TF2 server changes and a bit about XDC

And whatever I did seemed to make it worse, tonight we had a team 2 men down and it wouldn’t allow the others to switch 😯

Gonzo suggested it could be hlstats and beetles both trying to run their own settings, so I turned off any server side autobalance to hopefully allow hlstats to take control of it. Also had others complain about the random class thing tonight, so we’ve turned off another option which may or may not be affecting it (again may be a conflict with hlstats and beetles).

Keep up the feedback on this sort of stuff, it’s the only way we’ll get it sorted in the end.

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.

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 😆

you must be near bankruptcy now matt

Aye Uni almost did that to me last year, but got the day off work yesterday so not wasting around if that’s what you mean 🙂

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.

I’ve seen nothing like that now with regular maps, and that would be client side surely?

The new heavy update and all that comes with it has now been released. Can we please all try and use our server (once it’s been updated – gonzo sorting hopefully by tomorrow evening) because this is the perfect opportunity to get it filled up. Everytime these updates come out there’s a huge surge in tf2 interest and there will maybe also be a free weekend coming up? If we can get ourselves onto it then it should fill regularly every night, if we can show ourselves as good admins, we’ll gain some regulars.

Oh and one thing I’ll also do is rename the server and take custom maps off the rotation for a week or two while everyone tries out the new maps. Any suggestions for what we call it btw?