TFP July 2010 Newsletter!

Special Anthrocon Edition!

Totally not written by a lazy burd who takes forever to get out newsletters.

I don’t want to hear it! Nope! Lazy scribe burd has been in other countries! He has an excuse this time! I swear that I was working the entire 2 month period that there hasn’t been a newsletter, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! Yep. That is my story and I am sticking to it. So here we are! This is a pretty special newsletter full of all sorts of shiny things, so lets jump right in folks!

 

TFP Goes to Anthrocon!

 

So for those of you that haven’t been paying attention to the Fandom for the last few months, Anthrocon, the largest Furry Convention in the world ended last week. For the second year in a row, TFP has held its annual meet and greet in the Zoo area where everyone gets to chat it up and the admins get to ramble incoherently for an hour, as well as get information on what people think of the servers in person. This year we had a total of 30+ people show up for the meet! That is more than an entire server! We had more people at our little group meet up than many of the panels that are actually in the con guide, and there were many people that couldn’t find us so who knows what the total number might have been! We even had to steal a second table to fit everyone. I have a roll call sheet here that I did after we all wandered off, I apologize if I miss your name, I did this while standing in line for 2’s show so I was playing it by ear at this point.

1. Witchiebunny

2. Jinx

3. Nikkyvix

4. Sekh

5. Cmdr Lost

6. Nynnja

7. Pathia

8. Python

9. Draganta

10. Gavyn

11. A.M. Zinthos

12. Cyferwolf

13. Sivren

14. Matty

15. JousterL

16. Zenny

17. NightFurson

18. Pikacha

19. Tersi

20. Kit Kima (Spy!) (Also probably spelling error!)

21. Stryker

22. Artie

23. Shaggy the Batbear

24. Longshot Coyote

25. Kajiwolf

26. SpyingRedFox

27. Kasi the Kittejackal

Special Guest appearance by Aurafox disguised as Nynn’s phone as well!

I know I missed a few people, once again I apologize, it was kinda crazy that day. Here is the only known photo to still exist of the epic TFP Meet up, We apologize for the blur but it was taken by a scout as they sprinted through our lines yelling need a dispenser here….or something.

Next year we are trying to plan something really big and amazing, so stay tuned and as we get closer to that we will release more information on that! It is gonna be awesome!

Among other AC news, TFP member Hali of Firpine a.k.a Matthew Ebel gave an awesome concert on Friday, as someone who hadn’t heard him until then, I highly recommend checking out his webpage, his music is just awesome!

I also only got about 5 admins totally lost in Pittsburgh for about 10 minutes while trying to drive us somewhere! Navigational Burd will find the way! Eventually…..

You folk quite literally wore my voice out by the end of the con, I kept meeting more and more TFP members while wandering around and everyone was just so awesome that I eventually talked myself hoarse, way to go! :P

A final nod to the awesome TF2 Cosplayers that were running around the con, I know a good number of them play on our servers and they had some pretty awesome costumes done, including Radar Nocturn complete with a ginormous solid metal wrench that I have no clue how the Dorsai let him keep that damn thing, but it was awesome none the less. Hope to see all you folk next year!

Upcoming Server Events:

TFP’s Second Birthday and the Return of TFP Fun Server!: Due to popular demand both by players at AC and by you folk on the forums, we have realized just how much people enjoyed the old #3 screw around silly maps server. Also, we realized just how popular server #5 was with its more relaxed atmosphere. To this end we are bringing back this server style permanently by the end of this month in celebration of our second birthday! 2 years and 3000 members have to be right about something! In terms of rules this server will have a complete custom maps list of normal style custom maps (Think maps such as frontier, chaos, etc), as well as its own selection of wacky maps, such as Pacman! The server will have a shorter map timer, a maximum of 20 minutes per map, to alleviate being stuck on maps that a majority of the players may or may not like. We encourage people to send us map ideas, no matter what type of map it is, we promise to look into it for addition to this server. Plugins and the like are subject to change by the time the server comes out but for the most part this should be the final setup. Hope you guys enjoy the new server, expect it by the end of the month!

