Force Auto-Assign on #8

[Rico]

If all good players know each other though, it would make sense that they would want to be on the same team

Only up to a point, really. I mean, if I know 7 other people on the server, I don't feel the need to be on the same team as all 7. Sure, it's not great if I end up on one team and all 7 are on the other, but 5 and 3 or 4 and 4 are just fine.

[Binerexis]

No names, no pack drill, but I recently had a (good) demoman tell me to stop healing him and not uber him, as "I only play with X."

I really hate it when people do that. There's a whole team of other people you're playing with, guys and gals, don't just focus on you and your buddies!

[Rico]

Like pocket medics who refuse to heal anyone else. Grinds my gears, does that.

[Slavechild]

Twas medic today and I focused on the only good heavy (at the time) but healed everyone and anyone I could around me if I wasn't needing to focus on him, we won a few times, red shouted "scramble", so I swapped teams and it was stalemate.. but still a good game.

[m4dny]

Hmmm, which side to stack with friends



Is there a point here I'm trying to make, I dunno.


This was server #2 people mostly invading server #8

[Ger-h]

It's true players want to play with their friend's but when you have a mumble channel for a example that's always not the case where you have the option to play with your friend's due to the volume of players. I did notice playing that whole night on #8 where two/three player's joining the same team over and over again on each map but when you have 9 player's from another server (#2 in this case) the stacking does go out the window.I have been playing on #8 over the last two/three weeks in the late hours doesn't bother me stacking as it's a challenge to beat "the so called stacked team" is fun for me.

[nevvy]

stacking is a myth.

Winning and losing is part of life, learn to deal with it. If you're on the losing team you need to motivate your team, rather than crying and demanding a scramble. Remember that next time you connect you could be on the winning team.

You'll be surprised what can be achieved with teamwork and without snipers.

[Ama_]

stacking is a myth.

Winning and losing is part of life, learn to deal with it. If you're on the losing team you need to motivate your team, rather than crying and demanding a scramble. Remember that next time you connect you could be on the winning team.

You'll be surprised what can be achieved with teamwork and without snipers.

Sadly you can motivate your team as much as you want, but if it is way weaker or made of players who aren't as experienced and not as used to playing together as the other (= the "stacked") team, you may not achieve much.

[ApacheFlame]

Mmm, to a certain point I agree with both of you.

Back in the day, we had all literally bought into the game and so the experience and skill level was what you'd expect from a game you had paid to play. TF2 is being pushed in all different kinds of ways as a F2P game and so the buy in isn't there, not all players are dedicated point standers. Some people just load it up because it is free and to be honest they suck. They suck because they are new to the game the way we all sucked when we were new. The impetus to keep playing is not necessarily as strong as it was before as there are now a myriad of F2P games around. Or other cheap/free FPS games for that matter. Maybe our player base is getting younger? Parents are seeing a free cartoony game their kiddies can play that looks fun, it's a no brainer, compared to paying £40 for the new CoD which is hyper realistic and will melt their young fragile minds. As long as you ignore the swearing ofc. Ignore the forum statistics on age because I'm sorry to say, our throughput on the forums is nowhere near the throughput on the servers.

I am not saying "LOL TF2 DIED COS F2P N00BS", but it has had an impact.

[Mr TF2 Hats]

The term "stacking" is used way too often on #8. Being defeated and blaming it on stacking is too common. If you really want to win, why don't YOU do something about it?! Go Medic, it's a great class!

Don't do too much of a good job with the Medic though because if you do, there's a big chance that you'll be called:

- Stacker

- Someones boyfriend

- Pocket Medic (even though you keep the whole team alive but happen to KRITZ a friend that you know will deliver)

And also, a few players will:

- Refuse to heal you
- Refuse to do cooperate with you

[Slavechild]

I've been playing today on 8# and things seemed quite even while I was playing, started off a demo and then ended up as heavy on most rounds to push carts and generally help out, but it's odd seeing 10+ people in spectator at the start of rounds :/

[Binerexis]

Have to say, when I've been on #8 recently, it's not been any different than the other servers.

[Barbaric]

Every time an issue regarding server 8 comes up on this forum, the same couple of admins that don't actually play on server 8 constantly reply saying that everything's always fine. Not exactly good community engagement.

[ApacheFlame]

So you keep tabs on admin activity eh? No? Oh, good job I do then. Just becaude they dont play when you do, doesn't mean they don't play on 8 at all

Their opinion is still valuable to the discussion, whether they are 8 regulars or not. As you say, this is a community problem and the community expands beyond 1 server.

I said earlier in this thread, though it may have been moved, that we have to be careful with what we do to a server as we want to offer a consistent experience across all of our servers.

Whilst something might be fantastic for 8, it might break the other servers.

Now I am all ears if people have ideas that wont compromise the experience and stability we offer.

