[Hell-met]

Your first point is invalid, because you are a butthurt medic with a massive ego.


The rest, I agree 100%. Kudos.

[sdogg2m]

Your first point is invalid, because you are a butthurt medic with a massive ego.


The rest, I agree 100%. Kudos.

Thanks for the Kudos on the rest.

My first point has to do with the community being sourceops strong point as thus people log on to play with their friends. You can't force people to play on opposite teams (I hope you realize this). They will either play elsewhere or just try other games.

I was on one morning when a regular was scolded for team swapping. The admin told him he was handing out bans for people who did that consistently. The regular said he would just stop playing the server. You may think, "who needs that guy anyway," but he is not in the minority. TF2 is a hobby, no one needs to play this game, they do it for enjoyment. If admins feel its in there best interest to even teams even if that divides up steam friends then you will lose community members.

[JamaicanTJX]

As one of the old timers, I must say autoscramble hurts, and no admin hurts.

WHERES NOBODY!?!?!??!?! Im sure he has enough on his hands with a toddler running around.

I also think that its not just sourceOP but tf2 in general feels like its on the decline. Less and less people on my friends list are still playing tf2, and its not just because of the lack of competitiveness on sourceOP.

It has been a long and good run though. SourceOP has fostered some great friendships and competitive game play. I appreciate DF for all the stuff he has gone through to keep us happy and these servers going. I just hope that this 24/7 Goldrush doesnt die (RIP Q Clan).

God forbid we have to play with those Lotus noobs.

[Hell-met]

Your first point is invalid, because you are a butthurt medic with a massive ego.


The rest, I agree 100%. Kudos.

Thanks for the Kudos on the rest.

My first point has to do with the community being sourceops strong point as thus people log on to play with their friends. You can't force people to play on opposite teams (I hope you realize this). They will either play elsewhere or just try other games.

I was on one morning when a regular was scolded for team swapping. The admin told him he was handing out bans for people who did that consistently. The regular said he would just stop playing the server. You may think, "who needs that guy anyway," but he is not in the minority. TF2 is a hobby, no one needs to play this game, they do it for enjoyment. If admins feel its in there best interest to even teams even if that divides up steam friends then you will lose community members.

Yes, but it's called stacking, steamrolling and even circlejerking.

Ultimately it ends up in many players leaving and hurting the server.

You are hurting the server for your own personal fun.

[karlamarx]

1. Auto scramble - well I partly aggree it`s annoying. But then so is endless steamrolling. Recently I`ve been playing a payload rotation server that has scramblevote, scramble on a steam roll and autobalance is enabled, so even tho I play with a friend we will at least get the first round together, and if it`s stacked and scrambled it`s only a few rounds till the next map and we can get back onto the same team.

Which leads me to aggree with making Gold Rush a payload map. Making a best of server sounds good too.

2. Lag is not fun, although I`ve only occasionally had issues.

3. Subforums seems like a good idea.

4. yes to more admis.

5. yes to speccing.

[sdogg2m]

If Gold Rush goes to a payload rotation and the time frame for each session is shortened then scramble becomes less of an issue.

I am not sure how you can claim that team stacking hurts server performance as the servers are LESS populated since the feature was implemented. The question remains if the decline is due to a tf2 decline in general or the scramble feature in particular. The result is clear: fewer people are populating the servers.

--- On a personal note: ---

I guess this can be attributed to my "massive ego" but I win just as much with the auto-scramble function. The issue is I no longer am guaranteed time gaming with friends. Also, winning and losing no longer matters on Gold Rush or 2fort. If people think they are on the inferior team then they just throw in the towel knowing that a scramble will take place soon.

[DataStorm]

hmm, I join servers because friends are on it, and I want to play with them, if a server plugin stops me from that, I don't play there. quite simple.

A community I played with, implemented auto-scramble, it scrambled every time. and often just messed up my play together with 1 or more friends.

Yes at times its fun to play against friends, but at least I want the choice.

I cant remember if I stated it here before or somewhere else. but stacking teams happens on both sides always. to me that makes gameplay way more intense because small teams on both teams are just waging war on each in the game. the individual play is just fine for spy's, way easier for them.

example, I play often medic on blue, I medic my friends, and heal anybody, go with the flow, look how they set out, and uber the class thats needed to uber. On red, I play often engy, and friends all of the sudden stay around as pyro with the homewrecker etc spy checking. or blast away stickies, rockets etc. I place my stuff there where its most handy to them to tank and have a overview.

when I'm not on the team with the friends, nobody does clean the backyard, and help out to keep it free from spy's or pushthru's... no pyro just sweeps the area with fire or w/e

A community I played a lot on, decided to try out a auto-team join plugin, and a auto-scrambler... I mostly never got to play with friends, and lost my fun there because playing medic for who"m? sure I can get my heavy on top of the scoreboard, but most of my friends are decent players... and know I uber when they realy go down in health, not 10 seconds BEFORE we meet anybody. Its the small things that are quite logical with playing with friends that make it a enjoyable experience. when preventing that, ppl will look elsewhere.
Due to above, I cant find a server anymore with more than 1-2 friends on it. A shame really, I've played in above mentioned community with like 15 friends on it, devided over both teams. they all moved to other servers.

as for forum changes... I don't think each server should have its own subforum or w/e. General chat subforum here is the home for all servers... not handy to split the community based on what server they play on.

if servers are empty, maybe ppl should try to start the server more often, by having a small group jump on the server, play till there are 20 ppl on, and then move on to the next server to fill that one
its what I did with admins on servers. on the right time, it fills a server in 20 minutes. The map rotation after should make sense tho... but can't really comment on that for sourceop because I don't play on it and really have no idea what rotations are on it.

tl;dr: autoscrambling/autoteam joining etc hurt the community on the servers. Fill teams on servers, forum changes: nah.

