October 2010 Newsletter!
Halloween Edition!
So it’s October once again! The month where we’ve traditionally had some of best community events of the year! This year we are trying to bring you the same fun events and mods, but with a couple new things to mix it up, so read on below to find out!
The Haunted Pound!
So every Halloween since TFP was founded we’ve tried to host a Halloween fun event for our players. This has traditionally consisted of running ZombieFort on one of our servers and just goofing off. This year we are expanding our event a bit!
- Zombie Fort is Back! We are bringing back Zombiefort to be run on server #8 and a yet to be determined secondary server, which we will announce shortly! For those that haven’t played it before, Zombiefort pit’s a small team of survivors against an ever growing Undead Army. This time Zombiefort comes with Perks and special abilities to help the survivors last a bit longer! We encourage you guys to try out the mod, as it’s been a community favorite every year! ZF will be hosted 24/7 on #8, and intermittently on #6 whenever the maps are voted to be played.
- Halloween Screenshot Contest! So we wanted to try and make this years October event bigger, with something new and interesting for the community. To this end we have decided to hold a Halloween themed Screenshot contest for the community, complete with prizes! Full rules will be detailed below!
- New and Interesting maps and mods for Alien Swarm and L4D! While we can’t actually host a server for these two games, due to having such a large community and the servers being so small, we can help raise awareness about extremely good maps and mods for them, and give you guys the links to try them out yourselves! This being the scary Halloween event time, we thought these two games fit in nicely, so here’s our list of the best Mods and Maps for these games!
Alien Swarm Maps
Paranoia Part One
Paranoia Part Two
Paranoia Part Three
Left 4 Dead 2 Maps
Halloween SCREAMshot Contest!
Alright! So this is our big contest we’ve been planning! Are you interested in showing off your artistic talent? Want one of those fancy polycount hats you see everyone wearin’? Then you should try entering our TFP Screenshot Contest! Rules are pretty simple!
Goal: To make the best Halloween Themed in-game Screenshot you can think of! It can be scary, comical, anything you like so long as it involves TF2 or Garry’s Mod!
Media Used: Screenshot must be taken in either TF2 or Garry’s Mod! Going the extra distance for style and setup is preferred! Photo manipulation and other various methods of “arting” up the screenshots are allowed, but we would really like to see what people can do without Photoshop and similar programs!
Submission Rules: ONE (1) Submission per person only, sent to tfpscreenshot@gmail.com. Each submission received will be given a number which is sent back to the creator, judges will not have the names of who submitted each image, just their corresponding number. Please provide your Steam ID when you submit your image, if you don’t know your Steam ID, use this webpage to get it!
Deadline: Deadline for submission will be the 29th of October, winners will be announced on the 31st!
Judging: Judges will be selected randomly from 3 admins who wish to participate, and 3 members who wish to participate as well. If you wish to be one of the judges, send me a message on steam and I will add you to the list of candidates. Of course judges will not be allowed to submit an image, sorry!
Since the addition of trading, we can now give out Prizes!
First Place: One Full Polycount Set of the Winners Choice! Including the HAT!
Second Place: One Hat and One Paintcan of their choosing from our supply of donated hats!
Third Place: One Nametag and One Paintcan of their choosing.
We encourage everyone to submit something and try to win the prizes! Other things might show up while playing on the event servers, who knows what we might do!
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Upcoming Server Changes
No huge radical changes this month for the how the servers work. I tweaked the maplist on server #6 to reflect the opinions I have been getting from players on some of the maps, so if you play on #6 consistently you might see some of the maps which no one enjoyed are now gone.
TFP Minecraft Server
So we know many of you are anxious about the status of the TFP Minecraft server, since it hsa been down for the last week or so, but I am here to tell you that we are fixing it, and it should soon be up on a separate server than where it was before. Sumigaki is currently in the process of transferring all the relevant files over to a new box and should be hosting it soon! More information to come as we have it! Also Caigan would like you all to know that asking him about the Minecraft server will result in him bludgeoning you with a Creeper. That is all.
TFP Public Service Announcement
Alright, so we’ve got a few issues we’d like to sort out with folks on the servers, so we’ve made this helpful little section!
- Trading on the Servers: Please do not join the servers just to spam that you are looking for trades. We’ve set up a lovely trading forum here. If you have to trade in the server, please do it while dead or during setup as to not penalize your team for your wanton trading ways!
- Glitching: Fun “glitches” and bugs that appear after each patch. We are not in the habit of making announcements every time Valve breaks the game with their latest patch. If you’ve heard of a glitch or bug which allows you to do things way outside of what you are supposed to be doing, please do not test it on our servers. We do not like it when people abuse bugs and glitches on our server, ESPECIALLY if it is a bug which can possibly crash the servers. We do not warn for these things, we assume our players are intelligent enough to not use the glitches on our servers. If we catch you doing things which could be deemed harmful to the servers, you could very quickly find your TFP privileges revoked. If you simply MUST test the glitches, we suggest other servers for that. :)
The Future!
So next up for us, after we finish the Halloween event should be another maptest. Our last maptest was in June, so we are due to add some new fresh maps to the servers for folks to test out. We are always looking for new maps and ideas, and if you have something you think would fit well with the TFP servers, we encourage you to hit up the forums and submit it to us here! Other than that, we are still seeking new and interesting games to expand into, and should have more information on that next time. Finally, I am offically switching the newsletter over to an every other month newsletter, since that is how I seem to be writing it anyways, and it’s really hard to find cool stuff to talk about EVERY month! We need rest too! Anyways, hope you enjoy the events!
- Sekh the Scribe Burd
