I’m going to see if we can triple the effect.
I didn’t schedule a game for tonight, I was going to try to get something going on Saturday, but since a lot of us are around Friday we’ll get one going. It may just not be locked/private depending on how many people are around.
Scheduled a game for Wednesday at 8pm eastern.
Spy wasn’t just hard, it was impossible. At least in TFC (missed the QWTF boat), the spy’s skill curve peaked very early on and then flattened out. After a certain opponent skill level, the spy became pretty useless (no matter how much time you devoted to the class), as none of his tricks really allowed him to bluff his way past anyone familiar with the game mechanics.
While the spy is still one of the “weaker” classes in TF2 for high-skill play(along with the pyro, engineer and heavy), the skill curve for the TF2 spy extends far higher than the TFC spy (the cloak is a big reason for that), allowing him to stay competitive much longer in the game.
TFC didn’t play much like the real TF at all in my experience. TFC was a fast paced spammy nightmare, whereas TF was much more slow and deliberate. There’s not as much use for a spy in a game that’s more like a big quake free for all than TF.
The are other factors too - it wasn’t uncommon to play TF with friendly fire on, which made spy checking much less simple. In fact that greatest thing about playing a spy is that if you were really good at it, you’d end up making the other team so paranoid that they’d kill each other because they were afraid of you.
You could also use grenades without dropping your disguise which is a big deal - sappers have replaced the anti-sentry grenade role, but with FF on and a little bit of hesitation on the part of the other team, you might have enough time to blow a grenade in their face.
Medics also had to heal by hitting their teammates with the medic axe in TF, which made the medic not only a plausible character to play, but the best one, since people were used to medics running at them with their melee weapon drawn. In TF2 it’s almost useless to disguise as a medic since they expect you to be using the medigun at all times.
Maybe it wasn’t good in high end competitive play because everyone knows where everyone else is, had procedures for spy checking, etc. but then I’m ok with the idea that it was only good in 99%+ of games.
[Quote=SenorBeef]
In TF2 it’s almost useless to disguise as a medic since they expect you to be using the medigun at all times.
[/Quote]
Actually, I find the Medic to be one of my main disguises. It’s got no speed decrease (and the medic’s speed is sufficiently close to that of the spy that people don’t generally notice that you’re not moving quite fast enough), and you have a reason to be close to the front lines and other enemy players. If you use the weapon switch so that it looks like you have your “medigun” out, people seem to assume that you’ll start healing them any moment now, and are rather forgiving of your slowness to start. Until, of course, you’ve stabbed them in the back.
When using the disguise kit (which a DR spy like me has to make heavy use of, because it’s impossible to cloak on demand), success will be heavily influenced by the proper behavior that goes with the disguise used. It’s as much about thinking about how the enemy player would behave if you were really them as it is about positioning yourself right behind your would-be victim.
Good to see we can still fill up the server with 20 people as we did last night. Wednesday and Friday seem to be our best days, but originally it was my intention to spread the games out a bit more. Saturday night works well too though. I guess we can either do Wed/Fri or Wed/Sat as our scheduled private games.
Non-scheduled games can still pop up whenever, we just typically only have 8-12 of us, so we usually let pubs in to fill the game out.
I will add that I’ve been playing TF2 from back in the day when the Spy disguised as a Medic wouldn’t show the ubercharge meter and it was a dead giveaway, so people stopped disguising as Medics and I eventually never even bothered to check them. Despite having been patched since then, I STILL have a tendency to assume a Medic can’t be a Spy.
Scheduled a game for today (Saturday) at 8 eastern.
The entire topic is kind of a red herring, though. A good Spy player doesn’t care much about UI widgets like the uber meter or speed. Disguises don’t fool experienced players and aren’t expected to…anyone taking a good look at you is going to immediately notice that you’re not doing anything useful, and there’s no way to fake that. Disguising is just there to buy that extra half-second from a peripheral glance, to get the distracted player to skip over you in the heat of the moment, and a medic (and scout, for that matter) is exactly what people expect to see moving around them from off-angles.
But this is really going into…
…this. Things like disguising and feign death and even the shiny new sappers are just gimmicks that have limited utility at a high level of play, because they rely on the enemy to make mistakes. The cloak, and the more focused pacing of the game, give the class an ability to present a credible threat, the ability to succeed on its own merits without needing giant gaping holes opened for it. This is why you see Spies show up now and then in TF2 tournaments and never saw them in TFC.
