Re: [hlds_linux] CS:GO Dedicated Server with 2 public network addresses
On 04/02/2016 23:28, Otto Monnig wrote: Thanks for the reply yesterday. What I need is to have the same CS:GO server available with two public internet addresses. Why? Look at it from the clients point of view. They get a list of servers from valve. They don't want to see your server twice. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Mandatory TF2 update released
On 18/12/2015 20:28, Emil Larsson wrote: You can change the bars back to ping in advanced options in the game. Which is what I did. Fair enough, I should have checked. I have the net_graph on anyway to see my stats. I just think it looks so ugly. What colour is that for the bars? Gangrene? And the blu/red logos look like they were badly photoshopped in. More key to hiding ping, would be fixing the quickplay code so that Europeans end up on European servers and so on. Steam client beta seems to have knocked performance down to single digits in some cases too. So if you get people complaining about performance on your servers that may be why. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Mandatory TF2 update released
On 18/12/2015 11:49, Saint K. wrote: Any chance we can get a player count back at the scoreboard? It's a bit annoying that on servers with a higher than 24 slot count you cannot workout anymore how many people are in a team. Yeah 2nd that. It's awful. Programmer art and bars for ping? Yeuch. It looks like the results of a school kid doing his first custom UI mod and he's asked his dad to upload it to the internet. I'm expecting Gabe to reply with "He's only 6. I didn't want to say no" Either that or someone edited it after the Valve Christmas do. Sober up and fix it please. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Mandatory TF2 update released
Seeing as I can't get anyone at Valve to acknowledge via email, I'll report here. Not really a server issue though. I note a strange chargin targe is getting its kill counter updated when you do kills with other weapons. I assume it's not by design. I've got something like 5000 kills on mine now as a result. IIRC this started around the gun mettle update. At least that's when I first started noting the messages for reaching milestones popping up even though I hadn't charged to get a kill. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] baning TF2 servers together with CS:GO (dan)
On 21/07/2015 14:51, Alice Vostrikova wrote: just wait a week - its bad idea. The thing with time is, it happens whether it's a bad idea or not. In a weekend the temporary ban will end. Bad guys on similar ip won't correct a problem with their servers. Well imagine you want to sell hosting for game servers. If your IPs are banned because you let bad guys use your service then your service will eventually be useless, right? So obviously (a) you and (b) valve and (c) your hosting company all have motivation to get these so-called bad guys to stop. Valve can and probably will stop them by banning the IP address. So if you don't want the IP address banned, you and the hosting company have to think of something else. In that respect I think you're talking to the wrong people. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] baning TF2 servers together with CS:GO
On 20/07/2015 15:39, Erik-jan Riemers wrote: Respond to valve than, instead of the mailinglist, keep the spam where it belongs. I assume you also read the cs:go mailing list, you could address those suggestions too. Or, just wait a week. It says Servers blacklisted one week for inventory violations which is not really worth fretting about. Assuming that message is true then you may as well just wait. If you set fire to a Valve support guy he'd take longer than a week to notice and respond, so there's no quicker option here than waiting. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] TF2 Mandatory update release
On 03/07/2015 02:34, HD wrote: Lol just when I didn't think you could troll any worse than you already do I get surprised. TBH I can't see why you're crying. People have been boo hoo hooing all day on the TF2 community hub because they've added weapon skins and changed a few weapon stats. Then the boo hoo hoo I'm not running my servers any more here. Followed up 30 seconds later by What's in the new update? Why would you care unless your post was just some narcissistic attention seeking thing. It's really no different from Halloween - except you have to pay to play and that will put off enough to make it pretty insignificant anyway relatively speaking. People get contracts and assuming they're busy, cooking lunch and learning to juggle at the same time it'll take them all of 30-45 minutes to get the points. So an hour and a half later that's it. They're done for the week. At which point they'll stick the weapons they don't want on the market and equip the others and go back to playing the game the same way they have for years on whatever maps/servers they usually play. The same as they always do. I bought a ticket this AM and I've got the money I paid for it back from the market and that's it. It's done and dusted in less than a couple of hours including going out cycling. Are the skins some terrible thing for TF2? I could hardly tell the rocket launcher had a different skin. Look at the player stats for TF2 and it hasn't really budged from what I can see. So you know, there aren't bazillions more players all trying to get contracts that would be on your servers. But equally large numbers of people haven't quit playing the game either. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] TF2 Mandatory update release
On 03/07/2015 02:24, HD wrote: Ok another update just hit clients - what was that for? They've removed all the straws per your previous request. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] CheckValve 2.0
On 27/05/2015 18:59, David Parker wrote: I don't understand the question. The RCON part of the app creates a direct connection to your game server. Is that what you're asking? I believe he's suggesting that your app will steal rcon passwords -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Optional TF2 update released
On 19/05/2015 15:10, N-Gon wrote: Again. Only a small handful of people within UGC know about making Sourcemod plugins. Writing a plugin doesn't make you Donald Knuth. Any idiot can write a plugin. The reason there are so few writing them is because there's really no great need for plugins. Instead of being pessimistic about fixing something why not come up with a better solution than the one I have presented? There isn't really one. VAC et al is about not trusting clients. It kind of makes sense to do what you can to police the clients. If you don't trust the servers you play on it's game over. You have to play somewhere else. Many servers did nefarious things in the past to the general TF2 pub community. Not cheating per se, but essentially we can look at what Valve could do about it then and what they did do about it. Back then Valve didn't appear to have the stomach to ban servers permanently in the same way they do for clients. They did remove servers from the browser and make a bit of a fuss on here telling server owners not to do this kind of thing. Equally though, if a server runs a plugin or changes cvars Valve don't care that much, except where the owner deceives the players. However that's really the limit. If a server does something nefarious with respect to the player base then Valve can remove that server from the browser. But this hardly applies to comp servers does it or to comp teams using their own server to cheat in some way. When you get down to trying to determine whether changing a server cvar is cheating or not, you can't really expect Valve to police comp matches or all the potential plugins and settings that a server might or might not have and how that may impact some random comp game. The rest of us that are joining pub servers - well, it's like another vote for Valve's servers isn't it :D There is no need to have that cvar set to anything other than 1, so why not just remove it. Well this is perhaps true, but completely orthogonal as even if you remove this particular cvar, if you don't trust the server owner, they can still cheat in other ways. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Some exploit to play TF2 with an invalid SteamID?
On 18/03/2015 00:59, Weasels Lair wrote: Wondering if any other admin's have seen this. Today I had a player join with a SteamID that I was unable to ban by ID. From SourceMod I kept getting a message about waiting another 30 seconds and trying again, because that SteamID was not verified (yet)? In the end, I resorted to fire-walling-off his source IP address for now. When I punched his SteamID3 (which was showing as [U:1:96295245]) into SteamIDConverter.com, it kept showing unknown for their SteamID64, [U:1:0] for their SteamID3, and blank for their plain SteamID? http://steamidconverter.com/76561198056560973 Looks like it's just buggy sourcemod and maybe the converter too? Account doesn't have a steam profile. Looks like it was VAC banned 3 days ago. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Rethinking the community quickplay ban
On 06/02/2015 00:07, Gordon Reynolds wrote: I'd hate to see this thread de-railed from it's original topic of Quickplay and how it relates to Community Servers. While the change to trading is a big one, it was more of a change to bring TF2 in line with all other Steam trading-supported games. I think they're linked. Trading, F2P, the introduction of scratch card like gambling games and all these economy things changed TF2 from a team-based, objective based FPS to what it is now. This has changed the player base too. Simply put, the people who used to play on your servers are not throwing money at Valve for a conga taunt or for a key to open a box. Valve does what their customers will pay for. Their customers for TF2 are the people scamming each other, buying keys and items and so on. TF2 is probably the greatest game never played. As I said recently, TF2 is like playing chess against people who stick the pieces in their ears, strip down to their underpants and run around the room shouting GAAEE who would say It's only a game, I play for fun if anyone questioned this behaviour. If you bought the game in 2007 and have played 7000 hours without spending another dime Valve aren't that interested in you. Even if you play comp Walker has said that's boring. Watching 20 people conga that's like the super bowl or the Tour de France right? Well, it is if you watch the screen Robin does that shows the money rolling in. That gets his boss excited and smiling. They want people who will buy taunts and dance around the maps - or buy a gun that tells them what their killstreak is - you did that for free? Ah, suckers. You charged for some of these ideas? Well they took your idea and changed it so instead of you getting the money, they did. See how much better that is now? No? Let's try it one more time, you have a feature and people pay you. Now they have the same feature and people pay Valve. See the improvement yet? Maybe you've gotta be working at Valve. They saw it straight away when someone put the idea to them. So, we'd get the money?...hmm, yeah...let's do that They want to introduce young kids to the joys of gambling too. So thanks for that Valve. Steam's trading cards and levelling changed Steam from a service that was a bit flaky but nevertheless a warm and cuddly idea that sold popular multiplayer games and updated them over and over into a service designed to attracts buffoons who want to collect badges and increase their level in a web store. If you're a gamer, valve don't care. There are probably 100 idiots out there throwing money at valve for every gamer they have. The level of programming skill and effort valve need to do to get at their money is something a bright school kid could manage. Look at the features steam has added recently. That music player? The guy that wrote that must be a hell of a trombonist. Can you imagine his interview I mostly play the trombone Do you think you could write code? Sure...I could add a music player What features would it have? Well, I've used a lot of music players and using my vast knowledge of existing players I wouldn't have any How long do you think it will take you to create a music player without any features? About a year. Most of that could be a 'beta' though. In case some of the features it doesn't have don't work In many cases they can just bundle indie or old publisher titles on steam, say 75% off every so often and watch as thousands of people buy them just to get a bigger number of games owned or a few trading cards - and when gamers kick up a fuss they just change the steam interface to make it look like it's still something to do with buying and playing games. There are even people who collect and pay hundreds of dollars for games that were on steam but have been removed and then if you have enough of these removed games you can join a group. Can you believe that? Given these people exist what would you do? Spend millions on improving mental health care, or change Steam to accommodate them and free them from the burden of owning money? For Valve the answer was easy and you can't really blame them for chasing some easy money. Compare that with the 9 years TF2 took to create and the amount of money and talent you'd need to create a game which the guy who buys it, plays it for five or ten years without giving you another penny. Which one are you going to pick? If you're into playing games then you're going to have a bad time with Steam. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Spammers delight
On 26/01/2015 13:17, hasser css wrote: Learn how mailing lists work before saying such stuff. Mailing lists are nice and anyone with a half-decent client can easily filter out the spam. (What is an X-BeenThere header? ;-)) If we wanted something that was nice we'd get a girl or a chocolate cake. Also it's good that Valve hasn't shifted their dedicated server support onto the steamcommunuty discussions, there would be even more stupid how do I run server oh god I'm too stupid to use google questions. Let's not flatter ourselves. It wouldn't make the group more or less intelligent than it is now. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Spammers delight
On 23/01/2015 15:34, Erik-jan Riemers wrote: Dont forget that once a while you get this nice mail with your password in plain text.. Fletcher (at least IIRC it was Fletcher) has, in the past, wanted / suggested to move this list to Valve's other forums. I can only assume he met with enough resistance to not do it. This was before the community forums though. Given that the list seems widely published online and they harvested posts made in 2012 hasn't the horse already bolted as far as spam is concerned? I imagine they're all busy looking at Gabe's hedge now that windows 10 is free. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] IPv6 on SRCDS
On 17/01/2015 22:28, Erik-jan Riemers wrote: If we all think like that, we wont have ipv6 in 10 years and it will be too late. I rather have it *now* and support both so the change can be done in steps or something like that. It's probably a non issue anyway. It's more likely that the average buffoon will get, effectively, one /48 block from his isp. Or maybe a /56 block. Unlike IPv4, that will give him bazillions of addresses to assign to his toaster, phone et al. IIRC it gives your buffoon significantly more address space than ipv4 has in total. i.e he won't need NAT any more, but you'd be able to ban his entire range trivially. Just with a single /48 or /56 entry in your firewall. I doubt that will stop everyone of course. proxies, changing ISP, changing hardware etc etc etc could all get around an ip ban, but it's not like the extra address space of ipv6 is making the problem any worse than now, and, I think it would make it more difficult for some because a lot of people get dynamic ip addresses, which would be completely unnecessary. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Mandatory TF2 update released
to scramble if a team wins rounds. A team winning isn't a sign that the team is unfairly balanced. Besides anyone who thinks shuffling players randomly will balance the game needs to think about that some more (cf Apple who had to change their algorithm for shuffling on the ipod because 'randomly' selecting songs doesn't result in what people hope it would) Right now the game doesn't need new items or new maps. It needs updates to make it worth trying to win again - which, in essence, is the only reason to play a game. It's what a game is. I know you have this thing where so long as you're getting money from them you don't care if people don't play but why not find some way of splitting them out onto their own servers? If people like to conga, you could write dance mat game for them or something. Right now TF2 is like going into a room full of people nominally playing chess and when you sit at the board the other guy picks up a piece and pretends it's an aeroplane and he's making aeroplane noises and you say C'mon, play fucking chess and he says You're a tryhard and Valve, the people running the chess competition say We don't like to change the way people play our games, and that guy bought a hat! So you sigh go to the next board and the guy picks up the piece and starts chewing it and sticking it in his ear and you realise he's 8 years old and only went to play in the competition because it was free to get in and his dad wanted something to keep him quiet. (Although from the constant singing and repetitive shouting of the words fuck her in the pussy that didn't pan out) So you go to a 3rd board and the guy starts to play chess. Actually play chess! Excited you make a few deft moves and you take his queen. You're on a roll when a guy from Valve comes over and turns the board through 180 degrees to balance the game because you're winning - What? Fuck it, you roll your eyes and carry on playing - at least this guy is playing chess. You manage to take what was once your queen and get back in the game, when, suddenly, 3 Valve security guys grab you by the jacket, drag you towards the door and throw you out the building. As you fall to the floor one of them says You've been voted off -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Temporary Quickplay changes ... 8 months later
On 14/10/2014 15:39, Matthias InstantMuffin Kollek wrote: I think it's about effectively distributing more diversity to make a game less blunt and show to players (new ones and old ones alike) that there's more to the game than meets the current quickplay-eye. That just boils down to another players are too dumb to find and connect to the server they want to fallacy. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Temporary Quickplay changes ... 8 months later
On 14/10/2014 08:30, Ilya Larin wrote: Well, server owners are also a very important part of the community Well, nothing's stopping them feeling important on their empty server is it? Do they want a badge? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Temporary Quickplay changes ... 8 months later