July Map Removal: Normally these map posts are about testing new maps, getting all sorts of shiny new toys for people to play with on the servers, but this month we are running things a bit differently. It has come to our attention that there are a number of maps on the server which are either just terrible, or kill the server due to their complexity or large download size. To help alleviate this the admin staff have constructed a list of these maps which we will be putting up for vote later today and it will last for 2 weeks, at which point the polls will be reviewed by the admins to see which maps stay and go. I won’t post an entire list here but if you wish to participate in the poll, and honestly, TFP as a whole, you will need to register on the forums at so that you can take part in things like this. The poll will be broken up into two phases over the course of two weeks or so to give people time to read both of them and vote.">so that you can take part in things like this. The poll will be broken up into two phases over the course of two weeks or so to give people time to read both of them and vote.

 

The first poll can be found Here

 

Upcoming TFP Server Changes:

Counter-Strike Server: Due to demand from a large number of players, we have just finished the creation of our very own Counter-Strike Source server! Currently it is running normal CSS, with the full stock map list as well as a large number of custom maps. For the time being we will be running the default game mode, if there is enough demand for it, or the normal game modes do not garner enough players, we will look into the addition of a Gungame server at a later date. For now, enjoy the CSS server safe in the knowledge that annoying children and complete jackoffs will be swiftly hit in the face with a giant damn hammer. Normal server rules apply in terms of behavior of course. We are accepting ideas on the map rotation so if something is terrible and we have it, or awesome and we don’t, friend me and toss me a line!

IP for the TFP CSS Server – 208.115.128.10:27043

Removal of the Bad Company 2 Server: Sorry folks, the server simply wasn’t getting enough use from TFP members to warrant us continuing to pay for it at the ridiculous prices that EA charges. We will have to see what the future brings in terms of this game, if they release dedicated servers which do not require us to RENT the server from them, and instead allow us to host it on our own boxes (of which we have many of excellent quality!), then we will see about bringing this back.

TFP Public Service Announcement:

So we have implemented a new system of Banning people. I tell you all this because the system uses this lovely automated program which allows for players to check our bans, why bans were made, and most importantly, allows for players to mail us demos using the “Submit a Demo” button! This means no more juggling your demos of speedhacker and trying to upload them to other websites for us to review! Now you can simply submit them directly to us with the button at the top! We hope people will record more demos now that its much easier to send them to us!

Among other things that you can do with this handy tool is if for some god forsaken reason you have received a ban from us, you can protest the ban using the “Protest Ban” function. We hope all of you folk never have to use this button, especially after I met so many of you and you were all so very cool, so lets not ruin that ^_^.

Sourcebans can be found Here

 

Members of the Month

The award goes to..

Every single member who came to AC and took the time to either go to the TFP meet up or find a TFP admin/member and talk with them. Seriously, you guys were awesome and made that convention amazingly fun, hats off to all of you.

Honorable mention

On a personal note, This is my newsletter and I can honor who I want! Honorable mention goes to JousterL and Zenny for teaching me how to Rave at the AC dance. Next year I’LL bring the glowsticks!

 

Mailbag Posting

 

Nothing new here, only thing of note in the last month was someone on 4chan attempting to troll the group by posting our the IP addresses for our servers to get them to harass us. Some 200 posts later, we’ve now come to the conclusion that a majority of that thread are all closet TFP players due to the inordinately large number of people telling the original poster to go to hell, or admitting they’ve played here from time to time. Enjoy the servers you guys! :P

 

Banned.

 

Lovely! For one month out of the year when all the Admins are away getting totally drun—I mean, doing our damndest to improve the servers for all players while at AC…. noone does anything extraordinarily dumb and gets themselves hit with a hammer! I love you guys!

The Future!

 

The future seems pretty bright for all of us here at TFP, we had an awesome turnout at AC (Twice what we had last year), the servers are always full of cool and new players, to the point that we’ve had to once again expand our server list to accommodate all of you! Once again I’m probably driving the tech admins up the walls with my constant running around like a madman going, “And then we can try THIS game! And what about a plugin that does THIS on THIS server!” but then again, two years and none of the servers have exploded for any extremely long period of time, so you guys better thank all our tech admins for keeping this place so nice and clean, they don’t get enough credit as is! Again, any ideas you guys have for games, server plugins, group events, advertisements, art, drinks that Sekh can consume at his next con, maps, articles for the TFP website, and anything else along those lines please drop me or one of the other admins a line and we will see what we can do! Hopefully Augusts’ newsletter doesn’t take so damn long right? :D

– Sekh the Scribe Burd.

P.S. I wasn’t aware so many of you guys read this! Thanks for all the nice things you said about it, I never know if people are reading them since its so hard to get comments on it ^_^.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Announcements, Team Fortress 2, TFP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.