Actually, I like 2fort, I feel like that map requires more team coordination and diversity to win. Plus, with essentially just two long hallways to the intel, as an engie I can set up buildings in each and since spies just can’t resist sapping EVERYTHING they come across, I know exactly where’s he’s coming from.
Well, that’s why it’s a turtlefest. 
Engineers have a strong advantage and it’s hard to break through. Not impossible of course, but a combination of no time limit, no class maximums on Engineers, and all-talk being on, I can definitely see a recipe for an interminably long 2fort round.
All that said, I don’t mind it in the rotation; it’s a big enough of a rotation to allow for a little 2fort now and then. I still need one or two of the water-based achievements anyway, and there are few tolerable maps with water.
Ok, for the 2fort issue, I put a 25 minute timer and a winlimit of 2 on it. That way it can’t drag on that long - 25 minute max, whoever is in the lead at the end wins. If people still don’t like it, I can swap it out for another CTF map.
I did per-map configuration for all the victory conditions actually. EC told me that mp_maxrounds considers a round on multi-stage maps to be one team’s entire entire time on offense/defense. So if we set payload maps or maps like dustbowl for maxrounds 2, it’ll let red attack until they’re win or stopped, teams switch, and the other team gets their chance. That’s the behavior I was looking for.
So right now, payload maps and cp_dustbowl have a maxrounds of 2 - both teams get one full round. KOTH maps and degroot have a timelimit of 20 minutes. CTF maps have a winlimit of two - first to get to three caps wins the round, so you’d need two of those - with a 25 minute backup timer to ensure they don’t go on too long.
3 hours until we kick off the first scheduled game. I’m hoping we can manage to fill up the whole thing - if you’re even half-interested in TF2, give us a try tonight.
I live on the west coast, so I may not arrive til later. How long do you think it’ll go for?
In our previous games it’s gone for 3-4 hours with different people coming in and out.
Thanks, I should be able to make it in that case. I wonder how much different from a pub a Dopers-only game will be…
Pretty much the same, but if you talk smack, you had better be prepared to provide a cite.
As expected, I sucked, but still had a great time. Looking forward to the next frag fest.
Well that worked well. We filled all 20 slots with SDMBers for about 2.5 hours, and there were a bunch of people on not in the game at the same time, so we had extras. I’m happy with the turnout, and the server handled the load fine.
There was a problem with the victory conditions on the maps, but I realized what I did and fixed it. One weird thing was happening though - I had to reset the password every time the map change, which isn’t supposed to happen, it should persist. The only thing I’ve changed is that it executes per-map configuration files, but those only have win condition variable changes, nothing to do with the password. Anyone have any idea what’s going on?
You probably have sv_password “” in your server.cfg, which is executed every map change.
Good catch, it was in the default config file they gave me.
But, strangely enough, before I started doing the map-specific config files, passwords wouldn’t get reset every round. So it must only exec the server.cfg if you exec another cfg on map switch. Or something.
I was originally planning to schedule games for Wednesday at 8 eastern and Saturday at 5, figuring that’d spread them out and give people with different schedules a chance to make it to one of the games.
But I forgot I’d be busy for the next few Saturdays out watching the playoffs. That’s fine, we can have games without me, but someone else will probably have to poke people with a stick until they hop on.
We’ll probably end up playing lots outside of the private SDMB meetups. On Monday and Tuesday we had like 8-12 of us and filled the rest out with pubs, and I’m sure spontaneous games like that will keep popping up.
Just chiming in late to say that Wednesday was quite fun; the crowd was more helpful to newbs than the typical pub, and there was still some nice friendly trash-talking as well. For some silly reason, I was expecting more Straight Dopiness, but I didn’t really know what form that would take. Maybe people voice-acting versions of TF2 characters as if written by random authors (the Heavy Weapons Guy as done by Poe, anyone)? Or at least some random dude shooting rockets while yelling “MY POST IS MY CITE!”.
I generally dislike having alltalk* turned on (forgive me but I happen to enjoy being able to strategize with my team) but if there is one thing alltalk is good for it’s good for allowing me to quote the scout as a means of taunting the opposing team.
The scout is so damn quotable it’s not even funny:
-“I don’t usually kill morons this fast.”
-“Oh what? You gonna cry? You gonna cry now?”
-“What have we learned? I always win!”
-“Hey lotta good dat gun did ya!”
I could go on all day, I love the scout.
*alltalk being the feature where everyone can hear everyone else instead of each team only being allowed to hear each other.