On 02/10/2014 17:30, Ahmed Kandeel wrote: How about creating an online petition which we all sign and then deliver it to Valve themselves. I think it would be better if we were proactive and found out precisely how many communities these changes actually have affected. Even if every server owner thinks their server should have players instead of Valve's (and why wouldn't they? It's not going to be a surprise to learn that) why would anyone but those server owners care? The game exists for the millions of players not for the server owners. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Temporary Quickplay changes ... 8 months later
On 02/10/2014 14:15, Frank wrote: Valve uses the community to make and create all these nice items they are putting out lately...letting everyone else do their work for them That was an easy thing for them to do though. Rubbish items are easy to dismiss and you pay the ones that get picked a percentage of money they actually earn in the store. So it's a bit disingenuous to suggest Valve lets everyone else do their work - they pay them pretty reasonably for it. You can't do that with servers. Firstly because it requires few skills to run one. There's no barrier to entry. There's barely even a financial barrier these days. If Valve rewarded server owners then people would all crawl out of the woodwork to run servers to get that reward. Who then decides who gets it? The people that connect to the server? Valve? Some arbitrary scoring system? We've all seen what you do when you decide you need to fight over the same few players, and it's not pretty and it does nothing other than hurt the game for players. The other side, as I've said many times, there really is nothing to distinguish a good server that an admin can do. You can create a bad server and you can say what a bad server is like - high ping etc etc etc, but there's nothing you can do to the config files that will make your server any better than anyone else's. If there's one thing valve have proven it's that you can run thousands of vanilla servers and fill them and they work fine. If anything with fewer problems than many communities have. Besides, you're not a community of nice people. Why would anyone want to help you do anything? If you can make money from TF2 servers today you're on a cushy number. You can't expect Valve to implement some get-rich-quick scheme for you. Even if you say Just want players, not a reward the argument remains the same. Why should you get players and not valve or someone else? What did you do that was so special? We didn't get a response from Valve on that statue of you that TF2 staff could bow humbly before it on their way into work to remind themselves of who put them where they are today. Maybe if you offered to pay for it? No wait, get the French to make one, they'll put it somewhere everyone can see it. That's worked for statues in the past :D -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 28/08/2014 21:07, Alexander Corn wrote: You have pretty clearly never joined a Valve server. As a matter of fact, didn't you admit that you don't even play TF2 like a few months ago? I didn't admit anything. Though quite why you might think that playing or not playing a game is something you need to admit to is beyond me. How much I have or haven't played TF2 really isn't the topic and really doesn't improve your arguments at all. It just makes you look petty and foolish. Especially when you're wrong. If you want to have a pop, at least find some matters of fact first. People are playing on Valve's servers. You're not more intelligent than they are. Get over it. Your arguments are poor when you're talking about quickplay, but they quickly become stupid when you talk about me instead. FWIW, I've played thousands of hours of TF2, and I still play at least 25+ hours a fortnight. Usually more but in the summer I'm cycling 800-1000km a month. I've got a strange grenade launcher with over 70k kills. Anything else you'd like to know about me that you think will make a difference to Valve's servers or quickplay just ask, especially if you feel it's relevant or required to have an opinion. The vast majority of the time I play TF2 is on Valve's servers although I use skial, lotusclan, multiplay and a few other European / UK servers they are generally not configured to allow objective-based play whereas Valve's servers are configured to play TF2. You join, play a few rounds, the timer ends, one team wins The only downside is this rather silly idea people had about scrambling the teams - really shows a poor understanding of random numbers if you believe shuffling players will create a balanced game (cf why apple had to make their ipods less random when shuffling) and it's completely ridiculous to do that half way through a game leaving the score at 2-0. So yeah, if you wanted to create a better server than Valves, that's one thing you could do. Remove and configure out all scrambling options. If the people on Valve's server are bad in anyway, e.g full of people playing spy/sniper or turtling engies or whatever else, I just join another one. There are loads of them. It works. You have to hop a few servers to find a round, but you have to do that with every server - and the cool thing about Valve's servers is you know what you are getting. Or more importantly you know what you are not getting. It's a complete fallacy to state Valve's servers are awful. For one thing their servers don't appear to be static so perhaps your experience is out of date. When they first introduced them in Europe they had them in frankfurt and a couple of other European cities. Since then they appear to have moved a couple of times based on their names. At the moment I think they are in Luxembourg. Technically they are fine. I get low pings and so far as I can see most of the others players connecting do. I'm sure if you have some genuine technical issues you can tell them via this list and they would sort it. There is, as I said, an issue where at certain times of the day you get a lot of overseas people connecting. To me the network code, however much it's supposed to negate this, it doesn't really. Either Valve could do with more servers in these areas or I'd suggest, a better algorithm that doesn't connect people so they have 100+ pings (at the very least not the extremes you see where people have 200-300 ping) So, in summary, nope, you won't kid the player base that they shouldn't be connecting to Valve's servers because they are technically flawed. You'll need something that's not demonstrably false. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 28/08/2014 21:22, Erik-jan Riemers wrote: Ever tried to call for an admin if a cheater is on a valve server? Or tons of screaming kids? I've voted off a handful of cheaters without issue. As I've said before on this list, there really are not that many cheating in TF2 on the servers I play on. That's especially the case with Valve's servers. Or maybe they are so bad at cheating it doesn't make a difference? If anything is different about the present pub TF2 player base it's that they under perform rather than over perform because of cheats. The other side is, Valve have a ton of servers, a cheat can only play on one of them even if the voting option doesn't work. TBH I can't think of many instances where I've been on a server with admins where the admin has come and kicked a cheat. Most of the time admins don't play on the server. If they arrive via some !report command, they'll ask you to post proof to some forum (even if the cheat is still there and it's obvious) This is all a waste of my time. Put simply if there's a cheat on your server I'll just leave and join another server. This is no different to Valves. But as I say cheaters are a rarity. If tons of people cheated in TF2 I would stop playing it. I wouldn't join your server. If you get a lot of cheaters I'd suggest that's probably because you do have admins rather than because you don't. Especially if you get this thing where cheaters are creating account after account to wind you up. There's no on Valve's servers to wind up. No one to impress by bypassing a ban. Put simply, if you are getting trolled by cheaters etc, that's probably because you've created an environment for trolls to flourish and for kids to get some attention they crave via negative behaviour. Valve servers are, in that sense, lonely. The guys that want attention aren't going to find it there. As for screaming kids these really don't exist in the UK IME. I think it's mainly a cultural thing. Maybe an xbox thing here though. In either case people are easy to mute via the client. So screaming kids is a complete non-issue. There certainly aren't tons of them - there can only be 23 other people at a time. Most of them say nothing. Since no one in TF2 pub servers ever says anything useful on the mic anyway (and since Americans never STFU for 5 minutes and seem to talk inane nonsense all the time) I usually just disable it completely. As you probably appreciate too, there are 200 different languages here, so much of the chatter isn't in English and many of the people wouldn't understand me if I said anything to them anyway. You know, if you're playing 6v6 comp you use mumble or whatever so, no one really has any need for Valve's in game talk thing. It's a completely useless feature, just uncheck the check box and, if the kids in your country scream, let them scream. Same with sprays. If you're going to suggest people need admins to get rid of naughty people who post rude pictures. Nope. Don't have sprays enabled either. What about other rules? Well, most of those rules only exist because you have admins and they feel some kind of egotistical need to believe they are in charge of the people on the server. So, in short, the problems you presented don't really exist and I think my solution (join a different server) works more efficiently than waiting for an admin / recording demos / posting to forums etc. By the time I've done that, the round is ruined anyway. The biggest problem overall in TF2 is finding a decent round i.e a map you want to play with 2 teams that want to play the objectives. No server owner or admin has solved this problem. Valve, imo, often do things to make this worse. This requires constant hopping from server to server - so you can see, hopping for a cheat is really not adding to the burden because poor and disinterested players are significantly more prevalent than cheats. What I do to join a server is, pick 50 ping, 24 max players, pick the map I want, get it to filter out empty and full servers, and order the list by player count. At that point I get a big list of Valve servers saying 23/24 at the top of the list, and I just join them one at a time working my way down until I find a decent game. When the round ends, I just hit 'refresh' and do the same. Rinse and repeat until I've had enough and hit quit. Occasionally I might join a 3rd party server that appears in the list, but not because they have admins on them. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 28/08/2014 22:23, Robert Paulson wrote: Only one insulting anyone's intelligence is you. You think no one here is smart enough to figure out you are a failed server owner who got mad that no one joined your cheap and shoddy server from ThrustVPS. Now you waste your time flaming this mailing list as though everyone is dumb enough to believe all community servers are equally bad as yours were. Oh please, sing another tune. You didn't link to my steam account you just made yourself look stupid and got the thread closed (yet again) Talk about the subject or STFU. I didn't say everyone is smart - you are certainly the most obvious counter-example to that idea. However, suggesting that people are too dumb to join a server or uncheck an option is ridiculous. Since you asked the reason Valve need to warn people about links is not because people are stupid so much as it's because people are greedy. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 29/08/2014 11:00, Stephan Vandenborn wrote: I can't talk really about tf2 because I never play it, can't talk about the dynamis but in left 4 dead, a sourcemod/community server is way way much better than a valve server. Players with bad intentions can really take a left 4 dead game on valve servers hostage simply because it has zero admins present to immediately act, voting is slow and trolls will destroy teams in matter of seconds, start their childish voting spree and as publics in general are slow to really detect this troll's intention, it usually results in the game being screwed over, especially in versus. This is why I have a blacklist of known abusers and game destroyers. and I ONLY play left 4 dead on my OWN servers (or a friend's server that I manage). Sourcemod is great for giving you direct and instant control of your own server, fixes some engine bugs and allows me to actually manage it. I think with some of these games - where you need to start at the beginning , play a round, you can't really do it in an ad-hoc way. Same with dota 2 et al. These games suffer more from bad players (i.e not malicious, just people who have little experience of playing) than TF2 does. Then people get frustrated with bad players and the game as a whole gets a reputation for angry, frustrated people voting off each other and trash talking etc. Fortunately the game design of TF2 doesn't really introduce these problems. A few bad or disinterested players don't ruin the whole experience. That said, to some extent, I suppose MvM is like this but it's not really something that's interested me. So yeah, if I played L4D2 (I bought 2 copies of both 1 and 2, and have no idea why because I've barely played either) I'd generally organise the game. Which a lot of people do in TF2 by playing lobbies and so on. I've never bothered with comp, but that's what I would do if TF2 ever reached a stage where the pub community didn't have rounds that were at least a passing resemblance at going for the objectives. Put simply, it's obvious there are better ways yet of getting a good game than using sourcemod or having admins - neither of which I believe make that much difference to pub servers. But these things require far more time and organisation than I can be bothered to do. My son has played highlander comp and 6v6 and he spent at least as much time organising matches and servers and so on as he did playing the games. As a result, he probably got better rounds. So I'm no stranger to the idea that an organised group of people can create a better experience but that's not really what your typical 3rd party pub TF2 server is doing. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 29/08/2014 11:16, Erik-jan Riemers wrote: Could we now just put a ribbon on top of it or take it off list? I dont mind some arguments now and then but its like reading a book these reply's.. and really dont add that much value to the list now since its more a 'pissing contest' I won't post replies to you if you don't post them to me Erik. It's as easy as that. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 29/08/2014 12:58, Erik-jan Riemers wrote: Your right i'll stop. Arguing with a fool only proves there are two. Your moronic reply here shows that you are the fool Erik. Grow up. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 29/08/2014 16:53, AnAkIn wrote: Dan, please stop spamming the mailing list. Thanks. I'm not spamming the mailing list. I won't reply to you, if you don't reply to me. You won't stop me posting here with ad hominem and petty insults. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 29/08/2014 17:22, Valentin G. wrote: Please stop spamming the mailing list. No one is spamming the list. If you have nothing to add to the topic stop posting to it. If you don't want to read the thread google email filtering -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 27/08/2014 16:21, Ilya Larin wrote: dan, you don`t get the point of this discussion. While old bad servers are full of players, new good servers can`t get players not because they are bad, but because players don`t want to open server browser and look for a good server. This wasn't Frank's argument. Frank is upset because he thinks Valve owe him something. It wasn't really about quickplay - it was about him wanting valve to get rid of their servers. He believes he's responsible for some kind of success or existence of TF2. It's a level of narcissism and egomania often witnessed in beta testers and, it seems, some server owners. He believes that others servers, Valve's in particular, should be removed so that people join his server. Which, he very humbly and modestly suggests is better than theirs. At best I think Valve should recognise the social responsibility they have for creating Frank's issues and offer the resources to help him recover. Either that or they should pay for a 10' statue of him with the Latin inscription Frank TF2um Rex and place it in Valve's foyer so the TF2 team can all gaze in awe and wonder and kiss its feet on the way into work each morning :D The argument presented is that people cannot join a server. These arguments have been typed in before. This time may well not have explicitly said We think players are too dumb to join a server or change a default - but, from the past, less guarded arguments, it's what a few seem to believe to be true. Certainly there is no valid alternative reason given. Besides, all other arguments like people aren't changing the defaults People don't use the server browser etc, are just tough. If people are playing on official servers and not yours and you recognise that they are intelligent enough to make a choice, then it's tough isn't it? Conversely if your argument requires people to be too ignorant to join a server then it's equally fallacious. Either way, there's no valid argument. If anyone wants to join your server they can. The next argument used is usually that the game is dying - and in quickplay terms it goes something like, players will eventually hate TF2 because Valve's servers don't have adverts on them or some other plugin, but they are too ignorant, dumb or lazy to find an alternative, so they just stop playing the game never finding or realising how great the game is if you play on a different server This argument is nonsense of course. Proven simply by the fact that this announcement of the imminent death of TF2 at Valve's hands, has come and gone multiple times. But really this discussion was about someone saying Valve, get rid of your servers not about quickplay. We've seen all the quickplay arguments, indeed valve added a bunch of options to let them connect to their servers and now they are upset about what the defaults are. They really have such a low opinion of people that they don't even think gamers have the nous to make a decision about a checkbox. The odd thing is, when a niche group of self-serving and self-interested people get together they often delude themselves that their collective self-serving and self-interested opinions form some kind of consensus. They often wonder, on this very group, since they all agree on stuff why doesn't Valve change it? But, you know, the main thing that makes a server good or bad is the people that play on it. Beyond a few, small, technical issues that are largely either right or not, and which you cannot really use to differentiate yourself from any other server. You have to work to get people on a server. It's been said before but a server that gets its players via quickplay is not a community - if you want a community - as ridiculous as that notion is, you have to build and create it. The conflict here in the past has been where server owners have decided that quickplay players owe them something because it's their server. Whether that's donations, watching adverts, obeying silly rules etc. Valve, quite rightly realise that someone clicking quickplay isn't interested in your server or anyone's server. They aren't interested in anyone's community or anyone's bank balance. Hence they had to add or remove a bunch of stuff to stop server owners ruining players experience by exploiting them. Then they cry Whaa whaa, we can't make money, it's not fair - and a few get upset because features are disappearing. Usually features that don't really matter. That's a disease Valve staffers suffer from just as much as plugin writers. Whoever thinks adding browsers or music players into game clients matters really needs to be given a difficult programming problem to challenge them a bit. If you want a community. Build a community. Put the work in. And then exploit that community that you built yourself if you must. But, if Valve was sending hundreds of people to your server for a while via quickplay that wasn't you building
