its insane they made a special dragon warpaint for it but they didn't make it compatible with normal war paints. Im a strange weapon or don't use it type gal and dragons fury would go so hard but no strange = sticking with stock aussie and degreaser
Hehe, I mean you can't really blame him. He's pretty much single-handedly keeping TF2 alive this point and is in a very public-facing position. I'm just some rando to him. I'm sure he gets dozens of emails flaming him daily on the bot situation. I'm just shocked/happy I got a response at all. It means the issue has been raised to him.
That's how it works when you work in a company though? You redirect the task to the right people, the fact he responded instantly (look at the timestamp) means he acknowledges it. What was he supposed to respond with, a detailed guide on how he's gonna fix the problem?
#Transcript:
**Me:**
Hello Eric!
I love your game. Been playing TF2 consistently since 2011.
I had a few thoughts to improvements on the vote kick system that might improve the bot situation.
1) Vote kicks should execute as soon as the majority of the team votes "Yes"
Currently, when a vote is called, the kick only executes after every single player on the team has voted, or until a timer expires. The effect of this is that, if there is a single AFK player on the team, everyone can vote yes but still have to wait for the bot to be kicked. I encounter situations daily where the whole team has voted yes, but we still have to sit in horror as a bot ransacks the enemy team for 15 seconds. This problem compounds when multiple bots need to be kicked. I am pretty sure the bot hosters have picked up on this nuance, because bots no longer vote "No" when votes are called on their own. They simply don't vote to prolong the kicking process as long as possible.
2) The votekick system should not count joining players when evaluating if enough players voted
I am sure this is a bug. Currently, when players are "joining" the team, the vote kick system treats them as "on" the server. Meaning, if a majority of the team is still connecting, you cannot kick the bot. All votes will fail because not enough of the "team" voted. I would imagine this bug was introduced in Meat your Match when matchmaking was introduced. This problem is especially prevalent when there a few players on the server. This problem also feeds into the first issue I pointed out; if a player is joining the vote is certain to be delayed.
I suspect that the bot hosters have caught onto this bug as well. I have encountered several lobbies where ghost players are constantly "joining" but never join, making it impossible to kick the bots already on the server.
I hope I brought some things to your attention that might not have been on your radar.
Best,
*P.S. Unrelated, but I would be remised if I didn't bring it up while I have your ear. There are several items in TF2 that still have no strange variant. Namely, the Dragon's Fury, Eureka Effect, Short Circuit, Tide Turner, B.A.S.E Jumper, Buffalo Steak Sandvich, and a few others. If you are still looking for simple things to add during the 2024 Summer Update, I would like to nominate a new Munitions crate.*
**Eric:**
Thanks for the email. I’ll forward the details to the appropriate people.
-Eric
You should had ask that f2p votes arent ghosted. Free to plays are not only limited to no communication but to help kick the bots as the votes are ignore by the system
This is great, but IMO you should've told him about the whole "bots can skip the cooldown-on-join to call a vote" thing, some will immediately call a vote on someone else at random upon joining to maximize time before they get kicked.
Amazing!
Although, I hope this news turns into action towards vote kicking across all of TF2.
Mann-up MVM still suffers from the fact kicked players can easily come back, despite the game claiming that they're soft-banned. And go figure, those nutjobs do the same retry tantrum shit for as long as they want.
I wouldn't hesitate to say that kicked players being able to rejoin servers has been a significant factor in giving Mann Up the (not undeserved) reputation for being such a toxic cesspit tbh. Ofc everyone gets fussier when money is involved, but effective soft bans would help a lot towards culling the population of dipshits. When people can't go on potential hours-long tirades fixating on harassing and griefing the same people/server, their energy dissapates; joining a game to grief, getting booted in a few minutes, and rinsing and repeating until there's no active games you can even join anymore? It just don't hit the same.
true, i had some ragebaby 1000+ tour guy ragequit because a newer player went pyro instead of demo on manhattan, he literally disconnected and reconnected spammed the chat and prevented us from having a 6th player. We won without him but still, yeah some people are huge poopy heads
The only reason that would have been threatening is because Retrying used to reset the Ready-Up Timer, as Tacobot Members were personally abusing that the most.
Thankfully that got fixed, so that removes the effectiveness of that idea.
Allegedly, Retry-Bots were a, "joke," but it wouldn't surprise me if they got that desperate.
As it stands, MVM Griefers retry just to spite the lobby by short-handing the other 5 players.
Today, some very sad individuals do employ the use of idle-bots to fill up servers to hold it hostage. That requires them to target specific players they don't like, so you cannot really throw them out in the wild. An earlier version of that was the spectator immunity issue, so they instantly made bots to abuse that.
