Seeding a Server

Filling up your server; one of the biggest issues with Servers running on-line, multiplayer fps games.  When I  played just MMORPGs, it wasn’t something I thought of. I was in my kinship, and alright there had to be a certain number of players to run an instance or a Raid, but apart from that, you could happily play/quest on your own or just with a couple of people. A small kinship could happily function by itself.

It’s not quite the same with an online multiplayer fps. For starters, games often only take off once a critical number of people have joined. Before that number is reached, players are basically hanging around, entertaining themselves. But they need to stay as just by being there, they increase the likelihood of others joining to make up that critical mass.

So, for a clan or community server, you need that core of players who are willing to do that.

TF2 has something called Quickplay, BF3 has something similar. I’ve written about Quickplay before, but essentially it’s the insta-join facility that you can use as a new player when you start up the game, directing you to Valve-approved servers where you can start playing. The WDG server has now been running the Valve-approved configuration for a few weeks now. Previous to this, we were finding that the server wasn’t filling. People would join briefly, see the server was more-or-less empty and leave, understandable, they wanted to play a good game of TF2 straight off, they didn’t have time to wait. Now we are getting players through. It still needs that core, but maybe after a couple of maps, people start to feed in, though the rate does vary, and the server fills, and stays full. We’ve checked the server status and currently it rates at

Standing: Good

Trending: Upward Fast.

Basically this means, that new people are joining and staying. Apparently, when anyone joins, the server score is deducted 15 points, then for every minute they stay, the score gets incremented by 1 up to a maximum of 1 hour. The whole system intends to weight itself towards busy, well-run community servers to try and ensure that new players experience the best of TF2. So from that alone, our Server should do well. We have our seeding core of Clan and community players and, as well as new players, when the server is full, we have our more experienced regulars dropping in and out to give them a proper flavour of the game. And we’re seeing regulars who haven’t played for a while, stopping by for a couple of maps, easier now the server is staying full which is a great outcome.

Lazytown; Lazyday, Lazynite: Team Fortress

Think of a map, a 5cp map.

Ensure it consists almost entirely of chokes between each point, ideal for spamming. Now set it to 32-man. Now make it insta-spawn. Make sure crits are allowed.

Congratulations, you may have thought of Lazytown on the GFTO server.

Spamtastic!!!!!!

This map is one of the most chaotic, spam-filled, manic maps out there, I’m sure. Yet I play it all the time. It has a daytime version, Lazyday, and a night time version, Lazynite.

Most of the time I play Demoman. The map is made for Demomen. We can sticky trap the choke points and spam our grenades through them. With an uber we can wipe out an engie nest and with a kritz, well just go for it. It’s a good map for Engineers too, if they’re fine about constant building destruction. Engineers are vital, two is really the bare minimum, unusual – normally two is the maximum that any team needs on a map. But this map is so spammy, dispensers are essential to dispense ammo and due to the instaspawn, teams need to be teleported to the front line at top speed to hold positions. The only class which really has difficulty is the Scout. Flanking opportunites are a problem and they are easily taken out by the large number of sentry guns and spamming Demomen and Soldiers.

The extreme ebb and flow of the game is marked too. I suspect here, that the server I play on benefits from the majority of players having got many hours of TF2 play under their belts, much gained on the Lazytown map. Without the co-ordinated attacks that you can get with experienced players, the map would just end in a defensive stalemate. As it is, one moment you can be about to cap final point, the next a couple of well-timed ubers from the opposition could find you driven back to defend your last. Games can go on for a long time.

I’m not sure if it’s improving my game much. I do think I’m getting better at dodging because of all the flying grenades and rockets. Also at bouncing grenades round corners.  And at timing detonating sticky traps; just as ubers wear off for instance. And at spamming. Always spamming. It’s a map where no-one is annoying because everyone is.

TF2 and a LoTRO Christmas Party.

Had a fully fun packed evening yesterday.

It started with my kinship’s online Yule Party. We have one every year (obviously). To mitigate our geeky sadness, we actually have a real life one too, or at least those local to London. We meet in a pub in for an afternoon drinking session; this year, finishing off in a local Indian restaurant. Pleasant.

Anyhow, to allow the spreading of Yuletide cheer amongst all the kinship, we have our online party, hosted by the Officers in our kinhouse; the Stoop in the hobbit homestead in the Shire. This year one of the kin would be performing a poem, a quiz was planned then two raffles with fireworks afterwards. And, as is traditional we,the Officers, would be wearing identical and ridiculous outfits, this year a white cloak, an unflattering green trouser suit effort and a rather peculiar red and white checked tassled hat (Turbine cannot design hats).

Hats.