Action on this kind of topic can take a while because the problems can be very transient. When we are confident we have the right solution in place we will trial it on the server to see if it is working. We may or may not announce it as sometimes announcing changes only goes to skew statistics.

Apache.

[Deathtaker27]

Apache,

First off you admins do a great job, and I know that more work goes on behind the scenes than we realise at any time, especially considering that your all volunteers

As per a non-experiance degrading idea to possibly resolve this, would it be possible to put a message up to players who are say sniper if there are more then say 4 on a team, to say something about a different class being more useful to the team (but not forcing a change)

[Binerexis]

My opinion on that suggestion is that team composition is up to the players to decide. If there's an imbalance of classes on your team, you should talk to your team; doing that is much quicker and easier than implementing your suggestion on the servers.

[Barbaric]

So ApacheFlame how often are you on server 8? Binerexis spent about 5 mins on there the other night which was apparently enough to - as usual - dismiss all claims flat out (claims coming from people who actually do play on the server regularly).

Ever since most the original admins & players left, UKCS has been a dictatorship run by a small group of admins with server rules / mods never updated based on the suggestion of community members (same goes for CS:S). This forum alone lists community suggestion after suggestion continually shrugged off by "everything is perfect how it is" admins who don't even play on half the servers they claim to know so much more than anyone else about.

I love UKCS, the community is great, but the server administration cannot possibly be described as community-driven.

[Slavechild]

Ouch Barbaric, It's not like it's a massive problem or that #8's broken/unplayable because of this. I was on server #8 for quite a long time yesterday and everything was quite even, ever since the recent patch I haven't played on a "Stacked" server #8 and I hope it continues, but I'm not there 24/7 so I can't say this is the norm all the time now.

[Ger-h]

Like Apache said Barbaric you don't know how many hours a admin is on a server you can't say o is admin doesn't play on this server when your guessing how many hours he plays their.can we keep this topic on the rails please before it de rails to much please

[ApacheFlame]

So ApacheFlame how often are you on server 8? Binerexis spent about 5 mins on there the other night which was apparently enough to - as usual - dismiss all claims flat out (claims coming from people who actually do play on the server regularly).

Ever since most the original admins & players left, UKCS has been a dictatorship run by a small group of admins with server rules / mods never updated based on the suggestion of community members (same goes for CS:S). This forum alone lists community suggestion after suggestion continually shrugged off by "everything is perfect how it is" admins who don't even play on half the servers they claim to know so much more than anyone else about.

I love UKCS, the community is great, but the server administration cannot possibly be described as community-driven.

OK, you want to play statistics? Binerexis has, in the last 30 days, spend 12.2% of his time on #8. Considering we have 8 servers and his hours are spread amongst all of them he is pretty much spot on in terms of balancing his time. Other admins that have commented: 13th Nightmare, 20%. Ger, 17%. Rico, 49%. These statistics are not something I would normally post, but I did to show you that your perception of admin activity may be skewed. The community extends beyond the boundaries of server 8. As much as I like the server, you have to realise that it is part of the community, not the community in it's entirety.

Just because the admins that play on #8 almost exclusively have not commented here doesn't mean they haven't commented at all. As I said in the first couple of posts, the admins are discussing the situation as well. My server time? Well I have spent just under 30% of my server time on #8. Full disclosure, I don't always use my real name and these statistics are skewed by low server time at the moment, but hell, my thesis is important to me. Most of my time at UKCS is not spent on a server, it is keeping them running in the way you would expect. Plus donkey work for other parts of the workings such as events, ban appeals, backend things etc.

Arguments flare up and die down all the time. In this situation there is almost no right way to proceed. You can see by this thread that opinion is divided on the matter. Let's say we said it was an issue and we were going to do something:

1) We implement a force auto assign: It pisses people off, as they can't play with friends. (For the record there are a number of ways to do this, some are more effective than others and so if something like this was to be used it will take time to find the right way of doing it.). This is also not a great option as it gives a different experience to other servers.
2) We make admins able to shift players around: The admins get more shit for the voluntary work they do, not making it any easier or more appealing. Then, who do you decide to move?
3) We make the scrambler more sensitive: This does not fix the issue as if a round lasts 20 or so minutes you may not see a second round, as was complained about before. If you are then scrambled you may end up back on the blu team again anyway.

All of this is a balancing act, as it was when we made 8 instant respawn. Yes there will be a vocal core of users that do not like the situation either way the decision falls, which we will listen to. However at that point the only sensible way to measure player happiness was via how long the server stayed full. There was a marked improvement from default to instant respawn. We don't have that luxury this time as #8 is still doing well and probably by far our most popular server.

There are some limits to what we can do, based on the way our servers are coded, but on the whole there isn't much we can't do within reason. We are listening, but knee jerk reaction is not the way to sort a problem, it is a way to make it worse.