Team Fortress 2 Megathread - winter is the most chill time of year

[slender nexus]

the TF2 community does a little harassment campaign for fun

[crisp cedar]

ok so what replay said

i thought something interesting or funny happened

[mystic turtle]

all they had to do was follow the link lmfao

anyways, yes. fixtf2? more like fucktf2. see you folks later, and good luck with whatever you're doing.

[broken haven]

tuff as hell

[limpid panther]

black beans, white rice, omellete and tomatoes

[cursive peak]

https://www.twitch.tv/rglgg

RGL Highlander S18 starts soon.

[limpid panther]

I forgot the salt on the fucking omellete SHIT

[broken haven]

https://vxtwitter.com/stephenasmith/status/1797786445442068623

[limpid panther]

HOW COULD THE TF2 COMMUNTIY DO THIS

[wild grove]

This doesn't, if anything, I want to play the game more now.

[unborn pecan]

people misusing github issues

[crisp cedar]

tale old as time

[unborn pecan]

bro wtf

Cook your tomatos

or idk

Salt them at least

or cook them as a part of the omlete

[limpid panther]

tehy are salted

[limpid panther]

they are also part of the omelete

[unborn pecan]

good

I just watched the uncle dane video

It's kinda stupid ngl

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/903842162817507339.webp?size=48&quality=lossless&name=RageGrrr

Us TF2 players are angry and we deserve an update

you can't make anything on we get fixed

It'll ruin everyting, you'll see

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/903842162817507339.webp?size=48&quality=lossless&name=RageGrrr

I may have to unsub from dane for this

[grim parcel]

it’s funny how the community treats literally anyone not showing the same amount of interest in the game after 17 years

from youtubers to random valve employees

[uncut spear]

bro did that with efficiency

that was beautiful

it's funny he says soldier wouldn't give two fucks and just run into battle

which is so true lol

[next nymph]

a nice fresh tomato kinda quirky doe

[unborn pecan]

true true

[kind falcon]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1045968962736889929/1212552220386787399/watermark.gif

[rare creek]

Valve should add a hardware anti cheat into Team Fortress 2. A physical PCIE card that you plug into your computer and set contacts on your body in order to play, if it detects you cheating (at the hardware level) it will instantly kill you with 3000 volt electrical shock, followed by banning you.

[kind falcon]

https://tenor.com/view/cat-gif-14318776788849531473

[sour oxide]

@mystic turtle the classic brazilian plate...

[mystic turtle]

yo
I don't really know you, I think?
but yea, that was pretty nice to look at earlier today lol

[sour oxide]

Are you also a br tf2 player?

[mystic turtle]

nah, from Philippines, Southeast Asia's shit internet hotspot

I do know quite a few folks from Brazil tho

[sour oxide]

I'm new to this community, joined a few weeks ago.

[heavy solar]

@sour oxide has leveled up! (3 ➜ 4)

[mystic turtle]

hm, I see

[sour oxide]

WAIT, WAS TF2 ALWAYS "TEAM FACTOR"?! (Nvidia control panel)

[mystic turtle]

lmfao

[kind falcon]

it wasnt always tf.exe.. yk

[limpid panther]

I am one

[sour oxide]

I think I've played some casual matches with you sometimes, may I add you on Steam?

[limpid panther]

sure, why not

I'm at work though, won't be able to accept until later today

[sour oxide]

No worries mano xD

[left sand]

the game developer will be aware of the problem now

they werent before but now they will

(sarcasm)

[limpid panther]

what did Fauci do this time?

[grim parcel]

vaccinated my wife and kids

[cursive peak]

No idea, but I saw a screenshot of a tweet the other day accusing him of genocide.

[kind falcon]

shooorely

penguinz0 video incoming yada yada

[crisp cedar]

lol

[rare creek]

WHAT IF THE SAVE.TF SITE IS BOTTED

and that's why it has so many signatures,,,

[radiant merlin]

Eres pecausa?

[spare obsidian]

https://fxtwitter.com/DEWILL_yt/status/1797966456648520051 brainrooted tf2tuber

[kind falcon]

gambling addict

[high current]

I see where they’re coming from. Valve treated symptoms of the bot crisis but didn’t fix the bot crisis itself.

[high current]

Hey that’s pretty good

[spare obsidian]

.

[high current]

I mean the pace it got signatures at was pretty much what you’d expect. They slowly approached 100k signatures during the kinda half-assed “phase 1” before June 3rd. Then fairly rapidly approached 200k once literally YouTuber that plays tf2 actively made a video on it.

[crisp cedar]

i think itd be really funny if valve doesnt react

which is what they will do i think

[high current]

Yeh I’m not being sarcastic. What about it

I agree. I don’t think valve is going to do anything tbh

But they can’t accuse us of not trying to get their attention

[spare obsidian]

what happened yesterday, well about that

[limpid panther]

I don't think it would be funny

[high current]

Also it probably worked in FixTF2s favor that the Jake Paul vs Tyson fight got postponed. If that had been yesterday like it was planned iirc, then that shit would have entirely eclipsed us

[rare creek]

the who vs who?

[spare obsidian]

the who figth

[limpid panther]

what would be tragic though, is if they have been cooking something and release it soon-ish and people get into their heads that campaing was the reason

[high current]

A YouTuber was going to fight someone’s grandpa on Netflix live

[spare obsidian]

youtuber drama

got it.

[high current]

Pretty much. TF2 just got lucky that yesterday was generally uneventful other than FixTF2

[mystic turtle]

so in the end, it doesn't add up to anything
if Valve does something, then good
if not, invest in community servers (and hope server networks can get their shit together so that folks like me don't suffer much from the absence of Casual. The only server where I live that can compete with Valve servers in regards to ping is Uncletopia, and that's full a lot of the time)

[limpid panther]

tip: cl_resend sets how quickly the game tries connecting when you enable "auto-retry" in a full server

lower it a little bit but not too much as to be abusive

[rare creek]

lowerign it to 0 ms thanks for this info

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1d7d3t1/spotted_a_gem/
😭😭😭😭

[high current]

I think the idea is: doing this risked nothing but has the minuscule chance of resulting in positive change.

[misty plover]

Tbh my personal belief is that this movement is doing way more harm than good and that if I was Valve I would actually just close the servers for a day out of spite and say go touch grass

[slender nexus]

I'm surprised valve hasn't taken the nuclear route and just shut off all revenue streams from TF2 by shutting down the mann co store and tf2 steam community market

So they can say they no longer have a financial incentive to provide upkeep

[misty plover]

You know something that's been crossing my mind a lot lately is how much revenue does tf2 even generate for Valve

A lot of the economy is transfers and not inputs these days no?

Theres new goods bought every now and then but it's mostly just items changing hands now not many people are actively opening crates and cases anymore

[spare obsidian]

tf2 generates pennies to what other valve ips, heck even hardware

monetay speaking TF2 is worth less than a penny

[crisp cedar]

tf2 is still a silver earner every summer sale, no?

[small siren]

*tf2 is still

a silver earner every

summer sale, no?*

- rayne

[next nymph]

Valve takes a sizeable cut of nearly every PC game sale, that's where the money is

[livid oracle]

why would they do that

[crisp cedar]

yeah but you would rather earn 100% money than 99% money

its pennies but they dont even do any work

[spare obsidian]

tbh valve is sealing the high sea, gabe rn is focusing now in neurolink too

so, games for valve isn't their priority

[teal sand]

man i miss jungle inferno

that shit was so fun when it dropped

[kind falcon]

man i miss tf2... (Video Essay)

[teal sand]

What Happened To Team Fortress 2? [4:55:32]

[languid haven]

myocarditus caused by spike proteins in the mrna injections. especially in children.

[teal sand]

did i ever tell u guys about how i showed my friend tf2 one time and the second casual match we got into (i.e. her second ever game) we got matched against b4nny while he was streaming

that was pretty funny

[tough locust]

i remember chet faliszek saying in a video that valve usually doesny respond to these kinds of thinga (srry my autocorrct isnt workibg for some reason) abd that they ususally wait in the background to see what the people are saying. Chet said that whenva company says "we're working on it giys" the people stop giving feedvack and will only get angrier if the problem doesnt get resolved. if anything I expect that there will be a small update relating to the bots in the summer update but theyll never cone out and say "we're workibg on it guys!" since the fact that they did iit in 2022 made them look bad

wow this is typed horribly but i think it makes sense

If I can find his exact video after work i'll pull it up

[small siren]

*If I can find his

exact video after

work i'll pull it up*

- pilso

[misty plover]

I eated it

[next nymph]

fun fact! Covid infections are much more likely to cause myocarditis than covid vaccines

Fauci is in the news for supporting #saveTF2

[jagged pawn]

https://fxtwitter.com/stephenasmith/status/1797786445442068623

[languid haven]

it uses the same shit as the virus, there is no evidence to prove it's more likely to cause it then again no one seems to remember the blood clotting caused by the virus.

[potent wolf]

please keep this to #competitive-digging-archived

[languid haven]

it's not political.

