OCR TF2 Server - Anyone interested in trying out TF2 should join us!

[Top Gun]

And, again, delete all Arena maps off the server. Have Powerlord code a plugin that deletes your TF2 inventory, uninstalls TF2, uninstalls Steam, and formats your computer if you try to vote for it.

Shockingly enough, there are people that actually enjoy Arena.

I think increasing the recently-played limitation significantly would definitely be a good move, since it enforces some level of diversity by default. I don't want to see every single custom map tossed out, because there are things like Cashworks and MegaMan that are fun maps most people seem to enjoy. But yeah, lose all the cosmetic variant versions, and the one-note gimmicky maps. (RIP, Pacman. ) For what it's worth, I only saw that all-Badwater vote happen once, but it was done as a gag, and the real Badwater won easily anyway.

[Lyrai]

Shockingly enough, there are people that actually enjoy Arena.

They are wrong.

[ParanoidDrone]

Arena's okay in small doses. It's not my particular cup of tea, but I can tolerate it for short stretches. I would appreciate them appearing for a vote via nomination only though. It wasn't too long ago when I remember the vote list came up with something like three Arena maps and one other that I was less than enthused about, but I didn't notice if they were nominated or if it was random chance. (If they're already off the normal map cycle then of course disregard what I just said.)

I agree that customs that are simply a mirror/reskin/whatever of existing maps should be thrown out en masse.

An idea: Allow Badwater/Harvest/etc. to be selected via nomination and RTV as usual, but remove them from the normal map cycle. That way we can still nominate and play them if enough people agree but by default we'll experience a bit more variety. I'm kind of approaching this from a "break the habit" perspective and counting on the crowd at large to keep it under control and not nominate them every other map. (And if enough people vote for it anyway then majority rules and I don't see the problem.)

[XeroZohar]

I think arena should be put or kept in standard rotation. There is obviously enough desire for it if it's winning enough votes to keep the people that hate it complaining about it. So it has a place.

I'm ok with shortening the time some more if that'll appease the gripe-y ones.

[Mooker]

Just to clarify: I don't JUST nominate Egypt to troll. It's partly trolling and partly to do something else that isn't arena or payload or dustbowl. Seriously some nights it feels like all we do is a cycle of arena -> goldrush -> dustbowl in some kind of weird TF2 map purgatory. I'm aware Egypt is a bad map but at least Egypt is a different map.

[Garian]

Why not track how often a map is being played, and if it exceeds a certain percentage threshold then it is not available for nomination, on top of the recently played maps?

[Bleck]

why not just only play 2fort 24/7

[The Derrit]

i actually like playing egypt

[ParanoidDrone]

Why not track how often a map is being played, and if it exceeds a certain percentage threshold then it is not available for nomination, on top of the recently played maps?

TBH I'm not sure this is possible to keep track of, but I also have zero SourceMod experience.

[Garian]

I've seen map counting in Killing Floor, I guess I was confused on what SourceMod could do

[Lyrai]

You know Egypt was one of the maps that got a runthrough during the great balance update, right? They mostly nobuilded a lot of the more annoying, exploity-spots to build sentries on.

Edited August 18, 2013 by Lyrai

[ParanoidDrone]

So, um, J22 was saying that he wanted to be banned, so I obliged, but I forgot how to unban him.

Help?

EDIT: Nevermind, I got it sorted out. But thank you Brushfire.

Edited August 18, 2013 by ParanoidDrone

[Brushfire]

So, um, J22 was saying that he wanted to be banned, so I obliged, but I forgot how to unban him.

Help?

/unban STEAM:ID in console.

[Clefairy]

Of the 50(?) or so stock maps that exist, I can name only two, Badwater and Frontier, that were played "just about every night" as of a week or two ago. We play on Harvest, Upward, Thunder Mountain, and several other maps pretty frequently, but unless the crazy resurgence in Degroot Keep you're describing has only happened recently, we hardly play it "every single night". Hell, I'd estimate that the server rolls through about 5-6 maps on a typical night depending on what's played. The only monotony I directly recall with regard to map votes is Frontier magically winning more than I'd care to play it.