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 28/08/2014 19:22, Alexander Corn wrote: Dan, have you ever listened to developer commentary in any video game that was ever made? Time and time again, developers need to create hints to point players in the right direction. Ever played Portal? Do you remember how in the earlier levels that teach you how to fling, the spot on the wall where you're supposed to place a portal is on a protruding panel? This is not the same as trying to suggest that you need training to use the game itself. Perhaps I should have said use the game rather than play to avoid the confusion. Sheesh, my son was playing games and exploring the options before he was in school. The idea about a checkbox or a gui or menu item is not something unique to TF2 - and this is why it's pretty trivial for anyone to explore these options (as they clearly do) What you are trying to suggest here is that opening the box to take out a rubik's cube is like solving a rubik's cube. Therefore people won't play with it because they can't figure out how to open the box and that is, you believe, the reason the people are playing with a different puzzle. I'm saying if you can open a box then anyone can - and only the most deluded on this list (and valve if they believe the nonsense in their employee handbook) think they are special or gifted in some way. Do you think that? Do you think that joining a server before quickplay was added was some kind of amazing thing you did? I'm saying, meh, maybe they like the other puzzle and that's why they aren't bothering to take the rubik's cube out these days. Although when you actually look at the server list in TF2 there are clearly myriad people who do take it out they must, and I know from what my family do that the idea everyone is using qp is flawed. As I've said on the list many times, there's no evidence that PC gamers don't find and manipulate game options thoroughly. e.g Open the discussion on any PC game where options are limited and see the tears and wailing of PC gamers complaining about a lack of graphical options or whatever else. The other thing you can do is just look at the history of TF2. No one got training before it appeared. If you have any intelligence you'd come up with (and you've had a few years to do this now) a better argument to suggest to Valve why they should put people on your server. Forget for one moment the end goal - just read your arguments and imagine someone was putting them to you. Would you really take anyone seriously who suggested people wouldn't or couldn't uncheck an option box and that having the box checked was boo hoo unfair? C'mon, you insult Valve's intelligence with these ridiculous arguments - not the least because they are obviously fallacious, years old and haven't worked. Who was it that said insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results. As for Valve's umbrellas melting I think you're kidding yourself. See in my previous message about the delusion of those with empty servers deciding their servers are better. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 27/08/2014 15:14, Frank wrote: It would be nice to see Valve decrease the amount of Valve servers No it wouldn't. It's already bad enough when USA players get put on European servers with 150+ pings. If anything they need a few more. If you can't get players then make your servers better don't ask Valve to force or push players onto your server. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 27/08/2014 15:37, Frank wrote: Pushing USA players to EU is a problem on its own that can be dealt with. Yes, by providing more USA servers (and perhaps servers in some regions that don't have any - hint: if you want full servers run them where Valve don't) You can make servers better I'm glad you agree. but at the end of the day if Valve makes it difficult for people to find them then there is no point. It's no more difficult to find a server now than it was the day the game was released. If you think finding a server is difficult I will teach you how, otherwise if you can find your own server I can't see why you think it's difficult for anyone else. Do you believe you are special or gifted in some way? I have a Vanilla Asteroid server up and it hardly ever gets touched snip lets push traffic to the Community - the same community that is keeping the game alive. Frank, you complain your server is empty and then claim your server is keeping the game alive These are mutually exclusive ideas. This idea of community is nonsense. Most of the so-called community servers are just small businesses running hundreds of servers to try and make some easy cash. They've spent the years since the game came out configuring their servers to that end - i.e using plugins and configuration changes that they think will net them the most return. There might be a few exceptions - a few individuals running servers for fun rather than profit, but most of the time I run the game I typically have a choice between Valve's servers or one of the skial, multiplay, lotus etc etc etc. The community of players is probably not even the same people now 6 or 7 years later, and they owe you nothing Frank. Nobody owes you anything. If you made some money, frankly you were lucky because the barrier to entry to running a server doesn't exist. Quite literally any buffoon can do it. Hence if Valve decided to monitise it, there would suddenly appear thousands and thousands of servers just trying to grab that money - and there simply are not enough players to fill them all. We've seen what happens when you decide you want to fight each other for the servers and it's nothing other than detrimental to the game. See, stuff like map making and item creation has a barrier. You need to be skilled to do it, and it's easy to reject bad maps and bad items. You had your chance to run servers but this so-called community blew it by trying to shaft the player base and each other with moronic plugins, bots etc etc to make a quick buck. If you personally didn't do that, great, but bad luck that's the community of server owners that you are part of. They didn't keep the game alive and it was them who made it difficult to find a server, by flooding the browser with fake information. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 27/08/2014 15:59, Alexander Corn wrote: How, exactly, do you expect people to get players on their servers when about 45% of people probably don't even know that the server browser exists? Right, because only a guy who pretends to be a Doctor can be intelligent enough to use the server browser. Sheesh, people were playing TF2 for years when the only way to get on a server was with the browser. How do you suppose they did that? They were all gifted and talented? As I've said before, if you cannot join a server, ask and I'm sure others will help you but don't keep repeating this ridiculous argument that people can't join your server because they need to use the browser. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 27/08/2014 16:30, Alexander Corn wrote: If you hold someone's hand from the start and never let go, they're never going to grow up. In this case, people are conditioned to click the giant PLAY MULTIPLAYER button and click PLAY NOW. Many players never click the server browser button, and of those who do, many take one look at it, get overwhelmed, and go back to Quickplay. The server browser is not difficult to use, but the player is trained to take the easy way out and just click on the Quickplay button. If you required 'training' to play a computer game, good luck to you. You'll need it :D But, I'm not going to argue unless you say I cannot join a server - I didn't learn, it's all too difficult for me. Help me please Valve There's no point arguing over hypothetical people you've invented. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] New SteamID format for TF2
On 27/08/2014 16:28, Frank wrote: You can't argue with him..I have no idea why I even replied. You said it though Default Quickplay Settings - Valve needs to take the default settings off of Valve servers as targets and apply them to the Community servers or just mix them up so they are all showing up not just Valve servers. If you can't untick a box Frank, I'm offering a week's course starting in October. I'm making the assumption you know what October is - did you do the training? G -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Recreating replays
On 13/07/2014 20:35, Erik-jan Riemers wrote: Doesn't this also on a 24/7 server (with 1 map only) create just 1 big .dem file? Probably, I just skipped ahead in the file to the time I wanted to see using the demoui interface. Although I didn't have 24/7 rounds. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Recreating replays
On 13/07/2014 13:54, Erik-jan Riemers wrote: Ok thats one part i was after ;) but say you have a 24/7 server (map) and you want to make a demo file from 12:00 to 12:30 , how would you know which blocks you need to get? Since i've seen replays on the server which can have over 300 blocks. Is it as simple as getting the start dmx file and then getting the block from say block 56 to 122? Since i've read that the blocks need *all* blocks because of the way its made. If you want to do this for the future enabling source tv and tv_autorecord will get you demo files that are easy to copy to a client machine and watch. That won't help if you need this for existing replay recordings, but it's a lot easier than faffing around with the replay stuff if you think you'll need to do this again. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Can we have a Quickplay Status report, please? 2
On 07/06/2014 02:44, Robert Paulson wrote: Oh boy, I'm going to enjoy watching you squirm from this one. Nice try deleting your Reddit and Twitter account. Oh ffs, you halfwitted moron. That is not my steam account. Fletcher : is this twat's google searches on a keyword really relevant to this list? If I have to prove I've played 46 hours of TF2 in order to satisfy the buffoon, I can provide you the proof, but otherwise find someone responsible for him and them to switch him off. Robert. You are wrong. Stop being a dick. If you had more than 1 brain cell (or understood human reproduction) you could probably figure it out. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Can we have a Quickplay Status report, please? 2
On 07/06/2014 13:09, Rick Dunn wrote: How about you guys take your troll-fest to 4chan where it belongs and keep it off of the hlds mailing list. Dan, you troll every single thread in this mailing list with worthless, irrelevant, trolly replies. Find a better hobby. Having a different opinion from someone is not trolling I don't post to even a fraction of the threads let alone every single thread Rick, if you cannot be honest then don't post at all. I give my opinion on server features in the game generally on topic. If you disagree, that's fine, but acting like this will not discourage me from posting those opinions. Ad hominem will not work. As fascinating as I no doubt am, I am not the subject of this group - and certainly the person whose steam account Robert keeps posting has never posted to this group. I remember this quote from history class moron + google search does not equal intelligence Abraham Lincoln (well he might not have said it, maybe it was Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde) -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Can we have a Quickplay Status report, please? 2
On 07/06/2014 14:25, Rick Dunn wrote: I apologize if I used hyperbole to prove a point in my obviously extremely sarcastic post above. My point is valid. You do not contribute any useful input into any of the posts in which you do participate. I don't post for your benefit. I post feedback for Valve to read. I generally talk about the subject at hand. It's mostly others than switch the subject to the poster as both you and Robert have done in this thread. You both behave like dicks for no other reason than because someone disagrees with you. Get over yourselves. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Can we have a Quickplay Status report, please? 2
On 06/06/2014 07:32, Ross Bemrose wrote: You know, you see some interesting trends if you look at the graphs on that SteamGraph site on a per-year basis. If you cross reference your graphs with Paulson's posts can you find the previous 30 times he's claimed the game is dying? Valve should buy him a copy of the Parrot sketch The game's got beautiful rendering Beautiful rendering? That don't enter into it! This game is no moreit has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. Bereft of life it rests in peace. If you hadn't made it free to play it would be pushing up the daises, it's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-game Does beg the question what the point in changing a default would be in a game that no one plays :D -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Can we have a Quickplay Status report, please? 2
On 06/06/2014 21:31, Robert Paulson wrote: So just because TF2 still exists now means it was never losing any players? There seems to be a constant supply of new players. You can see that on the official servers at the end of a round when people on the winning team get achievements like powerhouse offence No doubt some people stop playing too. You're like a stuck record though. More or less every post you make moaning at Valve (this time moaning about a feature you told them to add, not once, but twice on this list) you post this guff about the number of people playing it and how it's dropping. You've done this for years. The game isn't dying. It is and has more or less always been in the top 5 games on steam. There's a fair bit flawed with the game at the moment but nothing to do with the number of people who are playing it or what server they happen to play on or what the defaults are. You should leave these mailing lists to the people that actually still play TF2. Steam says I've played 46 hours in last 2 weeks. That's down quite a bit. It's practically the only game I play these days. Maybe if Valve go back to doing game development they'll release something on their store that's worth buying. I think the last AAA title I bought was Borderlands 2 in 2012. TF2's not dead, but Valve and Steam appear to be. Perhaps the Oculus rift will help. I can't see anything Valve have announced or added recently that I'm interested in. Not Steamos, not steam machines, not streaming adding lag and blur, not featureless music players (can't hear the game if music is playing), not collecting virtual cards nor increasing my steam level, not plastic controllers. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Can we have a Quickplay Status report, please? 2
On 07/06/2014 00:07, Robert Paulson wrote: It doesn't matter if it has always been in the top 5 games on Steam. It deserves to be in the top 2 especially with the amount of dev time spent on it. I'm not going to hold off on complaining until it becomes the 6th most played game on Steam, because at that point it is beyond saving. Well it is in the top 2 sometimes. They move around. Steam says I've played 46 hours in last 2 weeks. That's down quite a bit. http://steamcommunity.com/groups/nigelkfc#announcements/detail/1640699685257593883 http://i.imgur.com/D6DrY0r.png That's not my steam account -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Can we have a Quickplay Status report, please? 2
On 07/06/2014 01:14, Robert Paulson wrote: Well it is in the top 2 sometimes. They move around. It hasn't been top 2 in very long time. It was 2nd when I posted earlier. It's 3rd now. That's not my steam account Yeah ok sure. It is just someone else that uses the nonsensical phrase needaxeo and nigelwantskfc on TF2 since 2012 also calls himself Dan, also in the UK, talks the same way on SPUF, and has Twitch and Youtube accounts named needaxeo. Yes, that steam account is someone else. Believe it or not you are not the only Robert nor the only Robert Paulson in the world either. Are the rumours true that if you google your name you just get a page come up with people facepalming? :D Now stop being a dick because you're nowhere near intelligent enough to be an internet spy. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Max Players on this build
