Well, that was fun. I really, really suck, but it was still fun.
Yeah, all half hour you played with us. Get back in here! I’m not gonna take “I’m 10 hours ahead” bullshit as an excuse!
People have been generous with the donations so far, combined with the extremely cheap price of the server we’re paid up through another 3 months.
fluiddruid contributed $20, ElectronicChaos $10, ReticulatingSplines $6, and… I forgot the SDMB name of the person who contributed $10 today. I remember you asking what the paypal address was, but I can’t remember who it was… remind me who you are so I can give you credit and administrative access on the server.
It was me (BurnedToast)
not sure that I really need administrator access though, I don’t know any of the commands anyway and I usually only play when you guys are on.
When’s the official game this week? Wednesday?
Yeah, Wednesday works I think. We had a big game going every single night last week. I don’t expect that to keep up - the server is new and shiny and people aren’t burned out on playing all the time yet - but it does show we can get games going pretty regularly. So I suspect we’ll have a pretty big game (10+ of us) going a few times a week, but Wednesday can be the big day where we completely lock out pubs and fill the server with just us.
Just in time for our Wednesday game, I got HLStatsX up and running. I’m hosting it from my home computer, so please don’t refresh it compulsively to check your stats. I ran through the backlogs and parsed everything so we’ve got stats from the first day. Here’s the link to it: SDMB Tracking. Of course, you can check your rank in game by typing “rank” or “hlx” in chat, too.
Good work EC. Between the work you’ve done for the server and your recent renouncement of holocaust denialism, you’ve really been making a turnaround.
The stats system is meant to be recorded in real time, and we parsed logs from when the server started, so it doesn’t quite record all data correctly that way. There are some glitches like the graphs tracking players over time, the awards aren’t working, some players have a mysterious 0:00 connection time… but all of this stuff should be accurate going forward because the real time stats system is operational and recording everything now.
Some of the stuff doesn’t work or make sense (this mod mostly caters to counterstrike, and in tf2 there’s no accuracy tracking and the only weapons that make headshots are sniper weapons) and there are headshot/accuracy columns everywhere. I’ll see if I can tweak those out, but no big deal, just ignore them.
But there’s lots of cool data there. Skill rating for players, awards, stats for number of kills with different weapons, all sorts of stuff (I’ve killed fluiddruid 104 times!). Check out all the various tabs and subtabs. You can click almost anything too - under “actions” you can see that we’ve built 2641 sentry guns, and if you click that you’ll see how many each person built, etc.
Anyway, thanks EC for setting this all up. Cool data to have. We’ll be tweaking it a bit probably over the next few days.
40 death streak? Really?
I really need to practice more.
Well, don’t you play medic a lot? It’s not like you can get a lot of killing done when healing someone.
I scheduled the big game this week for 7:30 eastern/4:30 pacific today (Wednesday). I’m going a half hour early because some people wanted to get it rolling earlier, but I didn’t want to go much earlier than that because lots of people don’t become available for gaming until 8-8:30. Anyway, it’ll fill up as they come on.
I have a bunch of crap to do tomorrow and I may end up being late or not making the event - if that’s the case you don’t need me to invite you, just hop on the server and everyone should be there.
We couldn’t fix some of the issues with parsing the old logs for stats, so we’re going to reset them starting tonight. That way it’ll be a full/clean/accurate/consistent set of stats with the real time logging in place. So if you want to check out your stats over the last 2 weeks since we started the server, check them out over the next few hours, cause tonight will be a fresh start.
The stats are a fun addition. Thanks guys!
I’m going to be late. Someone else with admin please do rcon sv_password “cecil” to lock it. I’ll join when I get home.
The one issue I have with the stats, is it likes to spam your chat window, so you might miss out on something. You can disable this for yourself though, by typing the following into chat (NOT the console):
hlx_chat 0
hlx_display 0
As far as I can tell, there’s no way of turning it off on the server’s side.
Good to see we’re still filling up the server. More people with mics last night too so it was more fun/friendly/etc than the first night we started. If you don’t have a mic, grab one.
The freshly reset stats page seems to be working perfectly. Well, except as of now, the lack of award winners, but I think it has to be up for 24 hours first. Go ahead and bookmark it.