Upon thinking about it for a few days, a lot of what I was talking about is anecdotal. We could use some hard data; back in the HLStatsX era, when Powerlord was the primary admin, we had a page for collating exactly this type of stuff. I remember being sad to see it go.

As for Degroot, it is fairly recent, yes. Sporknight and One-Hit have started playing a lot again, and it is a pet map of theirs. If one or both of them are around you can essentially guarantee it will appear in the vote list until it gets played or they leave.

I have no problem with that really, we've all got an agenda of some kind here. But like I said, this is a community that contains people like FROGG and GM, all the way down to John Q. Valveserver. Most regulars fall somewhere in the middle, but the massive difference in the skill of those outliers does cause problems.

They are wrong.

Serious question: why is this such a big deal for you? So other people like things within the game that you don't. Are you so starved for good servers that when this one doesn't cater to your preferences 100%, you feel the need to say shit like this?

Have Powerlord code a plugin that deletes your TF2 inventory, uninstalls TF2, uninstalls Steam, and formats your computer if you try to vote for it.

Edited August 18, 2013 by Clefairy

[Lyrai]

Serious question: why is this such a big deal for you? So other people like things within the game that you don't. Are you so starved for good servers that when this one doesn't cater to your preferences 100%, you feel the need to say shit like this?

Arena Mode is the complete antithesis of almost every other aspect of TF2's design. TF2 is built to be very, very friendly in almost all of it's aspects. You can identify classes very quickly in the heat of battle. You are never shown your Worsts in your stats, only your Bests. The game will pop up a window, in fact, when you have a new best. Deathcams are so you understand to a degree what killed you, so that you never get discouraged; it encourages you to try again.

I could go on, but you get the point - a lot of stuff in TF2, big and small, is designed so that you're encouraged to simply get out there and go. To keep momentum going. So you never have to stop playing and try to figure out what the game is telling you; it gets out of the way.

Arena is fucking awful and atrocious because it's a huge grinding halt in the middle of gameflow. It encourages turtling, it encourages prioritizing everyone play like a good medic (Never do anything fancy/always play it safe), and it destroys the "You messed up? Well just get out there and try again" feeling because if you're the shithead who's around when someone scores first blood? Well fuck you, shithead, you don't get to play this round. I hope you enjoy doing nothing for several minutes while two scouts run around the map jerking each other off, neither one wanting to get close to each other. Or a cloak and dagger spy just sitting on his hands. Or about a million other things that leave me screaming at the screen for an admin to just slay everyone so we can get on, and get to the fun fucking part of the game.

You want to play a game where when you're dead, you're out? CounterStrike and it's 50 variations are right there. TF2 Arena Mode was some weird attempt to include Competitive/e-Sports/"High-Skill" play at launch, except like set bonuses it was a mistake and never, ever used again, instead replaced with the vastly superior KotH, which has all of the good sides of Arena (Competiting over one central cap point, small compact maps that direct the flow to one area, etc) without kicking you in the face every 10 seconds and saying "No. Go sit in time out. You don't get to play."

I log on TF2 to play TF2. Not to sit in time out.

And if you want to get fucking catty with lines like

that when this one doesn't cater to your preferences 100%, you feel the need to say shit like this?

Okay.

A) Almost everyone here has some bitching going on about egypt this or degroot that. I literally don't give a fuck. Any map without arena_ in the game, I'll play at least once, without complaint. It is, most of the time, extremely hard for me to go "This is so bad, I do not want to play." The admins in charge of the maps in this server are generally good enough that, in conjunction with just the TF2 mapping community on the whole, there are very, very few bad maps. I will play almost all of them. Someone mentioned going down the customs and trying to analyze and pair the list down. Sign me the fuck up for that, I'd love to do that. Egypt/Degroot/etc doesn't bother me. Aside from Arena mode existing, only three things in the existance of the OCR server have ever bothered me. Closer to 2.5

1) Unexplained fuckery with the server. A few nights ago, we logged on, every weapon had different stats. No list, no warning, nothing. Given that the first action of half the server when this happened was "Figure out why and reverse it", I'm going to call this one "Not just me."

2) Creepy motherfuckers towards the females on the server. This is mostly why I don't use voice chat, because we've had some pretty goddamn creepy stalkerriffic motherfuckers that literally made me feel unsafe on the server. I already went to admins over this when it's happened, and to their credit, it's been smothered mostly.

