Alzir

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 😆

Over the last two nights whenever I join the server for the first time and join a team it randomly assigns me a class like has been mentioned.

Yea that’s the random class thing I was meaning and hopefully it’s been solved. It’s an odd problem because there’s no actual option to set this up on purpose, that I’m aware of, so it can only be a side effect from something else and we just have to determine what that is.

You also weren’t the only one last night having problems connecting to steam, and actually I’ll run that past Gonzo this evening just incase it’s a server side problem rather than a general steam issue.

I found an option deep in the settings which might have been causing this for you Jonny and I’ve modified it slightly. Let me know if it keeps happening.

Might have been the numbers but the custom maps didn’t work out as well tonight, though still fun, they seemed too big. I think also some tweaking needs done to the vote system as we kept switching tonight just as people were joining a map, and when it changed they left.

Some confusion over Avanti when it came on too but I think everyone had it figured out in the end. Did discover tonight that if you enter the blue spawn area as red you start taking damage, like when you go out of bounds in battlefield games, and die if you don’t back out again.

Oh definitely, and I’d love to make them a regular feature. It’s just a pain in the arse when a load of people have to download the same map because you always lose numbers. You get some who can’t be arsed downloading it, but we had a few disconnects tonight when a custom map loaded and the server looked deserted as I was the only opposition :(.

It might help if I make a post with links to all the maps for manual download, then at least a few more of us will be on the map immediately when it switches. I’ll do that tomorrow.

Found another good one today from a demo I was watching, ctf_geothermal_b2.

We need to setup a custom map night sometime soon, the ones we had on tonight were a massive hit.