Server proposal

[goosmurf]

I am guilty of playing mostly on what was formerly PL&R / Payload & Grapes servers. PL&R has shut down and the community servers that have sprung up with similar settings & rotations have their own annoyances which presents an opportunity to bring back some of the old #14 and #25 community, as well as other ex-PL&R players.

The things that made PL&R great:

• rotation - Goldrush, Badwater, Hoodoo, Frontier, Dustbowl even
• class limits - 2 spy, 2 sniper, no other limits
• auto-scramble -- this only kicked in if the winning:losing team frag ratios were way out of kilter; alternatively players could also !votescramble
• community -- I put this last because although a significant part of PL&R the community aspect can't be forced and forms because the settings & rotation made it possible to regularly find good games

I'm aware that the community of #14 and #25 pretty much disappeared for various reasons, some claiming that it was the forced teams that did it. The thing that worked about the auto-scramble on PL&R is that people were free to pick whatever teams they wanted. But if the players were collectively stupid and chose to heavily stack one team then it only took 5 minutes to play one round before the auto-scramble would kick in. So in the worst case you know the game might be **** for 5 minutes before a friendly pseudo-random number generator tries to balance things up Many argued that auto-scramble fails most of the time but quite simply the proof is that the PL&R servers were easily the most popular of the payload type servers in Australia.

The class limits helped to prevent the diabolical cases where you're trying to work with your team so you play medic but you've got 5 spies or 5 snipers to work with.

I was wondering if there are any servers with SourceMod available such that we could configure the class limits & auto-scramble as above? Or whether there would be admin interest in creating such a server.

I'd nominate #25 or #18 since they are both regularly empty and have similar rotations already, and #25 is probably still in many old GON players' favourites list.

Edit to add: I recognise that finding the right auto-balance settings (i.e. the right ratios) takes some tweaking and I'd be happy to help tweak that. There is a lot of self-interest at play as I very much want such a server to play on

[Scarecrow]

Bump for 32 player TF2 to return to GON.

I miss jumping in and seeing all those familiar names who didn't have a clue who the straw man in the corner was.

[goosmurf]

Ah I was advocating 24p servers as that's what worked well with PL&R.

I'm not too fussed between 24p and 32p though. My main point is that the auto-scramble setup on PL&R worked really well, and if you look at the popularity of the "new generation" PL&R, i.e. LaB and Hat-tf2, they continue to be popular.

There's a bunch of GON servers which are almost completely idle so it would make sense to copy the PL&R format unless it would take too much admin time to setup.

IMHO the value that GON can add to the PL&R format is that the GON TMR & admin processes are well defined (read: not randomly abused). I stopped playing on LaB and Hat because of their reserved slot policy (which kicks you off a server if an "important" player wants to play) and the admins would randomly change maps mid-cycle. You don't get that nonsense on GON.

[Mythor]

#18 is currently a 32p server. It's currently empty. Not sure the demand is there anymore, most seem happy with 24p.

Saxton Hale and the Surf servers are also set to 32. If you just want to play with a bunch of people, Saxton Hale is good for that.

As for the auto-scramble/balance it's something we do keep looking at. Many of the options wind up too intrusive and turn players off. But we'll keep looking.
Perhaps once the merger stuff settles down we'll get a trial going. But there's obviously not been a lot of interest since this thread has sat idle till today.

[Bicketybam]

I've been thinking about it but again wanted to wait until the new forums (and backend tools) were all sorted before getting around to trying out a server like this.

The biggest problem we face with TF2 and servers like this is that they usually rely on 3rd party plugins for sourcemod to add those extra little options and TF2 gets a lot of updates which tend to change things from week to week and unless the plugin creator stays up-to-date with those changes then those plugins tend to get broken and then the server tends to get broken.

But once things settle down, I will be having a look at trying this out.

As for the 32 player servers, they are still there. Servers #18 and #25 but players don't frequent them. As Mythor mention, I think they prefer to play on the different 24 player servers we have, now.