[misty plover]

Its not tf2 either graaaaaaaah

Talk about tf2 or else

[potent wolf]

https://tenor.com/view/thumbs-up-bt7274-titanfall-gif-14796563

[misty plover]

THIS IS NOT TF2

🙀

[potent wolf]

erm yes it is

[misty plover]

Wait is that not titan fall 1 I don't remember

[potent wolf]

no it's titanfall 2

[misty plover]

Oh it is

[left sand]

https://www.ign.com/articles/team-fortress-2-steam-reviews-drop-to-mostly-negative-as-players-plead-with-valve-to-do-something-about-bots

[misty plover]

Surely this will make valve implement the magic anticheat that instantly bans all botters!!! Right???

[left sand]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/team-fortress-2-players-gather-over-140000-petition-signatures-in-the-latest-campaign-against-the-ongoing-aimbot-menace/

https://www.destructoid.com/team-fortress-2-petition-is-looking-to-save-the-game-from-malicious-aimbots/

[misty plover]

Honestly I'm not even sure what the movement is expecting to happen

For Valve to just drop everything and focus solely on tf2?? For them to hire more contractors? Valve to construct a new emergency VAC team just for tf2?

[glass pollen]

"The company continues to support the game with events, the latest of which ends on June 30" do they refer to the latest community mvm campaign there?

[misty plover]

Yes

Oh my god my internet is dying what is happening

Correction discord is dying

Hitting a nice juicy 800ms ping time

[next nymph]

probably just took a peek at the teamfortress site

[misty plover]

4/5ths of the crisis is just because tf2 players actively complain about it and motivate the hosters to keep going

Whatever, I'm just gonna forget about this and go work on my own game

[wild grove]

That community campaign is mostly fun but some of the expert missions are way too hard, one of them especially, the mission gave you 300$, and you not only have to deal with giants but two tanks in the first wave at the same time!

There's another expert mission which is mostly fine until they spawn these giant heavies that shoot fast crit bison projectiles that straight up kill you instantly if you're not ubered.

[summer steeple]

classic video game journalism, read for 10 seconds, don't process it, repeat incorrectly

[high current]

If they do that they set the precedent that their virtual economies have no actual value and that would have implications to the much more lucrative CS2 economy. Even if it wasn't a total nuke like some copium-huffing TFtubers seem to think, if it impacted the CS2 economy by say 10%, that's a metric bootyload.

Also Valve takes 15% of sales on the Steam Community Market, and they obviously get 100% of their direct sales. So people buying/selling keys, skins, items in both TF2 and CS2 make them bank. So nuking either economy would probably cost them more than server up keep.

[broken haven]

my case selling for 3 cents on the market

[misty plover]

https://tenor.com/view/steam-stonks-gif-20956289

[high current]

To be clear, people know items are essentially valueless, but CS2 set the precedent that Valve does care about the virtual economy by porting it to the "new" game. If TF2 shut down and contradicted that, it would be bad news bear

Dudes will get their CS2 dual-butt-plugs priced higher because in the glint of lighting on specific maps you can see funny shapes on different parts of the knife. Those kind of sociopaths would panic at a parallel economy evaporating.

[left sand]

direct sales they share with workshop creators as well

[high current]

Oh true. IDK what the split on that is, but still Vovlo makes bank off TF2 and CS2. Not as much as Steam game sales, but not a dismissable ammount

Well, Valve could dismiss it, but they'd be braindead to.

[slender nexus]

why is this in the tf2 channel

[uncut spear]

team fauci 2

[hidden gyro]

https://tenor.com/view/madlad-mad-emoji-umadbro-gif-6910204822398718006

[hidden gyro]

Github moment

[rare creek]

gigachad kisak

[rare creek]

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1d89c0j/gaben_watching_in_horror_as_savetf_reaches_200000/

I LOVE GAMBLING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[grim parcel]

yeah it’s not like they invest a vast majority of their time into a game storefront, hardware to play games, developing tools to make games, and making/updating their own games

[mystic turtle]

"downvote the hell out of that post"

my brother in Christ this is standard github procedure. Too bad you didn't use Linux... you wouldn't understand

[hoary geyser]

only linux users understand github

[drowsy marlin]

I use linux but I don't understand it

[mystic turtle]

I know, it's a key part of the joke

since it's usually Linux users outside of full-time programmers that crawl github issues

[wild grove]

I do crawl thru the source-1 issue tracker when I am bored

[summer steeple]

I check it like every week or so

[eternal haven]

I wonder why valve hasn't patched the party invite crash that's been going around for like a month

It seems like adding one check to the GC that ensures you're friends with the user you're inviting would be sufficient to fix it

[summer steeple]

well at the very least looking at the github shit people haven't been spam creating issues

unless there's a way to just straight up delete issues i'm not aware of

[left sand]

there is

[summer steeple]

well unless it also fixes up issue numbers it doesn't seem like its happened

[left sand]

it doesnt

[jagged pawn]

https://fxtwitter.com/noobdoggy/status/1798048064340643859

[uncut spear]

BRO NO LMAO

[rare creek]

they stole my fucking idea sue the hell out of this guy #1072696252162117752 message

literally the same exact thing...

[jagged pawn]

that has to be a bit

[rare creek]

mastercoms fidn this guy's exact geolocation down to 28 decimal points

copyright infringement on my idea

[mystic turtle]

ah, yes. the game already lags well enough as is
as has been mentioned before you can just somehow run TF2 with an intentionally busted X window compositor to get all the effects of textmode without having to directly call textmode

[wild grove]

running the game in 100 x 100 pixels

[rare creek]

i mean with textmode you dont need a gpu

if textmode was removed bot hosters would just use an older version of the game or patch it back in lol

[wild grove]

it would be worked around because people are stupid enough to publically talk about it instead of emailing valve in private.

same with talking about the cheat that bot hosters use, like y'all are asking for more bots.

if you want a cheat to be effective, you need to be private or at bare minimum vague about it, otherwise people are gonna workaround it all the time. This is why a patch note has "security improvements" instead of what they specifically fixed for security reasons. But I think people here know that already.

[livid oracle]

what do you mean

i think cheaters would notice textmode being gone right away

[eternal haven]

Not to mention textmode doesn't really do too much other than prevent some code from being run

It would be trivial to add the functionality back even if it was completely stripped out

[livid oracle]

it's the same shit with ppl saying that the retry command should be removed

because they think it's what cheaters were using to bypass votekicks

[small siren]

*because they think it's

what cheaters were using to

bypass votekicks*

- crawl space

[grim parcel]

what if valve just removes the ability to cheat

[wild grove]

what's gonna happen to those signatures on the save tf2 website?

sent as emails to be shredded by the aggro spam filter?

[spare hedge]

From my understanding they're gonna be printed and sent to the Valve offices in person. And they might get shredded as soon as they receive them :/ .

[burnt dragon]

ballin

[radiant merlin]

gonna do the funny

[unborn pecan]

wait u got access to the valve github

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/508272488610922497.webp?size=48&quality=lossless&name=funkeuhh

you gotta add dougie to it vro....

[radiant merlin]

i made the issue

[unborn pecan]

oh fr?

lol

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/275004607690702848/1212826647741341757/dougie_funny.gif

do u like dougie

ashe wiki.tf

[radiant merlin]

this?

[unborn pecan]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/666008714393944064.webp?size=48&quality=lossless&name=funkeHmm

This is acceptable

[livid oracle]

its over

[fleet kite]

so, idiots

(im late sorry)

Ill be just reading chat and realizing too late that its been 2 days

[small siren]

*Ill be just reading

chat and realizing too late

that its been 2 days*

- goodoldjack12

[livid oracle]

youtubers told them it's impossible to have fun without random shotgun spread or whatever so they dont want to play on community servers

they already play 2fort and turbine constantly so idk what's really the issue with playing on any one of those 24/7 2fort or turbine servers

[wild grove]

The only kinda understandable reason people don't want to play on community is because they are in a server region that doesn't have any near them, but at that point, they should think about setting one up then if there's none.

[burnt dragon]

I dont like community servers because it feels fake experience

main reason being a new player wont jump on a community server

I enjoy seeing new players just goofing around not going for meta 100%

and other people not screaming racial slurs just because someone uses a non meta weapon

[jagged pawn]

yeah I agree. when I'm in the mood for a serious match with a smart team, I play a pug. when I'm in the mood to see people doing weird things an experimenting, I play casual. uncletopia satisfies neither

it occupies a weird middle ground that I don't care for

[livid oracle]

when does this happen

[burnt dragon]

it happened to me like twice in some community servers because I used force o nature instead of soda popper

[livid oracle]

wow

that sure happened

[burnt dragon]

people are weird

[livid oracle]

screamed at for using force a nature instead of soda popper, daily thing that happens in community servers because theyre so sweaty and competitive

[burnt dragon]

people also get angry when others play sniper in harvest...