[post]

Greetings

I would like to add my 2 cents to this topic.

The autoscramble is a pain, I also try to play with friends and we keep getting switch around, and by the time we think its settled and were ok, BOOM one of us gets switched again.

I think the autobalance is a good feature SOMETIMES.

but most of the time, its a nuisance and it makes me crazy.

I 2 have also noticed significant lag, and the server just acts goofy from time to time, sometimes its so bad that its just not playable. For example about 2 weeks ago, I would connect to the 24/7 goldrush and within 5 min my game would just freeze up, I could hear people still playing but I was completely froze.

I disconnected and joined another server, and played for about 30 min. Smooth as silk. I re-join source and got lag with an eventual freeze. That problem has cleared up for me, but I doubt very much it was on my end. I have played on many other servers with zero problems.

I usually play on the 24/7 goldrush server but it does get repetative after some time. It would be nice to play some of the other cart maps once in a while.

Now I certanly dont meant to upset anybody or to piss anybody off. Please dont take it that way. Source is THE SHOW. I enjoy playing with and against, the leet players that hang out on the source servers. Please take this for what it is, some constructive feed back from an end user.

Post

[Wendel]

I totally agree with sdogg2m.

I dont know about the others sourceop server but, even without auto-scramble goldrush used to work well. Let me explain.

Team stack happened? Sure. A lot of times. But after a couple of rounds people started to switch between teams* and then without noticing, the team were balanced again.

*people leaving to the stack team, and good people from stack team going to the other team.

There are some reasons I dont like auto-scramble:
- As stated before, some people join a server (and the team) his friends are playing. Autoscramble make it almost impossible to play with someone you would like to.
- If Im attacking this round, I want to the defend the next one. With scramble you may attack 3 times in a row.
- After a couple of rounds, your team adapt and become really competitive. After the scramble you will probably see your team full of snipers and without medic. All medics went to the other team. Or the opposite, your team with 6 medics.
- Completing what I said above, after a few rounds you know what your engineer is planning to do (or did), how your medic works and who you may follow or not. With scramble you have to re-learn how the players in your team play.

I do also like the idea of GoldRush becoming a Payload Rotation. I love payload.

[Drunken F00l]

I will admit goldrush and the other servers on that box (vm2, arena, prophunt) are suffering from lag issues. The server can't even maintain a 66 update rate. Part of this is Valve's problem. It could be solved by throwing more hardware at the problem, but remember, this box was once good at running TF2. I'll see what I can do about getting the server frame/update rate back up (which will also slightly reduce pings), but there's not a whole lot I can do besides bug Valve.

Getting another machine at this point would be suicide for the server since we'd have to get new IP addresses and we saw what happened when 2fort no mods switched IP. That server lost of all the late-night players because most of them were foreigners and probably didn't know good English and missed out on the memo that the server was changing IP. That and when a server suddenly dissapears off your favorite list, most people won't spend a whole lot of time tracking it down when they have other options on their favorites already.

The lag spikes (the half second or so of unresponsiveness) are something I need to investigate more, but I suspect they have to do with slow disk access when flushing logs and reading player sprays. This is probably something I can solve without Valve's help so more information about it would be helpful.

All that said, keep in mind some people just don't know what the hell they're talking about. Walk into any pub at any time and ask if anybody else is getting lag too. Somebody always says "yes."

In response to your points about community growth, yes there are definitely some improvements that could be made. I don't have the time to run 400 events every year and hire dozens of new admins, and finding other trustworthy individuals who can handle it is ... difficult. There are far too many people, even worse than Hell-met, who just get way out of control with the power. You're always free to recommend somebody (just don't recommend yourself -- asshole).

If I make separate forums for each individual server, how is that going to help? I foresee about one post per week in each. It's not helpful that people don't recognize the website for the SourceOP.com server they are playing on is SourceOP.com. Maybe that's my fault? Though I don't see how...

What's wrong with the Flame Bucket? None of the threads there are flames at community members.

You are hurting the server for your own personal fun.

Hell-met is correct here. Part of the reason the goldrush server has had a steep decline in players is because of the regulars' incessant whining. What attracts players more? A group of players having a light conversation over voice chat and participating in team work (see Valve maps 1) or a server full of people who aren't communicating and on the offchance they do are bitching about how terrible their team is or how there aren't enough fucking people on the cart or how there are too many fucking snipers or how they hate how stacked the teams are right now or how auto scramble sucks balls.

God forbid we have to play with those Lotus noobs.

There's a reason they're noobs. You may not realize it, but these servers use a combination of fake players and bots (disguised as real players!) to steal players away from other servers. For example, if a Lotus server has 26 players in it, it will show 32/33 in the server list. People, naturally being attracted to a crowd, join this server first and then when they see teams are only 13v13 don't do anything about it because it's close enough.

Second, half the players are probably bots anyways. These servers maintain a bot quota of something like 16 players (and show 23 in the server browser) and will disguise the bots as real players with real SteamIDs. Don't believe it? I'll get proof for you sometime or you can just see for yourself at around midnight when all of the Lotus servers have players with identical names.

It's completely dishonest but clearly the population is too stupid to notice and thus it works. It'd be easy enough to implement, but I think it would hurt in the long run.