This conveniently and coincidentally leads me to the other part of my evening, TF2. Originally the evening had been free and I’d been looking forward to an evening of just LoTRO frolics.

But no, Thursday evening turned out to be the date of the Season 10 ETF2L Grand Finale between Infused.Tt and Epsilon eSports. The readership may recall, assuming they’ve been reading that long and that their memories have held out sufficiently, that these were the same two teams that met in the final at i43 in August. This is because there are only two teams that play TF2 in the Premiere Division. No. I lie. I am funny. Really there are eight(ish), counting drops. It just turned out that, again, these were the teams that made it through.

Anyhow, this was happening, and it was a fair bet that with these teams and at this level, there’d be some excellent play plus the game Casters were known to be good. So, both laptops came out. The VanillaTV Stream went on one plus the chat channel, on the other I booted up LoTRO and partied.

And the party was good; and as for TF2, three maps were played. On the first, cp_Badlands, it initially looked as if Infused were heading for a steamrolling, but they managed to pull themselves back in a fantastic comeback (simultaneous to the Stream crashing and the screen going black for everyone) and eventually won 4-3 with a Golden Cap. Game-on. Epsilon took the next map, cp_snakewater 0-5, so it was on to the third, cp_gullywash. Again this was tightly fought,…until, until, until during the dying moments of the last match, Epsilon brought on two Heavies, or so I’m told. My Internet chose this moment to disconnect. When I returned, the TF2 world was in turmoil. Only one Heavy is allowed in comp play. So was it cheating? Was it all part of a desperate plot (not sure by whom)? Did Heavy no.2 have chance move or shoot; if he didn’t he sort of didn’t count. How much damage did Heavy no.1 do/take; if it was the same as a scout, well he sort of was one then. It was obvious the League admins couldn’t make an immediate decision, tapes would have to be scrutinised and either the final result upheld or an additional Golden Cap played.

Edit: at time of posting, it looks like the result has been upheld and Epsilon are the winners. Whatever, there was good play from both sides and either team would have been a worthy winner.

Trying League of Legends

I quote: A good ratio is 150 creeps by 20-25 minutes, If I get a good lane when I play AD carry (MF <3), I have around 175-200 by that time, which equals around 220 AD from full AD builds. If you get the metagame rolling (meaning an actual good toplaner like Garen) everyone should have that farm, even the mid, theres no excuse. Jungle gets a freebie, Support will get a /ignore when he exceeds the 30 J

It’s an extraction from a thread on the WDG  forum about playing League of Legends.

And it’s incomprehensible (sorry Karthus).

So it was obvious that I had to give it a go.

LoL is f2p, and the nearest thing to my current playing experience, is PvP in LOTRO or Rift. Basically you control a Champion with various skills/spells/attributes/items. And you fight, on your own or with others, either other player-controlled Champions or bots; you can fight with bots as well.  The Champions are reinforced by a number of NPC minions who carry out most of the basic fighting. Your goal is destroy enemy turrets placed in paths, called lanes, and eventually the enemies Nexus, all the while gathering gold and experience points.

But of course there is more to it than that.

I worked my way through the two tutorials. Then decided to try a co-op game with all bots. Except I didn’t. I first cottoned that they might be real people alongside me, when they seemed to be in discussion, and only the opposing Champions were called Something-bot. I was playing something called Fiddlesticks that appeared to be a kind of undead thing, chosen at random and in slight panic in the few seconds we were given to prepare at the start. And I seemed to be in the wrong lane. Fortunately, having done the tutorial, I knew what one of the others meant when he said

‘Berathe, you need to go to the top lane’

I might be clueless, but I was obedient too. So I went.

After that, things happened but it seemed to go. I was with another Champion; we sort of managed with the help of the first player, who ever so often left his lane to wade in. I clicked buttons, bought random items at the shop and died a lot.

Two champions, one turret, lots of minions

We finished victorious (I suspect this is usually the case against bots). My associates gg’d (good gamed) each other, so it seemed my total ineptitude hadn’t ruined the game.

Anyhow, for the next few games, it’s been all bots. I played one co-op with WDG people which gave an indicationof what the game’s potential and one where we went against other players; we lost but it wasn’t particularly well-matched, our levels were all over the place. I’m still working out my playstyle; in MMOs I’ve tended towards tanks. So far, it seems to be tank/heal/support.

Battling on Battlefield 3

I had some good games in Battlefield 3, the other night, on our new BF3 server. Yes, after years of rejecting the realism of the standard first-person shooter, I’ve started playing one. Having been softened up by TF2, I reckon.

TF2 = downward spiral

Anyhow, we’re trialling a server. Many in the clan and community have moved away from TF2 now, they’ve been playing it since it began and there’ve been many changes in the game, which some feel have diluted it’s nature. So it made sense for the Clan to look at other games being played. And BF3, being one of the most recent and biggest releases seemed an obvious choice.

