w00t folks, sorry about the delay, should really have written this yesterday but got sidetracked by a funeral.

Anyway! What did people think about sunday's pissing around on the custom server? I thought it was pretty cool?

We learned that clanners suck balls at granary but kicked ass on 2fort! (although we all claimed warm up sickness anyway)

But yeah, so i'm definitely hoping to get this done as a regular thing at least once a week, depending on popularity.


Ok so some things we learned and potential issues we need to discuss after that trial practice (mark 3):

Firstly spawn times:
People were getting a bit upset at the spawn times, but i think the most constructive criticism (can't remember who said it) was that basically having Normal spawn times meant people couldn't rush out and just start killing things cause they'd just get put back on the 30 second countdown bench; instead people had to wait and group up together and fight in waves! YES! FINALLY! cause personally i think thats a good thing. To those who dont know i'm an avid supporter of having normal (longer) spawn times on maybe one of our servers, I had a thread a while back about potentially setting up one of the offical map servers as a long play server to give a bit of variety between the two official map servers we got. So yes I'm a bit biased about this and i might continue going on about it untill get told to stfu about it.

Anyway so we definitely are not gonna speed the spawn times on matches because when we're playing other clans I imagine we'll be playing this game completely vanilla (i.e. how valve designed the game to be played). But this is a good thing because it forces us to play co-operatively.

Second thing, that weird restarting bug thing the console was doing:
Don't know what happened but when gimpster left and I tried changing maps to 2fort the server restarted the game about 2-3 times in the first 4 minutes and we got console messages saying something along the lines of "Console going live in 5 seconds" "LIVE LIVE LIVE" etc etc. Bit crazy, and haven't got a clue why that was. but we need to check up on it.


Third thing, the passwords:
Now im a bit unsure about this because i know I was definitely not prompted to put a password in at any point while playing but I think that was because i was already on the server when it was locked down. but how did other people find it? Did it work? Did you guys find the password on the forums alright? Do you guys think we should post the password for these kinds of matches ALL over the forum (i.e. in both the members section and the Reg's forum section) or can we just put it in one place and make sure everyone know's where to look. Also did the steam community event thing work? did it show you the password etc? Need feedback on that.

fourth thing, attendance:
Did everyone who wanted to get in manage to ok? anyone left out? I'm sorry about the short notice about this event but hopefully there will be lots and lots more publicity for future events, like messages poping up on the normal servers telling you to check the forums etc.

Ok so yeah any feedback (good and bad) you guys can give back on the event is much appreciated.


Now as it was said, this really was a practice beta mark what ever kind of deal. All we did was play a normal game, try and seperate reg from clan (while making sure to keep the medics [mentioning no names but i'll give you a clue it starts with a J] on the clanners side *grin*) and make sure as many people as possible were on TS. Now in the future we will be actually using proper tactics and stuff. The idea being before the practice we state a couple of maps we'll play. THen each team gets to write out tactics on thier forum section (or together, who knows. at the end of the day we're trying to improve Everyones play) and we try and implement these tactics during practice. Also we can assign things like squads within each team so you could have 3 person defence, offence, and flag catcher teams for instance etc etc. Then after the practice we come back to the forums and people who like typing like crazy *blush* can try and discuss what went wrong and what went right.

Once thing i would really REALLY like to get impemented properly is a time out. I think it's possible with the admin mod we got to freeez every one inplace. Then we can spend 2 minutes in the middle of the game each team trying to figure out how to advance forward, without the feer of getting killed (I can imagin the amusing scenario of a spy being frozen in mid backstab, but so be it).

Right thats my 500 billion words for the day, let us know what you think.

-Innocent

i think it went very well. big thanks to everyone that turned up.

i also agree the spawn times should be put back to normal on all servers.

the password thing worked fine.

the one thing that does need to be turned off for matches is auto balancing of the teams.

TS should have 2 rooms, 1 for clanners and 1 for regs, pw the clanners 1 if poss, that way everyone can use TS but reds cant hear blues. I also find the in game voice useful cos it comes up with the players name, there for you can see if that person is on the attack or defence. TS is useful when you are dead and can see the action whilst waiting to spawn. e.g. warning of spies etc.

thats all i have to say at the mo, may think of more later

It was great fun, thanks for the invite and thanks to Gimp for the help getting in. password issues

I think maybe Clan vs Regs would be a good idea as it would give you Clanners a chance to view the potentials. Maybe also swap the odd Reg into the Clanners team so that you can see how they play in the team environment?

I think the practise sessions should as closely as possible resemble any organised matches and follow the same sets of rules. IE, Spawn times etc.

I AM very new to all this so apologies if I talk out of turn!

All in all, thought it went great. Potential to have a regular night? (mondays?)

Cheers

Dave/Q

I'm really sad I missed it Glad you guys had fun!

you can use ts overlay to display names of who's talking while you're playing a game.

http://www.teamspeakoverlay.com/

As for the voice thing i liked having the option of TS = all talk, and using ingame for team coordination. Dont think we need to give one side an unfair advantage (being able to hear the other team when the others can hear back), cause thats a bitch cheeky.