[burnt dragon]

it happened to me enough to just mute voice chat alltogether

[livid oracle]

remember when valve deleted the entire chat and voice feature from f2ps because bots kept spamming slurs in chat

[burnt dragon]

yep, oddly enough I think it is one of the things that killed communication in tf2 teams

people dont really talk at all in casual nowadays

[uncut spear]

I swear I've never had that happen 😭

but that does sound like a community server thing

it's like l4d2 versus lobbies

those things need to die

way too competitive and there's literally no prize or rank involved

[wild grove]

erm, aschully, back then before casual, quickplay, they were just called servers and you had to navigate the browser to find one 🤓 ☝🏽

so aschully casual and quickplay are the fake experiences and not community servers 🤓

I mean casual is the reason bots are a big issue in the first place, if quickplay was still around, or no matchmaker at all, this wouldn't be an issue.

[fleet kite]

lmao the solution was there all along: reverse Meet Your Match

[mystic turtle]

the only question is what to do with the contracts tbh, and the casual rank badges
altho in all honesty since casual rank doesn't matter you should get exp for it from a wider variety of servers and gamemodes, save for idle/grinding servers

[next nymph]

give people a new gibus with their casual rank on it

[pure tiger]

https://x.com/ayakaasama/status/1797620302723359110/photo/1

Ayaka The handholding CEO (@ayakaasama) on X

@TF2SolarLight

Twitter · Jun 3, 2024, 1:24 PM

According to ChatGPT, TF2 has conditional if statements and aliases are variables 😱 AI's are so helpful 🤣 Edit: here is a link to my chat https://chatgpt.com/share/14194001-e063-45a0-9c32-bb21fa721d97

[kind falcon]

💯
😱

[livid oracle]

@next nymph thoughts

[next nymph]

https://tenor.com/view/my-goodness-what-an-idea-why-didnt-i-facepalm-the-simpsons-gif-17489109

[high current]

I mean 200,000 pieces of paper is a lot. That’s like tens of pounds of paper probably, and if you shredded 1 every second it would take 55 hours to shred all of those. Which they’re going to assign to some intern probably.

[burnt dragon]

I would do it if they let me visit their headquarters

but the problem is

it wouldnt be 200k papers

since its just email and name

[cursive peak]

Seeing several posts on r/tf2 talking about attempting to sue Valve.

Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just abandon casual and play community servers exclusively?

[hoary geyser]

For what?

[burnt dragon]

I GAVE THEM MY MONEY WITH MY OWN CONSENT AND THEY DIDNT DO WHAT I EXACTLY ASKED THEM TO DO/s

slams table crying

HOW DARE THEY!!

[misty plover]

They always talking about fix tf2 but never about fixing their love lives

[broken haven]

im with my team making green in my fortress 2

this paper stack high as a tower 🤑

[burnt dragon]

as high as high tower or higher tower?

[broken haven]

im that soldier fly as a spy

[livid oracle]

kinda wish the end of round scoreboard showed which team actually played better as like a compromise between stopwatch and no stopwatch

[broken haven]

hit all my shots like sniper on fire call me pyro

[spare hedge]

Valve should just shut down casual, redirect people to community servers and allow contracts to be completed on then. This isn't a perfect solution, but considering Valve doesn't really care about tackling the bot issue head on this seems like the most realistic solution.

[livid oracle]

like says one team scored 5 points in 4 mins vs scored 5 points in 6 mins

[broken haven]

valve shutting down causal and letting people play on furry pound

[spare hedge]

Considering Valve added the vore flag into the game, I don't think they'd mind

[heavy solar]

@spare hedge has leveled up! (3 ➜ 4)

[livid oracle]

whats the vore flag

[high current]

The literal point is to print 1 page per signature

To give a physical representation of the number of people signing the petition

[rare creek]

what

no

[spare obsidian]

yeah uhh good luck with that

[misty plover]

What

[high current]

I mean it’s not that outlandish. A 5,000 pack of printer paper costs $45, maybe less. So if one person fronted the cost of that it would be around $2000 in paper. There’s the cost of ink and the cost of delivering it, either in person, like I think the plan was, or by postage.
I doubt it’d all be 1 person though, realistically I think 3-4 of the main YouTubers were in agreement, and each printer can probably do 2 pages per second or more, so worst case it’s like 10 hours of printing.

It’s a lot but not an unreasonable effort for a protest

[next nymph]

can people see the images when I post it this way or does it screw up for everyone else too

[high current]

It screws up for everyone

[next nymph]

its how they eat

[spare hedge]

This, they added it as a warpaint

[broken haven]

[wild grove]

people who said that are delusional, it's not the vore flag.

[broken haven]

https://x.com/Thewhat89/status/1798407998877864360

Thewhat (@Thewhat89) on X

The https://t.co/jUBX4n3enm website temporarily needed to remove all TF2 imagery from the site because a malicious actor IMPERSONATED a Valve lawyer and filed a fraudulent DMCA against the site.

Needless to say, this is ILLEGAL, and it won't be tolerated.

#Fixtf2 #SaveTF2

Twitter · Jun 5, 2024, 5:34 PM

this some real hater shit

https://tenor.com/view/ishowspeed-try-not-to-laugh-gif-7682731162751353849

[spare hedge]

Probably wasn't the intention. But I still find it funny

[wild grove]

It's even more funny that the creators renamed weapons that had the war paint applied with that stuff to mess with people.

[spare hedge]

lol Didn't know about that.

[burnt dragon]

that sounds like a really huge waste, sad

[spare obsidian]

tf2 community thinks they can pull out a WoW type of move

[orchid sorrel]

The difference between this and wow is that wow still had people working on it

[spare obsidian]

plus WoW movement was pacifict

here, well

[rare creek]

mmos are run and controlled by their players, the same is not true for any other genre

[spare obsidian]

savetf2 movement using hell drivers protest is also ironic because they literally settled down when they removed the account requieriment but keeped the buy restriction which is so ironic

i guess it was never about letting everyone play the game

[rare creek]

also sony is a public company

[spare obsidian]

show this to a tf2 player

they would go mad

[next nymph]

what was the Chet's explanation?

[misty plover]

His information is outdated, kinda

[misty plover]

No one looks at this average

https://twitter.com/thexpaw/status/1729519712449474695
xPaw made a tweet in response as well to Chet's initial complaint (which he purged off the internet because gamers were gamers and started sending death threats)

Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) on X

@chetfaliszek saw your post about player numbers on steamdb, and that number comes directly from the steam api.

It doesn't matter if the game is small or big, there is no interpolation. And its concurrent players, not daily players. Same data visible to you on partner site.

Twitter · Nov 28, 2023, 3:16 PM

Fwiw I don't know how Valve currently handles the system for the real time count, but its definitely a lot more precise than lazy sampling, even for entirely dead games you can see it change in real time when you query the api, even for dead games

I'm almost certain that Valve is just using a push model (active reporting which Chet claims it isn't) with an in memory data store though, probably with some aggregation somewhere along the line to prevent a stampede. Very similar to how social media feeds work, or how youtube handles views. Its a dead simple, stupid, scalable system. I could architect it in a day, throw it up, and have it scale it up to Steam's player size fairly easily.

(Source: I have... literally architected that system in a day)

I mean, its literally writing a single integer mapped to a game id, and there's only what, like 110k games? That's trivial.

[high current]

200,000 pieces of paper is probably like 0.0001% of Starbucks paper cups thrown into the trash every hour.

[eternal haven]

What do you guys think does make up the difference between the 70000 players reported by steam vs the 14500 players in servers listed on the master list currently?

[misty plover]

Master list?

[eternal haven]

https://api.steampowered.com/IGameServersService/GetServerList/v1/

[misty plover]

That list doesn't count idle/in private servers

Or in single player

It's also maybe not reliable in general because community servers misreporting

[eternal haven]

I tried using steamkit to talk to the tf2 GC and you do need to be 'playing' tf2 to interact with it eg. by sending CMsgClientGamesPlayed for tf2

but it only seems to count you as playing tf2 if you set your profile status to online

so it looks like even for bots that interact with the tf2 GC (eg. crafting and whatever), it's optional whether they appear as playing

[misty plover]

Now that's an interesting one

[next nymph]

tbf they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, unless I misunderstand. You could keep track of the accurate number of players but you only update the numbers obtained from the API periodically

feel like it'd be easy to test by just re-polling in quick succession

[eternal haven]

I don't have any way to verify it

like verify whether it actually counts you in the player count

but even if you're online in other sessions but don't set online status in the session playing tf2, it doesn't show you as playing tf2 in your status

[misty plover]

There are a lot of players who are invisible on steam or have private profiles, it'd be pretty funny if that was the source of the missing data, but I doubt it

[eternal haven]

well if anything that would be lowering the 70k player count

eg. there would be even more players than steam reports, if that's how it works

[misty plover]

Because that'd be like one of very very few systems that respect player status

IE: game times and last played date are (obviously) updated when invis

[left sand]

all will be clear once i launch my player stats website

[misty plover]

The masterstats...

