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Valve released a new game mode for Team Fortress 2 called Mann vs. Machine. The backstory is that you’re defending a base under attack by robots and you and a group of up to five other people must prevent a bomb from being moved to an end point by waves of server-controlled bots.

The game mode began as unfun for me as I was playing on 4 person teams. Once I had a proper game with 6 people I found it fun. An additional game mode was added on top of this called “Mann Up” where players could pay 99 cents to play a round of a modified version of Mann vs. Machine that is harder but has rewards at its end. Today, I played my first match of this type with a group of people I vaguely knew. When a wave defeats your team, you get to try again an arbitrary number of times and it took us five or six tries.

For two hours/9.4 miles I disappeared into my computer. I had to stop to get a fake Red Bull and when we were done I felt closer to those I had played with. The deck of my treadmill was slick with sweat, and my shoes made an audible squishing noise. The last time I had gotten that involved in a game, my ass was sore at the end, now the sore parts are my legs and pads of my feet.

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One thing I think my Team Fortress 2 team does well is respond to game updates as these are both regular and manually applied on the server-side yet automatic on the client-side leading to cases where players can’t connect to a non-updated server.

I logged into remote desktop to apply the update, jumped into team chat to announce its impending arrival and checked the server mailing list to see if there were any documented issues and all registered clear.  I applied the update to a test server and every time some joined the server crashed.  Great.  I unloaded all the SourceMod plugins and it still crashed but didn’t if SourceMod was removed, so SourceMod was the problem.  One might say “ok, go without SourceMod” but to me that’s the equivalent of “Windows has been updated and it works great, except you can’t install any applicants or customize it.”

I hit up a friend who was a SourceMod developer as to what to do and he replied “if you had been in the SourceMod IRC your server would be up by now”.  And thus began the Da Vinci code bullshit that would mark my attempt to update.  So, I jump into the IRC channel for SourceMod and whenever someone was asked what to do to fix the update the reply was only “4836-4839”.  This didn’t correlate to a forum post, a development snapshot, a phone number nor a URL but the number of the ticket in the version repository that contained the changes that needed to be made to a text file to get things to work which was listed entirely in the “+/-” format that repositories use.

I don’t think I’m a noob when it comes to this stuff and have been doing updates of one sort or another for almost 3 years, but this whole run around struck me as an attempt to remind the user how sharp the developer was.  If it happens again, I’m going to suspend my recurring monthly donation to SourceMod for 30 days for each 5 minutes it takes for me to get an answer.  Both sides have bullets in their magazines.

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Prophunt is a variant of Team Fortress 2 whereby one is disguised as an object in the map and the opposing team has to find the hiding players in a certain period of time.   I find the game mod fun, partly because of the sex ratio.  I’d wager that the average TF2 game has a male/female ratio of 50:1 where Prophunt tends to run about 10:1.   Today there was a ratio of about 5:1 which breaks the absolute sausagefest that defines most games.  The changes in the gestalt of a server with more than 4 ovaries present is fascinating as the normal spate of sexist jokes becomes terribly awkward and is bracketed with futile attempts to separate the joke from their sentiment.  Their presence also changes the normal calculus of server appropriateness.  I had the following exchange over admin chat:

Other player: Hey, she just said faggot.  Is that ok?
Me: Why would that be ok?
Other player: She’s a girl.  So… I wasn’t sure.
Me: Why would the usage of the term faggot suddenly be ok because she’s a girl?
Other player:  You know…. they’re different.

One of us is woefully undereducated on the difference between men and women.  I hope it’s him.

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The mapping competition my TF2 team is rebooting has involved a lot more community involvement this time around.  I was looking for partners and got the creators of  PropHunt, a mod I quite fancy, to get on board as PropHunt is the theme.  This plugin changes the functionality of the game in some interesting ways.  I was somewhat impressed when I found that the creators of the mod were 14 and 16 (sure, they’re programming beyond their age, but I was lighting my house on fire at a collegiate level around that age.)  The savantism of the creators came into sharp focus when I asked them about the next revision to the plugin:

Me: So when’s the next iteration of the plugin due out?
Him: I don’t know.  The last few changes I wanted to make have been very time consuming.
Me: Are you familiar with Cargill’s law?  The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the remaining 90% of the time.
Him: Makes sense, so what happens to the other 1%?

The children are our future; unless we stop them now.

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A charismatic Team Interrobang member proposed we change our names to AFI top 100 villians and raid other servers and try to make friends. So, 16 of us gathered and I as Auric Goldfinger raided some servers. The first server had 10 people or so in it, and after joining all but 2 of them left leaving a 9 to 1 ratio of Team Interrobang members to pubs. The second server called me for mic spamming for asking what stats package they used. Finally, we found a 32 person server with 18 slots and we piled in only to be greeted as some sort of TF2 savior for filling their server. One admin changed his name to “OMG Our Server’s Full” another wondered aloud if they could handle so many people. It was quite sad.

So, what started out as a recruiting expedition turned into some sort of bizarre deliverance for a failing servers. But it wasn’t a total bust, we’re thinking for a small fee a server that has trouble filling could rent us to create some sort of gaming Potemkin village. We could throw the same softball questions each time like to make them look good like “Is your server always this awesome?” and “do you have a program where I can pay money to you for guaranteed placement?” and for a little more, we’d even engineer it so the side of the renter’s choosing would win. Direct all paypal payments to teaminterrobangpayments@gmail.com at a rate of $3.00 per shill/hour.

