Anyone try Man vs Machine mode yet? How is it?
I’ve not tried it yet but I watched some people stream it* and it looks fun. It’s a whole different way for friends to enjoy the game without having to put up with the uber raging nerds in public servers or without having to get into the competitive scene just to have fun with friends.
*My download hadn’t even begun yet and people were already playing it.
So far, it seems like the queues are always long. (Had one yesterday of 94 min. We gave up.) And that’s assuming we can even get the matchmaking server to respond. It’ll probably be like that for the first few days, but after that I hope to give it a try.
This is news to me - do you download something from Steam?
It’s a regular TF2 update. If you have TF2, it’ll take care of itself automatically. If you don’t have TF2, you should get TF2 (it’s free to play now!), and then it’ll take care of itself automatically.
But that’s only for the public servers, right? Private server and server browsing should get you into a game quickly, no?
Yes, but as of last night, everyone was still updating, so we couldn’t find a whole lot of servers. In addition, MvM isn’t just like another map you can add to a rotation. You have to convert the server over to MvM-mode. I expect that may limit the number of servers that switch.
I’ll let you know when the server queue times aren’t hours long.
I reinstalled TF2 to try this and so far it’s been abysmal. There’s been a grand total of one server that’s not full, the players can vote to not restart (and thus keep playing instead of letting the people waiting have a go), the one time I succeeded in getting into the game it lagged all to hell, and the most recent time I got kicked for inactivity. Of course I was inactive, I was waiting for you to let me play!
Has anyone had any recent success playing Man vs. Machine mode? I’ve been trying to connect on a public server. The search function seems slightly buggy (we got to the wait estimate being “only a few seconds now” and we got taken out of the queue) and the time estimator seems off as well (the wait went from 49 minutes to 12 minutes in a matter of seconds). Have any others of you had any success in actually playing a game?
I’m guessing the issue is that the “play co-op” option searches for games with less than five players, and there aren’t any. It’s impossible to estimate how long you have to wait, because you have to wait until someone chooses to quit.
I have now succeeded in playing MvM.
I hosted my own password-protected server with a player cap of 8 and using the console command “tf_mvm_min_players_to_start 1” to allow myself to play alone vs. 7 robots at a time.
I haven’t won the first wave yet, but at least it’s playable.
I played last night with some friends - we all went ahead and paid a dollar to get into an official server (still had a wait of about 10 minutes).
It’s fun. Very, very difficult. In fact, we lost the last wave four or five times until another buddy dropped in to spectate and basically became our general over ventrilo, calling out where people should go and helping us focus our efforts.
For those who haven’t played it, it goes like this:[spoiler]
There’s a bomb that the waves of robots will carry to your spawn (if the one carrying it dies, the next one will pick it up). If it gets there, you lose.
Each wave features a mix of regular and giant sized robots. The giant robots have tons of hitpoints and usually some other feature (charged, rapid fire, maybe something else that I can’t remember). They are terribly difficult to kill.
There’s also a tank with a CRAPLOAD of hitpoints that carries its own bomb - if it gets to spawn you lose.
You collect money as you play, and you can use it to upgrade your damage, attack speed, and resistances.[/spoiler]
It’s fun, but fairly two-dimensional. I love the idea of co-op TF2, but without some new modes this is going to get stale fairly quickly.
On the Steam forums someone pointed out the auto-connect for MvM games is completely borked, for reasons Grumman has touched on. Also that non-US users are getting horrendous pings in auto-connected games.
Someone suggested a solution that’s worked for me so far. Look for maps with map names starting with “mvm_” and < 6 players, not password protected, at the ping rate you find acceptable. There’s a decent number of games available and I’ve just been playing for two full maps successfully.
It’s definitely a lot of fun, but as Johnny Bravo points out, needs to be changed up eventually or it’s just going to be tedious in the end.
Oft wears hats and I have managed to play a few games of Man vs. Machine. It’s a fun alternate game mode, though we both found it very difficult and have not succeeded in winning a game yet. On the other hand, there are a number of technical problems which interfere with our ability to play the game:
– Joining a public server using their search for a server function is horrible. The wait is on the order of 20 minutes, the estimated wait times are often inaccurate, adding another player to the party will remove you from the queue, and it’s common to load into a server which is running an earlier version of the game, which causes you to automatically disconnect. This is extremely frustrating.
– Finding a server yourself is an option, but it takes so long to load into the game that Oft and I have never managed to get on the same team (instead of spectator) before it fills up. This is extremely frustrating.
– Pressing F4 to toggle start often causes the game to quit unexpectedly. This is also extremely frustrating.
In short, there’s so much that interferes with our actual ability to play the game that I’d recommend waiting a month or so before trying to play it. By then, the novelty will have worn off and the waits may not be as long, and more of the bugs may have been worked out.