On 14/03/2014 15:01, pilger wrote: Hey guys, I need some guidance to see what can I get from a server like this one: vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5645 @ 2.40GHz stepping: 1 cpu MHz : 2400.085 cache size : 12288 KB When I used a VPS the cpu was the limiting factor. I think it had 1gb ram, 1gb swap, 30gb disk and 1tb per month bandwidth - which IIRC was limited to 5 mpbs or so . The bandwidth never got close to being used. I think I used about 1% per day so 30% at the end of the month. Games don't use a lot of bandwidth. Latency is more important (except to Valve who seem to think connecting Americans to European servers with 250+ ping makes sense. Whoever wrote Valve's quickplay server selection code must be one hell of an artist. Maybe a descendant of Leonardo da Vinci?) Gabe, I've painted the ceiling in the cafeteria Ok, but you need to write some code too I'll do quickplay...350 is a low ping, right? 30gb was more than enough disk space and the 1gb ram was fine too. Running minecraft was a bigger problem in terms of ram than either TF2 or L4D 2. You need the virtualisation options that gives you 1gb ram, not shared, ie Xen and similar rather than openvz. Trouble is, most VPS aren't even sold on the basis of how much CPU you actually get or in a misleading way where they tell you the cpu specs of the host machine. That means there's generally not an option to pay more money to get more cpu resource. You can pay more and get more ram and more storage - but you don't need them. At which point, if the only thing you want to use the server for is TF2, you are usually better off renting a TF2 server from one of the providers - because you'll still be sharing resources, but you should get what you need without having to pay for stuff you don't need. The reason I got a VPS was twofold (a) I wanted to run different games like minecraft, tf2 etc and (b) I wanted my son to get some experience configuring and using linux. When he created a 6v6 team though, they just rented a TF2 server - it was cheaper and better than the VPS (albeit they only needed 12 or 13 slots) Try it and see is the best answer to your question though. Use net_graph 5 on a client and look at the fps and sv fields when the server is full. On the best servers these will be a solid 66 and sv the lower the better. We found the sv rising as the server filled, and then the game, even though your ping is fine and it's running ok on your machine it felt a bit laggy. It depends who you get playing too. I mean, those 250+ pings that Valve connect across the pond won't know a good server from a bad one. People that typically spam across the map while jumping up and down will be happy and probably won't notice either. If you're playing 6v6 you might find it's good enough too with fewer players. Valve's changes a long time ago to limit to 66fps improved things. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] server problem - sv consistently low
On 14/03/2014 16:47, Stefan `Sec` Zehl wrote: Hi, On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 10:58 -0400, Kevin wrote: You said you were using linux emulation, that would be my guess to the cause. That is a definite possibility, and one of the reasons why I posted here. Maybe someone else tried running it under FreeBSD and can confirm or deny that this is the problem? Most likely, yes. Perhaps you're aware, but your title suggests the opposite. sv should be consistently low. It's the 18s that are the problem not the drops. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Valve Only Servers in Community Servers
On 25/02/2014 02:24, Weasels Lair wrote: Actually, if you plot that over the last 12 months, and throw some other games in for comparison ... it doesn't look related at all. That's unsurprising since it's been previous related to every other time he's posted saying the game is dying in the past. The irony is, he suggested Valve add the checkbox on 2/11/2011, not once but twice :- 1. Add a check-box for Valve-only/Favorites-only Quickplay servers. 1. Allowing players the option to select only Valve Quickplay servers would end the player complaints for those that cannot tolerate any modifications. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Valve Only Servers in Community Servers
On 27/02/2014 02:51, Robert Paulson wrote: 1) TF2 has fewer players after community servers were removed by default on January 28th. Player count is the most unbiased measure and the facts show more was lost than was gained. Your one personal experience isn't going to change that. The number of TF2 players fluctuates up and down, before and after updates and based upon various different things but most definitely the time of day, time of week and time of year. You should get one of those 'End is nigh' boards and walk up and down outside Valve's HQ in Seattle. Give them something to take their minds off all the dead starfish. You asked for the checkbox. Twice. You got the checkbox. You cannot ask for a checkbox and then complain that players are using it. What did you think would happen? Does anyone here not know how to uncheck that box? It's your first checkbox? There's nothing to be embarrassed about. Everyone started somewhere. Changing options is a normal and healthy part of growing up and becoming an adult. Don't feel rushed or pressured by your peers into changing TF2 options if you don't feel ready. Changing TF2 options won't make your players more likely to stay on your server, they may even leave and play somewhere else. Your first time is important, so make it special - and take a backup! How to respond to peer pressure to change your TF2 options They say : What's wrong, don't you like my server? Say Yes, but I want to get to know it better first They say : Your friends are all changing their options! Say Yes, but they don't know what's best for me They say If you loved me you'd play on my server! Say If you loved me you'd leave my options at the defaults until I'm ready! Lastly, a quote :- In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life playing TF2 is that joining a server is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do - Donald Knuth. Wow, Donald, you think? Well, fair enough. Mea culpa. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] DDoS Victims
On 17/02/2014 00:14, Robert Paulson wrote: Isn't this the 2nd and 3rd time you have advertised those hosts? Why do we need to keep hearing about them? It seems weird coming from someone who was ddosing other servers. http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1wltom/psa_still_keep_avoiding_kill_streak_gaming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1keagu/psa_avoid_killstreak_gaming_servers http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.games.fps.halflife.server/43931 Is this from Tarantino's leaked script Drama queens of reddit? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Important changes to TF2 coming soon
On 07/02/2014 20:23, Valentin G. wrote: This really can not be the intentioned or desired gameplay: http://i.imgur.com/xQBp6fG.jpg If you force classes you don't create good players, you just hide a good indicator the server isn't worth playing on. If they're happy, leave them to it, and play somewhere else -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Important changes to TF2 coming soon
On 05/02/2014 23:52, Fletcher Dunn wrote: QUESTIONS? Will we be able to blacklist by these new accounts too? I like the idea you can see the map etc (although, for the example of capture the flag, I think you'd be better simply developing some better maps and dropping the ones that suck in the meantime. The ratio of good maps is low. Even the ratio of maps people vote to play on is low to the total. e.g 2fort and doublecross people play and are pretty good maps. 2fort not being nearly as bad as the reputation it has from its abuse at the hands of instant spawn, 32 man, never ending rounds et al. Turbine people want to play even though it sucks. The rest no one wants to play and they're rubbish too. Then you've thrown doomsday onto those servers when it's not even CTF. It means (if we ignore that voting will skew servers towards 2fort and turbine) picked at random, a CTF server will most likely have a crap map running that no one wants to play. If you added turbine pro that'd make 3 maps that people want to play and that are playable in terms of the objectives. Really though I select servers on information that isn't available until after you've joined. Firstly some technical stuff. Servers that mess with rate either forcing it low or high. But, more often things like the time the level has left. Whether the game has scrambled at 2-0 ( usually pointless joining after that) what the class choices are for the teams, what the other players pings are. In other words, I leave a server if it's full of 23 people with 250 ping, all playing sniper and spy after I've joined and / or some subsets of these. After that, you have to play to see and that's really the point at which you should join, not before. For this reason QP doesn't work, because it puts you on a random server and you need to remember which servers you've checked to not join them repeatedly. For sure, this browsing of a subset QP finds may help, but really it would be better if we could simply see the kind of data I've suggested above before joining. (I think the general problem can be shown with an analogy, If you regularly cycle 200km a week on a road bike, when a colleague who has a bike with a basket invites you to ride at the weekend with a group from his church, you probably don't think Yeah, I'll join your ride - because they aren't going to average the 24mph the guys in your sunday club runs do. Similarly, if you take your kids to a track to race you'd expect them to race against their age range. You wouldn't put your 8 year old in the adult race. TF2 lacks the ability to see these different groups except via inference. e.g one explanation for servers full of snipers and spies with no motor control, game sense or clue, would be that there are vast swathes of halfwitted teenagers and adults in Europe and America. Which is perhaps what a lot of people do believe. However, the real explanation is it's young kids playing this game because it is free - The F2P feature added huge amounts of them, but it didn't add any way of filtering each other out. IRL we can do that easily - and to be fair since this is a game, it's not as simple as parameters like level of fitness or age can do for real sports. But F2p competitive games need something. Currently one way to see in TF2 is just to look at the classes the teams are playing - 6 engineers all camping together in the intel room and none of them have more than 5 points each? Kids 7 spies? Kids) Also, I sometimes pick the map based upon what the next map is because I'd prefer a full round, from scratch on a good map. e.g If I, say, like doublecross, and join doublecross servers on average the round will be half way through. Whereas if I join 2fort servers, I will get part of a round of 2fort and a full round of doublecross. Aside from the annoying voting feature messing that up, so knowing what the next map is going to be is often as important as the current one when selecting a server. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Important changes to TF2 coming soon
On 06/02/2014 00:28, Fletcher Dunn wrote: What's the problem with overfull servers? Can you not set visiblemaxplayers to 24 and allow players with reserved slots to join past 24? That sucks for people that want to join a server that has 24 players on it not a dynamic varying increasing number of people. i.e the problem with it in the past was that people abused it to get quickplay players presumably believing that 32 players gave them more advert hits or chances of donations but needing to pretend it was a 24 player server to get players in the first place. Now you're saying there is no penalty for a 32 player server. Fair enough, but there are still QP players selecting '24' in that box, and they don't want the server to turn into a 32 player one after they've joined. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Important changes to TF2 coming soon
On 06/02/2014 01:23, Frank wrote: I agree here, the official servers box needs to be UNCHECKED by default not the other way around. This needs to take effect with the update tomorrow to go ahead and fix this problem as so many have expressed over the last week. This wasn't even mentioned by Fletch in the recent mails tonight or from anyone at Valve over the course of this past week and the countless mails sent thru this mailing list from the majority of owners not happy about it. The data shows it causes issues when left checked by default - just uncheck it and let people decide after the fact. It's the players that the game and checkbox is serving, not the admins. It's a rather obvious answer if you ask a group of people whether they want a checkbox filled in that does or doesn't send them players to get the answer they want it so it does send them players - but only because they have nothing other than their own interests at heart. If you could get countless players to care they'd probably change it. Although I've a sneaky suspicion Valve can count better than you have. That said, a lot of you are often moaning about your server bills too. Valve has just halved them if ICS's figures are correct :D -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] So let's have a look at what happened since Valve turned off quickplay by default
On 05/02/2014 17:53, ics wrote: Some time has now passed since Valve defaulted quickplay to Valve servers only on TF2 and we are taking the hit. Roughly half of our servers it now empty. Changes daily which servers have players and which have not so it's not really a lack of people not knowing them are there but lack of players one and nobody enters. They switch to fuller servers and since there isn't much new players entering automatically and regulars are hesitant to enter empty ones, this is where we are. So after running servers for TF2 since the game came out, this is what i get, go away message? You don't want me to run servers anylonger? I don't run crap on servers or advertisements or any mods, except for administration between servers. Thanks a lot, Valve. I notice lots of Americans on Valve's EU servers off peak. Starting about now (11pm GMT) which might suggest QP is broken if it's sending people to the wrong country. These aren't even East coast 99 pings, it's 200-350 pings. Maybe a few from South America too. Unless all Valve's USA servers are full and so QP is putting them on EU? If the latter is the case it doesn't make much sense because 22 people playing with 200+ ping when there are presumably local servers sitting empty. Locality should override any checkbox or choice the user makes, unless they actually say Connect me to that server IMO there's no point connecting to a server thats 50, but I suppose you could stretch that higher, but it's definitely not worth playing when it gets over 100. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Fletcher - I'm Calling you Out On This (Enough is Enough)
On 25/01/2014 23:53, Bottiger wrote: You rather asinine tags We don't have any tags like that. Rather typical of you to make false claims, unfortunately some here probably take your asinine postings seriously. Ah my mistake, I thought you were lotus. Apologies. You can't have it both ways, either your servers are so much better and This change does not allow community servers to fairly compete with Valve servers when they get all the new players. They don't get all the new players I found and played on numerous servers years before quickplay was added. There have been people on the list in the past who have tried to give the impression that using the server browser is evidence of being gifted and talented, let's not go down that path again. But TBH, if you want a server that's worth playing on you don't really want players that can't fathom how to find and connect to servers - and you probably don't really want new players that not only can't play but don't even know where to begin playing. Valve have always taken these via quickplay, even before the checkbox, because they weighted the joining based upon hours in the game, and the reputation of Valve's servers has suffered as a result - i.e even the weakest players will still express the idea that Valve servers are full of noobs - not entirely true (because a fair number of people join them directly and have significant time in the game) but not entirely false either - clearly Valve's weighting created servers full of people who cannot play - and it still is doing. But, you could do a ton of things to improve skial servers. At least the few I've played on. e.g much of the time your 2fort servers are full of people having parties in the sewers, red and blu together, and not even playing. But I suppose you only care how many people you have connected and decide, as mister mckay is trying to in the other post that if someone connects they think it's good. Wrong. I've played on your servers a lot and, without wanting a big long argument about it, I think they suck. The saving grace you have is, most of the other servers suck most of the time too. What you can do about that - probably nothing. The servers suck or are good because of the players, not because of anything you do or don't do. I play for that small percentage of the time when you get a decent round - and it's getting a smaller and smaller percentage - because Valve redesigned the game to be an item collecting one instead of a class-based FPS. I play on Valve servers (when they are around, which is often not the case, hence why I end up connecting to servers that suck for a few weeks) mostly because the vanilla round times mean, if you hop from server to server, you get an actual game of TF2. 24 people (well, minus the spies and snipers) all trying to cap the intelligence or stop the other team doing it, until the team I am on wins. Or cap the point in koth, or whatever the objective is. I tend to play CTF because given a pub community where half the server aren't interested, you can at least still play CTF, the other game modes don't work well if people don't play. The worst thing about the vanilla game is the dumb scrambling at 2-0, but there are no 3rd party servers that fix that, they nearly all make it worse with ill thought out plugins. But I digress, tl;dr, there's nothing stopping playing from finding and connecting to your servers as before and, if Valve's servers are full of new players, that's exactly what they will do - my advice would be, make your servers somewhere where it's worth playing TF2 and don't assume that because someone plays on your server they must think it's great - 90% of what makes a server good or bad is down to who else is on it, but the 10% most server admins get wrong imo - it's just they all suck at it (because they copy each other) -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Fletcher - I'm Calling you Out On This (Enough is Enough)
