TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2) Blog

I’m sure everyone reading this is fully aware of the drama that has surrounded Valves release of the Halo aka the Cheaters Lament. Well to add a little bit of fun to the mix Daimao has released a skin/model replacement which turns it into some devil horns. This model combined with our hat plugin means that anyone with access to !hatme can now wear fun happy horns (If you want to check it out yourself I recommend that in the morning you help start a server, when the client count hits 6 everyone gets hatme access for the session). Unfortunately TF2′s system for downloading particles is lame, so if you want to fully experience them you will need to download Devil Horn Particles and place the particles directory in C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\YOURuserNAME\team fortress 2\tf\ otherwise you’ll not see the little red circle glowing particle effect.

A couple bad screenshots I took of myself can be seen below..

In other news, I’ve made a more stylish looking image to show the real time stats on how many players were idlers / not idlers that hav ecame to my server since the afternoon of September 3rd 2009.

If you’d like to use this somehow, feel free to hotlink to the image so that it continues to update where ever you put it. The link is:
<img src="http://tf2newbs.com/haloVSnohalo4.png" border="0">

According to the official tf2 blog post yesterday around 4.5% of the user base of TF2 would be effected by the removal of items for manipulating the item system (using the idler). I just couldn’t believe it, because most of my friends list was idling every day, so 4.5% seems awful low. I started logging players that had the halo in their backpack vs players without the halo (people I assume were idlers since they didn’t have a halo). Right now its sitting at 35.61% of my users having ‘no halo’ :) If you’re interested in tracking my servers ratios, check out http://tf2newbs.com/haloVSnohalo.png or if you want a text version http://tf2newbs.com/haloVSnohalo.php

Meanwhile Daimao (famous hat modeler) has suggested an alternative system to valve – he proposes That the ‘cheaters’ should be forced to wear devils horns / have a health penalty for a period of time as punishment. I think it’d be great if the devil horns did come out (officially or unofficially) but I’m not sure valve would want to be seen as penalizing the already super angry faced crowd of idlers who think that its just not fair that they lost their ill gotten gains already.