I’m also tweaking the rating system. I can’t find a web page that contains all of the items you can score and their default values to show you all the options, but I’ll try later. These are the tweaks I did so far - I wrote it as a reminder to myself and didn’t mean for it to be read by others so it’s kind of shorthand. The first number is the default value, the second number what I replaced it with. This only affects the total score players have in the ranking system, it has no in-game effects.
backstab 2->1.5
sentry built 3->0
built mini sentry 3-0
build teleport 2-1
killed minisentry 4-3
kill charged medic 1-4
mad milk 0-1
mvp1 5-8
mvp2 3-5
mvp3 2-3
made disassembly penalty match assembly score
pyro extinguish 1-2
sniper extinguish 1-2
stun 0-2
ambassador 1-1.5
amputator 1-2
baseball 2.5-5
brass beast 1-.75
deflected arrow 2-20
deflected grenade 2-15
deflected rocket 2-10
deflected sticky 2-15
chargin targe 2-4
l’etranger 1-1.5
engie pistol 1-1.5
powerjack 1-2
revolver 1-1.5
all taunt kills (3 to 5)-10
telefrag 2-5
world 1-2.50
Some of the stuff I made consistent (all melee kills are worth 2, except a few like the powerjack that were mysteriously left at 1. Jarate on an enemy gave a point, but mad milk didn’t. Took away points for simply building a sentry - you get enough points from the kills they generate that I don’t see why just building one should be worth anything - as opposed to dispensers which don’t score on their own but are inherently useful to your team just to build. Yeah, I think I may go ahead and raise the points on building a dispenser.
I gave rare but skilled actions some high points, like if you can manage to reflect an arrow with your pyro airblast and kill him with it, you certainly deserve those 20 points… Potentially most controversial, I lowered the modifier on some weapons - I made backstabs worth 1.5 down from 2 - because while melee kills are worth 2, the spy kill isn’t really a normal melee kill - it’s their primary weapon and an instakill so it didn’t seem like their default weapon should be worth twice as much as everyone else’s) and took the Brass Beast from 1 to .75, because it just seems so OP to me, but that’s subjective.
Anyway, still tweaking, but I’ll post a list of any changes I make.
EC isn’t actually sure you can deactivate the messages the stat system sends to people globally. But you can turn it off for yourself individual with the comments in the last post. I think I’ve seen it disabled globally before - played on an hlstats server that didn’t send messages.
But actually… it’s less annoying than I thought it’d be. Since it only contains actions that involve you, it doesn’t pop up constantly, and it’s actually kind of interesting to know how many points the guy you killed has, or how much extinguishing your teammate by pissing on them is worth in terms of points. So I think I’m going to leave mine on.
I’d also like to remind everyone with mics to follow the instructions in this post. It’s extremely useful to have a team-only talk button, and you only have to do it once. As an example of why it’s useful, last night we were playing doublecross, and my team dropped the intel… I thought at the front of their base but then I heard someone on the other team say “they dropped the intel in our sewer, so go cover it” - so I turned around, went into the sewers, and captured the intelligence. If that person, that horrible horrible person, had their team talk key setup I never would’ve heard that and wouldn’t have captured.
That was a fun game. Last night was my first time playing but it was fairly easy to learn despite having little experience in FPS’s. The hardest thing to figure out was how to fight spies, as I had no idea what they could do. I was pretty frustrated when I thought I killed Heller only to die 3 seconds later to him. Happened three times in a row and I had no clue what was going on until later when you guys were talking about it. Other than that it was a blast, definitely worth the 5 bucks.
Yeah, spies can be confusing to new players, especially since they now have several ways of working.
The default spy gadget is a simple cloak. You become mostly invisible but you still show up sort of like the predator - you can see an outline and some shimmering, and you can shoot the spy if you see it. You have a limited charge and when your invis watch runs out, you become visible again.
The dead ringer works differently. It’s a feign death. If you have the dead ringer activated, if you take damage, the enemy will see you fall to the ground as a corpse and get a kill message. But it’s false - the spy actually went completely invisible (not just 90% invis like above) for a few seconds, allowing them to escape. Pyros are the best (only?) counter to this because they can set them on fire after the cloak activates. As a non-pyro, the best you can do when you recognize a dead ringer spy is to simply try to blast the area you think they’d escape towards, and keep an eye out for them reappearing. In my view, the dead ringer is too powerful.
And of course spies can disguise themselves as part of the enemy team. They lose their disguise as soon as they fire, so if you see someone shooting or a medic healing you know they aren’t a spy. They’ll take damage if you shoot them - so again, pyro is the natural counter, since they can ignite a bunch of people at once and see who burns.
There’s also “your eternal reward”, a different spy knife that takes away the ability to manually disguise yourself, but gives you the ability to instantly disguise as your victim if you backstab someone, as well as hiding their corpse and suppressing the kill message to their teammates.
To add to this, there is also a distinctive noise when the Dead Ringer cloak activates, BUT their outline won’t show like a normal cloak if you bump into them.
Also, be on the lookout for a Heavy that’s moving too fast or a Scout moving too slow - they are probably spies.
Actually, after doing some reading up on spies, it works a little differently than I thought. I thought cloaked spies were always slightly visible, but that’s not the case - apparently the invis watch is a complete cloak, and the cloak and dagger is a complete cloak when it’s charged, and a semi-cloak-with-outline when the charge is used up. The latter thing is probably what made me think spies always run around at least partially visible. That, and if you bump into them, or damage them, you’ll see an outline for a bit. But if someone is using an invis watch, or charged cloak and dagger, and no one has shot them or bumped into them, they’re 100% invisible, right?