[eternal haven]

btw I figured that teamwork.tf is not using tf2 GC for valve server stats

I looked through all GC protobufs and tried some of them, there's none that give that info

teamwork.tf is querying master server list for 'whitelisted' servers which are only valve servers

then they're getting region by the server name

and gamemode by the map name

[left sand]

how do valve servers show up on the master server list

[potent wolf]

oh huh

that's funny

[eternal haven]

Idk but I tried making a fake valve server with fake players and it didn't show up on teamwork.tf

so I know they're checking only for 'white' servers

which can only be valve

[misty plover]

I want to make a meme project that's steamrep except it doesn't validate anything you just send in a plus one or minus one with a comment and it accepts anything

[eternal haven]

since valve servers use SDR you can basically make fake valve servers that look identical to real ones

[misty plover]

And see how long till people start trying to use it for their bot detectors

[next nymph]

+rep good idea

[eternal haven]

except when getting master server list with whitelist 1 as filter they don't show

[misty plover]

Thank you for encouraging my intentionally awful ideas

[eternal haven]

I thought maybe teamwork was using this api to check for message key which only valve servers have https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamApps/GetServersAtAddress/v1?addr=169.254.1.2

but you get ratelimited super fast on this so I don't think they are

its a public api no keys

[misty plover]

I also considered doing this except instead of a comment its a fixed category but I feel like that one's too obviously intentionally stupid

[high current]

Idk but I highly doubt there’s 55k bots like tftubers came to the conclusion of. At the end of the day why would the be that many? Maybe a couple hundred trade bots, maybe a couple thousand item idling bots (why?).

I’d bet either the master list isn’t accurate, or there’s some steam bug/quirk listing people as online TF2 when they shouldn’t be.
Like maybe the community market lists players as always “online” the game they have an item listed on because it has to verify it is in their possession. I doubt that’s actually it but it’s just an example of what kind of spaghetti there might be.

[eternal haven]

I don't know, it doesn't make any sense

Idling bots don't seem profitable

From everything I can tell, it's completely optional for every single trading bot to appear as playing

[high current]

Only reason I could conceive for there being 55k bots would be that people try to counteract the bot crisis by artificially inflating player count by just having like 1000 main menu instances open with their fps capped to 1.

[eternal haven]

I think all trading bots can do everything they ever need to do without ever appearing as playing tf2

if they want anyways

including interacting with tf2 GC

no way to confirm that though, at least not that I'm aware of

apart from getting thousands of steam accounts and testing it lol

[high current]

Right. Like coming to the conclusion that: TF2 doesn’t follow the expected peak hours = 50,000 bots seems like a stretch.
As for the inaccuracy for server reporting, idk, I’d wager it’s an indicator of a problem elsewhere in the pipeline than bots.

[eternal haven]

You can delist servers from the valve master list

It's completely optional whether you advertise to that or not

but it's default to advertise to it

[high current]

Maybe steam player count assumes all tf2 parties are full of 6 players? The mismatch between reports is 4.66 times, so it’s not a stretch that some of the 15,000 players are actually in parties, hence why it’s not a perfect multiplier?

[eternal haven]

Steam player count is supposed to just count how many people have launched app 440 on steam

nothing to do with parties

[high current]

Yeh but maybe there’s some funkiness in how Steam tracks it? I wouldn’t be surprised

Spaghetti is the answer. What spaghetti exactly is anyone’s guess

It could just be the the Valve reporting has a multiplier in the code because of some internal testing and they forgot to take it out.
Wouldn’t be the craziest spaghetti to be cooked by Valve.

[misty plover]

Wait I just noticed Chet mentioned the daily average, that's not even viewable on steam itself anymore iirc only 24hr peak and current players, and I don't think steamdb reports it either???

[eternal haven]

Yeah I don't see any daily average

[left sand]

steamcharts does it afaik

which is what everyone uses

[eternal haven]

Well I meant from steam

But yeah I wonder how steamcharts computes that

[left sand]

well chet is saying "then the sites"

"the metric the kids use"

[eternal haven]

I'm pretty sure steam only reports player count at 10 minute intervals right?

[left sand]

afaik its realtime most of the time

[eternal haven]

I've heard so many people saying this but I've never seen an example

of anything on steam that shows player count that will change even minute to minute

[left sand]

xpaw posted

[eternal haven]

Link?

[summer steeple]

#1072696252162117752 message

[eternal haven]

That doesn't say it's not a sample from every 10 minutes

or however many minutes, I haven't even checked

it could well be every 15 or 20

I guess maybe they cache it per IP?

I really don't know what to make of this

The only explanation I can think of is I'm hitting multiple different servers and they don't update at the same time

Try it yourself, it's https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamUserStats/GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers/v1/?appid=440

Yeah I guess it depends on your region and stuff

They have load balancing/caching/proxying/whatever for multiple backend servers and they don't seem to be in sync

Which is somewhat understandable, it's not necessarily an easy problem to solve

Unless someone has a better explanation

I tried with IP addresses from different parts of the world and get somewhat different numbers

[left sand]

https://fxtwitter.com/thexpaw/status/1311916614590361600

https://fxtwitter.com/thexpaw/status/1311919683709415424

[eternal haven]

The best resolution seems to be a sample every 10 minutes

it's not 'realtime'

and it's not consistent between servers/regions

[cursive peak]

Where did this notion that it's over an hour begin anyway?

[small siren]

*Where did this notion

that it's over an hour

begin anyway?*

- steamworks

[wild grove]

Sucks they got death threats for speaking facts.

[spare obsidian]

TF2 Players speedrunning being the worst people ever rn

[unborn pecan]

i hate tf2 youtubers

besides funke

😍

[misty plover]

You know

I hope Valve finally does something about A2S caching

[eternal haven]

What do you mean?

You hope valve adds A2S caching to srcds?

[misty plover]

No

[eternal haven]

or you hope they do something about the servers using anycast cdns to cache it

[misty plover]

Yes

I mean there's not a whole lot that can be done to stop the issue outright, obviously, but its against valve's tos to do it (iirc) and they've refused to punish anyone doing it for years and years now

[eternal haven]

Yeah I don't know what they'd even do

Other than replacing a2s with an entirely new protocol or something

[misty plover]

That's not really going to fix it

[eternal haven]

What if they made it require connected netmessages

[misty plover]

The solution is to start enforcing shadowbans against servers who participate in the behavior

[eternal haven]

rather than unconnected

like required you to login with steam

and 'connect' to a server in some way

[misty plover]

The only way to have someone know the true ping of a server is to actually be on the server and communicating in a way that requires high enough traffic that you can't just fake it

[eternal haven]

Yeah I guess you're right

[misty plover]

Doesn't matter what game, if its trivial to cache its trivial to cache

[eternal haven]

Unrelated but I wonder how the server browser isn't full of fake servers

[misty plover]

You can add a "challenge" but then they'll just make the challenge done on the cache layer

[misty plover]

Which is, exactly what happened

[eternal haven]

All you need is an anonymous steam login to list a server

[small siren]

*All you need is an

anonymous steam login

to list a server*

- mysterious_eagle_46873

[eternal haven]

You don't need a steam account

[misty plover]

No one's really tried

[eternal haven]

It's so weird

people have done it for css and csgo and stuff

but barely tf2

[misty plover]

There's not much to gain by doing it fwiw

[eternal haven]

like if I was a bot hoster I would probably spam the server list with thousands of fake servers

[misty plover]

IPs aren't free

Getting blacklisted isn't worth it

[eternal haven]

I don't know if you actually need ips to list servers

besides, there's SDR

[misty plover]

SDR does not play nice with the server browser whatsoever

Don't have time to go into detail but it breaks everything

[small siren]

Don't have time to go

into detail but it

breaks everything

- undefinedbhvr

[eternal haven]

well sdr servers get listed

and there might even be a limit on how many servers you can request through steam client messages

[misty plover]

Anyways there's nothing to gain by spamming fake servers anyways

[eternal haven]

I know there's a limit of 20000 through the web api

[misty plover]

People play skial uncletopia or gfl

And they usually check their history tab to do it

Not the main browser

[eternal haven]

I guess

I'm just surprised it's not been abused

[misty plover]

Its a waste of time for literally no benefit

[eternal haven]

it seems very vulnerable to it

[eternal haven]

so are the bots

in casual

[misty plover]

It won't even annoy players enough to complain

[misty plover]

The benefit are those make people enraged and whine

[eternal haven]

I think if you really cared you could break the server browser for everyone

at least until valve manually fixes/moderates it

a lot of people use the favorites list and stuff

also I wonder how valve deals with people spamming SDR

you can use SDR with an anonymous steam login

hopefully they have a limit of SDR sessions per IP or something

[slender nexus]

I wuv that server I don't want it to be flooded by normies 😭

[misty plover]

Back to the a2s caching/anycast issue, it's technically possible to determine if an IP is anycast by tracerouteing it from multiple locations, but thats somewhat unreliable if the ips you use for it are well known.

Though, if you avoid that issue it's pretty trivial to keep a database of known anycasters and throw up a warning for a player that their connection may be worse than expected cause of it

[tough locust]

i just assume that bots can use a direct X hook to disable graphics rendering even if it isn't a true "textmode"

[misty plover]

I'd have to think on the exact details to approach it, but it's possible

[uncut spear]

it's not gonna get flooded dw

they're gonna join and get scared

they don't have true strength

[eternal haven]

To go back to the steam player count discussion, it seems to update about every 15 minutes, and it's super janky when it does

that's what it reports over the course of an hour or so

pretty consistent across different regions, more so than I thought at first

[mystic turtle]

I look at the chat once again
What is the community on, do we have to be contrarian trolls to put a single ounce of sense in their heads?