On 26/01/2014 00:16, Doctor McKay wrote: If you're going to accuse someone I wasn't accusing anyone of anything. , at least accuse the right person. Lotus is the community that has the LIVE NUDES! tag not, Skial. At the same time, why on Earth do you care? Are they stealing traffic from your own live nude servers? It was a joke. I am a bit dismayed because my skial joke in response to the same quote would have probably been better. Joining *and continuing to play on* a server is a vote for that server. No it isn't. As I said in my other reply. I've played on pretty much every name server you can mention that has a presence in the UK or EU - skial, lotus, multiplay, saigns, valve, etc etc etc. I've connected to them directly and I've connected to them more than once and that is not because I think they do things well or are good. Not by a long way. They nearly all suck in various different ways. Some more than others. I notice Valve have got many of you running servers that accept quickplay players. In doing that many have removed a fair amount of things that made their servers really suck. So if you're sat there counting how many players you have thinking you must be doing something great, I'd reassess that. TF2 is the great thing - and if you're getting Quickplay players that's often because of Valve's idea to stop the game sucking. Servers get away with it because (A) How good a server is, is down to the people on it, not the admin which means throughout the day a server can go from great to completely rubbish, all out of the admin's control. and (B) Because if everyone sucks, there's nowhere better for anyone to go anyway. Sometimes you play for an hour shooting a few people just to mess around, most of the faults on the server cease to matter but counting page hits on a website or joiners on a server as votes of confidence is a mistake. You can guarantee if one of you has an idea to make your servers suck a bit more than the others, the others will soon copy it. Thus ensuring you won't become better than the others even if they try to help you by getting worse. You clearly don't understand how a default works. As Bottiger said, this is the same thing that happened with IE in the earlier days of the Web. No it isn't, it's not the same at all. For one thing, the reason people stopped using netscape was because it became a bloated buggy mess. Netscape cried, and eventually started writing an open source version, which was a bloated buggy mess too. Eventually someone with half a brain cell at netscape released firefox (albeit it wasn't called firefox at first) that was less bloated and people actually started to like it, rather than just pretending to because they still spelled MS like M$, and it's grown from there. Similarly, Chrome appeared (thanks to webkit) and has grown because it's a fast, lightweight browser and perhaps because they were rather intelligent thinking about how to let people install and update it without needing to be administrator so maybe they got onto a few work PCs they wouldn't have otherwise. For all the fuss made about antitrust this and that, the reason people stopped using IE was because it sucked and there were years of headline breaking security issues in it. But mostly because the alternatives got their act together. That said, I do accept that many new players may click and join a server asap, and will use the 'official servers' box checked. But, firstly, I don't see that as any different from Valve looking at the number of hours someone has played and putting them on one of their servers which they've done for a long time afaiaa and secondly, I don't accept that gamers won't explore any and all options that are in the game. Look at the cardiac arrhythmia's suffered on a forum if a new game fails to have a setting for every possible graphical possibility Ewww. it's a console port...I can't disable reflective ambient occluded shading! - this is hardly indicative of an audience who only ever use defaults is it? PC gamers will explore what TF2 has to offer, they won't just play koth on valve servers if that happens to be the default if you don't read or select anything else. Plus people, especially young people, experience games in a social context - i.e their friends play and tell them about it and they learn about other modes and alternatives that way too. Perhaps you should try making friends with the community. But, you have to offer these people something, otherwise I can't really see you have a point anyway - and I mean something the players care about, not something you think makes it better and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm the only person connecting to all these servers and thinking well I play here sometimes, but it sucks, but if I'm not, perhaps you shouldn't take your player base for granted and assume their mere presence means your servers are good. -- Dan
Re: [hlds_linux] Fletcher - I'm Calling you Out On This (Enough is Enough)
On 28/01/2014 03:28, Bottiger wrote: You made a false accusation without any kind of reasoning? I've never said or hinted I was affiliated with Lotus. Your other statements have also been completely baseless. Well, no, I made a joke because I mistook you for one set of people who run a bunch of servers instead of another bunch. Mainly because the fake doctor said Bottiger: I have nothing against you or Lotus when you started crying about being put in a list. Which, now, it's clear meant I've nothing against skial or lotus but it could be interpreted as saying I've nothing against you or your company to someone involved with that company, yes? Anyway I apologised. Take or leave it, but get over it. I'm not sure exactly what accusation you believe was made? Is it against the law to use the word nudes where you live or something? Will you end up on the run falsely accused of using the word nudes, Bottiger had to flee into the night to hide...would he clear his name... I look forward to seeing the movie. I love a good melodrama. The only evidence you have offered sums up to: I did it so everyone else can too. Sheesh. I wasn't the only one playing TF2. I wasn't on empty servers. How do you think the other players connected before quickplay? The evidence is and was obvious. Millions of people played the game and joined servers using the browser before quickplay existed - and they do the same in myriad other games that don't have a quickplay feature too. And they still do it today, after quickplay. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Fletcher - I'm Calling you Out On This (Enough is Enough)
On 25/01/2014 02:45, Bottiger wrote: If community servers did not provide any extra benefit, Valve servers would be at least as full as the top community servers but they were not. TF2 ranking websites would be filled with Valve servers like CS:GO but they were not. Therefore proving that community servers provide substantial value. Here are some examples: Well, no, people using a server doesn't mean they are making any statement about that server providing extra benefits over another one. e.g lots of people complain about the level of play on Valve servers, this suggests some of them at least have played on Valve servers. Equally, others complain about adverts, bots, certain plugins, certain rules etc etc which suggests they've played on servers that have these things. Being on a server isn't a vote for that server nor can you put words in the mouths of those players about what they think of it. Besides, as I said, if you cannot compete with Valve servers as they are today, you can't compete with anyone. Writing a list saying why your servers are better - whether I agree with each entry or not is moot, if you agree with your list what are you so worried about? You can't have it both ways, either your servers are so much better and they are more full than Valve's or they aren't and boo hoo hoo big bad Valve are stealing all your players. Both cannot be true. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Fletcher - I'm Calling you Out On This (Enough is Enough)
On 25/01/2014 02:45, Bottiger wrote: Not sure what this is supposed to mean You rather asinine tags -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Prevent game servers from redirecting players to alternate servers when players connect through quickplay
On 24/01/2014 04:47, Chris Oryschak wrote: We can all just play on valve servers but you are failing to realize that we are the ones that made TF2 better. Playing vanilla with no sense of community, added benefits; stats, incentives, contests that some of us run make TF2 enjoyable to keep coming back to play. We are added value that helps keep TF2 interesting. Self evidently not if you're worried about this. You've listed 2 words benefits, incentives - that aren't actually concrete things. Besides, Valve could do benefits, incentives and run contests, is that really a competition you want? They could add stats easily enough if they wanted to and if they made sense (but the stats TF2 servers use are nonsensical anyway) It still doesn't answer the basic question - why does everyone here think they are entitled to players on their server? I tell you the main reason I would stop playing TF2 on pub servers, it's because the pub community isn't interested in playing the game. It's just dull playing on servers that have the same set of disinterested players all the time that don't play to win. I notice this most of all when Valve take their servers away for whatever reason (halloween for e.g) I join servers with 24 people that are simply not playing. I suppose the comp community is the answer here, but there's a lot of hassle and organisation required to get 6v6 and you end up (at least my son did when he did it) spending more time organising 12 people to all turn up at the same time on the same server as you do actually playing. And I don't want that hassle, but I would play on servers that had people who wanted to win on them. I don't mean they play sniper and use the option to vote to scramble if their team is losing or switch teams if they think red has the better players. I mean people who want to win and play to that end, win or lose. That would be a community worth joining. But no one has afaict created that community, or tried to create that community. I don't see these communities of servers and servers and players that are making the game great. I just see a group of people that run what they they think they need to make money and to feel like they're in charge of a bunch of people. e.g If I look down MrMcKay's list of plugins he's written on his website, it seems many of them are concerned with exercising control over people or invading their privacy. Whether it's faking convars or letting admins impersonate players, or seeing who they have muted. There's nothing there to make the game better from the player's perspective. For sure, you can say some of these things are needed, but there's no evidence of people adding benefits to the game. No evidence of to them showing Valve how it should be done. Perhaps a few people who run one server, but, because everyone else is running loads of servers they are wasting their time unless they have a group of friends that will join and play. Because the TF2 player base doesn't magically increase because you run a server or 100. It's like trying to trade in TF2 with 1 account. People came along that created 20+ accounts - and that didn't make them rich like they hoped. They just got the same money but now they are doing 20x the work that they did before. Greed just caused the value of items in the economy to nose dive. Running servers for the same sized player base is no different. There's no more money to be had by increasing the number of servers you run. There aren't more players magically created and any buffoon can run lots of servers, there's no barrier to entry - and there really is very few out there, if any, with the imagination to actually make their servers better. I think valve have created a bit of a monster. A community of people who used to play a game, but now don't want to do anything now unless it makes them money - even if it costs them more money to buy what they need to make that money. The people that run piles and piles of servers are just doing that. They aren't creating community and if they are, well Valve must be too with their servers, because they are doing the same thing. Unless you're suggesting that plugins make a community because that's the only real difference between valve's servers and most of the others. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Prevent game servers from redirecting players to alternate servers when players connect through quickplay
On 24/01/2014 15:08, Rudy Bleeker wrote: On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 5:27 AM, dan needa...@ntlworld.com wrote: Why add all the incentives to win MvM and none for the multiplayer and, worse, make those MvM prizes hurt the multiplayer objectives even more? The answer to this is simple. Official MvM mode where you get those prizes, aka Mann-Up, still makes Valve money with the sale of tickets and surplus vouchers, where as community servers or even their own quickplay servers don't really since you can buy your hats and other items for MvM as well as the 'normal' game. That's not the answer - that's the question. Why hasn't valve added incentives and tickets to the MP game? To me personally MvM doesn't seem to require skill or at least not the skills that I would care about learning. So I've not really bothered. It's like L4D it's we can't do good ai, so we'll just do a lot of ai and ramping up difficulty just means the AI need more shots to kill them I get why some people enjoy it, but I want the things I throw nades at to wiggle the mouse a bit and make it at least something of a challenge - I want missing to be an option. Rather than a tank you can't miss requiring tons of nades spammed at it or a group of bots all running along in a straight line, straight into your shots. You could kill tanks the same way you can play keyboards for pink floyd songs, by taping the keys down and going to fetch a coffee while the guitarist has fun. But I'd buy tickets for a MP version - or even a single player version that required more skill and less attrition. If tickets make money and mean that there will be servers with people actually trying to win for a change, it'd be good. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Prevent game servers from redirecting players to alternate servers when players connect through quickplay
On 24/01/2014 18:04, thesupremecommander wrote: I actually sent an email to Valve about a week or so ago (back when this issue was just bubbling up) asking them to implement a CS:GO Overwatch-type system for TF2 servers. I still think that such a system is the best way to go without requiring Valve to manually police servers themselves, allowing community owners to still compete for QuickPlay traffic with servers both following the intent and the text of Valve's QuickPlay rules, and giving players the same unadulterated vanilla experience that they want. I just joined a valve server with quickplay and 'official servers' checked to play 2fort. The experience of joining is pretty good. Fast and I got a server with a low ping that played well. All I can say to the folks here is though, if you can't compete with a Valve server, switch off your servers and bake cakes to sell because you're in the wrong game. It was a complete farce. Barely anyone knew how to cap, where to cap, or what the objectives were. Neither team had any defence, certainly no engineers. I was told what I was doing was impossible (i.e shooting nades at people and hitting them) So, relax. No one who sits facing the shiny side of their monitor will be playing on Valve servers via quickplay for any length of time because the servers are swamped with the confused and bewildered. You can (as I have in the past) jump from valve server to valve server and find a decent round, but you'd spend all day doing that with the quickplay button joining random servers. Who knows, perhaps the official checkbox will mix up the player base and change that, but right now that doesn't appear to be the case. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Prevent game servers from redirecting players to alternate servers when players connect through quickplay
On 24/01/2014 19:57, Rick Dunn wrote: Everything you've said is perfectly relevant and 100% besides the point. You are talking to a list of people who have been running TF2 servers since its release. TF2 was built by Valve, came out, and was popular for about a year in its default format. When its charm had worn off, communities took it, modded it, added incentives such as hats, custom weapons, skins, in their mods, and built large playerbases from it. Ummm this is not really an accurate history of TF2 development. It reads like the Hollywood movie version of history. Just add an ending that makes the Americans win and sell the script. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Prevent game servers from redirecting players to alternate servers when players connect through quickplay
On 24/01/2014 21:30, Rick Dunn wrote: Yeah, it was a 2-paragraph distillation of one person's view of the past 4-5 years of this game in his life. I like the bit where you wrote TF2 and Valve stole it the best. Who do you have in mind to play you? Tom Cruise? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Prevent game servers from redirecting players to alternate servers when players connect through quickplay
On 24/01/2014 23:31, Valentin G. wrote: Then explain how should people remedy this situation? Well, first you have to accept the premise that it probably doesn't matter if your server is full or not to anyone except you. So what situation is there? Things that might matter are whether there are enough servers and whether people who want to play the game can find a server that they want to play on. Right now, Valve servers are heavily biased towards new players. Which suggests to me that there won't be a lot of people using QP + official checkbox unless Valve have something else up their sleeve to use official servers for that will attract people with rudimentary motor skills and a few hours in the game. Also, that if some of those new players improve and the servers are like they are now, they will look for different people to play against - because Valve servers seem to have tapped a constant stream of new players. Presumably kids because there's a constant stream of kids one year older every year that haven't seen or experienced all the things we think everyone has seen and done because we first did them 6 years ago, or 40 years ago. That means, I expect, as players get better they will look to escape from these newer players. Perhaps some will find and join the competitive scene. Others will stop playing and find a different game. Some may find your servers. If more people use the checkbox, Valve's servers may well not be so biased towards people who haven't played much. You have to wait and see. Either way, what tends to happen is, players tend to find people who, more or less, are as good or bad as them at the game. So, the only interesting thing about a server is, aside from the few technical things they browser lists like ping and so on, the people that play on it. Ultimately players will do whatever makes them happy. Whether that makes you happy or not, they won't care and why should they? What they do after 10 hours or 5000 hours in the game probably changes several times over, and will differ from person to person, but what they do in common is whatever they want to do - it's a game, after all, people play it for fun. And if they can't find servers or think the game sucks yadda yadda yadda they'll moan about it on forums, but it has to be said server admins have over the recent past, managed to do the things that cause players to moan on forums about servers. Some of those things have been attacks on the server browser you hope people will use, some have been attacks on the quickplay feature, and others have been attacks on the client, especially the html rendering features. It wasn't us miss, it was some other bigger boys that ran off that way... I guess :) But players mostly won't care about any of the things that are worrying you. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Fletcher - I'm Calling you Out On This (Enough is Enough)
On 25/01/2014 00:00, Bottiger wrote: If Valve wants to provide the best experience to players they should let community servers compete on equal footing with official servers. They should get some real live nudes? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Prevent game servers from redirecting players to alternate servers when players connect through quickplay