2.5) The endless Badwater recently. And that's being shown to be a near-unanimous thing. The scenery is a bit stale. It's mostly just boredom rather than annoyance.

So yeah. Not a whole lot bothers me, and what does bother me, I don't see the point in "sitting on it." I see the point in going "HEY. THIS SHIT BOTHERS ME." and seeing if I can affect some change to where it doesn't.

Edited August 18, 2013 by Lyrai

[Lyrai]

why not just only play cp_orange 24/7

Actually there's this absolutely bizarre subset of people who keep trying to do amazing things with orange maps. I'm not quite sure I understand it.

TBH I'm not sure this is possible to keep track of, but I also have zero SourceMod experience.

HLStatsX is a stat-keeping plugin that will do that. Sourcemod itself doesn't offer the capability, you have to snap on something like that.

Edited August 18, 2013 by Lyrai

[DarkeSword]

I agree with everything Lyrai said about Arena maps. They are the absolute worst.

[Brushfire]

The voice begs to differ DS!

[Clefairy]

Finally, some debate in this thread. *cracks knuckles*

Arena Mode is the complete antithesis of almost every other aspect of TF2's design. TF2 is built to be very, very friendly in almost all of it's aspects. You can identify classes very quickly in the heat of battle. You are never shown your Worsts in your stats, only your Bests. The game will pop up a window, in fact, when you have a new best. Deathcams are so you understand to a degree what killed you, so that you never get discouraged; it encourages you to try again.

TF2 has been out since 2007. I've been playing it pretty steadily since then, and have a solid understanding of almost every mechanic. I'm not clear on when you started, but you log more time week-over-week than most of us, period. If you go into a server, any server, get killed and don't immediately understand why through sheer experience, something's wrong.

Arena is fucking awful and atrocious because it's a huge grinding halt in the middle of gameflow. It encourages turtling, it encourages prioritizing everyone play like a good medic (Never do anything fancy/always play it safe), and it destroys the "You messed up? Well just get out there and try again" feeling because if you're the shithead who's around when someone scores first blood? Well fuck you, shithead, you don't get to play this round. I hope you enjoy doing nothing for several minutes while two scouts run around the map jerking each other off, neither one wanting to get close to each other. Or a cloak and dagger spy just sitting on his hands. Or about a million other things that leave me screaming at the screen for an admin to just slay everyone so we can get on, and get to the fun fucking part of the game.

Here's where your argument falls apart. Some people find failure fun. Dark Souls recently came out on Steam and has pushed several million copies in that time. DS is significantly harder and more punishing than TF2.

Am I saying there's necessarily a large overlap of players between those games? Of course not. But there is clearly a group of players out there who want to be pushed to do better through the game mechanics.

You could argue that overall performance stats do this already in vanilla TF2, and that's true to an extent. But regular play lacks that moment-to-moment tension. If you die, so what? You know where that taunt-happy little schmuck is, so count the seconds till you can go murder him back. Big deal.

It's telling that the reason you don't like Arena is the reason I do; if you die, the game shoves that back in your face and makes you sit out, to reflect on what you could have done to survive.

You want to play a game where when you're dead, you're out? CounterStrike and it's 50 variations are right there. TF2 Arena Mode was some weird attempt to include Competitive/e-Sports/"High-Skill" play at launch, except like set bonuses it was a mistake and never, ever used again, instead replaced with the vastly superior KotH, which has all of the good sides of Arena (Competiting over one central cap point, small compact maps that direct the flow to one area, etc) without kicking you in the face every 10 seconds and saying "No. Go sit in time out. You don't get to play."

What if I don't like Counter-Strike's aesthetic? What if I don't have the twitch aim to succeed in that environment? I should go get stuffed?

Here's the other place where your argument falls apart. Nobody is forcing you to play. If arena gets voted in, and you'd rather not participate, either alt-tab and watch youtube or something for ten minutes, or go find another server. The majority picked something you don't like; that's how pure democracy works. You may not like it, but unless you can persuade people to your side of things, it isn't changing.

I should note that coming out swinging with "IF YOU LIKE ARENA YOU'RE WRONG AND SHOULD UNINSTALL" is unlikely to win you much favor with the people who enjoy it.