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A charismatic Team Interrobang member proposed we change our names to AFI top 100 villians and raid other servers and try to make friends. So, 16 of us gathered and I as Auric Goldfinger raided some servers. The first server had 10 people or so in it, and after joining all but 2 of them left leaving a 9 to 1 ratio of Team Interrobang members to pubs. The second server called me for mic spamming for asking what stats package they used. Finally, we found a 32 person server with 18 slots and we piled in only to be greeted as some sort of TF2 savior for filling their server. One admin changed his name to “OMG Our Server’s Full” another wondered aloud if they could handle so many people. It was quite sad.

So, what started out as a recruiting expedition turned into some sort of bizarre deliverance for a failing servers. But it wasn’t a total bust, we’re thinking for a small fee a server that has trouble filling could rent us to create some sort of gaming Potemkin village. We could throw the same softball questions each time like to make them look good like “Is your server always this awesome?” and “do you have a program where I can pay money to you for guaranteed placement?” and for a little more, we’d even engineer it so the side of the renter’s choosing would win. Direct all paypal payments to teaminterrobangpayments@gmail.com at a rate of $3.00 per shill/hour.

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Christmas went well.  I woke at 1 AM, took a walk, read, shot people, and prepared for a new day.  About 7:30 AM I prepared breakfast, then spend 2 hours waiting for someone to wake up. I opted not to roust the house with slamdancing and assumed the scent of delectable breakfast meats would do.  Apparently sausage doesn’t waft as well as one would anticipate.  At 10 AM gifts were exchanged and by 10:02 my father and I were done and watched the love-match between my brother and his girlfriend take turns out-gifting one another.  Somewhere in the middle my brother got a really nice miter saw.  He doesn’t really use or need one, but should he, he’ll have a really nice one at the ready.  In other news I think my brother won Christmas, but I suspect him of cheating as Amanda pitched in on the tiebreaking decorative bench.

My single gift request for 2008 was a new speaker set for my computer and received the Logitech Z-5500 set.  I thought they’d be much smaller and found of the 55 lb package that 54 lbs was the sub woofer.  This fucker’s HUGE with a warning label cautioning not to use it within 2 feet of magnetically sensitive devices like pacemakers or credit cards (or simply ‘electronics’ as they put it).  It has an air intake for it’s turbocharger (I assume that’s what it is) big as my fist and fat heat-sink.  I’m confident I could sit on it while playing whale songs or something equally bassy and ride the thing like a hovercraft.  Alternatively, sneak it into Bestbuy and play Foreplay by Boston and permanently magnetize every CRT and erase every hard drive there.   I can now hear entire instruments that I could make out before like the “bones” in Great Big Seas Rant and Roar album or the wicked Bonnie Rait-inspired slide guitar opening to Appalachian Spring; true story.

My brother asked why I had the speakers on when I wore headphones while playing Team Fortress 2.  The answer: With the headphones, I can hear my enemies.  With the speakers, I can feel them.

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Team Interrobang bought a dedicated server a little over a month ago and the person setting up the server quickly received a 1/2 dozen tickets as we customized things to our liking and “Charles, the technical support guy” became “Chuck, our man in Houston”.  Then today, while discussing server problems on our team’s forums, a guy named Charles posted that our balance was coming due.  I thought it was a joke until I saw that our payment is due Monday, the IP address was out of Houston and the email address was charles@ourserviceprovider.com.  This is both kinda neat and kinda REALLY FUCKING CREEPY.

So, is this the Internet equivalent of saying “Bloody Mary” in a dark bathroom?  Flame your tech support guy in an obscure forum 3 times and he’ll appear and tell you when you’re bill’s due?  This only furthers mine and Apollo’s theory that Chuck simply runs a server farm out of his senile grandmother’s basement after he hijacked a fat fiber pipe he found under her flowerbed with used boxes liberated from a bankrupt Circuit City, which would be awesome.

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Team Interrobang has had a spate of people (we think) using wall hacks (ways to see through things you’re not supposed to, like concrete) to cheat in Team Fortress 2.  I talked to a high school friend about what he did to track cheaters when he ran a server he said he’d use a coordinate tracker to help make demos showing impossible shots and such.  I follow his instructions, jump into a game, he tells me the start command and suddenly I can see through everything.  His solution to dealing with wallhacks, was to run a better wallhack.  Shit.  Team Fortress has built in software that generates hashes of game files to find cheaters, I think I could hear his hack humping and ravashing the EXEs and DLLs that Valve monitors so, knowing I couldn’t wait for a normal shut down before I received the irrevocable title of “cheater”.  I ripped the power cord out of the wall.

Guess who’s got two thumbs and is going to spent Turkey Day scrubbing his hard drive with a rare-earth magnet?  This guy!

If the above was a little too technical for your taste, here’s a video of a warthog running into a lion.

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Request I sent to GameServers.com tech support to switch our TeamSpeak server to Ventrilo:

Dear Imponderable Rulers of GameServers domain. Team Interrobang humbly beseeches thee and thine to change our humble TeamSpeak server to a mighty Ventrilo server such that we may gayly game in gameservers glory with superior intra-team sound quality with the same number of slots.

Response: It would be much appreciated if you could elaborate on your issue so that we can help you further.

Smooth.