First it's MSB (this acronym sounds like something else and I will keep that unintended meaning until you unglue it from my cold dead hands) telling his fans to go ham over getting redirected to an open issue, now it's... sending Chet Faliszek fucking death threats after he contradicts what our least favorite Texan had to say about it.

someone get the obligatory "TF2 community, fuck you" macro

[misty plover]

The Chet death threats were from L4D2 players

He made a spiritual successor people dislike and gamers did what gamers do best and be absolutely horrendous abominations without any morals

[mystic turtle]

back 4 blood, right?

[misty plover]

No

It starts with an A

Came out in December

[mystic turtle]

oh

[misty plover]

Anacrusis

Couldn't remember the name

Game kind of flopped and hasn't had an update since January

[mystic turtle]

I see

[limpid panther]

Dr. Face posted

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs8G0QsEFSo

[cursive peak]

Didn't see one of the people I know who went in that video.

[small siren]

*Didn't see one of

the people I know who went

in that video.*

- steamworks

[unborn pecan]

who is dr. face

[limpid panther]

an old tf2 animator

[unborn pecan]

kenaj is an unc

[limpid panther]

whats an unc

[unborn pecan]

Uncle

Specifically, with the connotation of being an old-head

[small siren]

*Specifically,

with the connotation of

being an old-head*

- potasiummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmicrowave

[limpid panther]

I see

[rare creek]

did valve do anything yet

[mystic turtle]

nope, not at all

not even a single acknowledgement via Twitter

Yep, this was indeed a dud

[summer steeple]

didn't it take valve a while to send the original tweet

[rare creek]

nah they sent it on the first day p sure

[jagged pawn]

lmfao were you guys expecting them to respond within the day

[mystic turtle]

nah, I'm mostly just joking
altho yea, we should give Valve some slack, they're slower than a crouched revved brass beast heavy

[jagged pawn]

the original save tf2 video by squimjim was posted on may 7, 2022. valve responded on may 26, 2022

[mystic turtle]

anyways
[in Heavy's voice] Team Fortress is dead. Not big soup rice.

[summer steeple]

also they haven't even sent the petitions to valve yet i thought

[small siren]

*also they haven't

even sent the petitions

to valve yet i thought*

- treacherousfiend

[jagged pawn]

correct

they're still sorting through it

[summer steeple]

and that was like the main thing

[jagged pawn]

so yeah there's no reason to expect a response rn lol

if they respond at all it'll be at some point in the second half of june imo

[rare creek]

nah tf2 is mega dead

[misty plover]

Valve responded after people started being weird outside their office and security kicked them off the property

[misty plover]

Specifically that spy cosplayer who was outside their office all day

[rare creek]

should i dress up as spy and go to their office again

[jagged pawn]

lol I always forget that was the same day

[high current]

Yes

[broken haven]

nothing burger with a side of fries

[tough locust]

show up to valve software in suits and ski masks

[crisp cedar]

apparently half life and portal is being review bombed lol

[rare creek]

why?

[wild grove]

https://tenor.com/view/baby-crying-baby-crying-gif-7234455624545360372

[kind falcon]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1171678939991777311/1223498867048190005/ezgif-7-6c0f5aecdb.gif

[uncut spear]

how more stupid can this get

[merry vault]

they patched extendfreeze? are u fukkin kidding me?

is there another way to extend respawn time?

[left sand]

comp players

no

[merry vault]

dammit, how tf am i supposed to spec cheaters with more than 1 braincell of subtelty

[rare creek]

you cant

they dont want you to spectate cheaters obv

[merry vault]

valve doing more damage then anyone else as usual

[rare creek]

extendfreeze being removed might be my fault

like a couple days before it got removed i had a alias loop set up and added like an hour of respawn time to me so people in the server would react because funne

lol

i think you can use menuopen to delay respawn time now but it doesnt work for watching enemy players

[merry vault]

does anyone know how it was beign abused in comp, did it do something other than extend timer?

[heavy solar]

@merry vault has leveled up! (7 ➜ 8)

[merry vault]

Thanks, seems like a decent extendfreeze alternative.

[rare creek]

JUST ALLOW SPECTATOR IN CASUAL GODDAMMIT

[merry vault]

Hmm i was wrong, executing menuopen just once seems to keep your respawn timer looping, but you can open the class screen to select someone and then spawn in.

[rare creek]

?

[merry vault]

After using menuopen the respawn timer counts to zero then go back to 1, it just loops. For me this seems to last until I open my class select menu then pick a class. However it sounds like that may be because my custom hud.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Source-1-Games/issues/5275
If you dont have a custom hud you may have to use the menuclosed command to stop the loop, idk.

[rare creek]

what

no

[merry vault]

??

[rare creek]

menuopen and menuclosed are vanilla they're supposed to be triggered when opening and closing the class selection screen so your respawn can be prevented

it has nothing to do with any custom hud shenanigans

[wild grove]

That depends, does spectating take a player slot, if so, then that's why it's not enabled in Casual, if not, does staying in there not kick you? If so, then that's why.

I do know that there's a server command to make it so being idle for too long puts you in spectator, then kicks you after that.

[rare creek]

it does but so what?

[wild grove]

Hm, there could be a way to have it enabled but make it so spectators are kicked if they are in there too long, I would have to research the console commands more to see if there is a command that kicks you if you idle in spectator too long.

okay so we can limit the amount of spectators so there isn't many taking the slots, by default, it is 4.

[merry vault]

Ah ok, I thought it might have mattered from some of the comments on the github thread.
I tried it with my hud off and can confirm it works the same on default hud, just trigger it with menuopen and you can get it to stop looping your respawn timer by opening the class select screen and choosing a class(or just pressing class select again to close it). No need to use menuclosed.

The day is saved

[wild grove]

okay so this is what I got so far in commands that can be put in casual server configuration files to bring spectator into casual back

mp_idledealmethod 1 from 2
mp_idlemaxtime 1 (I am unsure if 1 minute is too short to see someone cheating, maybe bump it to 2 minutes?)
mp_allowspectators 1 from 0

[rare creek]

why not like 10 minutes

[wild grove]

Default is 1 minute, I assume it's cause time idling doubles when you set the dealmethod to 1.

I could check what VALVe sets the idletime to.

Idletime is 5 minutes, so if we set the time to 2.5, that's 2.5 minutes idling in the game, then another 2.5 minutes idling in spectator.

at least I assume it's doubling the idle time if you set the dealmethod to 1

You could even bring back server time limits with no round win cap at all, although I question if the end of final round scoreboard and map vote occurs when both the server time limit is up and the round is done.

This would also add being allowed to extend time in the server, meaning you wouldn't even need the same map occuring in the map vote if implemented.

Like Casual being better could've been done 100% with commands lol, why they decided to keep it the way it is, with it being worse than how Quickplay server was in terms of features in server is beyond me.

lmao you can disable being able to hear players voice chatting that are dead.

[mystic turtle]

ah, yes. sv_gravetalk, IIRC
perfect for countering salty bozos like me screaming into the mic after dying to the cracked scout (I am salty, sometimes, but I don't scream into VC)

[wild grove]

I was gonna a write an email to eric smith about this like what I did with the community fix, but rn, I am a little too lazy to basically baby a company.

[kind falcon]

yes

💯

[wild grove]

Low chance of getting implemented but hey, worth a shot anyways.

[small siren]

*Low chance of getting

implemented but hey, worth

a shot anyways.*

- woshee

[wild grove]

What is the standard server time limit amount?

Is it 30 minutes?

[fleet kite]

10 hours of printing if the printer works*

so, it might take 2 months

[broken haven]

https://x.com/babypyrogaming1/status/1798451259651039431

babypyro_gaming #FixTF2 (@babypyrogaming1) on X

@rice_miIk @lordbroly6366 @valvesoftware It's time to review bomb Valve's headquarters on Google Maps for #FixTF2.⬇️

Twitter · Jun 5, 2024, 8:26 PM

[next nymph]

have we tried simply gangstalking valve employees? Maybe hiding subliminal messages in the news and in weather patterns?

[broken haven]

sunny with a cast of save tf2

[wild grove]

This is getting childish at this point.

[slender nexus]

☠️ I have a feeling someone is going to take this way to fucking far eventually

[kind falcon]

make the change you wish to see

[formal dew]

Maybe the solution to the TF2 problem is playing tf2 and having fun

[livid oracle]

we should hunt down and kidnap valve employees and torture them to death with power tools

[formal dew]

Richard Garfield be like

[radiant merlin]

Hunt down?

[burnt dragon]

hunt down the valve employee

[mystic turtle]

hunt down the gaben

[high current]

We should steal valve employees milk so they have no milk for their cereal.

That’ll fix the bot problem.

[paper sluice]

Did this guy just time travel from 2016 or what

[next nymph]

this happened at activision-blizzard and it didn't improve their games

[spare hedge]

Wait... Are you suggesting that stealing Gaben's breast milk wouldn't fix tf2 ?

