Powerlord

Spy has now officially passed Engineer as my most played class, as of when we were playing Steel last night.

It's not just BBQ, Pyros run just as fast as Spies do. Last time I just ended up pulling my gun and shooting a Pyro to death after chasing them for a good 15 seconds with my knife (they only had partial health). If I do that, does it mean you'll forgive me for ubering at the wrong time?

I get killed more often than not when trying that. It doesn't help that it takes like 6 bat hits to kill a Heavy at full health. (Up to 9 if a medic has been healing him, due to the +50% max health)

Heavies are really easy to backstab, particularly when they're shooting the minigun... the hard part is getting behind them. What's funny is that, as a Spy, you can occasionally strafe around a Heavy and backstab them even when they've spotted you and are trying to shoot you.

I still haven't played it yet, but here's a sobering fact: There are all of 20 servers (including passworded ones) in Valve's server list. Of those without passwords, from the ping times, only 3 are in North America.

I've only done the single player stuff so far, but if multiplayer is the same, the game could get to be quite long, as the single player map is really large.

So, anyway, I may be off playing The Ship, since it's on Steam for $4.99 this weekend. No idea how good of a game it is, though.

So, anyway, there was another update to TF2 to remove some of the particle effect checks that were apparently blocking some clients from connecting to servers. However, I don't want to restart the server at the moment, since people are actually playing. I'll get around to it tomorrow, most likely.

By the way, I've confirmed that you can no longer build buildings in the blue spawn inner door on Badwater.

Someone linked to me an article last week sometime (maybe even in this topic?) that said TF2 wasn't going to have its next content update until 2009 because most of the TF2 team are currently working on Left 4 Dead.

Yes, but the other notes make me wonder if they also removed the thing in Badwater where you could build teleporters in the blue spawn room...

TF2 update today! From the notes: Added rate limit for several client commands to prevent server spamming Added consistency checking for particle systems Updated r_particle_timescale ConVar so it can only be changed if the server has sv_cheats set to 1 Updated loading/disconnect dialogs so they're easier to read Updated Dustbowl, Granary, and Badwater Basin with several exploit fixes Updated Granary to remove the setup time and gates The server should now be updated as well (I ran the Steam Update command from the server's website). It also appears to be up and running; I did not do a lot of testing on it... just logged in and made sure the round started correctly. Valve's servers are apparently being hammered, as the Linux server updates are taking much longer than normal for the small number of files that have been updated.

RAM was the first thing that came to mind... that's where my old computer's main problem lied for a lot of games.

I've been tempted to spruce up the MOTD lately, using some techniques from specialattack.net: How-To: Create a TF2 chalkboard style MOTD with HTML and possibly some additional ideas from How-To: Put live server stats on your chalkboard MOTD. I found out that TF2 stores its fonts on your system and you can copy them to your Windows fonts directory... and can thus use them in images for the MOTD.

Hmm, I wouldn't rule out custom maps. I'm going to disagree with what I said earlier about custom maps; we had 20 people on by the end of pl_cave_b6 last night.

No preference here (other than being busy Wednesday nights). Also, I've noticed lately that the server population tends to drop heavily whenever the two custom maps in our rotation come up. Since we're currently having problems getting enough players for games, I propose that these be removed from the map cycle, at least temporarily. I know that even last week, among our regulars, pl_cave_b6 often gets enough rtvs to vote away from it as soon as it came up. Last night, when pl_dustbowl_b4 came up, we dropped down to 8 players. I want to say we had double that at the end of the previous map, cp_steel.

There were a few people on last night. However, there were actually more people on ZUZ's server than on OCR's. ZUZ's server is 8.12.70.175:27015 btw.

Well, the topic still says something about 9pm... I've always assumed that was EDT. Of course, I have no power to change the topic here.

I'm normally not on Wednesday nights, because I have a tendency to put off assignments for the Oracle PL/SQL class I'm taking until the last minute.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to play TF2 tomorrow. Tuesday and Wednesday I was a bit busy.

a3 has now been uploaded to the server and file mirror. a2 has been removed. On a side note, I'm surprised that a3 is smaller than a2.

Slower stab? Only if the long backstab animation is removed on the regular knife in the process. It's sad that it's faster to stab while moving towards someone and still get a backstab kill than if I actually try to backstab them.

Well, if it didn't remove their disguise, it'd make it much easier to sap things even in a small space like 2Fort's intel room. Right now, the wrench is the Engie's best defense against Spies... other than having other players (Pyros!) around. That'd be great. I do wonder what they could replace the teleporters with, though... maybe a special teleporter exit that you could give to someone else to place... but you couldn't capture points or intel while carrying it. Maybe a two-way teleporter that takes longer than normal to recharge... However, since all the building upgrades would be unlocked via the same achievement, either they'd all change at once, or have only one of them change. Actually, I think they should just switch a wrench upgrade for a second building upgrade.

Hmm, I don't think they'd make a long distance sapper... that'd make it too easy to keep slinging them at machines. I think they'd be more likely to make a sapper that works faster but removes your disguise when you use it. ... ...and I think it's even more likely that the Scout update will come first. Scouts need some serious lovin'.

Haha, I think I was on your team when you found out it could do bubbles... I remember you commenting on that after it let you do fire underwater.