill.
I’m curious to see how long a game will last with pubs. Yesterday we filled up, but then I passworded it to get rid of people so we could fit 12 SDMBers in. I’m curious to see how long a game would sustain itself if I didn’t do that. So I’m going to try to seed another game - just play around with a few friends on a smallish map until it takes off. So feel free to join if you want to play around a little bit.
Probably until tc_hydro comes up.
I don’t have hydro on the map cycle. This is what it is currently but I haven’t put much thought into it, just randomly ordered some maps I liked. It’s fairly payload heavy.
I’ll take suggestions. Here’s the list of stock maps.
koth_harvest_final
pl_goldrush
cp_dustbowl
cp_degrootkeep
pl_badwater
ctf_2fort
cp_mountainlab
koth_viaduct
ctf_doublecross
pl_hoodoo_final
koth_sawmill
plr_hightower
As a server name, may I suggest “Teeming Millions”.
Never having played TF2 nor any multiplayer games, for that matter, I’m seriously tempted to join in the fun.
You should join Terminus, TF2 is fun to play and funny to watch.
Cinn and I should be there tomorrow night!
I’m hoping to be joining in tomorrow (although I’ve never played TF2 before, but I do play MW2 on xbox).
I like the map list quite well (though I don’t know one or two). I wouldn’t mind adding koth_nucleus to the rotation, if folks would be willing. I prefer payload generally, but I find it to be a refreshing change of pace, not to mention dead easy for a newbie to navigate. It’s a small map. That would put us a little heavy on koth though.
Gotta say, I’m loving Degroot Keep. Never played that one before; I used to pick servers based on the map, so I know my favorites very well and others not too well at all. 
I’ll hop on anytime on Friday or Saturday nights (I work swing shift, so other nights are iffy).
I’m trying to implement per-map win conditions but I’m not sure how to do payload elegantly. I want to always complete one full cycle of a payload map - one team attacks until they’re stopped, and then the other team attacks until they’re stopped.
Most (all?) payload maps are 3 stages, and I think the way it works is that if the attacking team wins they get a point and push to the next map, or if the defending team wins they get a point and due to the successful defense, they switch to the attacking team.
I can’t think of a win condition that would always result in one cycle. If I set the roundlimit to 6, then if both teams stopped the other on map 2, we’d get 2 maps into the next cycle before that condition was triggered. Setting the win limit to 4 (first team to 4 rounds) is a little more elegant, but if both teams are stopped before map 3, or if both teams successfully win on attacker for all rounds, it would go into the next cycle. The variable win times/amount also makes timelimits impractical.
So how would you create payload victory conditions?
Edit: Guess the same question applies to any multistage maps, like cp_dustbowl etc.
Awesome, a SDMB TF2 server! Definitely getting favorite’d.
I’ll second the request for KOTH Nucleus, it’s one of my favorite maps. Does anyone actually like ctf_2fort? I know it’s one of the classic maps all the way back from the original Quake Team Fortress, but it’s one of the worst maps around now. This is mostly due to the relative difficulty of access to the flag rooms for the attacking team, having to pass through enemy spawn. Also, snipers having a directly line of sight to each other (and not much else) makes them tend to play their own little sniper mini-game the whole round. It plays like a death match most of the time.
The servers I’ve played on seem to have this figured out, where they finish the attacking run for one team (be it 1, 2, or 3 rounds), and then for the other, and then a map change. Maybe ask at a TF2 forum?
I generally avoid 2fort, but if other people like it, I’ll play it. It’s kind of a standard map, but it usually ends up being a turtlefest. Still, it’s not a terrible place to learn the game, either - given that it’s a mirror of itself, it’s an easy map to learn.
What’s a turtlefest?
When a team just barricades itself and makes no attempt to capture the flag.