We decided to start modest and get a 32-slot servers and trial it for 3 months. It’s been set to a mix of Rush and Conquest maps (Rush: basically attack and defend, Conquest: basically capture points) with a 2-player start up. The default is 8-player but this is a large number of players for a small community to guarantee being available to start a server up (below that number, you’re just frozen in place waiting for others to join).

The first night we only managed to play with three or four of us, with no randoms joining us. Randoms tend to be the key to a server’s success; players who either find the server via the Quick Play option or via the server filter. Regulars are also vital of course, but unless you have a huge pool, there are often not enough fill a server. The hope is, of course, that enough randoms will favourite the server and become Regulars to do this and build a community. It’s the same really in TF2.

The other night, however, we managed to more-or-less fill the server. A fair few were us, along with various friends, but others I didn’t recognise. I hope they were randoms.  There have been complaints in BF3 forums that the Quick Play system wasn’t picking up some servers so they weren’t getting random players. Also that only a certain number of servers ever showed up in the browse servers option, this option seriously needs refining anyway. You can’t filter for ping for starters which means a large number of the servers that show up after a search are of little use. But maybe the other night showed that the WDG server was managing to get itself picked up.

Anyway, time will tell.

Edit: patch came out today which seemed to set minimum number of players to 4, to prevent stats padding apparently. They have also reduced idle time before you get kicked. Together these are potentially not good.

(shameless plug: server name WDG)

ETF2L Season 10 draws to a close

Season 10 in the European TF2 League is just drawing to a close. We’ve seen some good games at the top, a bit of drama; teams folding with other teams being unexpectedly promoted as a result and interesting line-up changes, along with the usual amount of low-level inter-player abuse and mild (or sometimes not so mild) homoerotic innuendo that goes to make up our happy little Tf2 world.

My clan has a team in Division 5. And it has been exciting to watch them, as they attempt to arrange games and get everyone together at the same time to play bearing in mind work commitments, life commitments and time zones. Sometimes they’ve made up to three or four arrangements in the same week. It’s kept me on the edge of my seat.

I think some matches have been played, though these seem a small, insignificant part of it all. We seem to have done well, though regarding actually winning games, perhaps less so.

But to be honest, in my opinion, any team that has made it through the Season, as a team, has done good.

6 vs 6 gameplay in TF2

I’ve written before about pub play compared with comp play. Most comp games are played 6 players vs 6 players (although there are other formats; 2vs2, 9vs9). The main comp classes are Soldier, Medic, Demoman and Scout although other classes will be used as the occasion demands. Most pub games are played either on either 12vs12 or 16vs16 maps.

I’ve never played 6 vs 6. It sounds as if it would be very different in style and pace from the usual pub match. Certainly as a Demoman, my fave class, there seems to be certain things that you must be able to do or know, to be able to play. For starters, you need to be able to do sticky jumping; sticky jumping and knowing exactly what you intend to do as you soar through the air. And then you need to know rollouts. On 5 cp  maps  (capture point), much depends on which team can capture the central point. The team that can get there first has the advantage and often as not, this hinges on the Demoman. Rollouts are the fastest routes to the central point. The Demoman, assisted by sticky jumping, uses map specific Demoman rollouts to get there quickly, and using sticky traps etc, will secure it, alongside the Scouts who are the fastest class and who will have made their own way there. It may be the Scouts who actually capture the point (they capture at double the speed), the Demoman holding defence and dealing out the damage.

Badlands; one of the rarer maps played in 6vs 6 and Comp (this is a lie)

So, in order to play 6 vs 6 I need to learn the rollouts. There is a lot of information out there, many Youtube videos.  But the trick is remembering what you’ve watched on a video when you’re actually in-game. TF2 allows you to create maps off-line which is useful, this means you can practice this sort of thing without the distraction of getting killed or being required to do something; yawn!

There are opportunities for less experienced players. There is a Steam Group that has been set up by various higher level players since TF2 went f2p to help introduce new people, in particular f2p players, to the 6 vs 6 format (6 vs 6 doesn’t have to be competitive as such, it is just a different style of play). One thing I like is about the TF2 community and many of the high level comp players is how much they promote TF2 and encourage and support others to play the game, whether it’s pub f2p players or fellow comp players at lower levels.

Anyhow, when I’ve reached a level of competence and confidence, I may give this group a try.  From what people have said, playing 6 vs 6 as well as being a new (for me) and fun experience, also helps improve play generally which can never be bad.

Going Huge in TF2

In my time with TF2, I’ve learnt many new words and phrases, many of them not at all suitable for a family-centred blog such as Berath’s Brain Burps.

