Here I am! Everytime I get home from college I'm on and trying to get people to fill it, we manage to keep it full for a few hours then it starts to die down again and then I need to get to bed so I can't keep playing and getting more people to join.
Valve Maps's Progress Thread
- Thread starter Kazoo
- Start date
I received a similar answer/confirmation from spidEY. The only way to have QuickPlay is to remove the no crits & no spread.
Have you tried idling using GamingRobot's textmode_tf2 file? A console window shows up, you click 4 (for Valve Maps), and you'll be running TF2 in console mode.
All right, so far, people seem to favor keeping the no crits and no spread instead of the Quickplay. This is understandable, since a good number of our members like competitive gameplay, and Valve Maps is the our only server that can offer this.
However, if this is the case, we need to put more effort in keeping this server active. Remember, you can idle during the night if you're busy with school and/or work. If you cannot for reasons beyond your control, that's understandable.
For those of you who are already idling and playing on the servers whenever possible, you have my sincerest thanks.
However, if this is the case, we need to put more effort in keeping this server active. Remember, you can idle during the night if you're busy with school and/or work. If you cannot for reasons beyond your control, that's understandable.
For those of you who are already idling and playing on the servers whenever possible, you have my sincerest thanks.
I am no good at using the console commands. I would need someone to talk me through it in order for me to understand. Also the respawn time on the server can be up to 15 seconds for me sometimes, is that supposed to be normal? At university I cant even find servers in the server list, they dont show up, so i dont know if i could even connect via gamingrobots idle thing.
Dylan, I try to go when I can but I also have other things I have to do.... I am not able to be on tf2 until 6 pm most days because I cant connect. I try to get on but as stated the university must be blocking the servers or something... I have to work on labs and other things and when I get home I usually dont want to idle on a server, I want to PLAY on a server, which is why I go for whichever server has around 6-12 players on it so i can help fill it and have a good time. I only get 3-4 hours if im lucky, and i have to factor in distractions and other things....
Follow the instructions in GamingRobot's Idling Tip thread. If you still have trouble, ask him or me for help.
Also, I have been watching Valve Maps' GameTracker page today. Thanks to everyone who played and filled the server this evening.
Unfortunately, now we are back to no players. We have 5 idlers right now (myself included). If you can't play right now, feel free to idle. Remember, using Gaming's idling tool keeps the game running at minimal cost.
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just thought i'd put this out here.
Kazoo might wanna copy the code for this in your original post.
You know, I knew about that image. Yet it hadn't occurred to me to put it in the first post.
Thank you for the suggestion!
Also, it brings me joy to see people are on right now. (Of course, five of us are idlers, but that's not the point. Hehe.)
Edit: Of course, 20 minutes later, the server pretty much empties out to just the idlers... Why is it so hard to keep this server full?
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Valve has been blacklisting servers that try and cheat the quickplay system. So we are currently just using the cvars. Just check the sv_tags here.
Whoops that posted before I was ready.
I was going to say:In all honesty, there could be a lot of reasons the server doesn't stay full. Perhaps it empties because the map changes to something the current crew doesn't like. Perhaps they don't like the number of idlers - I've seen comments along the lines of "I hate servers that do this" and "how is this any different than bots?" Maybe they, like a lot of us, only have a limited time to play. Maybe they're not as competitively-minded as the rest, and they decide after a while they don't like no-crits and no-spread. Lots of things could be contributing, and there's no one solution that will solve them all, I think.
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Whoops that posted before I was ready.
In all honesty, there could be a lot of reasons the server doesn't stay full. Perhaps it empties because the map changes to something the current crew doesn't like. Perhaps they don't like the number of idlers - I've seen comments along the lines of "I hate servers that do this" and "how is this any different than bots?" Maybe they, like a lot of us, only have a limited time to play. Maybe they're not as competitively-minded as the rest, and they decide after a while they don't like no-crits and no-spread. Lots of things could be contributing, and there's no one solution that will solve them all, I think.
Your words are very true. So many factors play into this. If only there was a magical way to drive traffic to our server constantly. :/
Hans be sorry, Hans got school & Work nao Hans only has weekends to pleh. Baaaack to the subject, I believe that Gypsy is correct, sometimes I join into Valvemaps ( that is 10/24 ) and think " OK lets get this server started " only to see that in fact, there are 10 idlers, 8 on spect, 1 on red and other on blu. so I go to foundry or 2 fort. We have to limit the number of idlers. There has to be a reasonable number that A) prevents the server going downhill on ranks and B) disapointing people that thought there were actually XX players in the server (playing)
No need to apologize. Life comes first.
Perhaps we can use 2, maybe max of 4, idlers to get the server active? (The active hours seems to be from 4PM to 11PM CST.)
At night (past midnight CST), I think having more idlers is best. Though then the people that join late at night get disappointed...
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Perhaps we can use 2, maybe max of 4, idlers to get the server active? (The active hours seems to be from 4PM to 11PM CST.)
At night (past midnight CST), I think having more idlers is best. Though then the people that join late at night get disappointed...
Gaming and I have come up with a brilliant solution to the idling problem!
Unfortunately, the solution requires a good deal of work on our parts and we have limited time.
The solution is this: an advanced idling tool that keeps track of the number of players on all the TF2 servers. It could, depending on the time of day, decide what a good number of idlers was (say 2 - 4 during peak hours and 10 -12 during the dull times of the day) and only idle on a given server if there were fewer than that many players on the server. If there were too many players on one server, it would look at another, and another until it found a good server to idle on, and if it found that all servers were decently full, it would disconnect.
The tool would check the number of players on a server every 10 - 30 minutes and if any server got below the number of advised idlers, it would rejoin that server. This way one could leave the idling tool on all day while one was at school, and know that they would be automatically disconnected if the server they were idling in became full.
The mac version is in the works, though it still crashes sometimes, and the algorithm for picking which server to idle on is not as good as it could be, but if anyone is desperate, they could beta test the app with me. It grew out of the original idling tool for mac, and the basic functionality of pick-a-server, idle-indefinitely is still there.
However, the final result is at least a month out, if not more. And Gaming hasn't begun work on the Windows version, so if you want that, you'll have to go bug him. . .
This sounds amazing. *o*
You guys will be my heroes when you get this done.
Until then, we'll keep idling the old fashion way. But I give you two my thanks for taking up this project, despite your limited time.
(I'll be sure to bug Gaming to start. Hehe.)
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As if I don't have enough to do already. *Goes off and does AT and EC stuff*
I thought you were busy watching anime.
I know! D;
I would've left my laptop running on idle, but I thought there would people on right now.
