red had a 25s spawn on dustbowl last caps if i remember it right.

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Comfortably Numb

well why dont we just make the servers 24/7 2fort instant respawn. Nah just kidding

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"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving."

Red also has a shorter way to the last cap points than Blu and its easier to survive as Red unless you're being totally retarded.

What kinda made it impossible to play with default spawn times imo was the implemention of lvl3 teleporters. It makes it completely impossible to defend because there's a constant stream of enemies coming into you cause it only takes them ~5-10sec to get back to the battlefield (depending on the teleporter's placement). Yet playing with shortened spawntimes still makes it pretty hard for the attackers so its really hard to balance out.

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All roads may lead to Rome, but all Wikipedia pages eventually get you to the Third Reich. - m3n

After playing a horribly stuck game today, I've implemented the following changes:

*reduced max players from 26 to 24 (excluding reserved slots)
*raised respawn time from 50% to 80%
*disabled lvl 3 sentries on all ctf maps
*disabled random damage and weapon spread
*fixed sudden death melee


I'll look into adding some more maps to the mapcycle.

/cheer

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Comfortably Numb

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All roads may lead to Rome, but all Wikipedia pages eventually get you to the Third Reich. - m3n

Can we have swamp maps ? :3

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"The bots came, saw Saints post count and gave up instantly."-[SpA]futari

go demm . Have been wanting to have the melee sudden death back for a long time

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"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving."

Interesting indeed :)
Looking forward to new maps, preferably a few swamp themed ^^

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"There is a simple, logical explanation... and there is nothing under the bed.”

Aye, the swamp maps do look nice. Any thought been given to us hosting some Highlander games? I'd be pretty interested to see how it plays

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

We can have highlander events, like we did have in the past, but I doubt a public server with that configuration will be able to maintain a player base!

Give us back the overtime nagging!

And atm dead peoples chat is displayed twice.

Okay; I wanted to rant about this earlier, but I thought I would give it a day in court. To whit, I have played for some time today in order to try and fully appreciate the changes you have made.

While I could wax both lyrical and prosaic about them, allow me to summarise: They fucking suck.

I say this with all due respect, Demm, but without a shadow of a doubt you are killing SpA's TF2 servers even faster then they were dying before. The engie limit is inexcusably redundant and the timer limits are broken and just wrong.

I'm sorry but this is the one and only thing in which I will support Valve: you need to give in to the higher power and put the servers back to normal.

The way they are configured now is just wrong, in every measurable aspect, and the fact that they are empty, what?, 80% of the time proves this.

I love you guys and I really want to play here but for now I simply cannot. I will be on the UKCS servers until further notice, because right now there is no fun to be had on the SpA ones...

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

Great changes demm, howard likes ukcs so I doubt his opinion can be taken seriously! What I would like to see is a vote for crits on off at the start of a map, like HH have.

Nice attitude...

I will play wherever people do not think that they know better than people who balance this game for a living. I also play on HH, smart arse, but their servers have been a bit shonky of late. Good to see we have more TF2 players coming in who don't care for making the game actually balanced, but are concerned for making it balanced with their own play style.

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

The SpA servers are closer to vanilla after the changes then they were before (24man 80%reaspawn from 26man 50% respawn) so your argument makes no sense.
How can you say you want servers to be as close to "valve balance" as possible yet enjoy the 32man spamfest that is ukcs?

My arguments always make sense. Period. If you took the time to fully comprehend what I was saying you may begin to understand that.

It is not a question or spawn timers of player limits; these are things that can disrupt the game but generally will not break it.

The main problem, as I stated quite clearly but you chose to ignore in an attempt to validate you opinion, is class limiters. Limiting classes beyond the obvious (i.e. that there should not be more of, say, 3-4 of each class) is idiotic. At all times. No matter the sentiment.

The game IS balanced. The classes were deliberately and logically constructed to play off and offer counterpoint to each other. Removing an entire class as SpA used to or, as they now do, drastically limiting an entire class is wrong. Always. No matter the intentions. By removing one class you make others more powerful. The issue is not what classes or maps are unbalanced, it is that players are fecking lazy. A well organised team can take down any defence, regardless of the number of engineers and that is simply a fact and not up for debate. Limiting classes because you acknowledge that your regular players are lazy, class-hogging whores is just self detrimental. If SpA had an active TF2 community any more then the issue would not be so apparent.