[spare obsidian]

https://youtu.be/1bog9YqX2TM 💀

[broken haven]

and people are ANGRY

[spare obsidian]

would be incredible funny if this leads to nothing

[high current]

Honestly it’s probably the best “coverage” of the tf2 situation from an outside perspective. Basically: he assumed the tweet from Valve after SaveTF2 resulted in sweeping changes, but this is the first he had heard that the bots have gone largely unchecked.

[tough locust]

just heard about casual.tf which is cool but it's just a list of servers. Always wondered why someone hasn't made some kind of quickplay/matchmaking system in a browser that you can load with the steam overlay? Teamwork.tf is kinda close but it's still just a server browser that requires you to sift through servers.
Imagine you could click a button and be tossed into one of the trillions of vanilla comunity servers at the same time as other people

[unborn pecan]

there has been

remember

creators.tf

lol

[rare creek]

didnt casual.tf shut down?

[tough locust]

still think creators.tf was a ton of wasted potential due to all the drama and for being a walled garden. Would've been awesome if more servers could use their custom weapons but nope it was restricted to their servers only

[tough locust]

apparently its still around but there's not many people in it

[unborn pecan]

what was the drama even

was like

tyler mcstinker

?

[tough locust]

no idea but it got shut down bc of it

tf2 community memembers cannot handle a single project without getting angry and shutting it down

[rare creek]

tyler mcvicker was promoting it in his videos like he just found the server and liked it while he actually co-owned it

[unborn pecan]

cringe.

[hidden gyro]

What if valve added something that requires a GPU to complete timely for the game to function like a GPU miner

Make money while making money

Absolutely no downsides

[tough locust]

i also think that they were around at the wrong time. They came and died in 2020, and considering that Casual was still pretty much okay and people weren't disillusioned by it yet nobody was trying it out. I'm pretty sure it didn't even have a matchmaking system tho it was also just a list of servers. There were only like 5 total and they were always full so there was no point to use the hats and stuff that only worked on those 5 servers

[hidden gyro]

Valve added 64bit to TF2, why not make it a requirement

[tough locust]

the bots are already on the 64 bit version

[unborn pecan]

valve should require

tpm

[hidden gyro]

Yes

Anything newer than 4th Gen i series has one anyway

[tough locust]

the bots also have tpm modules then

[left sand]

theyre using the 32 bit version

[tough locust]

and my laptop is an intel i7-3570m I dont even have TPM and it runs TF2 fine

[left sand]

and even if they removed 32 bit, it wouldnt be too hard for hosters to maintain updates to the 32 bit version

[hidden gyro]

How would you know unless

[tough locust]

you can talk to the bot hosters they make videos on youtube all the time

[left sand]

it would help though

because the more work it is

the more bored theyll get

[tough locust]

does anything even change between 32 bit and 64 bit in that eregard i thought they use directx dll files

[orchid sorrel]

c.tfs biggest problem was the huge download times

multiple gigs of content for just a bunch of server only hats

[small siren]

*multiple gigs of

content for just a bunch of

server only hats*

- drcactus

[orchid sorrel]

it was great in the early days when the asset pack was relatively small

[tough locust]

true i honestly didnt give a damn about the hats but the custom weapons were pretty cool. Seems unnecessary when tf2 already has literally any hat you could possibly want

[orchid sorrel]

the hats were a nice carrot on the stick for their contract system, but it wasnt really sustainable in the long run due to how much new hat packs bloated the asset pack

[jagged pawn]

LMAO

[hidden gyro]

https://youtu.be/NArb-D-M8aU?t=540

WAT

The upwards dong?

[high current]

huh?

[hidden gyro]

Watch like 10 seconds from the timestamp

[mystic turtle]

oh man, looks like the Original isn't the only Soldier weapon that leads to a paenis joke

[high current]

huh, i mean the most common prop in the game is dick rock

[mystic turtle]

oh man, I remember hearing about that callout
that was goofy

[left sand]

i think itll be really funny if the summer update comes out with a lot of fun stuff for the community and everyone just stops talking about fixtf2

[hidden gyro]

New TF2 Update:

• Removed Linux Support
• Updated Localization Files
• 103 new community provided items

[mystic turtle]

true, that would be silly
especially since they'd be going back on the whole "keep pressuring Valve" thing

[mystic turtle]

2 of which are weapons, one of which is a reskin (the community goes insane, we have had no new weapons since Jungle Inferno)

oop sorry for ping

[hidden gyro]

lmao it's ok

[wild grove]

Both are gonna be reskins, gonna be put in the commando grade-assassin grade slot like invasion.

[mystic turtle]

oh man

[broken haven]

https://x.com/TF2Emporium/status/1798859525455597893

TF2 Emporium (@TF2Emporium) on X

New Scout Collection, The Gooner! Vote now on Steam Workshop: https://t.co/PnYOFIxirZ #TF2

Twitter · Jun 6, 2024, 11:28 PM

[mystic turtle]

anyways, a random idea I had, before I head out
what if the BFB's boost drained over a period of time (to be determined through testing) instead of instantly disappearing
It might be able to encourage players to stay in fights as boost loss is not as much of a problem, possibly even with the harsh boost lost after taking 20 damage the gun already has
and at least for me it seems much more appealing than just reducing the amount of damage needed to drain boost or the alternative of having boost drain over time when out of fights, meaning you're stuck with the speed penalty almost all the time when playing defensively or waiting for picks like a Spy with the C&D and the Big Earner
which kinda beats the point IMO because Scout is a pick class and his utility falls off once he has a group of reasonably skilled players focusing him, let alone sentries

But IDK, I'm not some sorta balance god

as for how the drain works, to prevent some sort of EarthBound "rolling HP meter" type of scenario where a chip shot for 20 can completely stop boost drain, perhaps the actual value of your boost could work just as usual, with the functional amount of boost you have being affected by that drain over time
so it lags behind the actual amount of boost you have

[uncut spear]

LMAO

that cosmetic actually goes hard

[wild grove]

That and another tweet or retweet.

[unborn pecan]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1085675210021281842.webp?size=48&quality=lossless&name=STARE

They would never remove linux support

NEVER EVER

[summer steeple]

replaced entirely with proton

[unborn pecan]

that'd be fine

if vac worked with proton

which it doesn't

[summer steeple]

intentional decision so they can kill linux tf2 support

[spare obsidian]

kill linux when valve invest heavy on linux? most unrealistic take

[summer steeple]

no you see it'll fix every single problem with tf2

removing linux support will add 20000 new weapons to the game

[hidden gyro]

Kill Linux TEMPORARILY (Permanently) with a promise (tweet) to add it back when they add VAC support to proton (never)

[spare obsidian]

how about valve remove every single bone of every tf2 player that would fix the problem

[summer steeple]

dear TF2 fans, we hear you! We see how out of control this problem has become, and we are removing Linux to fix it

[spare obsidian]

lol

[unborn pecan]

die

[next nymph]

owned

[unborn pecan]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1085675210021281842.webp?size=48&quality=lossless&name=STARE

[next nymph]

https://tenor.com/view/trip-fall-down-owned-gif-15908897

[spare obsidian]

is tf2 save yet?

[next nymph]

yea

[merry vault]

• removed official servers

game saved

[hidden gyro]

Yeah, quickplay seems like the likely solution

that or paid to play again

but like $30

but maybe they'll give us a free keyless crate monthly to make up for it

[merry vault]

Honestly Im not sure if there would be enough people to moderate community servers if official servers died.

[cursive peak]

There were enough back in the day.

[hidden gyro]

UncleTopia on DDOS watch

[merry vault]

Premium matchmaking plus hiring people to manually ban people in that MM would be good tho.

[summer steeple]

back in the day sure, but there's way more players now, and there's a lot less community servers (though i'm sure if official servers died more would pop up)

[merry vault]

given people say teamwork.tf numbers arent reliable, and that steamcharts numbers arent reliable, is there a reliable estimate of human players?

[summer steeple]

wait for coms player numbers website

[spare obsidian]

how much i bet voldemort will say mcom website is inacurate lol

[summer steeple]

well considering he can't read

high

[cursive peak]

If that happens, we all collectively show up and take a shit on his desk.

[paper sluice]

Scout beard cosmetic, immediately rejected

They’ll never let it happen

[spare obsidian]

that would be so funny to watch

[cursive peak]

Even better if he's streaming when it happens.

Door gets kicked open, a parade of the over 1000 people in this server coming in, dropping a fat shit, and leaving.

[spare obsidian]

he would have a lot of guts to be proud of being wrong if that happens

[cursive peak]

Assuming he's not buried in the process.

[summer steeple]

for some reason i've been misreading this message as "they'll never let it happen again", and I was trying to figure out if there was already a scout beard cosmetic in the game and what kind of nightmare it unleashed when added

[next nymph]

already happened twice

[unborn pecan]

the west has falen

[summer steeple]

billions must shave

[tough locust]

okay but imagine if they change 2 lines in the source code and allow for larger MvM robot teams with unrestricted_maxplayers and bump up the edicts from 2048 to 4096. I'd still be salty about the bots but i'd be distracted for a week. All the little changes that they do always end up being the most exciting (like the 100 player 'support' that they shadowdropped for mostly no reason)

[tough locust]

i mean as-is official servers dont have any moderation and every server has a handful of mods or at least some kind of sourcemod anti cheat

[merry vault]

Honestly I have no idea how effective sourcemod anticheat is, I kinda assumed its bad since everyone says anticheat is too hard to make and doesnt even work with kernel level drivers.
I.e. with no humans to moderate, community servers would just turn into valve servers 2.0 and if they readded like a community server quickplay the good ones would just delist themselves and its back to the server browser.