[Trixxter]

I think a big problem for the 32 was people either had lag, a map would cause crashing and with some people banned (not my alley) it scared off some regulars too in fear or who knows. I know lots of peeps want 32 slots to be restore to their glory like a year ago but no one seems to make the push to get everyone back into it.

[jackalus]

PL+R servers auto balance were the worst i've seen - You would be lucky to get through a map without multiple balances and votes - the current balance system on node if fine, PLEASE leave it alone thx

Jackalus

[Scarecrow]

Point of clarification: Surf is NOT TF2, and you shouldn't suggest I play on a Surf server if I want 32 player experience.

And what is a Saxton Hale server?

[Mythor]

32p isn't TF2 either, 24p is the official maximum.

Saxton Hale is everyone on the server versus one person playing as Saxton Hale. Hale has very high health and can kill most classes with one hit of his fists. Everyone else tries to kill Hale while Hale tries to kill them.
It's fun.

[goosmurf]

PL+R servers auto balance were the worst i've seen - You would be lucky to get through a map without multiple balances and votes - the current balance system on node if fine, PLEASE leave it alone thx

There was a time when PL&R auto-scramble triggered way too frequently but Prof Butt Rawb who ran the servers was pretty active in tweaking the auto-scramble settings. It was pretty effective for several months before PL&R eventually shutdown.

One of the simple metrics one could use to evaluate the success of scramble is whether a subsequent scramble is necessary (or would be triggered). Butt Rawb and I discussed it here.

Why do I even care about this?

The problem I see with stacking is that long term it entrenches itself as the dominant behaviour. Players see that the teams are stacked so they also try to stack. They rape noobies, feels good(?), noobies don't come back. Seems ok in the short term but in the long run it puts people off playing the game.

The natural suggestion is to force auto-team - so no one gets a choice which team they're on. But many are against this because they want to play with their friends, fair enough.

Auto-scramble is a compromise that says "hey, pick your own teams, but if it's horribly imbalanced then we'll force new teams upon you".

[Mythor]

I think a lot of the angst would be solved if more people used auto assign and stayed where the auto balance put them, rather than jumping on one or the other team for whatever reason. And I'm not pointing fingers because even I will pick a certain side sometimes, usually only to get away from someone though.

I'm not a big fan of forced auto assign at the start of a round because it blocks a lot of friendly rivalry stuff, as well as things like an experienced player helping out a newbie, etc etc. It works in situations where people will sit out a round in spec just so they can stack, but in most cases people will give up and just play long before then.

Where I think we need a better solution is the people who get autobalanced to a team or decide after joining that the other team is better/winning and make the swap. That's one the admin team has been noticing and has been pulling people up for. If we could get a good automated system for dealing with that...

The next big update comes in 11-12 days, if rumours are correct. Will have to poke around and see what's out there before then.

[goosmurf]

I'm not a big fan of forced auto assign at the start of a round because it blocks a lot of friendly rivalry stuff, as well as things like an experienced player helping out a newbie, etc etc. It works in situations where people will sit out a round in spec just so they can stack, but in most cases people will give up and just play long before then.

Where I think we need a better solution is the people who get autobalanced to a team or decide after joining that the other team is better/winning and make the swap. That's one the admin team has been noticing and has been pulling people up for. If we could get a good automated system for dealing with that...

I agree auto-assign doesn't really solve the issue, and will put a lot of people off altogether which is why I think the auto-scramble based on some trigger like winning frag ratio or similar makes more sense.

The swapping teams thing and shirking auto-balance I think go away if you can solve the fundamental problem of skill imbalance. I have seen a SourceMod that prevents you from changing teams after it's swapped you. It even remembers the state if you /retry.

The way I'd like to see people play is pick your team for whatever reason. You can't really know until a round is played how the game will go. But if the 1st round is a massive steam roll then have auto-scramble kick in and mix things things up -- at the very least then no one can complain that the teams are stacked, and in practice it shifts the blame to auto-scramble. And auto-scramble is a tough cookie who can take a lot of abuse