Clefairy

Drunken F00l to the rescue once again. http://tf2items.com/ EDIT: new patch. Guess we'll see what happens.DOUBLE EDIT: Also new blog post. Allegedly, everyone who hasn't idled will receive a new hat 'soon'. The drop rate has also apparently been upped.

So we tried koth_oilfield tonight. I don't see us doing so again for a while. The map is more Pyro-friendly than Junction. Think about that for a minute; really let it sink in.

People that never really were on his side.

The current system is strongly analogous to your standard lottery. Weapons are those crappy free-ticket wins you get from time to time, hats are the jackpot. Only difference being, it doesn't cost you anything extra to play here. http://nerfnow.com/comic/173 The blurb down below the comic itself sums up my feelings on the whole affair.

New patch out. Nothing groundbreaking; just bug fixes and such. burning underwater people is impossible, the use command is now disabled by default, and building kills will now show unlock icons. Some music was also apparently added to tf/sound/misc, but I haven't cleaned out that particular folder in a while, so I can't tell what's new or not.

I played this. As a game, it was strictly average, but the world it took place in was powerfully realized, in my opinion. Tracked down the PC version not quite a year ago; all things considered, it's aged pretty well. As someone who has several tracks from the game on his hard drive, I am interested in seeing where this goes.

So, for some time now it seems, the mapcycle has been spitting out Follower twice in a row. If an admin could look into that I would be most appreciative.

This is probably my scout bias coming through, but a lot of the maps feel really cramped with 24 people. Especially when there are only two routes between distinct areas of the map. Getting behind people to do whatever it is you're doing is a royal pain with that many bodies running around. Don't get me wrong, I love a good midfield deathmatch as much as the next guy. But if I wanted to do that all the time, I'd have bought a different game. EDIT: And now, mostly to vent my frustrations, a story. A red heavy and a blue scout are on a patch of land, about 30 feet on all sides. They have been stripped of all their weapons, and are bare-knuckle brawling. The scout isn't stupid, and makes use of every single advantage he has available; using terrain to put the heavy on unbalanced footing, throwing dirt in his face, using his enormous opponent's momentum to get in reversals and cheap shots. In spite of all this, the heavy is larger, stronger, and more experienced in this form of combat, and repeatedly mashes the scout into a bloody pulp. This goes on for some time. The scout begins to show up less and less often, as the collected injury to his body is taking its toll. Eventually, after a particularly vicious beating, the scout doesn't come back for the next round. Once the heavy realizes his sparring partner isn't coming back, he moves on as well. The patch of land is reclaimed by nature, grass and weeds spread over it like a two-foot-high carpet. It becomes a haven for mice, crickets and other small members of the natural world. The heavy implacably marches on toward further conquests, the letters ZUZ proudly emblazoned on his shirt. -- Playing with your friends is one thing; playing with your friends exclusively is entirely another. That's all I'm going to say.

I'm inclined to agree on the player count, at this point. Later today I think I'm going to track down a decent 18-player server and see how that works out. As for comp Pyro, he does all the stuff you'd expect him to do. Flank the other team, apply pressure through afterburn, manage spam and ubers with airblast. At a higher level, yeah, the pocket soldier would just turn around and two-shot juggle you, but I've yet to play with anyone that good.

Don't worry about it. I might bitch when a FaN scout ganks me, regardless of class, but that's just the heat of the moment. Issues of team dynamics are far more worrisome to me, and that isn't something that can be resolved on a public server. Some people just want to log on and kill things, strategy and class balance be damned; it's not a playstyle I agree with, but that hardly makes it invalid. On a sort-of related note, my entry into the competitive scene has gone rather well. In fact, the last few days have seen several pick-up style games taking on all comers. The atmosphere is pretty laid-back; heavy, spy and pyro appear frequently from round-to-round, and everybody gets together on Vent afterward to have a good laugh. If anyone here is interested, by all means contact me. And yes, Trianine, I do so by choice.

Thanks to everyone who responded; to be perfectly honest, I expected to get trolled by Bleck, then have the subject changed. So this was a lovely suprise. Speaking of lovely suprises, I'd like to personally thank Sporknight for showing up last night. Your two-beer fueled antics brought needed mirth to an otherwise cold and dreary day. For those of you who don't know, I'm living with unmedicated depression (not untreated, just unmedicated). It's been unusually acute this past week, which has been a strong influence on the tone of my last few posts. That's the detail I was referring to earlier; there are other places online to whinge about life, and I'm not asking for anyone's sympathy. In spite of that, you guys are one of the most consistent reasons I have for continuing to get up every morning. Thanks for doing what you do.