On 24/01/2014 01:24, Chris Oryschak wrote: I currently have 235 players on my servers right now, of all of those only 23 players are from quickplay. What difference will this change make to you then? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Prevent game servers from redirecting players to alternate servers when players connect through quickplay
On 24/01/2014 02:34, Chris Oryschak wrote: Dan, That's only ~1/2 my player slots filled when it's normally near full capacity thanks to quickplay filling in the gaps. I'm a community that has been around for a long time and couldn't imagine anyone starting out to try to build themselves now. The way I see it, your glass is half full and you're complaining it's half empty. Quickplay players are not really part of your community. If you have 235 people connecting to you, that's 10 full servers more or less. How many full servers do you need? I note that any particular time there are 20-5 people playing TF2, give or take. If they are on a server happily playing TF2 why should Valve do anything so you can all fight over these players? There's no logic to that is there? What purpose does it serve to the people playing the game to give you tools that let you fight over the same set of players. There's no economic competition. You can't undercut anybody. There's no technical advantage you can gain. One missing thing from TF2 right now is some incentive for the pub community to complete objectives and play the game. All of the incentives are now randomly given - and it's great to see Valve congratulating themselves in slides at the Dev days over how much money they make doing this but it's come at the expense of the actual game Team fortress 2 that was once about capping intel and points. The new weapons that count kill streaks encourage people to play defensively and build a streak rather than pushing to cap or to complete an objective. The game rewards a kill streak but has no reward for winning. Ironic really given that to get the kill streak you do have to win the MvM mode. Why add all the incentives to win MvM and none for the multiplayer and, worse, make those MvM prizes hurt the multiplayer objectives even more? So, that's something pub communities could perhaps address to get an edge, but they don't. If the complaint was Servers are empty because people have stopped playing TF2 because of your change Valve - there'd be a point. But you cannot argue People are happily playing TF2 on other people's servers and that's not fair Unless you're going to say without our servers there wouldn't be enough servers But, then your servers are bound to have players on them, aren't they? If your servers are so key to Valve's and TF2's success that Valve will miss them if you take them away how can those servers be empty? If QP is 50% of the player base - it doesn't really matter what the percentage is, it follows that 50% of the player base don't care about communities. And I doubt many that connect via the server browser do either. I think they look for nearly full servers with a low ping running a particular map, pretty much regardless of what game they are running too. Unless you have a game that gives you some kind of persistent presence on a server, like minecraft, and presumably newer games like Rust, there's no great reason to fret about going back. So in some ways you picked the wrong game if you want people to care about revisiting your server. There's no state left behind after someone leaves a TF2 server - and the communities that have attempted to add this via things like 'credits' and stats and ideas like this are not very imaginative. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Game launch errors
On 11/01/2014 16:54, Frank wrote: Anyone know the answer to this problem or is this just something that players have to live with? I keep getting reports on it from my clients/players but I have no answer for them. If they're asking you, tell them it's unusually high sunspot activity. Client crashes are usually caused by a bug that Valve will fix at some point. Although I can't say I've noticed any problems if you have many users triggering the same problem its unlikely any change they have done is causing it. You could get specs from them and look for a pattern - there are loads of ways to waste their time until the fix arrives - support 101 does most of them Try rebooting verify your cache reinstall windows replace all your hardware bit by bit monitor your temps tell us your specs remove any overclocking disable your AV and firewall and see if it works All of these, not necessarily in that order, might keep them busy for a bit while the bug is fixed :-) Although FWIW, exception 803 is a breakpoint instruction. Which might suggest it's hitting some debug code that, when the developer is testing it, would jump into the debugger. I doubt valve develop libcef.dll, so it's unlikely their debug code, maybe the way they are using the library is triggering the issue? Either way, go back in there, chill those trigger fingers out and wait for the fix that should be coming directly. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Game launch errors
On 12/01/2014 10:10, dan wrote: I doubt valve develop libcef.dll, so it's unlikely their debug code, maybe the way they are using the library is triggering the issue? Actually, seems it is their code. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [Regression] Horribly inaccurate player counts from Steam.
On 27/12/2013 01:25, Jesse Molina wrote: Every other day it seems that half the people playing TF2 on my friend's list are actually asleep and not playing TF2. Isn't looking like you must be asleep when playing TF2 just normal behaviour for pub players? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Where is my traffic coming from?
On 23/11/2013 12:15, ElitePowered . wrote: Doing so is the equivalence of joining via a link on a site containing steam//connect:ip. If a user is connecting from a steam group, there isn't an efficient way of tracking it other than concluding the connection originated from a site. gg Well I dunno it's the client that is tracking, so it should be able to easily distinguish between these different methods. If you type connect in the console or type 'retry' that is not really the same as clicking a server in faves or clicking a URL on a webpage. There's a bug / race condition that happens sometimes when you pick a team before a round starts. Presumably it happens if you do that at the exact same time as someone else does. Normally if you press '3' from the team select menu you'd either be placed on, blu, or, if blu has more players then you'd still be at the team pick menu. But, when the race condition happens on the client the team pick menu disappears and you get put in a kind of limbo where you're spectating (on 2fort, usually looking from the bridge camera) and , and . don't work. I quite often use 'retry' to get out of that and back on the server. So that's hardly the equivalent of joining via favourites. To my mind, retry probably shouldn't count at all (because the method you used to join that server has already been counted) but at the least it should have its own category. Depends how much it is used I suppose but it will skew the results if it is used a lot. The convar could do with adding to the console's autocomplete / find features too if possible. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Where is my traffic coming from?
On 18/11/2013 17:08, Fletcher Dunn wrote: Quickplay is basically just automated server browsing, and it uses real pings. You might be thinking of MvM matchmaking, which uses geolocation. (And quickplay beta, which may be revived at some point, used the same thing.) Right, that's it. I knew you'd mentioned geolocation in the past with regard to one of these things. Thanks for the correction. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Where is my traffic coming from?
On 15/11/2013 03:56, ElitePowered . wrote: So how come Lotus doesn't fill up all it's servers when it has close to the same network performance as you do? Ping is a quality to each client, not a feature of the server. That said IIRC Fletcher once said rather than measuring ping they guessed it (Remind me of what that handbook was saying again...) So unless they fixed that, actual ping doesn't mean a great deal either. I imagine they don't qualify for quickplay because either their server is full (with people joining from other methods) or they have bots. Just as likely, most of the people that use quickplay are like people who called themselves fred.bloggs on the internet, they are aged 8-12 and have not played a lot of TF2. Ergo they are new, ergo they are more likely to get sent to Valve's servers if they use quickplay and some of yours if/when those fill up. But I suppose Valve will have stats to show this for sure soon. Player latency does in fact play a roll in determining where they are sent but there has to be an outside factor in play. There are thousands of servers for TF2, not each one is filled completely. So your point is invalid. Well, obviously not, there are more server slots than players. The score used for quickplay has never been revealed. The only thing that existed was, IIRC, the trend and the speed of that trend You're going downhill fast kind of thing although not in those exact words. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Where is my traffic coming from?
On 15/11/2013 09:33, Mart-Jan Reeuwijk wrote: Shouldn't be hard to have a score script running... - On player connect: penalty of 15 - On every minute of the player being connected: add 1 point unless they're there over 45 minutes. - Start over on map change/reload (= reconnect) That sounds more like the old unused score. i.e not what quickplay used. Quickplay was supposed to use ping. Tags for whether the server qualified and then player count / max player count. So a vanilla 24 player server with 10 players is more likely to get another player than an empty 32-man server. There may have been some handwaving about other criteria used but never fully revealed. Although, since then, they added the beta matchmaking which was trying to group people together to find a server and start the game all at the same time. Presumably that (which I bet is used even less than qp) would prefer empty servers. They did once say IIRC they were thinking of turning server score into a game, so you could rank and level up and so on. Not a good idea imo - it obviously doesn't make sense to show any score or value given the way some admins get into a flap. Maybe when Valve are measuring heart rates and blood pressures it'll be safer to implement gamification of servers - and it'll add a bit of fun for the rest of us to watch if they put a real-time graph showing server admin panic on the web :) -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Coming soon: changes to TF HTML MOTD support
On 08/11/2013 20:14, Robert Paulson wrote: For someone who tries so hard to sound logical, it is sad you can't make a simple deduction. Are you cutting and pasting lines from Dr McCoy or something? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Coming soon: changes to TF HTML MOTD support
On 08/11/2013 09:39, Robert Paulson wrote: While you may not personally care about plugins broken by Valve, there are other people who do. Every TF2 player is not like you. You aren't even the majority as according to Valve most players don't use quickplay. Ponder this for a moment before writing your next essay. The change only affects quickplay so I'm not sure what you're blathering about. Maybe you should read the large print edition of the mailing list? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Is sv_tags event247 broken after the update?
On 07/11/2013 01:14, Bjorn Wielens wrote: seven HUNDRED valve servers? I'm sorry, but I'm with those kinds of numbers I'm going to re-raise my earlier point about valve actively skimming the bulk of the quickplay traffic for themselves and leaving barely anything for communities. Anything for communities to do what? Seems fairly evident that if Valve servers are full then people either clicked quickplay or joined their servers directly. In neither case were the people specifically interested in joining your server or any other community one. Bearing in mind too that Valve run servers around the world. So there won't be hundreds of them competing with your local server. That said I think it was a pity they switched most (all?) of their servers to Halloween maps because (a) it (mostly) sucks and (b) it doesn't leave any Valve servers for people that don't want to play Halloween maps. But that's the only reason. Equally though, you could say they've helped communities fill servers that serve the other maps but you didn't. I've said it before you cannot make your server special or interesting unless you DON'T want quickplay traffic. (I would argue further that you cannot make it special or interesting at all - but that is debatable perhaps whereas for quickplay it's pretty much self-evident given the rules for adding a server to the pool) There's no point otherwise. Quickplay means I want the game Valve wrote without any crap - and, by definition, this makes all the servers the same. If they aren't the same, as sometimes happens, then quickplay sucks. And really, as I've said before, there's no point competing for this pool of players. You're not going to gain anything doing that. If there are more servers than people then you may as well put your time and effort into something else. If you have an existing community then you can run whatever you like. Valve won't take your players. But it makes no sense to call yourself a community if you don't have a full server of regular players that actually want to play on your server. Nor if your full server is just because quickplay has sent you a bunch of people. 24 quickplay players is not a community. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Is sv_tags event247 broken after the update?
there will be. Initially, as you say, they may decide to try and dupe people to join their empty servers and when that is stopped they may try to throw their lot into Valve's quickplay and try to scam advert hits or otherwise exploit this set of players they have done nothing to earn. When that doesn't work they throw their toys out of the pram and complain that Valve are shafting them. But why are you entitled to these people? They haven't expressed any desire to play on your servers. You haven't created a community. You need to be creative. You need to ask yourself why anyone would connect to your server rather than either use quickplay or join someone else's. In many cases the answer will be They won't. I'm kidding myself here a little bit In many more cases the players are not interested in anything special or different. That's why quickplay exists. You just have to get over it. Maybe there's a sizable population of TF2 players who do want something special. I've no doubt there are servers with mods and other non-quickplay configurations that are full and that have people joining to play whatever game the admins have created. These are the people that worked to build that community. If you do have good ideas and can get a sizeable group of people to play on your server - without duping them or relying on Valve to send them, then build it from there. If you cannot do that, join another community. Often the best answer to How can I fill my server is Don't. Get together with other people asking the same question and fill one together Make sure your goals are realistic too - there's no point, for example, playing pub games and then saying I'd like a pub server for skilled players because there aren't any. And if there were there's certainly no setting you can add that filters the other people out. Comp serves these people - and they work hard, just to build a team, get 12 people on a server they need to work at it. For example, right now the game is geared towards no one winning - you see Valve's default is to scramble if a team has the audacity to win. That and the fact the game doesn't reward winning but rewards randomly, has created a community that have, more or less, stopped playing the game objectives. So, that could be one area a server could try and build a community. Look at the myriad flaws in Valve's design (especially since they've abandoned game design in preference to adding community created items) and try and correct some of them. Find people who think Yeah, that will make the game better and maybe they'll join your servers to play. I'm sure there are other angles. Training is ripe for new game modes. Some have started, Valve did a bit, but there's lots that could be done here. Most of the servers I join have made their servers lowest common denominator even without Valve introducing quickplay they had nothing to differ them - or worse, what differentiates them actually makes them worse. Hence I play on all of them, but equally I couldn't care less who runs them. It's a complete buyers market right now. If an admin bans me there are hundreds of other, perfectly good servers to play on. If he adds some dumb thing to try and scam me or annoy me, there are hundreds of other servers. Ultimately I know I could do it myself - and that's a sure fire way to see that it doesn't require much nous or effort to do. If you manage to create a community around TF2 you are probably doing something that I and every other buffoon out there either cannot do or cannot be bothered to do - and then you might be on to something. But if you're doing something I, and any buffoon could trivially copy given half an hour of effort, don't expect it to work. If it worked for a time or still works now - which for some it may then count yourself lucky. Don't rely on it though. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Coming soon: changes to TF HTML MOTD support
On 07/11/2013 23:13, Robert Paulson wrote: I don't see how that is safe to say. I've donned my cycle helmet just in case. You think that will be enough? Does everyone here really prefer Valve to kill off a little competition rather than trying to get features back? Whatever happened to the people who cared about their radio/bp/rules plugins? It's only quickplay. No one sane is going to click quickplay and hope they randomly land on a radio enabled server if they want or appreciate the feature. click 'capture the flag' Oh not a radio server click 'capture the flag' Oh not a radio server click 'capture the flag' Oh not a radio server click 'capture the flag' Oh not a radio server click 'capture the flag' 'type !radio to enable radio' Yes! !radio Admin : That won't work now Damn you valve! That's really not happening is it? It's easy enough to type rules in text (although I'd probably expect anyone with prescriptive rules about, say, what language you have to speak or where you can stand and so on would probably be best sticking to non-quickplay traffic in any case) -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Is sv_tags event247 broken after the update?