Yeah, the all talk thing has its upsides and downsides. Since our gathering is mostly social I decided to keep it on.
What games really should have, and few do, are two chat keys - one chats to all, and one chats to your team. Which TF2 doesn’t have… but Electronic Chaos found a sourcemod plugin that claims to let you do exactly that. We’re gonna test it out soon.
Speaking of useful scripts, EC also wrote a script to automatically password the server when it hits 18 people, and take it off when it hits 16. This is a far more elegant method of using a reserved slot system than anything that kicks people, and the server should rarely be completely full, so anyone with the password should be able to get in most of the time even if we have a big game going.
I just installed a script to address the alltalk/teamtalk issue. There are now two seperate channels: All talk channel, and Team talk channel. The only thing is, you’re going to have to edit your autoexec.cfg file in order to use teamtalk. If you have Windows, your autoexec.cfg file is located at:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps[username] eam fortress 2 f\cfg
Where [username] is your Steam username (What you use to login, not your display name).
Open autoexec.cfg* in Notepad, or any other plain text editing program (not Word or Wordpad) and add the following two lines at the end:
alias +teamonly “+teamtalk;+voicerecord”
alias -teamonly “-teamtalk;-voicerecord”
Then, once you launch the game, open the game console (~ key by default), and type in the following:
bind f +teamonly
This will bind teamtalk to the “F” key. You can use any key you’d like here. (MOUSE4 for example)
This is only necessary if you wish to actually speak on the team channel. You’ll hear the team channel automatically, so if you have no mic or only want to talk on alltalk, you don’t need to do anything.
*if autoexec.cfg isn’t there, just create a new file named autoexec.cfg.
While you’re editing that file, you can put in whatever other commands you’d want to run each time you run TF. For example, people who have administrator access to the server can set their rcon_password there so they’re automatically logged in. Or you could put “password cecil” in there - then it will automatically give that pass to the server when you try to join and you won’t be prompted for a password if it’s locked.
In other server discussion, I’m leaning towards removing cp_dustbowl from the map rotation. I’ve been trying to keep the maps pretty quick - somewhere in the area of 20-30 minutes - and dustbowl seems to drag on for most of an hour. The attacking teams almost always win maps 1 and 2, which makes it sort of boring from a competitive perspective*, and map 3 can drag on for 20 minutes by itself on both sides. It’s not a great map, although it’s popular, and I’m just not that enthused about playing it. I stuck it in the initial list mostly because it was so popular so I figured it’d be a good map to have, but bleh.
Also, I’m thinking of turning respawn times off for KOTH maps. I don’t want to do instant respawn across all maps - in payload or CP maps, it upsets the balance letting the defense spawn faster near the last checkpoint making it too hard to attack, but KOTH maps are almost deathmatch anyway, so they seem appropriate for instant respawns.
What do you think?
- I hate how TF2 gives each side the same amount of time to attack on CP map, and then gives the attackers tons of time. That almost always means attackers win, BOTH SIDES WIN, EVERYONE WINS, PARTICIPATION TROPHY FOR EVERYONE WHEEEE. Which is sort of unsatisfying, since most rounds don’t end with a clear winner. What they should do is let one side attack, and if that side completes the attack in, say, 14 minutes 35 seconds, then the sides should reverse, the clock starts at 14:35 and ticks down. That way you’d always have a winner - you need to beat the time the other team set, rather than just being able to eventually win on attacker for a tie.
Fun times tonight with random joiners. Hopefully we can set a firm time again soon.
About Dustbowl, I think I can go either way. You’re right that point 3 is really where it’s at, and that it really should be timed, to break the all-too-common ties…
I do think KOTH should have some sort of respawn timer, though, because it does make the battle for the control point a little more meaningful, and seems to add more swings to the match (i.e. it’s easier for a team to actually cap the control point when they manage to kill a bunch of the other team’s defenders at once, even if it’s just a 5 or 10 second respawn time). I may just be weird, but I find that I seem to care more about my team winning during KOTH maps than any other game type, and actively pursue that agenda more so than other maps. If my team has the point, I even find myself just trying to draw enemies away from attacking it, with no intention of killing them, if it lets us hold on a bit longer.
I’ll go ahead and schedule a game for tomorrow at 5pm eastern. I may or may not be here. If I am, I won’t be able to play much. But you don’t need me - other people have server control if anything needs changing, but otherwise you just need to hop on at the same time and send out a few invites.