A) Almost everyone here has some bitching going on about egypt this or degroot that. I literally don't give a fuck.

That's great! I also feel that way. People don't give non-standard maps enough of a chance. I, personally, love that feeling of exploring a new custom, only to have a heavy drop down out of nowhere and horribly murder me. Or to be capping an unfamilar point at half health only to see a sniper's hat appear in some forgotten little corner, and be forced to abandon the cap to go find health. These are fresh, novel experiences.

In contrast, I have played enough goldbowlwaterward to last a fucking lifetime. I know every nook and cranny on those maps, and it is extraordinarily rare for something new and surprising to happen while playing them. Yet the rest of the server doesn't feel that way. So every night we play the same maps, with occasional swaps here and there to create the illusion of variety. It's been this way since the beginning. I don't see it changing now.

1) Unexplained fuckery with the server. A few nights ago, we logged on, every weapon had different stats. No list, no warning, nothing. Given that the first action of half the server when this happened was "Figure out why and reverse it", I'm going to call this one "Not just me."

That's entirely on GM. He has a reputation for doing stuff like that on a whim; see sentry-jumping for a less meta example. From what I understand, he had intended to get everything back to normal, but apparently it didn't stick. You have a problem with it, ping him on steam directly.

So yeah. Not a whole lot bothers me, and what does bother me, I don't see the point in "sitting on it." I see the point in going "HEY. THIS SHIT BOTHERS ME." and seeing if I can affect some change to where it doesn't.

Which is why I'm telling you now. Bahamut wants this server to accomodate the entire community. That community has consistently expressed a conservative bent in their map choices, and there are certain popular members who enjoy arena. Taking away their fun so you won't be inconvenienced by it is unlikely to happen.

[Bleck]

Here's where your argument falls apart. Some people find failure fun. Dark Souls recently came out on Steam and has pushed several million copies in that time. DS is significantly harder and more punishing than TF2.

so what you're saying here is that because dark souls is on steam that people should therefore be okay with sitting around not playing tf2 at a time when they would like to be playing tf2

[Clefairy]

so what you're saying here is that because dark souls is on steam that people should therefore be okay with sitting around not playing tf2 at a time when they would like to be playing tf2

No, I'm saying that it's a valid playstyle that some amount of players enjoy, which is why they specifically seek out arena maps. People who hate Arena as much as Lyrai are a vocal minority, at least among OCR regulars, and to make a meaningful difference on the 'should Arena get played here' issue, she needs to get more people on her side. The extremely aggressive manner in which she makes her point about it makes this unlikely.

Also, presh came on last night. Shit was awesome.

Edited August 19, 2013 by Clefairy

[Bahamut]

Also, presh came on last night. Shit was awesome.

I missed this .

I shall be on shortly to kick off some good old TF2 action!

[Bleck]

No, I'm saying that it's a valid playstyle that some amount of players enjoy,

what about it other than that some people like it makes it valid

or more to the point, why do you think that the fact that some people like it means that anyone who dislikes it because of its exclusionary nature is somehow wrong to feel that way

do you really think that the server would be ruined if perhaps a change was made to accommodate a vocal minority of people who by all accounts have every reason to be dissatisfied with a game mode that largely involves sitting around not doing anything

[Clefairy]

what about it other than that some people like it makes it valid

or more to the point, why do you think that the fact that some people like it means that anyone who dislikes it because of its exclusionary nature is somehow wrong to feel that way

do you really think that the server would be ruined if perhaps a change was made to accommodate a vocal minority of people who by all accounts have every reason to be dissatisfied with a game mode that largely involves sitting around not doing anything

I don't feel anything one way or the other. I like a little Arena, but I'm as likely to spec or quit if it comes up as play it out. I'm simply stating, this is the way things are. If Lyrai can convince Bahamut to take arena off the server, I'm fine with that. If things stay as they are, I'm also fine with that.

The matter, at present, is merely democratic. Off the top of my head, among the regular crowd, I count 6 people who like/love arena, 2 who dislike/despise it, 3 who tolerate it, and everyone else doesn't seem to care enough to voice an opinion.

[Brushfire]

and everyone else doesn't seem to care enough to voice an opinion.

I voice the sports cast.