A lot (and a little) can happen in 5 years
 

Hey all,

It's been about 5 years since I last played FF or looked in on the forum, judging only by names and avatars, it appears the community has changed drastically. The only real familiar faces I see are squeek and kube. I show up because, oddly, someone tried to log in to my account, which got me to look at the site again and see the changelogs and greenlight application (I voted for it, of course).

But the forums give off the impression that the game is still heavily dominated by ff.pickup play and that the pub servers are mostly (if not entirely) empty. Is this still the case after all these years? For a moment, I considered playing again, but I always preferred the casual atmosphere of a mostly full pub most nights and competitive clan play on some others. Have the pubs started to fill since the most recent patch?

Pubs seem to be about the same as they've always been, but usually getting a few people in a pub can still easily fill the server up over maybe 30 minutes to an hour depending on the time of day.

It got to a point where the only pubbers who played enough to keep a pub populated were [o-t] members. Use your imagination on how that turned out.

tbh i think pubbing would be better if servers had specific game types. One AvD server, one mildly organized CTF server, a skill/fun server, and one free for all server with infinite maps like [OT], Kube's, and TALOS have. when a server has 400 maps it can either be fun or can kill it when bad maps get voted.

Also no server should have the "You cannot nominate this map it was recently played" setting on. Why force people into playing different maps? As long as their playing who cares?

It's kindof silly that all 3 active servers in FF are identical and offer no variety except for their swearing policies.

Yeah I have tried to at least curtail people from voting for bad maps by default. What happens is if nobody nominates a map, it chooses from the mapcycle randomly, not the huge list of 400 maps. As always, if you have a problem with a certain map on the mapcycle, let me know and I can revise the file. A lot of the maps in my mapcycle tend to be more newly released maps too, so I think that helps to add variety to the existing cycle.

With regards to the recently played maps, I have disabled that option because I agree that you should be able to nominate any map on my server at any time, even if it was the last map played.

If the Devs for FF have their own dedicated server, that type of thing could easily be setup for official gametype-specific servers. I like that idea too.

Inc 24/7 openfire.

If that's what the people want and vote for, then I fail to see the problem with it.

BUT THE PEOPLE ARE PLEBEIANS! EVISCERATE THE PROLETARIATE :evil:

TRUTH

The people don't know what they want!

Mildly organized CTF server? I have one of those. Thor's has had people play on it from time to time, but never seen a larger game. Would be good to see if it can handle around 14 people. It's a cloud VPS so I'm not sure how much RAM it needs.

yes people do know what they want. :rolleyes:

Of course we know what we want. We want happiness.

But how to ACHIEVE it, not all of us know . . .

the question though, is why are you sure you know. :mrgreen:

uhh fapping off and drinking beer?

Fapping, Beer, and Airshots.

It's a living. :mrgreen:

did all three tonight, weekend PARTY

Does it make use of the new MOTD and explain rules?

Such as - No OvO and Full games after 5v5?

The new MOTD is one thing we should get uniform or at the very least used in all the servers. #FF.Pickup servers included (an explanation of how to join IRC for those maybe?)

It uses a text MOTD to explain all the rules. Not sure what you mean by "new" MOTD? Do you mean using HTML?

Full game is required after 5v5. OvO is "permitted" though not encouraged. Friendly fire is also on for all maps except xpress, sports maps, and AvD maps. It's not meant to be a public pickup style server, which is why there is cr_sniper 1 and cr_pyro 1 instead of having them completely disabled. Rather, it is instead intended to give structure to public play. The rules and FF configuration may still need some tweaking.

Yeah HTML MOTD, everyone should put sexy images that show the rules simply so that people read them.

To get an image to show up all you have to do is put its URL in the motd.txt

I forget the exact size the MOTD box is though