This was more feedback than I expected to get. Thanks. And, okay, we've established custom maps have problems. I won't deny that. But what I really want to know is what makes the Valve maps successful in terms of design. That's the half of the argument nobody ever bothers to make.

Wow, Powerlord. At the risk of sounding like a brown-noser, your dedication to this community is amazing, even post-admin. I salute you. It's not frustration, really; I've moved past that now. I'm just... tired. I won't bother going into detail, since the historical response to such things has been a link to livejournal.com. And it would drag the thread off-topic anyway. -- Directed toward no one in particular: I would sincerely love to hear, in as much eye-straining, mind-numbing, microscopic detail as you can possibly conjure up, why Valve maps are so much better than customs. Need examples to work with? I've got pairs handy: Badwater/Cashworks, Yukon/Granary, Dustbowl/Egypt. Do more than one if you're feeling ambitious.

Ehh. The FaN is still a training-wheels gun designed for people who aren't good at scout to perform well. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not for me at this point, even with the updated jump functionality. The only thing that might get me to use it now would be the fact that it resets player momentum, and I'm sure Valve will get around to fixing that eventually. -- Steve, I honestly can't remember any of those incidents; to be fair, I haven't been on late as much lately. Any names? -- I'd like to apologize for being grumpy/snarky to certain people in the past few days. After playing in 6v6 and seeing what can come about when a team works as a cohesive unit (not my team, if you care to know), I've become a lot less tolerant of useless players without really meaning to. I try to lead by example, playing aggressively when it's called for and calling things out to my team, but it doesn't seem to make much difference. If things stay as they are, which is a safe assumption, you'll probably see a lot less of me in future. Makes me sad, since I love this game and I really enjoy being part of our core playerbase. But I guess that's how it is.

That sucks, Sensai. Maybe talk to Brushfire when you get the chance; though this situation is nothing new, it's possible he might have some advice for making high-ping play bearable. In other news, I thought this was novel: http://www.ubercharged.net/2009/08/26/how-to-have-bots-fighting-on-your-main-menu/

Hey, I'm in that! I'm the pyro who eats a flare at 1:01. ... And again as a heavy at 1:53. Good times.

Not inherently, no. But it does make some people not want to play them. Which is ultimately the same effect. Based on that, it's pretty easy to conflate the two ideas. That's a logical disconnect, but there it is.

Yeah, it was forced. I didn't actually catch the first one, so I wasn't sure how any of that would go down. -- Anyone chomping at the bit to take over planning inter-OCR scrims? I'm getting my feet wet playing with another comp team; depending on how much time that takes up I might not be able to work it in.

You know, that's a good idea. Think I'll nip this in the bud right now. -- Coming back on-topic, there was a guy in the server just now who requested that we(OCR the site) fix our RSS feed, as it is, in his words, 'terrible'. I told him I would pass that along, and now I have.

Someone making idle threats in my general direction!? ON THE INTERNET? Get over yourself.

TF2 is 2 years old today. Woo! Assuming it's not forced, I'd like to request that party mode be enabled for this occasion. -- You know, I'm getting pretty tired of people ragging on customs. Sure, Valve is better at it, in most cases (Dustbowl is a series of chokepoints, chained together and occasionally alongside each other. Explain to me how this is good map design), but that's largely because their designers are highly-paid professionals, with the resources of a medium-sized private company to draw on. The people who bring you custom maps have none of that; unless stated otherwise, it's quite safe to assume they're working out of their own basement, doing it for love of the game. They're people with lives, just like everybody else: I sincerely doubt very many of them have enough time and money lying around to afford design school, let alone to hire beta testers. So it's left to us, the gaming public, to try these maps out and give the creator feedback. It's more work, sure, but we're rewarded for our efforts. At the end of the process we get a quality map that offers a significantly different experience, and we keep the game fresh just a little bit longer. Does it always work out that way? Of course not. But, think about where we'd be as a species if everyone who failed at something just stopped trying. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Last I checked, this was the Internet. We can complain about whatever the hell we want. Moving Don't Change to first slot sounds fine to me, but until someone figures out how precisely to implement that, I'll give my vote to reducing the rtv list by one or two. It's very rare that a map outside of the first three slots gets picked anyway, in my experience.

Well, votes of any other kind almost always fail, so at least it'll be consistent.

Doesn't look like it. You could try blocking him through the Friends list, but that's mostly a wild guess on my part. In lieu of that, just keeping an eye on the chatbox works okay. For a while I would mute Tiddly as soon as he connected; IIRC it becomes an option as soon as they get to the motd, signified by their name popping up in green for HLstats. EDIT: Don't remember Swiftwater. Been a while since I ran through all the customs; at any rate, looks good to me.

Page-breaking, but worth it. That was somebody's labor of love right there.