TFP January 2010 Newsletter!
Hey folks, I’m going to try to put together a newsletter for the servers every month full of interesting and new things that are coming to the servers, upcoming events, and a mailbag of….things, that we in the admin staff receive on a daily basis. So lets get things started!
Upcoming Server Events:
Prophunt: Prophunt has been rescheduled for the 22nd of January through whenever people get tired of it. We had to cancel it because Valve pushed through the WAR update during our scheduled time. The instructions will be posted in a separate post, though you if you don’t know what prophunt is, I suggest viewing this video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9U8q30UmeU
Upcoming Server Changes:
We will be experimenting with a new Scramble plugin for the servers to alleviate the problems with stacking as well as people forcing autobalance through spectate. The new plugin will protect certain classes from being force autobalanced (such as medics with an ubercharge), and will not allow players who are autobalanced to join spectate until the round is over. Players will still be able to rejoin a team if it will not force an autobalance, the plugin will simply prevent players from spectating to force autobalance.
The new plugin will use varying parameters on how to determine if the server needs a scramble, as well as allowing for the traditional vote of “stt” (now named scramble) to prompt one as well. Once we have the plugin working, it will be pushed through to all servers. Comments on how well it works are encouraged on the forums.
Players of the Month
So I’m trying a new thing, just to give a thank you to players who have helped us out here with various problems with the servers. Player of the Month awards will go to people that help the Admin staff out with things, not to ingame skill.
First award goes to..
Biofreak – For catching 2 speedhackers and numerous trolls on demos and providing fast reports with steam ID’s to the admin staff. Good work keeping server #3 safe for the rest of the players! Thanks from all of us in the staff!
The second award goes to…
iller – For finding and documenting a new STT plugin which we have been searching for desperately to try and alleviate complaints of stacking. This is the plugin being tested later this week! Thanks again iller! Hopefully it works out properly!
Final award for this month goes to…
The crew of players who helped us test the extremely boring STT plugin that we have implemented across the servers. Thanks a lot everyone that came, especially Snippo, Articwuffeh, John the dragon and Devvy for staying to the final anti-climactic ending.
Mailbag Posting
So we thought it might be funny to drop some of the mail we receive from permabanned players and the stupid things they say for you guys to see some of the stupidity we have to deal with. Names have been removed where applicable.
So first up is something that was posted on the forums. After being banned for trolling for 3 or 4 months constantly, someone decided they were going to “get 4chan to destroy us”. As ridiculous as this is, we kept an eye on it and beefed up server security. Eventually he came back to post the link to his 4chan thread with the line “Say goodbye to TFP”. This is the final page before it was deleted from 4chan and he was banned for 3 days. Enjoy.
http://www.thefurrypound.org/asdasd/185761458.htm
Next is a reply we got from someone who thought it would be fun to spawn camp the doors on Steel. Now keep in mind, that the poster was simply warned, and after they continued, kicked a single time. No tempban, just kicked and told to read the rules. This was the results. I’ll post pieces of it as they were something like 12 pages long. This was the first PM we received, complete with commentary by myself to clear up some things.
http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j158/ … ntary1.jpg
After a long bout of arguing over…really nothing, he was eventually banned for his trouble of being completely crazy. This was his final reply though, saved for your enjoyment.
http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j158/ … ntary2.png
He was subsequently banned and indeed made good on his promise to use proxy servers to circumvent his ban and harass the forums…for all of 5 minutes before we turned on Administrators must approve new members at which point he cried foul and disappeared.
The Future!
So this final section is for things we are looking into for the future. Things in this section are VERY much in the planning/idea stage. They might never work, we still have to see if the coding in TF2 works, or talk with outside sources on how to get them to function properly, but I thought I’d share with you guys some of our ideas we are working on.
Player Teacher Nights Return!
We are bringing back player teacher nights at the request of some of our members! We will be scheduling a Scout night, hosted by Zareth, and a Pyro night hosted by our moderator Austin for players to learn interesting and tricky strategies involving these classes. Any other players interested in hosting their own teacher nights are encouraged to send either Sekh or Jinx a private message regarding the class in question. Times will be posted later this month.
We are looking into various things to make our servers more interesting. Some sort of TFP tournament is a current idea for our more competitively oriented players. Also looking into the possibility of a TFP DJ system for a player to guide music on the servers (optional of course, we wouldn’t force our terrible music choices onto people that didn’t want them.) We are looking into the possibility of a Randomizer event in the future, as scouts with miniguns is just too funny to pass up. I’m personally looking into the creation of some sort of dropbox for suggestions/ideas that people might have as well. We are also looking into expanding TFP into new games, anyone with interesting server ideas drop a line on the forum post that will be linked to this newsletter!
Finally, our biggest planned update is something we aren’t prepared to reveal until we are sure we can get it to work, but the member helping us is just too excited and so I thought I’d throw out some teaser images. BEHOLD!
Anyways! That’s it for this month, drop us a line here if you like the Newsletter and want to see it continued next month.
- Sekh the Scribe Burd.
