TFP February 2010 Newsletter!
Hey everyone, time for my second installment of the TFP Newsletter, little late this month since we have been working on some important things which I will go into greater detail below. Hope everyone is having a great month, and hopefully some of the things below will make it more interesting.
Upcoming Server Events:
Player Teacher Nights for February: No game play mods this month, as the month is a little shorter and we decided to let prophunt run for a few extra weeks since it was so popular. So this month we have two separate players who want to give a lecture of sorts on their preferred classes. The two nights, with dates to be announced soon are, Pyro Night hosted by Moderator Anti-Austin, full of interesting tricks on how to best ambush and incinerate various classes. and, Scout Night hosted by Zareth, who will hopefully shed some light on why the scout is so hyper.
Upcoming TF2 Server Changes:
Alright, so here’s our big changes.
We know many players are experiencing the lag issues on servers 1/2/4. This is caused by a few things, most of them are caused by the number of people attempting to join these servers instead of the others. In an attempt to alleviate this issue as well as provide our players with more servers to spread themselves across, We are initiating the following changes.
Server #6 will be moving to the Americas. It has come to our attention that the European players simply play on servers 1/2/4 anyways instead of #6, so we will be moving #6 to a to be decided area of the United States, and keeping its config, so it will be a stock server the same as #4, but keeping No Crit and No Spread. Hopefully this will give people more stock options, as well as a more agreeable ping for this interested in a No crit server.
Next big change is that Server #5 will no longer be members only except during events, or when we decide that it needs to be. It will keep all other settings, effectively making it a clone of #1/2. This should give people more options for custom style servers that seem to be so popular amongst our players. #5 has been empty except during events, so this change shouldn’t affect people much.
Map Changes – We will be implementing a change in map rotation soon to remove maps that simply aren’t being played, or kill servers when they appear because of dislike. There will be a vote on the maps to be removed on the forums once we decide on a final list, so if you really want a map removed, or kept, you will need to register on the forums and make your opinions known. This change will extend to certain stock maps from the custom servers (1/2/5), since there are certain stock maps that empty the servers out.
New Server/Game
In response to the recent interest in a new game for TFP, we began a search for what people might be interested in last month. After reading through the posts, we are ready to try our latest idea in Non-TF2 games. We will be adding a new server to our collection which will only be used for HL2 Source Mods. This server will rotate every 2 – 3 weeks to a new Mod which will be decided by player interest. After a mod has been played awhile, an announcement will be made and players can download the next mod in the rotation and play that for awhile. Hopefully we can keep interest up through varying the play style of each mod. We will be running this server as long as interest is maintained in the servers style.
Players with interesting new ideas on which sourcemods we should try are encouraged to post in our thread regarding future TFP games located here: http://www.hiddendisguises.com/Forums/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1662
First Mod – The first mod we will be running is the recently released over Steam – Pirates, Vikings, and Knights II. It has a similar playstyle to TF2 in that it is a team based game with humorous classes and interesting maps. I highly suggest downloading it and trying it out with us, if you don’t know what it is, try watching the video below!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoK9kGZVZlE
Members of the Month
Renamed to members of the month as it’s not based on actually playing.
The award goes to..
Gami/Axel – For helping keep new players informed on the rules of the chat room and deal with the people who decide they simply don’t want to play nice with the rules. Thanks for the assistance guys, its much easier on us to not have to watch over it every second of the day.
Honorable Mention
Munch – Munch gets an honorable mention for being the first person to suggest PVK2 as a mod we could try on the forums, although he wasn’t the only person to do so, he was the first to post it. Thanks for the info Munch, hopefully it works out well this month!
Mailbag Posting
So this month, the mailbag is dominated by a single person. Someone so insane that they have an entire section dedicated to them. I thought of editing this up into some sort of epic story, but decided instead that simply giving you the pastebin and a simple description was the only way to do this justice. You will simply have to make your own opinions on the insanity that is this man.
Some names redacted by request of the people that sent the logs to us. Name of the guilty changed. Entire thing had to be pastebinned as it was far too long for this simple newsletter.
The First Signs – This was the first thing we received from this person, it was totally out of nowhere, hence the confusion.
The Confrontation – Here he was requesting information about his ban. We attempted to inform him of it, and it kind of…went downhill from there.
The Tragic Truth – The truth comes out, plus more insanity. Insanity the likes of which I have never before seen. Warning – Super long.
tl;dr version – We had an insane kid who thought he was a super spy in a hacker shadow war, complete with super computers such as NOVASTRIKE who wanted us to believe that his phishing attempts for account information where not him at all, but instead some sort of crazy super hacker who was stealing his account information in an attempt to destroy steam. Or c4 a house. Or something. Just read the thing. It’s worth it.
The Future!
There are a lot of changes this time around, so the future is mainly just making sure we don’t break anything with all the different things we have done this month. We are looking into a possible Randomizer event for TF2, as well as working more on the TFP Achievements. More information on those two things in March.
Well, that’s that for the February newsletter, hopefully it helped clear up some things as well as give you guys some information on the exciting new changes we are putting through. Same as last month, comments are always appreciated either on the forums or on the announcement thread.
Sekh the Scribe Burd.