I believe I can to prove the fact that SpA no longer gives a crap about TF2 by pointing out that, earlier today, when I requested that someone reboot the TF2 servers as they were all furiously lagging and glitching, I got told, in comedic but no less certain terms, to go fuck myself as the reason for my discomfort was that I was not playing Global Agenda.

That is the issue here: you want to have TF2 servers, then have TF2 servers! But they require effort, you see. Quit getting lured away by the next "in" game and give support to the player base you already have.

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

That's all I need to respond to your posts Howard, since, as Marmelada explained perfectly, they're now more vanilla then before and you kill your own argument with that. Of course you come back in a condescending way, like you usually do, thinking you're smarter than everyone else, claiming that someone was too stupid to understand your post, but as seen in the AvP thread, that's just who you are. The fact remains though, that now the servers are closer to the configuration that you prefer than they were before, so it is really strange that you think the changes "fucking suck".


About the crit vote: that is actually not a bad idea. We used to have a no-voting policy on our servers, but we should think about changing that.
We had a no-crits server a year ago, but it wasn't too successful since nobody cared to fill it. That's actually the problem we have now, because Saint stopped idling and now an empty server stays empty. We need to more actively try to fill the servers.

So, if anyone idles for hats, he should do it at our server!

Stalemates for 30 minutes are why I play on ukcs and gtfo!

The only time anyone wins on those servers is due to the massive failure that is the opposing team, not the brilliance/organisation of your own team.

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

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SaintK: I'm completely lost

lol banana

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Comfortably Numb

Ok enough hammering at one another, lets focus on the servers not on each other.

All I know for some of the regs the major complaint was that if you play every night you get sick of playing the same few popular maps all the time (goldrush, dustbowl, granary, gravel pit and then again the same circle). I really liked it when I got on yesterday that there are more maps to be bought again. However my vote would still go to making server 1 a main rotation server and make server 2 a server where you can buy the rest. That way people that only want to play popular maps are happy and peeps that are bored of m are too. For me. I still would like maps like egypt and junction in the buy list for server 2.

What is sheit is that the game lags like fuck. I dont know if thats our servers or my computer or the game in general atm. But maybe someone can check it out, for many have that issue atm.

Have you btw considered the earlier mentioned idea for 3-stages maps?

Honestly, i have no lag :/

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"The bots came, saw Saints post count and gave up instantly."-[SpA]futari

Junction would need some restrictions as its not very fun to play on a large server with lots of people.

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

Yupp prefer a large variety of maps, too.
Have been on different servers and its everywhere the same lag for me. When dying aso, so its not specially a spa-server prob. 156 replies in the steam forum about that prob yesterday when i checked.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=1134130

Maybe that has effected the popularity of the servers? Or is it only me thinking they are not so crowded anymore?

Me and Amyl noticed yesterday that Steel finished after one round and we did a quick cap of E. It went straight to the scoreboard then went to the next map.
Can we get someone to look at this please, there should be at least two rounds of steel, so everyone gets a turn at attacking and defending.

Also, i have to say, engys on turbine are working fine they can still hold the line but they are still fragile - without being useless.

Finally, Its probably not the servers fault and more the map designers fault, but there is something really wrong with goldrush, 1st stage, im really not sure what to suggest, its proof enough that the first stage is badly made as valve already had to update the geometry a while back. What do you guys think? It cant be down to teams, really cause out of the 12 games ive played of goldrush, we only got to the third stage once and that was due to a SpA stack - even then it ended on the first point of the third stage for some reason.

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

Servers are now completely in dead water it seems. Awesome changes!

Also Labor seems to be a map that makes sure the server drops half its player...

I think I need to kick saint and bucky so they come play BF2.

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Da boyz need themselves a Nob they do

The amount of people varied all day, goldrush kind of killed the numbers, same with well.

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

CACTI graphs actually show a downfall in players starting early on in week 3 of 2010, this is before demm had applied any changes.