Alzir

I’m a soldier so I’m glad of that delay….comedy results are good though, especially on a comedy class 😉

Demo’s a brilliant class, just wish I could master it, you should watch a wizzy play it.

Anyway just a wee note to say our server’s up and running again today, so if you have a chance, please join me on it in the evenings and help get it filled 🙂

Managed to get the server going again last night with some help from these friends I’ve been paying 😕 but after switching to cp_labor the server emptied before a round was even underway. Confused by this I asked the ones who did make it past the download how long it had taken them, and they said it seemed slow and one guy pointed out we’re making people download the full .bsp file rather than a compressed .bz2 file (tf2 can handle the extraction). It took a wee bit of research into how to do this, but Gonzo’s doing the compression now and it should make one hell of a difference as for example one file was cut down in size from 28 meg to 6.5. If this is the norm on other servers out there, it’s no wonder we’ve been loosing people when a custom mapcomes on.

Just another big thanks to everyone who helped filling the server up yesterday. It’s hard and boring sometimes but it is starting to pay off. Last night I noticed a few familiar names, so we’re slowly but surely making it onto peoples favourites list. I also logged onto steam this morning and found a couple of friend invites from people on the server early yesterday, so here’s hoping that will help with seeding the server in the evenings.

There’s just a couple of points I’d like to raise about server admin. First is that there’s an option in beetles to scramble teams and restart a round (easily accessed by typing @scramble in chat) which I just wanted to make people aware of, and I think we should use it anytime the teams become unbalanced in terms of skill. I don’t mean to have a fixed rule on this, just use common sense, as you know yourself when a team’s getting steam rollered every round it can be pretty frustrating. Obviously it’s a random shuffle so it won’t always even things out, but I think it worked well last night on Chaos when inadvertently we had all XDC on the one side, and starting to dominate.

The other thing is about the maps I’ve been trying to stick to as starters, in particular goldrush and 2fort. Goldrush is still one of the most played maps out there but because it can be really frustrating with a small number of players (with either side) I tend to switch to a less lopsided map, like 2fort, in order to keep things as balanced and interesting as possbile. Recently I’ve been trying a few of the bigger cp maps here to mix it up, and had some success last night on badlands and at the weekend with fastlane (oddly enough). There’s no hard and fast rule about this though, and all I’m trying to do is avoid the lightning offense or spawn camping that normally results from small teams on Attack/Defend maps. So if you’re not on the server and fancy a game, but not on the servers current map, don’t be shy about coming on and changing it to something you prefer. Obviously it’s a good idea to check with the people on the server before you do this, just so we don’t loose too many, but it’s our server at the end of the day and we can do what we like with it. I might speak up and ask that we wait a bit before changing, but I’ll only ever do this if I think a map change will undo some of the hard work done getting people on in the first place. Again though XDC takes priority so if you really don’t want to wait, just say so and we’ll change.

Oh and Jonny I’ve got the day off so I’ll look into sourcemod, though I’m a bit hesitant going to gonzo with yet another request, the poor guy’ll be sick of the sight of me on msn 😆