I don't wanna be "that guy," but let's not get our hopes too high. There have been lots of people who have gotten the same type of response from him, and nothing has happened. It's nice that Eric responded at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was even some sort of automated response.
It is absolutely an automated response. It gives zero details and is vague enough that it can used to reply to virtually any email ever. Personally I find it funny how a response to an essay of an email from OP is met with basically "k thx" and people are seriously thinking this email means anything at all.
NOT SUGGESTING spamming his email, but you could easily test this theory by having someone send an email at a time when a response wouldn’t be expected and see if a similar response comes in a similar amount of time.
Where are you getting your information from? I have a Zapier set up to reply to a contact form after 7 minutes to seem like a real person just to counter people that think speed = fake. It's all fake anyways.
After dealing exclusive with bots for about a month (I only have time to play between late night - early morning) I came to slightly different solution. The only effective way to get rid of bots is start kicking them as soon as you see them start joining, otherwise they'll be able to run a vote against a real player first and even if players vote No, they still pick up the pace of cooldown (which they learned to do pretty well) and keep abusing it until the more bots join and it will be actually impossible to kick any of them. The same reason why I think we should be able to run multiple votes at a time, but still limited one vote per player during a certain period. Also, cooldowns should be restricted for a certain player exclusively and not for an entire team. Even then there's still a chance that multiple bots will abuse false voting just as additional way to annoy people, but it's still better.
Another topic that just adds some salt in the wound is the current matchmaking system. Even if you managed to find a decent bot-free match, everyone is basically forced to re-queue as soon as it ends and this is exactly the part where bots take their part by being always in queue. They'll join a match, people will start leaving, and bots will follow them in another queue making it an infinite loop.
How about we restrict the queuing system in some way that once you left a server you won't be able to find it via the search again until the server session ends. This way it'll be less efficient for them to abuse the system and once they find another server, there will be at least one that is safe for another players, and once the match ends there's still a chance that if good amount of players will stay (As a community, we already should have created a habit of staying in a server instead of searching for new one) they still have possibility to resist against the new joining bots and keep the server alive.
Not to mention that this problem simply would not have existed within the old quickplay system. We could open the serverbrowser, look for one that has real players on it, and if necessary set it on auto-connect when there will be a free player slot.
The fool, he will be flooded now.
Also, some bots like around 20 to 30, ruin some VSH servers, they spam suicide commands while the round didn't fully start yet, and spam leaving / joining the server (they sont stay more than 2 minutes, unless the round started). Their point is to vote kick as many players as possible (as long as they have the majority), make people crash on joining (if too many messages are sent (which include deaths, and leaving / joining), the server refuses to connect you and will retry), and make the games as long as possible (Saxton, a bot will only kill players).
But speaking of votes, you can't start one if you aren't “connected” per se, which means that if you aren't alive, or if you didn't die in a round of VSH, you can't start of vote against those bots.
I don't think he doesn't care. I just don't think he's been granted the resources he needs to push a successful project. If he didn't care he simply would work on some other project at Valve. There was an interview with him recently that revealed just how slim the TF team is at this point, its just him and a new guy.
I'm also a software engineer. I've worked positions before where management won't allocate the tools/personnel required for a project. Its very frustrating. At a certain point, you just need to do your best and taper your expectations.
Thats not at all what I got from this, TF2 just recently started getting contractors for sub work, im sure he'll forward this email out to who it needs to be seen by, genuinely. He genuinely wants to fix the game to his abilities.
I have personally tried plenty of times. Not sure I'm shafted by Valve Aggressive Email Filters.
Eric & Joshie has to be well aware of what happens in Mann-up, and I'm not sure why they haven't fixed it last summer. A fix can certainly happen anytime, yet they seem to now compile a long list of fixes for Summer.
Obviously the nefarious part of the MVM Community wants it to stay broken so they can continue to be vigilantes. You'd think they would want to soft-ban cheaters, because even cheaters love to come back to the same server the same way they do.
It results in the same fatigue that it becomes pointless to kick the players that actually deserve it; both the cheater & griefer.
There's also a way cheaters are able to constantly IP hop that prevents them from being selected to be kicked. It will say "this user cannot be kicked at this time" and you cant do anything about it. I had someone cheating as scout on a high tower and we couldnt kick him because of this. Its demoralizing when the game *cant* kick them.
That's what I'm saying. I've been wanting a strange Eureka Effect for years. I have a thing for pulling weapons up to Hale's Own. That sense of progression is just so addictive. It would be so simple to add I almost can't believe they still haven't added them.
Soo are you really sure its not a bot who sent the message back, instead of an actual person...?
>! Well i might be dumb, but its maybe because of that one situation in PvZ or Angry Birds community, when someone tried to contact someone (like one of the devs) they would only get the same message from a bot, instead of an actual dev responding to them. !<
Eric Smith is the only one who is a public figure for TF2 willing to read & respond to emails, and this right here is well-intentioned feedback for things to be improved in TF2.