Now that we’ve been playing over a month we have a decent sample size for some stats. Here’s the global awards page of all the various awards you can win. See what you lead the server in.
Game in 2 hours btw.
I sent in a support ticket about the lag spikes and this is what I got back:
It only happened once for more than a minute, so I guess we can ride it out. If it continues to be a problem we could look into switching providers.
On the plus side, it also has the potential to provide some humour.
Installed a new mod to the server, roll the dice. You type “rtd” in chat and you can have any of about 15 positive or negative effects - I made it so the negative chances outweigh positive by about 2:1. You can become timebombed, frozen in place, blinded, or given bonus health, invisiblity, a speed boost, etc. The effects last 20 seconds and only one person can have them at a time.
It’s goofy fun.
Our wednesday scheduled games have been working well so I’m going to do that again. Wednesday at 8pm eastern will be the next big one.
They added 3 new maps to the game tonight, a king of the hill, a payload, and a payload race, so awesome. We can give them a try out tomorrow. I’m going to make the big locked scheduled game for Satuday night but we usually fill it up pretty good friday nights too.
Not sure if I’ll be able to make it tonight, but you don’t need me to start games - just start hopping on at the same time and it’ll grow. Aim for 8:30ish eastern, that’s usually when the bulk of people become available. Invite people from your friends list or the group inteface.
Someone with admin should be around to do the new maps if you want to give them a try.
Good turnout tonight. I plan on running the scheduled/locked/private game tomorrow - same time, 8 eastern.
What’s everyone’s opinion of RTD? I know at least one person - one terrible person who is no fun and hates all that is good in the world - despises it, but everyone else seems to like it.
The choices aren’t only on/off. I can modify it too. I can change the amount of time you have to wait before using it again (I put it on a short 45 seconds because we were playing around with it, but I can bump it up to a few minutes). I can change which effects can happen (take out specific ones like noclip or god mode). I can change the time of the duration of the effects. I can change the ratio between good and bad effects (right now you get a bad effect 65% of the time).
Anyway, I like it. It’s goofy and already people are using it less as the novelty wears off, so it’s not like it’ll continue to dominate the gameplay. What do you guys think?
Oh, and private SDMB game in 2.5 hours.
Ok, good news. EC was running our stats server on his spare computer but his bandwidth wasn’t so hot so when people were using the page he’d feel everything else slow down - and they were kinda slow anyway. So I found some webhosting we could use for under $5/month. We moved the stats there, and this also lets us host custom maps, and I’ll put up an image gallery, and whatever other use we can think of for it.
For the stats go to stats.senorbeef.net - I haven’t created an image gallery yet, but start sending your funny/interesting/whatever screenshots to screenshots@senorbeef.net so I can build a gallery. Your screenshots are stored in \steam\steamapps\username eam fortress 2 f\screenshots.
One problem - screenshots by default are in an uncompressed tga format, which can make them fairly big, and lots of e-mail servers reject any e-mails over 20-30mb in size. I don’t know what the size limitation of the mail server is here because my ISP’s mail server won’t let me exceed 26mb to test it. You can convert from tga to jpeg with any image editing software, or there are free sites online that do it. Set the “jpeg quality” to 100 - even at 100% jpeg is still small enough.
Once we get the gallery set up we may have an easier way to directly upload the pictures, so you can wait for that if you’d like.
About custom maps - I don’t want to start introducing a ton of custom maps right away. I need to test to see how fast this server serves up the files, and even then, every time you change to a custom map you tend to lose players - a lot of people will just cancel and leave if they have to wait for anything. So I may want to start doing custom map nights just on the locked/private games and see how that goes. But if you have favorite custom maps go ahead and list them and I’ll look them over.
And if you can figure out any other uses we have for a webserver - even outside tf2 specifically and maybe for SDMB gaming in general, please suggest them.
[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
One problem - screenshots by default are in an uncompressed tga format, which can make them fairly big, and lots of e-mail servers reject any e-mails over 20-30mb in size.
[/QUOTE]
Another way to get around the .tga problem is to simply take screenshots in .jpeg format. To do this, open up the console and type: bind f5 jpeg. The f5 key is the default screenshot button; this bind will simply save them as .jpegs instead of .tgas. Everything else should be the same as far as the funcitonality.