[cursive peak]

I don't know why you'd expect community servers to go unmoderated. There are always people in the community around said server who want mod on it.

Like, how many discords are totally unmoderated?

[merry vault]

Its in regards to the hypothetical of valve pulling the plug on official servers and community servers having to bear the entire burden.

[tough locust]

skial's mod army is like some huge corps of people playing for thousands of hours to become mods, i'm sure with more users coming to community servers demand would get even higher

[cursive peak]

WIth more players, that means the admins would have a bigger pool to pull potential mods from.

[tough locust]

they were able to mdoerate themselves just fine from 2007-2010 before valve servers were enev around and then from 2011-2016 before valve pulled the plug on quickply

[merry vault]

I was a post f2p updater. I think I first tried TF2 after a "TF2 killer" called Brink launched and flopped lmao.

[cursive peak]

And community servers usually have a way to report problem players that persists even if every available admin/mod is offline/AFK.

I do believe there are even plugins that let you !report in in-game chat that relays the info to a channel in a discord.

Even the old community I was in had a report command that posted on the community's forum.

[merry vault]

I mean maybe, i just assume the lowest common denominator would be more like the pinion server ad days.

[cursive peak]

I just blacklisted those servers.

And null routed pinion.

[merry vault]

Blacklist works for the server browser, but if there was a quickplay style queue to bypass the issue of seeding community servers i think youd run into the same problem as back then. Idk what null routing means.

[cursive peak]

I do believe quickplay honored your blacklist.

I had edited my hosts file to redirect the pinion URLs to 127.0.0.1.

[tough locust]

those pinion pot of gold ads were actual painful slop to have running in the background while you were trying to play the game

[spare obsidian]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvH7syo376E

[high current]

I was just about to ask if anyone had watched that

IMO it's one of his worst videos, it seems based on the idea that anti-cheat measures need to stop 100% of cheaters in order to warrant existing.

He also made it sound like Steam Trust Factor is near impossible to make differentiate between human and bot accounts

[wild grove]

I saw this video and the whole quickplay section is incorrect, at some point in quickplay's life, they addressed the issue of ads in motds, training bots in servers, by making servers that did that not able to be in quickplay.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210302211648/https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2825-AFGJ-3513

[high current]

He's also fixated on the idea that Valve would make the game pay-to-play.

[livid oracle]

isnt this just because the cathook guy got bored lol

do they have literally no other programmers

[tough locust]

i like that we came to the same conclusion about community quickplay major W

maybe someone will make one now with shounic's shphere of influence

[summer steeple]

valve, the company who made csgo f2p will make a game pay to play

[wild grove]

They should fix not being able to connect to servers from the steam web browser, for some reason, it doesn't work and I have to manually copy paste IPs.

[high current]

that is wildly annoying actually. I just want to click a button and join servers again

[high current]

Exactly. This seems like a troll video tbh

its so bad

And in fairness there's a lot of some people in comments calling him out for it

[spare hedge]

Agreed, a lot of weird assumptions

[wild grove]

I should actually report it, I have a feeling it hasn't been reported yet.

[summer steeple]

holy shit tf2 players with brains????

[livid oracle]

no his worst video is the 64-bit one where he pretends that the +100 fps boost is entirely from porting to 64-bit

[summer steeple]

idk a lot of his videos are bad

its so hard to pick his worst one

don't worry, any inaccuracies in his videos are actually intentional due to "simplifying it for the audience"

[high current]

I mean at least that one had the vague concept of “64 bit better than 32 bit” right

This one is like a 4th graders assumption of anticheat and ai

[livid oracle]

i really dont like that one because he explicitly says the fps boost is from porting to 64 bit so now everyone parrots that

especially when JOSHIE AND FICOOL WERE TALKING ABOUT THE OPTIMISATIONS IN HIS OWN SERVER

[spare obsidian]

last point "build your own site" did shounic did got the memo about c.tf failing? lol

[high current]

Basically “because AI exists, we’ll never be able to differentiate between humans and bots”. As if tf2 bots use AI and as if that’s at all relevant to the situation in the first place lol

Yeh idk. His bug rundown videos are pretty interesting. But I feel like when he tries to cover more than 1 basic topic in a video he just butchers everything

[tough locust]

i still think creators.tf died because it was walled garden and wasn't exactly "for the community" like tyler mcvicker heralded. it just fragmented the community with its closed ecosystem, had drama, and died

[high current]

I like most of his stuff honestly. But he has some stinkers that he doesn’t really do anything to correct.

[summer steeple]

its funny because many of his bug videos are wrong or have really shitty fix ideas too

[left sand]

i like how he conveniently made it seem like smooth 100 player servers are exclusive to his server

[high current]

Eh. It’s still kinda interesting to see the vague idea of how bugs might be caused

[summer steeple]

conviently adds everyone who said anything to him to the credits of his 100 player server vid except mcoms (who did most of the work)

[high current]

That was basically copying what you figured out on your server, and with plugins other people made which he credited as “someone made a plugin that…”. Right? Or am I misremembering

[tough locust]

i thought he mentioned mastercoms directly in his first 100 platyer video

[left sand]

i dont believe he mentioned me by name at in any video, i mean not like that even matters

[wild grove]

Was mcoms also involved 🥺 ?

[left sand]

the important part is just linking people like

[spare obsidian]

also one good thing shounic broguth is that valve did got restructure in 2016 according to the final days of HLA

[left sand]

the config to make 100 players smooth

it would be like

go to this link you can download it right now and have your own smoothly running 100 player server

but nah instead internally they said my config was mostly useless

even though they use it lol

[high current]

Yeh for some reason I still see people talk about how Valve still has people’s desks on wheels so they can move around freely. As if it’s 2010 still.

[tough locust]

so more people can do 100 player servers since his is full 24/7, shows off plugins to get servers restarted after a crash and doesn't release them for anyone

[spare obsidian]

literally, i've read the final hours of HLA the reason of why they did it because they got too many things doing

like i don't think shounic is wrong in the last point too

[radiant merlin]

Hopium take: valve is still working on steam trust

[left sand]

yeah the plugins are super simple theres no point in not releasing them imo

and its like

when i announced i was researching it and i made my test server

[small siren]

*when i announced i

was researching it and i

made my test server*

- mcoms

[left sand]

i was begged

to release my work

even though i was already intending to

it was just annoying

[radiant merlin]

Why? Persoanally i find it weird that valve had been doing these game type events like mmo week, so probably they are collecting data from the users

[tough locust]

new 100 plater lore

[left sand]

because i was constantly asked by people who had no intention in releasing their own work

lol

[high current]

But how are they going to figure out what account behavior is human and what behavior is bots? According to Sonic it’s impossible!

[radiant merlin]

Most users will at least interact with the ads, buy games, etc, so that's how they detect bots

[wild grove]

one good thing is that I was right about VALVe not wanting anything to deal with tf2 because it doesn't make as much money as the other stuff VALVe does

[high current]

Yeh the meme is that sonic basically made it sound like it’s impossible to differentiate between humans and tf2 bots using steam trust, and that you’d need an impossible amount of data to have a chance.

From the video you’d think they haven’t implemented it anywhere

[spare obsidian]

i think the question is: how do you differenciate pro players vs cheaters? like how do you know that snipper for example isn't cheating but is just good?

🤔

[radiant merlin]

Yes, bots can also "interact" with steam features, but i believe valve figured out how to differentiate an user already, and they have already marked several real users as real

[spare obsidian]

you have to asume eeveryone is a cheater until proven inocent type of thing

[summer steeple]

also bots don't try to be subtle

[high current]

Also I think there’s something to be said about the fact that TF2 bots are as bad as they are because they can basically just be bots, they can just do the most optimized, basic, blatant version of everything. If you raise the bar to them doing things, they’ll meet the bar, but they won’t be able to host as many bots on each machine

[spare obsidian]

i think the reason bots are so blatant in tf2 is because even bot makers don't see a monetary incentive like they see in cs2 or dota

[high current]

If you need 10% of your bots to be pretending to be humans on Steam, that’s 10% less bots spinning on casual servers.

[radiant merlin]

And probably making bots behave as humans in steam is more cpu costly than tf2 bots lol

[high current]

Well it’s because TF2 is only protected by VAC, which apparently isn’t even updated anymore. So they don’t even get detected by VAC to my understanding.

[spare obsidian]

i mean outside of that, making cs2 bot farms are far best invertion that a bot maker could do tbh

[high current]

Exactly. So having 10% of your bots pretending to be human on steam is like 25-50% less bots in casual.

Sure there’s still bots, but less.

[merry vault]

is the CS2 cheater problem human cheaters or bots?