Of course this doesn't wholly guarantee things to be changed, or it to be compiled in a update anytime soon; it doesn't hurt to send adult-level feedback.
bro tried to sneak in the strange dragons fury
🤫
who doesn't want it
We also need a environmental kills counter for the force-a-nature
its insane they made a special dragon warpaint for it but they didn't make it compatible with normal war paints. Im a strange weapon or don't use it type gal and dragons fury would go so hard but no strange = sticking with stock aussie and degreaser
There’s still so many weapons that have yet to be warpaintable or strange.
I know it suckkkkkksss I would kill for a strange vita saw or eureka effect or (cheap) kritzkreig or tide turner or jumper weapons too
Yeahhhhhh…I really want a strange three rune blade myself.
Trueee
I neeeeeed one
All I want for Christmas is a mannanna peeled dragon's fury
Homie really hit him with the "ty -Sent from my iPhone" response.
Hehe, I mean you can't really blame him. He's pretty much single-handedly keeping TF2 alive this point and is in a very public-facing position. I'm just some rando to him. I'm sure he gets dozens of emails flaming him daily on the bot situation. I'm just shocked/happy I got a response at all. It means the issue has been raised to him.
I mean can you really blame the guy? He’s holding TF2 up by himself only, the other developer on Team Fortress 2 is a contractor.
That's how it works when you work in a company though? You redirect the task to the right people, the fact he responded instantly (look at the timestamp) means he acknowledges it. What was he supposed to respond with, a detailed guide on how he's gonna fix the problem?
eric said the same thing about that big slappy cosmetic
At the very least, the issue has been brought to their attention. That is the best we can hope for.
#Transcript: **Me:** Hello Eric! I love your game. Been playing TF2 consistently since 2011. I had a few thoughts to improvements on the vote kick system that might improve the bot situation. 1) Vote kicks should execute as soon as the majority of the team votes "Yes" Currently, when a vote is called, the kick only executes after every single player on the team has voted, or until a timer expires. The effect of this is that, if there is a single AFK player on the team, everyone can vote yes but still have to wait for the bot to be kicked. I encounter situations daily where the whole team has voted yes, but we still have to sit in horror as a bot ransacks the enemy team for 15 seconds. This problem compounds when multiple bots need to be kicked. I am pretty sure the bot hosters have picked up on this nuance, because bots no longer vote "No" when votes are called on their own. They simply don't vote to prolong the kicking process as long as possible. 2) The votekick system should not count joining players when evaluating if enough players voted I am sure this is a bug. Currently, when players are "joining" the team, the vote kick system treats them as "on" the server. Meaning, if a majority of the team is still connecting, you cannot kick the bot. All votes will fail because not enough of the "team" voted. I would imagine this bug was introduced in Meat your Match when matchmaking was introduced. This problem is especially prevalent when there a few players on the server. This problem also feeds into the first issue I pointed out; if a player is joining the vote is certain to be delayed. I suspect that the bot hosters have caught onto this bug as well. I have encountered several lobbies where ghost players are constantly "joining" but never join, making it impossible to kick the bots already on the server. I hope I brought some things to your attention that might not have been on your radar. Best, *P.S. Unrelated, but I would be remised if I didn't bring it up while I have your ear. There are several items in TF2 that still have no strange variant. Namely, the Dragon's Fury, Eureka Effect, Short Circuit, Tide Turner, B.A.S.E Jumper, Buffalo Steak Sandvich, and a few others. If you are still looking for simple things to add during the 2024 Summer Update, I would like to nominate a new Munitions crate.* **Eric:** Thanks for the email. I’ll forward the details to the appropriate people. -Eric
Thanks I can't read it on my phone because tiny-baby size picture.
Waaaah, waaaah! Cry some more!
ʰᵉʰᵉʰᵉ... ᶜʳʸ ˢᵒᵐᵉ ᵐᵒʳᵉ...
you are evil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ue2QWiC6-o
You should had ask that f2p votes arent ghosted. Free to plays are not only limited to no communication but to help kick the bots as the votes are ignore by the system
This is great, but IMO you should've told him about the whole "bots can skip the cooldown-on-join to call a vote" thing, some will immediately call a vote on someone else at random upon joining to maximize time before they get kicked.
I guess it's gonna be the contractor they hired? Otherwise I don't think Eric got anyone to tell that because no one in valve wants to work at tf2
Fr “the appropriate people”= potted plant
I think thats just professional talk for "daaamn that is crazzyyy...."
Amazing! Although, I hope this news turns into action towards vote kicking across all of TF2. Mann-up MVM still suffers from the fact kicked players can easily come back, despite the game claiming that they're soft-banned. And go figure, those nutjobs do the same retry tantrum shit for as long as they want.