On 31/10/2013 18:46, Marco Padovan wrote: Proabably that's like they do with csgo: all their servers get priority so the users firstly fill theirs and eventually the rest AIUI that bias to their TF2 servers is only for new players (i.e accounts that have played under a certain number of hours) Unless that has changed. I suspect though this will cause the effect you're seeing, because if you play 2fort on Valve's servers you notice myriad powerhouse offence achievements at the end of a 3-0 round. It probably explains the general TF2 community view that folk on Valve's servers cannot play too. The thing is, for sure on a Valve server you'll see more of those new account giveaways, but you see quite a lot on other servers too. Suggesting the community, in general, is now biased towards newer players. Bans probably serve to create more as well. So yeah you'll be fighting for the same players as Valve simply because the players that, in theory, are supposed to be put on your quickplay servers either don't exist, join servers manually or have played enough Halloween events to know that they suck :) I don't think the mid ground exists much these days i.e I suspect the community is now made of new players and people who have played forever. Why? Everyone is new at some point, so you get a big pool of new players. Especially for a game that is free for anyone to try, well publicised and updated relatively frequently. So long as the game attracts new people Valve's servers will be full. And there is always a new generation of kids every year getting older and discovering these games. Most people will play a game for a few hours and then move on to another game. So this mid ground is where most of your players will quit playing. Beyond a certain point though, the longer someone has played, the more likely they are going to keep playing it. Your TF2 addicts. So eventually, if you plotted hours played in buckets, by currently active players, I think you'd see a big spike of players that have just started playing and a big spike that play TF2 a lot and the bit in between them less so. Now of course, Valve only run so many servers so once full, new players will get sent elsewhere regardless. So, if you ever get bewildered TF2 players that have barely played on your servers then you know the player base is biasing towards newer players and valve servers are full. I notice whole servers like this. These longer term players though are probably far more likely to stick to the maps they play ignoring the event, or type plr_ in the browser, order by latency and join one of the myriad servers with 15 ping. Rather than entering Valve's quickplay lottery which, whenever I try it, usually gets a server I'd reject based upon config, ping or server performance. Simply put, quickplay sucks at picking servers compared with me and yet, I just said what I do - I order the list by latency and click a low number. Whatever Valve do makes it worse. Perhaps they believed their employee manual and figured the speed of light didn't apply to them? :) You have been specially chosen to work at Valve because the laws of physics don't apply in your case. You may notice other staff floating in the halls and ignoring ping in their matchmaking code. Don't be alarmed by this. We're not like other companies you may have worked at before. Maybe they should stop the bias? Throwing a couple more parameters into the data quickplay and the browser gets might help improve it. I'd happily get a random game but I don't use quickplay because it can't pick servers. Firstly, ping uber alles - there's absolutely no point connecting someone to a server with a ping over 50 and the lower the better. Then filter out servers that limit or change the rate below the 3 default you have set in the client. This is still a pain when you connect from the browser. Var is perhaps the next field it wants to check. Especially on this Halloween event. I don't know if the event map is particularly processor heavy or something but there seemed to be far more servers that were incapable of running the game (a lot like the early days of MvM) Let them down gently if you like but can't the server spam a 'you've got to be joking mate - am I running on a mac? console message when it detects it cannot maintain a specific level of performance? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Servers spamming ads
On 28/10/2013 16:21, Nick F. wrote: Will anything be done about the servers that spam ads? Does anyone look at in game reports anymore? Just block pinion.gg at your router or dns or whatever providers they use if they've expanded beyond pinion. Valve seem to think pinion are their partners so I doubt they'll do anything. Makes little sense in my opinion because if ctf_turbine can generate money with stamps then I'm sure valve could find a better way of monetising running a server in exchange for giving players some worthless digital tat. MvM tickets weren't a bad idea. Sell a multiplayer ticket and if you win a round you get a sprogget, collect 20 sproggets and you get a wedge. 10 wedges gives you a token. Craft 5 tokens into a statue part. With all 3 statue parts collected you get a golden ticket to enter a master server to play for the main prize. Win the round on the master server and you get a special 'TF2 multiplayer trading card which can be sold on the market for as much as 5 pence. Now, valve simply share a portion of the 5p generated by selling the trading card amongst the servers you played on to collect the 3000 items needed to create the golden ticket. They can use the £3000 for the tickets to pay the community members who create the sproggets, wedges, tokens and statue parts as well as the winning trading cards and unusual hats. Hats? Yep, one in a thousand golden tickets will win an unusual hat - unique to this game mode. In this case, because there's no 5p generated, Valve send the server owners a picture of the winning user wearing the hat. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Servers spamming ads
On 01/11/2013 16:57, 1nsane wrote: That's not Pinion. Pinion limits the amount of ads you can show to prevent such a thing from happening. It's something like one ad every 30 minutes. But there's alternatives so who knows what kind of crap is being loaded in the background. Especially if it's hidden. Well, if it were legit advertising companies (stop laughing at the back) who think they are paying for people who have seen or watched adverts, then the server owners are committing fraud against those companies. Your best tack then might be to talk to the advertisers and maybe they will take their money and leave, or possibly even report it if they are upset enough. But, you know, if it's traditional spam advertising, for illegal prescription medications and stuff to make your doodle bigger they probably don't care too much, they don't expect high hit rates and they obviously aren't going to report crime when they are doing it themselves. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Family Sharing Ban Bypass.
On 26/10/2013 14:17, Frank wrote: Been trying to follow this discussion, sounds interesting no matter what comes however I know myself and the other server owners are really wanting to know of the impending ETA of the Halloween 2013 Event? Year after year we have to spend the next 24hours trying to adjust and fix things that get broken by this update It'll be at the end of October, just before Halloween, same as every year. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Family Sharing Ban Bypass.
On 24/10/2013 06:47, Todd Pettit wrote: One cheater is one too many. One cheater with name changer, aimbot and speed hack can clear out a server in minutes. Most cheaters prefer to be more subtle and use wallhacks and if you are not using SMAC or something else than you have no clue how many there are but I can damn well guarantee you have more than one. I thought the same thing till I installed SMAC. I suspected a few players but I caught hundreds within days. If you aren't checking for cheaters you have cheaters and any cheaters is too many. Well, I see your point but you can't really cheat in a subtle way. That doesn't work. It's effectively not cheating. It's like having the lottery numbers a week before the draw but not buying a ticket so that no one knows you cheated. Well, you didn't win anything either so what was the point? If you go for the lower prizes, you still have to keep winning them over and over or again, what is the point? I won $10 on the lottery by cheating wow, who cares? So you're either not winning or you have to make it obvious that you can win and if you do that enough times it'll be equally obvious you have some edge buying lottery tickets that cannot be fair means. In TF2 terms, if you have a sure fire advantage over another player then they'll be dead over and over. The more times that happens, then you're winning the lottery over and over. Once suspicion is aroused it's fairly easy if you're killed over and over by a player to figure whether you're far worse than you thought, or they're exceptional or if they're cheating. We've all seen videos of really good TF2 players. Their playing looks nothing like cheating and typically every aspect of their game looks better than the average player. Cheaters on the other hand, are typically poor at playing. Perhaps even worse than the average player. Except for some reason the guy is killing you over and over and usually it's fairly obvious when you consider how he's doing that what information or assistance he must have to do it that a non-cheating player doesn't have. So, I don't accept that you could not tell a cheater from a skilled player without SMAC and I think I mentioned the last cheater I saw in the game using an aimbot was on a SMAC server. I'm sure their plugin works for whatever it's programmed to detect but it hasn't stopped cheating. People cheating don't emulate skilful play. If they ever do - i.e if IBM decide to throw their talent and money at creating a 'virtual player' you probably wouldn't be able to tell their player from a skilled TF2 player. So long as cheaters stick to mundane code that provides aiming assistance, 100% crits and/or seeing through walls, you should be able to tell because these do not impart skill onto the cheater. In fact, pub players more often try to emulate skill they see using binds and aliases - i.e they try using legitimate means to emulate what they think more skilled players do to move around. They don't really work. The other point is, as I said, if there are hundreds and hundreds of individual cheaters joining your server then banning one guy who repeatedly joins the same server using family sharing to simply wind up whoever is kicking and banning him won't really solve the problem. Because the feature being asked for here will not help to stop a large player base of cheaters. The only point to being able to ban players still requires that the vast majority want to play fair without cheats. If your server has hundreds of cheaters and they are all different people then your server is, as you say, going to empty. If this were reflected across the whole of the game, the game would die. Clearly - at least I think it's clear - we can see that's not the case. The reverse is the case, the ability for people to kill me is falling lower and lower and I don't believe this is because I am getting significantly better at the game. Players are getting steadily worse. Which actually makes cheating more difficult to get away with, because anyone that can kill you in a way that looks as though he did it deliberately sticks out these days on pub servers. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Family Sharing Ban Bypass.
On 21/10/2013 16:46, 1nsane wrote: It did happen. There was a noticeable increase in hackers, especially on servers that don't have admins on all the time. Such as valve's own. Valve's EU servers are certainly not havens for cheaters ime. There are a few cheaters but it's a tiny percentage. It's not even one cheater per server. If it was then I wouldn't be able play the game (i.e if a cheater joins I find another server. But if every server had just one cheater on it then I couldn't do that - there'd be literally nowhere to play) And that has never happened. I've never had to search for a server that didn't have a cheater on it. I've never even done something like jump to 3 or 4 different servers because they've all had cheaters on. Most days I don't see any. So, if we focus on 24 man servers for a second we can conclude the number of cheaters on 24 man servers is probably less than 1/24 of the player base - and I would argue significantly less than that. See, I don't think people care about it that much. In most activities people generally want to get better at it. You see a group of guitar players or pianists and they want to get better. People that draw pictures usually do it to get better at it. Gamers, in general, are not interested in getting better. They crave mediocrity. If you're below mediocre, to them you're a noob but if you're better than average they'll hate you for it. Why would anyone with that mindset cheat? And it's the mindset, I'd say, of at least 90% of the TF2 pub community. They are happy being crap at the game and will often say things to that extent like I only play for fun or No one's interested in capping the point / capturing the intel / what the score is They want roughly to be on par with the other players. They want to blame the weapon / class / lag for every death and they want everyone to crave the same level of mediocrity they have reached and then stopped at once they reached it. As a few of you have noted cheating is cheap (it's always been cheap, it's just cheaper now) and it's trivial and easy to do (to the point where calling it hacking seems ridiculous. That would make someone who flushes the toilet after having a dump a hydro engineer or something) Yet, self-evidently, few choose to do it. Indeed, you want this feature because you want to ban what is effectively the same guy creating lots of accounts for himself. That in itself suggests that cheating is not rife. Because if lots of people cheated then it wouldn't matter if you could stop one person from creating numerous accounts or not. It would be like banning a bad driver from the roads. Which makes no real difference because there are literally millions of incompetent drivers and more join the roads every year. If there was a high percentage of cheaters you may as well just switch all the servers off (of course, at that stage, if you really do have tens of thousands of cheaters you have to ask questions about the game, why people don't want to play it to get better at it, but more importantly why they care about pretending to be good at it which is, as I've said, certainly not the case for the vast majority of TF2 players) That said, maybe I'm lucky. My current stats say I've played 92 hours in the last 2 weeks, of which around half are TF2 (it's usually more than half but with family sharing I've been playing a bunch of other games) so I play a lot but I still only experience a small percentage of servers. As I said some of you may be attracting people who want to grief and cheat or wind you up specifically but I can't imagine how such an erudite and polite group of people could have upset anybody, can you? So that can't be it. I think perhaps it's partly cultural too. Especially the griefing thing. As for child predators?!?! I can't see how that works. TF2 doesn't have any way of talking to one person on the server does it? Steam does I suppose but game bans won't really help. Do Americans really join TF2 servers and broadcast in chat or over the mic Hey, anyone want to see some puppies? -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Family Sharing Ban Bypass.
On 20/10/2013 00:23, Kyle Sanderson wrote: Considering this is the first weekend where the beta was opened up, it's only going to get worse. Unlikely, if TF2 is a good measure. The predicted doom and gloom didn't really happen. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] [hlds] Family Sharing Ban Bypass.