[spare obsidian]

bypassing steam trust could be potentially be bypassable with actual AI bots, like those AI Bots in twitter or youtube

[radiant merlin]

Valve could also fix the automated steam account generator

[high current]

They don’t really have spin bots because VACnet can autodetect those.

[spare obsidian]

that really means making the api cost money

which it could backfire

because iirc they use the steampi to automate this

[misty plover]

Did he actually I never watched the vid despite him asking me questions about what the potential benefits were (such as new optimizations from the new compiler version and simd extensions that aren't active by default in 32bit msvc)

And even then I was pretty direct about how I don't work with tf2's code enough to know what to even expect in gains esp because Joshie and Ficool made so many changes and fixes for that release

[radiant merlin]

Mmm maybe increasing the price and making discounts to trusted partners?

[misty plover]

Do they still not do captcha for sign up, I thought they did

[spare obsidian]

not gonna work, when elon made the api cost money people figure out how to scrap the api

which objetively is the best way to work with apis, scrap it

[summer steeple]

I mean scraping is reading, I assume the account generator uses API functions

[spare obsidian]

yeah they do and even if people for some reason don't want to use official API there's like a re-implementation of the API iirc

[radiant merlin]

So basiclly, the treadmill work probably works in ther way too

[misty plover]

I would just rate limit the endpoint based on ip

[spare obsidian]

that's piss easy to bypass lol

setup a vpn relay with a kill switch everything you got rated limited

[misty plover]

Disallow creation when using an IP block hosted at a known VPN or datacenter. It's really not that complex?

Like you're talking to a developer who has implemented protections against this type of spam

The two methods are restricting creation or adding more annoying captchas

[radiant merlin]

Yeah that's easy to bypass for someone who knows what they are doing

[small siren]

*Yeah that's easy to

bypass for someone who knows

what they are doing*

- ashewiki_tf

[radiant merlin]

But it also adds up to the treadmill work for the hosters

[spare obsidian]

i mean setting up a vpn kill switch isn't that hard

like it doesn't take more than a minute

some apps even automate this

ex: qtbittorrent

[misty plover]

Is a VPN Killswitch not what I think it is?

[radiant merlin]

Also idk about the vpn. The only issue with vpn i belive valve has is buying games at cheaper prices

[spare obsidian]

they tecnically fixed it by making those countries use USD by default iirc

[misty plover]

I thought it just prevents you from using the internet while not connected to the vpn

Which doesn't really stop rate limiting

Is it not that?

I don't really use or work with vpns beyond the fact I usually have them blacklisted from sites I work on just because of the high rate abuse

[orchid sorrel]

not the same thing I know, but rafmod/sigmod lets you do this currently

[spare obsidian]

that doesn't matter if rn mvm is unplayable because of severe perf issues with bots

[orchid sorrel]

do u mean the stuttering you get in valve servers

[wild grove]

It's fine in community.

[spare obsidian]

it only happens in valve servers?

[orchid sorrel]

yea

[summer steeple]

what kind of stuttering?

[orchid sorrel]

server will randomly stutter, most common when the server needs to spawn a lot of robots at once (or constantly spawning new bots)

[summer steeple]

huh, i don't remember seeing that

idk how recently i've played mvm tho

[orchid sorrel]

its a pretty old issue

its most common in bigrock and mannhattan missions

and I think ghost town

[wild grove]

yeah valve mvm servers are ran on duct tape, band aids, and john.

john as in john the old homeless man that spills beer on the dataserver once in a while, pretty chill guy.

why can't more community server brand websites have this feature?!

copying the ip?!

[eternal haven]

I think it would be interesting to see how long a simple server side anticheat would be effective against the bots

Something like StAC that community servers run, that would ban the bots just out of the box wouldn't it?

And it doesn't really have any false positives for real players

I bet the bot runners are too lazy to work around something like that

Certainly you could identify behaviors that the bots do that are impossible for real players to do

[left sand]

i mean there's already server side anticheat stuff

[eternal haven]

And even if they work around that, suddenly they're a lot more killable

since they're not allowed to do that anymore

[wild grove]

at that point, you're just playing with expert training bots lol

[eternal haven]

That would be somewhat better than aimbots wouldn't it?

[radiant merlin]

No if they still kick

[eternal haven]

Disable votekicks

[mystic turtle]

so essentially waves with snipers on higher MvM difficulties, got it.
not much trouble

[fleet kite]

Should have licensed it as GPL3 /s

[jagged pawn]

late but extremely good video

[jagged pawn]

no they didn't. they tried to but it continued happening all the way until they caved and removed community servers from quickplay completely

[wild grove]

well that sucks I guess, but ngl I would rather take ads in the motd (that you can disable) than the game being unplayable officially at this point.

[merry vault]

Some servers had stuff to discourge disabling MOTD. I cant remember if it was outright not letting you play or just a nag. There was a short cfg you could try to use to bypass it iirc and some server would kick.

[wild grove]

it just replaces the default motd's text with "please enable motd :("

on pretty much all servers.

[mystic turtle]

I don't know if this practice was there back then, but I recall there's this one achievement_engineer server that forces you to enable MOTD by constantly opening a small Source popup
which unfortunately also happens to prevent you from switching weapons with the number keys, which is definitely obstructive to gameplay

[wild grove]

Def sounds like one to avoid.

[mystic turtle]

yea
then again, it's one of those servers that I class with Skial 2fort Asia and others that don't seem to bother getting a good internet connection for their server

and for some reason, I find sweaty players more often than bots in casual, I can confidently say that I've left more servers because of sweats than because of bots
Asia I guess

so at least over here Casual is usable, and so I don't bother with those servers usually

[wild grove]

US and EU is where the bot issue is more prevalent, its severely lessened on other regions.

[mystic turtle]

perhaps it's because the TF2 playerbase is concentrated there
down where I live, the PC gaming market is smaller because, well, 3rd world country

free mobile games get more traction because it's free and because people already have the hardware

[jagged pawn]

this is the take of someone who did not play back then

like sorry if this comes off as dismissive but you're seriously saying you'd rather have built-in ads rather than just opening your server browser and selecting uncletopia? come on lol

[wild grove]

Ew uncletopia, I have never had a good experience there.

[jagged pawn]

I mean same but you get my point, any other community server

I'm just not getting why you need them to be accessible through quickplay

[wild grove]

I don't want quickplay back.

[jagged pawn]

well that sucks I guess, but ngl I would rather take ads in the motd (that you can disable) than the game being unplayable officially at this point.

[eternal haven]

I love uncletopia

It's like casual but slightly better

and no bots

[wild grove]

I want community server queueing added. That doesn't require quickplay coming back.

MvM Boot Camp already does the whole community queue thing while also not being quickplay, it just doesn't have the option to specifically queue for community servers.

But also I completely fine with looking thru the server browser, much better if there's a website I could search servers thru like Moonlight MvM.

(Can you tell I mostly play TF2 for MvM from all this MvM talk?)

[eternal haven]

I mean you could make your own super easy

valve has a web API that lists all servers

only issue is you can only list 20000 servers with it

but usually there's only about half that many tf2 servers

[wild grove]

and exclude the amount that's a valve server since they can't be joined by ad-hoc?

[eternal haven]

well valve servers are included if you want

[wild grove]

Or are those already excluded?

[eternal haven]

it's optional

you can specify a filter for valve to filter on their end

[wild grove]

I wish I could do that. A community matchmaker would be nice. But 0 skills in relation to making a website :(

[eternal haven]

well it wouldn't be matchmaking

[neon knot]

HOW MUCH MONEY TO GET MASTERCOMS TO FIX PREC

[eternal haven]

just this

[left sand]

its coming

[rare creek]

HOW MUCH MONEY TO GET VALVE TO DELETE TF2

[neon knot]

I LOVE U

[burnt dragon]

I agree

[jagged pawn]

you should've said like $10k so jazz would've dono'd

[left sand]

im raging

[wild grove]

What is Prec?

[jagged pawn]

recording software for demos

pretty much every comp player uses it

x64 broke it

[wild grove]

ahhhhh

it sounds useful outside of comp.

[rare creek]

just use the ds_ cvars??/

are comp players stupid

[wild grove]

what is the ds_ convars?

[rare creek]

demo system

they let you auto record demos

[jagged pawn]

it's not just about the auto recording, you can do that with in game settings

it has other quality of life stuff like logging killstreak timestamps

[rare creek]

ds_ also does that

[jagged pawn]

oh?

well I'm sure there's other stuff but I never used it myself because I don't need more than the in game stuff

[rare creek]

in fact i think you can even set up a bind to create a custom timestamp at any time while recording

[kind falcon]

there’s no point in maintaining 32bit if u can benefit from the performance the 64b update provided

[left sand]

queue into team fortress 2 casual at 3am
expect unplayable bot crisis
have normal boring game of tf2

[jagged pawn]

I've always wondered if they only hit certain modes

or not only obv but like prioritize

[rare creek]

they dont queue for degroot keep

[wild grove]

bussy?!

[jagged pawn]

egypt my beloved

[wild grove]

Also why the payload cart playing?

[left sand]

we had to kick like

1 bot

every 10 minutes

tf2 is unplayable

[jagged pawn]

lmao

[left sand]

okay that one had 6 bots