Don’t forget that the mid-week game will be tonight rather than the usual Wednesday. I’ll get things rolling around 7:30 eastern but it probably won’t fill until 8-8:15.
Phoenix and I should be there, hopefully around 8pm if we can get our 7yo to cooperate.
Should be fun. You guys aren’t gaming nearly as much as you used to. Probably need to fix that!
I was thinking for one of these games we should give highlander mode a try. That’s a built-in mode where you have a max of 18 players (9v9) and there can only be one player of every class per team. So ideally in a 9v9 game you have one person for each class in the game. Sounds like a fun thing to try - maybe tomorrow night if people are into the idea. What do you think?
Gonna get a pick up game going tonight, so if you’re around hop on. Tomorrow night will be the big private/scheduled/locked game.
Hmm, something odd. If you go to the global awards page on our stats page, it has me as the all-time leader of pipe bomb kills with 82. But I almost never use the pipe bomb launcher and I’ve maybe only gotten 5-10 kills that way at most since we started keeping stats. Is there something else that records as pipe bomb kills?
I also want to remind people to take advantage of our alltalk/teamtalk voice chat mod, since only a few people seem to be using it. It’s hugely useful and you only have to set it up once if you stick it in your autoexec.cfg file, instructions here.
Does anyone have any experience debugging TF2 servers? Is there a crash log file somewhere? For some reason, about 1/5th of the time the server is switching to KOTH maps, it crashes… and I have no idea why.
We’ve got a bug we haven’t been able to resolve where killing minisentries doesn’t properly award points in the stats system. Oh well. No way to fix it until the sourcemod forums come back up and they’ve been down for a few days. Doesn’t affect anything in game.
Big scheduled game tonight. We’ll probably get the ball rolling around or a little bit before 8pm eastern. Last friday wasn’t a scheduled game and yet managed to have about 16 of us at one time (and about 20-25 total with people going in and out) so I’m hoping we can fill it up easily with it being a scheduled game.
If no one objects, I want to give highlander mode a try. 9 players per team, 1 player for every class. I think it’d be fun and create a more interesting type of gameplay (no 3 heavies on the cart on payload maps…) so I want to give it a try. The downside is that some people might get stuck with classes they’re not comfortable with … in that case let’s try to accomodate people by swapping with them. You can release your class by going to the class changing menu and pressing “reset” - then someone else can take your vacated class, and you can take theirs.
I might join in. I loved TF2 for awhile, though I stopped playing (combination of the friends I played with stopped playing, the server went defunct, and Valve added too many damn items to the game). Should be fun (glad to see you have 24 or less people).
If you’re having trouble getting the teamtalk thing to work, btw, one potential problem may be that windows might be appending .txt to your autoexec.cfg file if you’re creating it in notepad. If it’s autoexec.cfg.txt, the game won’t recognize it.
To find if that’s the case, go to the folder in detail view in windows explorer. Under “file type” it should say “CFG file”, rather than “text file”. If it says text files, you’re going to have to go into the explorer options, uncheck “hide extensions for known file types”, go back to the \cfg folder and rename the file from autoexec.cfg.txt to autoexec.cfg.
Everyone who hasn’t configured this yet should. It’s extremely useful. Step by step instructions.
We installed a melee only mod to the server that we can turn on whenever. It’s mostly similar to degroot, except it doesn’t allow bows and people don’t drop health kits. But it allows a few non-melee items like jarate to work. Might be fun trying payload or CTF maps as melee only occasionally.
What did you guys think of highlander mode? I liked it, quite a bit actually. It eliminated the very boring stalemates where 3 people were heavies backed up by 2 sentry guns creating a stalemate. The teams were inherently balanced class wise. The combat was more diverse and interesting.
I could take it or leave it. It eliminates stacking in certain classes, which I do like, but I remember at one point we were getting owned by a sentry gun that we couldn’t take out because the spy and/or demo just wouldn’t do it for some reason. I know we have some newbies, so no biggie, but that was a little frustrating.
Keeping with the Tuesday/Friday thing, I scheduled a game tonight. I may not be able to make it on time. You don’t have to wait for me to send you an invite though - everyone just hop on when the event starts (8pm ET) and you’re good. Someone with admin should be on if there are any problems.
It also potentially forces people to play classes they don’t like because that’s all that’s left. If I was left with sniper or scout, for example, I’d probably just switch to spectator till someone quit since I have absolutely no interest in playing those classes at all.
It also seems like it makes any skill imbalance that much more crushing. Enemy got a good heavy/medic team but your medic is new and runs around ubering your engineer? too bad, you lose. Enemy team has heller spy and your team forced some noob who’s never played spy to pick it? it’s now essentially 8 v 9.5. Games already get pretty lopsided sometimes, no need to make it worse.
Overall the bad of highlander outweighs the good IMO.
Went ahead and scheduled a Friday 8pm game. Those have been successful so far.
Tuesday doesn’t seem to be an especially good day for turnout, and I’m still experimenting, so I may try Monday next week.
Of course availability is kind of random anyway - last night I didn’t have anything scheduled yet we had 12 or 14 people show up. Still, I’m hoping the scheduled times will be useful for the occasional players to pick a good time to play with us so that we can fill up a server with 16+ of us and lock it.
BTW, if anyone has a bill’s hat or earbuds they don’t care about, I’m trying to acquire TF2 trading material so talk to me and we can work out some sort of trade.
I’m going to try scheduling the early week game on Monday this week. Still playing around to see where the best attendance is. Monday at 8pm.
Btw, you don’t need me on to get a pickup game going. Very often if you start playing and invite everyone you see on from the group you’ll get a decent game going. I won’t be on till late tonight so go ahead and start it without me if you want… put everyone on your friends list and invite them when you want to play.
I’ll try to get invites going around 8, so if anyone’s not my friend, feel free to join up or befriend me between now and then. 
I’ll try to make it tonight but I’m not sure I can. If I don’t make it, fluid will be the one who will reach back and smack you when you misbehave and threaten to turn this car around and go home.
Game tonight, 8ish eastern. If anyone wants to try any maps or mods or anything, feel throw to throw out some suggestions.
I’m scheduling the next private game for tomorrow night (wednesday) at 8 eastern. Wednesday averages us the highest amount of average players in the early week, although that may have been boosted by the increased interest in the first few weeks we ran the server.
We might temporarily be disabling various mods (and stats) in an effort to hunt down the occasional crashing we get.
Can I vote against the shiny arrow mod? It really gives away my position. 