Monthly Archives: March 2016
The Uncoachables or when will my Prince come
So the Uncoachables aka Origen, have made Playoffs. Yay! It’s been a bumpy ride so far. They’ve lost against higher level teams but they’ve been beating the less good ones so they’ve done pretty well so far on the consistency front. It’s good to be consistent. I’m very proud.
They’ve been looking for a Coach all split as well. They’ve had quite a few since the team started. The Coach is a revolving door position in Origen. They like Coaches (because who wouldn’t like someone who helps you get where you want to go) but it’s just that they haven’t found the one that’s right for them yet, the one to fit their needs and help them sort themselves out and keep on track. And after all, we all know you’ve often got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your Prince. We also know that every frog is someone’s Prince which is nice but not really relevant, unless of course Origen is the frog and it’s them being kissed and not turning into Princes at which point the analogy is, probably, being stretched beyond breaking point and I need to stop…
Origen Coaching session
But anyway they’re grinding their way through trying to find form and as their most impassioned fan; I support them even more than Leyton Orient – I know all their names and where they are in the LCS and everything, I’m behind them all the way. Rar rar Origen!
(it’s actually easier supporting an LCS team than a football team because there’s less people involved to keep track of and only one League with fewer teams. Football is a nightmare)
The Death of TF2 community servers
I’ve been away from TF2 for about a year. Now I’ve come back and everything has changed. I knew WDG would have difficulties keeping itself going but I didn’t expect the disappearance of communities which I’d thought would be around for a long time yet. Communities which had seemed vibrant with servers full every evening.
On Saturday The Grumpy Old Gits said goodbye when they held their final hurrah before taking their server down.
The Hampshire Heavies, always a go to community server, seems to be empty most of the time now. UKCS have almost halved their number of servers, I remember when theirs were almost always full even when others were empty. From their forum, they seem to be having trouble even filling these. The reddit server staggers on.
The decline of the Community Server really began with the introduction of modified Quickplay and the Valve server default setting steering players to approved servers. This solved the problem of the spam commercial server chains with their premium pay2cheat servers soaking up new players; there were so many of them that by their sheer quantity people would stumble onto them. Unfortunately putting the Quickplay server default to Valve servers only, meant that community servers found themselves deprived of Quickplay players too. This was later tweaked to be more accommodating but by that time, for many community servers, the damage had been done.
Other games have come along of course, League of Legends and Dota2 in particular, to draw players away. That’s natural. But we still haven’t seen a decent community game supporting dedicated servers that can be run by a gaming community/clan emerge, a game that communities can move on to, to keep themselves going. I also think new players don’t think in terms of joining gaming communities anymore. They’re not a thing in most games that are out, they’ve never been a thing in console gaming. TF2 is still a popular game but most players are happy with just casually jumping onto a Valve server and having a runaround.
Anyhow, I’ve half a mind to get the WDG server up and running on Fridays, always the most popular evening. I’ve mentioned it to a few of people who’d be up to dropping by. I like the idea. I’ll be keeping it to Fridays unless someone else helps out so it’s not all me. I think there’s not a lot to beat an evening of fun and fragging on a server full of regulars and chilled people who’ve just dropped by (…and only the chilled because it’s our server so trolls and cheats are kicked so there!)
Berath's Brain Burps 