On 20/10/2013 17:36, Kyle Sanderson wrote: Unfortunately, TF2 is a pretty good measure. The predicted doom and gloom continues to happen, whether or not people are talking about it is beyond me. Everything I've seen so far mimics what occurs daily in TF. Well I saw one cheater today playing sniper, in several hours of playing TF2. If others were cheating they weren't doing it well enough to actually make a notable difference. If someone's worse than me with his cheats I'm not going to notice. So, if they're all flocking to your servers I'd ask myself why? But thanks for providing the service. That's about on par from my experience playing. More often than not, if voting is enabled and they are voted off, they don't come back even though the ban typically lasts less than the round length, so they wouldn't even need to bypass it via some clever method, they could just wait. Today's cheater was, ironically perhaps, on a EP server that says it's running SMAC. No doubt the things SMAC does were relatively easy to solve too, but didn't actually solve the problem. Perhaps it's because it's actually a difficult set of problems to solve? There are not, ime, significantly more cheaters now since F2P. I've always noted, from when the game was released that it is fairly common for people to exploit glitches that appear in the game, until they're patched out. e.g the cl_interp changing was, with hindsight, being used by a few players but, by the time the glitch was known there were a number of people on the server all using it. Same with the abuse of the coaching thing. When it's patched out they go back to being rubbish again. But out and out cheating is and pretty much always has been rare. Maybe they all go to the servers where they get the attention they crave? Perhaps british or european players are not entertaining enough for them. Both problems are relatively easy to solve, in TF's case, passing the Steam Guard cookie in a Steam callback would `fix` about 90% of cases (as already proven with external ban methods). Well, I doubt it. Maybe some change will help, but there's no magic easy fix for cheaters nor for banning people unfortunately. The internet would be a lot emptier if banning worked. (e.g SPUF wouldn't have anyone posting by now, because between the cod moderators and that Texan, they've just about banned everyone at least twice by now, I bet he's even banned himself :) ) It's like spam, if someone has an easy fix they probably don't understand the problem deeply enough. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Now that halloween is coming for TF2
On 10/10/2013 06:37, ics wrote: What about the people that don't run Sourcemod? You don't need sourcemod to mod a server But, it's probably the easiest option if you want the feature and sourcemod and the plugin exist. So, the answer is, I suppose, they'd have to install it. Do we really need a plugin for everything? I doubt it. The TF2 pub community these days isn't really capable of killing other players - at least not deliberately :) If you get someone on your server that can play a bit you could always ban them I suppose. You won't be kept very busy doing that though. Although it's fair to say they aren't really capable of (or interested in) completing objectives either. Maybe some shiny item will persuade them to fire roughly in the right direction. They don't seem that interested in completing map objectives any more. I suppose the actual event itself may bring a few players out of the woodwork, but it'll be more difficult persuading the bunch of young children playing spy and sniper that make up a big %age of the player base these days that they should change class to shoot at the big monster. A few years ago if they'd had 9 classes (which they do) and a significant number of the player base were playing just 2 of them, Valve would have written a blog about how they'd noticed this and how they went about solving the issue and encouraging people to play the game yadda yadda yadda. Now, they're don't seem interested in game development, they just add community created items and blather in the press about how more efficient the community are at creating items than they are. I shan't hold my breath waiting for this community create a decent game though. There is reason to rent an office and fill it with snacks and it's not for daft ideas like trading cards Who is going to give us something worth playing on steamos if your latest ideas have been creating a crate and a key and getting kids to gamble £2 to see what's inside it - amazing gameplay there. Or, the best one yet, giving them a jpeg image of a game character after 20 minutes of idling in a game and letting them sell it for 3p steam wallet credit. This is what you need the hyper pan galactic T people your handbook goes on about to come up with and implement? In amongst drinking the kool aid and counting the money, they've apparently forgotten that TF2 is supposed to be a game. No doubt there's a plugin to help with this as well. Albeit it'll probably hide the problem rather than tackling it. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
which admins seem keen to change for no good reason into the browser too so they can be filtered but, it's not the end of the world) So yeah, better filtering to improve the browser, including things like pinion use? Absolutely DNS for faves? A waste of time and effort. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
On 26/08/2013 04:36, Robert Paulson wrote: Sure a server will recover, but it will take as long as half a year and sometimes won't even return to its original size. Oh please. That's just utter nonsense. If that were true no one could ever start a new server. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
On 26/08/2013 04:07, Mart-Jan Reeuwijk wrote: I do not agree on your assumption. Most players use their favorites, they have a bunch of them in there, for various mods within the game. Personally, I have like 80-100 servers in there, I really wouldn't notice a server dropping off cos they changed IP. Well you wouldn't really have to notice it would you? Most of the time Robert must be crying because you're not on his server you're on one of the other 99 in your favourites list. So your argument doesn't really solve Robert's problem does it? He wants you to have one favourite server - his. Please, at least use some common sense before replying. What assumption do you disagree with? I'm saying in order to have 100 servers in your faves list you must have found and joined those servers at one point without them being in that list. You cannot argue with that, it's a simple fact. So, if you've only 99 servers (and it's clear you don't know if you have 80 or 100) panic! No don't panic, do exactly what you did to find those 99 servers to find the missing one. Or just play on one of the other 99. It's clear from your point of view there are far more servers than you'll ever have the time to play on even if you spent 24 hours a day playing tf2. There will always be empty servers if there are more servers than people. Valve can't do anything with DNS to change that. As there are enough other servers to play on, I would not need to find that server again in the server browser. I just go to another favorite server. Why? See pinion story, most non-favorited has pinion in a very intrusive way enabled. Exactly. There's nothing special about servers. Nothing at all that makes them worth chasing rather than playing on a new one or a different one. Nothing that makes much sense adding 100 of them to favourites. You can find another server to play on as easily as you found a server and added it to faves in the first place. So, after years having a server in somwhere in my favorites, with a vague familiarity of the server name, ppl won't go looking for a missing server that changed IP. Now apply above to other players. And add to that that often server owners cant move IP to a new box. They lose their player base there. No they don't. The player base is the same. Whether people originally joined their server via quickplay or the browser, people will again. If there are players around. The server is easy to find as it was before. The guy like you with 100 servers in his faves isn't playing on their server much is he? Not if he's forgotten all about the server, the name and everything. If anyone plays on a server regularly enough to care about finding it when it goes awol then they know what server they are on. If you were really involved in the community of one or two servers and really loved playing on them, you'd know the community and you'd know the servers. All you have is lots of faves in your list that you've added but rarely if ever play on and so, as you say, you really have no idea what servers you've added - but you haven't really been a significant part of their player base either - because one guy can't be a significant part of the player base of 100 servers. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
On 25/08/2013 00:30, Robert Paulson wrote: I would rather ask Valve do it the faster way since they have ignored this request every year it comes up. Because it's not a problem. If I play on Fred's TF2 server regularly by connecting to it via the browser, Fred can do what he likes to his IP address. I notice servers by name / description in the server browser that I played on in 2007. I couldn't tell you if the IP address is the same or not because it doesn't matter what their IP address is. Your premise seems to be that most of the people who use your server are too dumb to use the browser to find a server they play on regularly yet they use the browser. That makes no logical sense. I'm far more likely to stop playing on a server that is DDOS'd or on a crappy host simply because these are real problems that affect the gameplay. I'm pretty sure Valve have thought about it and figured admins would find some way to fuck over the player base if it were implemented. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
On 25/08/2013 14:31, AnAkIn wrote: Funny how this has went offtopic. Well, the topic's more or less answered 1. It seems unlikely hwid is any more permanent than any other identifier you can currently ban by. 2. Either way, Valve have seen the feature request. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
On 25/08/2013 21:12, Robert Paulson wrote: Any server owner who has experienced this can tell you that most players never figure out an IP change every time even on the most popular servers There are many logical explanations for this. Players might only go off their histories list and do not understand the concept of an IP. Or they might only use the favorites popup when you leave a server. Or they would just assume the server shut down and find the task of searching through thousands of servers too daunting. I'm sure most players are at least as intelligent as you, if not more so. I see no evidence to explain why you can find a server and they can't Feel free to explain your vast intellect, but I'm sure us mere mortals will find your server if we need to, however much you believe otherwise. The idea that someone only joins a server from the favourites list? Now, come on. Think about that Einstein. How did they join the server to add it to the favourites? If they did that, they can do it again. Most players will tolerate small imperfections in older servers. Users are far more likely to tolerate occasional ddos and the increasing lag spikes Well, then there's no need for you to switch host or change IP then, is there? Don't join a debating society. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
On 25/08/2013 21:50, Robert Paulson wrote: You can keep arguing about how logical your thinking is but it doesn't matter because it doesn't line up with reality. I've seen this problem affect dozens of servers, even those that are totally off quickplay such as Azelphur's Surf server. Who cares? If most users (and let's face it, most users have never and will never connect to your server) are really as stupid as you hope (and as I said, if you think you know how to do something that a lot of people don't then you've got a rude awakening coming up at some point in your life) then clearly they find another server to play on. What do you imagine they do? Sit in a pool of tears wondering where your server went? Do you not have a web site or a server? You know a server that can run plugins and pop up information, on the MOTD and so on? Perhaps a lot of servers find their users switched off MOTD because they used it for something no one wants to read. (Of course your users won't have switched it off because they are all, according to you, conveniently too stupid to do anything) So, you know, if /you/ can't find or join a server feel free to ask and we'll talk you through the process, But don't sit there trying to kid the list that most users are dumb. If you're really struggling to think of ways of communicating that you are changing ip address to the small group of people that use your server regularly, again, ask away for ideas. But don't sit there trying to kid us that you cannot fix your broken server without this feature. If a server empties when it changes IP then self-evidently there was nothing particulary special about that server. Personally, I cannot think of a single server on the TF2 list that has any characteristic that would make me join it rather than another. Except stuff like ping and the network connection to it, and whether it's got people on it and whether it's running a map I want to play. You know, all the stuff that the server browser tells you when you search for a server. So, perhaps I join servers from history, perhaps I join from them from the main server list. The point is, if one server disappears it doesn't make diddly squat difference to the game. There are plenty of other servers. OTOH, if a new server appears, I'm as likely to play on that as any other. Whereas you are trying to kid us that a server that is getting ddosed or that is on a crap host with lag spikes doesn't matter because your dumb users put up with it? Yet that's the reason you want the feature? Start talking sense. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
On 25/08/2013 23:37, Robert Paulson wrote: I don't know how many times I have to repeat this but you can make all the logical assumptions you want and assume that most players are smart and aren't lazy (lol?). I wouldn't go as far as saying they are smart. I just think they are no more or less dumb than you. And specifically I'm not assuming they are smart enough to join a server, I've a ton of evidence that shows they must be smart enough to do it. As I asked, can you find and join a server? If so, what makes you think you have some special skill that others do not? I think I played TF2 for at least 2000 hours, possibly 3000 before quickplay appeared on servers that were nearly always full. How did those people join the server? Do you think they all had comp sci phds or something? No. Any buffoon can play a computer game. Just as any buffoon can run a server. As I said, some of those servers I played on right at the beginning are still there. They appear right at the top of the server browser if I sort by ping, just as they did 6 years ago. I can see they are there from their description which has remained more or less the same for all that time. The company running them has a presence on the web that if they disappeared you could go and see why. There's no need at all for them to appear in the history or favourites section to find them. Besides I remain unconvinced that a server which has changed host or other significant things like that, should be seen as the same server in any case. Indeed, if you want to go down the route of having some kind of identifier for a servers I think Valve would be wise to consider when that identifier should change. Seems to me that a server being on the same IP shouldn't just been seen as the same server that someone added to their favourites if significant changes to the config or installation have occurred. If you want to blather on about community, you can't in the next breath claim that your entire community will disappear the moment your server changes ip address. If you have any semblance of a community attached or related to your server, you should have plenty of ways of communicating information about changes to the server to them and they should have plenty of motivation to look for you. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Add something to the game so that server ops can ban HWID too.
On 23/08/2013 01:43, Scruppy Dawg wrote: Everyone knows the HWIDs are stored due to Steamguard (Or some form of HWID, anyway). Couldn't Valve simply add something so that server operators, when banning a SteamID, can also elect to ban the associated HWID? The HWID never needs to be exposed to the server admins. Is it difficult to change hwid though? I can't say I've looked at it or care about it, but if something as simple as changing the mac address alters it, it's not likely to improve anything. It sounds like one of these things that might work for a week or 2 and then cheaters would just figure out a way of working around it. Auto detecting cheating and kicking / banning seems the best approach. Doesn't SMAC and the alternatives work well enough to do that? I've got to say I don't really notice a significant problem with cheaters in TF2 on the servers I play on. I can't imagine why someone would keep creating accounts and going back to the same server only to be kicked and banned immediately, unless it's reached the point where he's just doing it to wind the server owner and admins up. -- Dan ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Uh, so are we going to take care of all these fake player servers?
On 12/08/2013 14:46, Brian Simon wrote: I'm fairly positive at this point that Valve just doesn't care about the Policy of Truth anymore. The amount of reports sent to them is INSANE, all without reply or with an empty Oh, we'll look into that at some point.. Really? Because, at the time they introduced it, it was silly season, with lots of admins using various plugins to do it. Often using the pale excuse that everyone else was and so they had to. What I recall is that the server browser was filled with all sorts of crud not just fake players but the same server listed multiple times and so on. This was making it difficult to find a server manually, let alone via quickplay. I certainly don't see that it's such a big problem now, at least here in the EU for the filters I use on the browser. The vast majority of the servers I join have real people on them and a more or less vanilla config. There are imho, far more significant issues with TF2 at the moment that I'm sure Valve aren't working on. For example, I'm not that convinced that joining a server with real players is that worthwhile. Pubs have, of course, never been ideal places to get a decent match, but the quality has and is continuing to decline almost to the point where the game is now, at times, farcical. This isn't helped if Valve start to make item drops dependant on accounts that are actively playing, because the TF2 pub community absolutely doesn't need more people joining servers who have no interest or desire play the objectives. I get that Valve don't want them idling to get drops either, but that's the mess they made - don't hurt the game more by forcing those people to sit on real servers. Predictably, I suppose. If you reward people for not playing your game then they won't play it. MvM had a reasonably good way of rewarding people for finishing rounds, with the tickets. Perhaps something like that would work in MP? But that's by the by, ultimately, of course, this is a client issue, not a server issue. If you all run a sufficient number of good servers then no one will need to connect to the bad guys - and the fact they are faking players suggests that is the case. Quickplay is flawed for myriad reasons regardless of these fake players. It's nearly always the case when I have tried it that the server has some technical issue that quickplay and the server browser does not reveal until after you've joined. Fake players is just another to add to the list. At least with the server browser you can build up a history of good servers from a technical standpoint. One feature from quickplay that would be useful if added to the server browser would be a checkbox to automatically add 'matchmaking' to the end of the connect string. The only time these things become a big issue though, imo, is if and when a sizeable portion of the people running servers decide they need to do it too. I don't think you can ever hope to eliminate it entirely. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
Re: [hlds_linux] Loss ingame but connection doesn't show any problems
On 24/07/2013 05:05, pilger wrote: Reminding that this problem is not related to network issues, since we're monitoring the network simultaneously and no packet has been lost. It's also not affecting other srcds.exe servers running on the same server. Packets can presumably still be dropped if queues get too big? So maybe that's it? That'll depends on what you're using to capture / count the packets though. But it could even be a bug in the networking layer on your OS, or firewall filtering rule. Otherwise, if packets really aren't getting lost, it sounds more like a bug in source. -- Dan. ___ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