However, out of them all, ‘going huge’ is my favourite. ‘Going huge’ is a term that I, personally, would like to use as often as possible in my daily life. I have decided that. I’ve heard that people go huge as in, ‘X is going huge’ or ‘Y going huge there’. Competitive divisions can go huge as in ‘div3 going huge’. Team Fortress 2 itself can go huge as in ‘TF2 is going huge.’

Unfortunately,  I’m hampered a little by not being entirely, 100% sure, what it means apart from some sort of impressive achievement. Could I validly say, ‘the bus is going huge’ when it gets me to work early? Or the tube ‘went huge this morning,’ when there were no delays? Could I tell my co-workers that they have ‘gone huge’ when they have passed their annual appraisals with flying colours?

I don’t know.

I shall work on it.

(‘going huge’ is apparently not the same as ‘larging it’)

The Drunken Scotsman: trying to main Demoman

In Team Fortress 2, it looks like I’m maining Demoman (in as much as anyone mains anything in TF2). It’s the class I enjoy most. And I have got better. I’ve now got to the stage where if  I find myself on a server of predominantly f2p players with probably about 20 or so total TF2 hours play between them I can do reasonably well. In other words I have now effectively become good enough to be able to take candy from a baby. Result.

I’ve been practicing my aim on tr_walkway (a training map) and sticky jumping (this is where you explode one of your sticky bombs at your feet and use the explosive impetus to move forward/upwards). My sticky jumping is still random and I’m not very confident doing it. I don’t feel 100% in control, haven’t got the technique quite.

I’ve also carried on trying to develop mindset, as I’ve written earlier. I’ve read various tips and watched videos, and I found one of the most useful ones on a thread on the Steam TF2 forum. Here someone who felt they had plateaued in their development was asking for help. Someone replied with

1)     Every time you die spend your respawn time thinking about why you died and what mistakes you made

2)     Make note of your class weaknesses and play with those in mind, try to say with players who can help you compensate. A Demoman is weakest in close combat. Therefore it makes sense to stay close to classes who are better here. I sometimes now focus on making myself hold myself back, in line with a Pyro or a Soldier (who can also protect against scouts). In return as Pyro I keep an eye out for my Demomen allies.

Dead....again

3)     Think, think, think about what is going on, where you are and what everyone else is doing, don’t be rushed, don’t rush in. I suppose this counts as developing gamesense. As Demoman, this means I’ve been looking for choke points, trying to spot where opponents might come from, thinking about tricky sticky trap placement. And sticky placement to help the team as well, to protect the medic, to protect the advancing frontline (grenades help here too) and to defend it.

All this can be seen as pretty basic, but it’s the kind of stuff that can suddenly ‘click’  and make you go, ‘Oh yeah, duh.’ Things that you pick up in bits while you’re playing but don’t quite put together as a proper game plan and focus on.

I know that I’m still a fairly conservative and defensive player, I can’t dodge for toffee, my aim is dire and I die too much. I spend most of my time cheerfully at the bottom of the points table on my regular servers. But it’s all a start and it keeps me busy.

LoTRO; a poem, yes!

To celebrate the new LoTRO expansion, I think we’re all due a new poem, and to my excitement, we have a new poet. Rhiannon (Berath’s Brain Burps official poet-in-resident), has briefly stepped aside to allow a newcomer to experience the adulation and adoration of the readership, regularly accorded to those artistes published on Berath’s Brain Burps; Rhiannon herself, arbitrary, Tommy the Cat, Ripsaw.

So, here, let’s wave our feathers in the air for Jonsong, of the Kin, and now official Visiting Poet to Berath’s Brain Burps.

Jonsong has not written a poem about the new expansion.  Instead, he has produced a poem about the last big expansion, the Mines of Moria from a while back; generally thought to be one of the best expansions of any MMO. But that is of no matter to Berath’s Brain Burps. Berath’s Brain Burps prides itself on rarely being at the forefront of anything.

Now all you need do is make yourselves a brew and  enjoy:

“Oh Moria! Oh Moria!

Oh Moria! Oh Moria!

You make me such a worrier!

With windy stairs and stairs so tall

I see a ledge then oops, I fall!

 

Oh Moria! Oh Moria!

I am not a warrior!

Can you install a lift or two?

A Stennah to the  dwarven loo?

 

Oh Moria! Oh Moria!

All dwarves rise in euphoria

But then I think- catheter bound

Is this the Waterworks I’ve found?

 

Oh Moria! Oh Moria!

Is this phantasmagoria?

I jump down a well and then I see

I died and then forgot to pee

 

Oh Moria! Oh Moria!

You make me such a worrier!

A mistress harsh and vengeful still

As I stare at my repair bill…