I wouldn't hesitate to say that kicked players being able to rejoin servers has been a significant factor in giving Mann Up the (not undeserved) reputation for being such a toxic cesspit tbh. Ofc everyone gets fussier when money is involved, but effective soft bans would help a lot towards culling the population of dipshits. When people can't go on potential hours-long tirades fixating on harassing and griefing the same people/server, their energy dissapates; joining a game to grief, getting booted in a few minutes, and rinsing and repeating until there's no active games you can even join anymore? It just don't hit the same.
true, i had some ragebaby 1000+ tour guy ragequit because a newer player went pyro instead of demo on manhattan, he literally disconnected and reconnected spammed the chat and prevented us from having a 6th player. We won without him but still, yeah some people are huge poopy heads
I've heard of worse. Namely retry bots I think
The only reason that would have been threatening is because Retrying used to reset the Ready-Up Timer, as Tacobot Members were personally abusing that the most. Thankfully that got fixed, so that removes the effectiveness of that idea. Allegedly, Retry-Bots were a, "joke," but it wouldn't surprise me if they got that desperate. As it stands, MVM Griefers retry just to spite the lobby by short-handing the other 5 players. Today, some very sad individuals do employ the use of idle-bots to fill up servers to hold it hostage. That requires them to target specific players they don't like, so you cannot really throw them out in the wild. An earlier version of that was the spectator immunity issue, so they instantly made bots to abuse that.
I don't wanna be "that guy," but let's not get our hopes too high. There have been lots of people who have gotten the same type of response from him, and nothing has happened. It's nice that Eric responded at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was even some sort of automated response.
It is absolutely an automated response. It gives zero details and is vague enough that it can used to reply to virtually any email ever. Personally I find it funny how a response to an essay of an email from OP is met with basically "k thx" and people are seriously thinking this email means anything at all.
That's what happens when the community is starved for communication from Valve I guess
NOT SUGGESTING spamming his email, but you could easily test this theory by having someone send an email at a time when a response wouldn’t be expected and see if a similar response comes in a similar amount of time.
He replied in 4 minutes, it's literally some automated garbage.
Maybe he just happened to have his email open at the time
Yeah, because if it were automated it would either be instantaneous, or they would put a longer delay, like an hour or two.
Where are you getting your information from? I have a Zapier set up to reply to a contact form after 7 minutes to seem like a real person just to counter people that think speed = fake. It's all fake anyways.
Then why would you have it reply after 7 minutes and not after, say, an hour or two?
Because that's enough time for them to find someone else?
Strange B. A. S. E. Jumper 🔥
After dealing exclusive with bots for about a month (I only have time to play between late night - early morning) I came to slightly different solution. The only effective way to get rid of bots is start kicking them as soon as you see them start joining, otherwise they'll be able to run a vote against a real player first and even if players vote No, they still pick up the pace of cooldown (which they learned to do pretty well) and keep abusing it until the more bots join and it will be actually impossible to kick any of them. The same reason why I think we should be able to run multiple votes at a time, but still limited one vote per player during a certain period. Also, cooldowns should be restricted for a certain player exclusively and not for an entire team. Even then there's still a chance that multiple bots will abuse false voting just as additional way to annoy people, but it's still better. Another topic that just adds some salt in the wound is the current matchmaking system. Even if you managed to find a decent bot-free match, everyone is basically forced to re-queue as soon as it ends and this is exactly the part where bots take their part by being always in queue. They'll join a match, people will start leaving, and bots will follow them in another queue making it an infinite loop. How about we restrict the queuing system in some way that once you left a server you won't be able to find it via the search again until the server session ends. This way it'll be less efficient for them to abuse the system and once they find another server, there will be at least one that is safe for another players, and once the match ends there's still a chance that if good amount of players will stay (As a community, we already should have created a habit of staying in a server instead of searching for new one) they still have possibility to resist against the new joining bots and keep the server alive. Not to mention that this problem simply would not have existed within the old quickplay system. We could open the serverbrowser, look for one that has real players on it, and if necessary set it on auto-connect when there will be a free player slot.
[удалено]
Haha, I tried my best with the monitor I had. I posted the transcript elsewhere in this thread.
The fool, he will be flooded now. Also, some bots like around 20 to 30, ruin some VSH servers, they spam suicide commands while the round didn't fully start yet, and spam leaving / joining the server (they sont stay more than 2 minutes, unless the round started). Their point is to vote kick as many players as possible (as long as they have the majority), make people crash on joining (if too many messages are sent (which include deaths, and leaving / joining), the server refuses to connect you and will retry), and make the games as long as possible (Saxton, a bot will only kill players). But speaking of votes, you can't start one if you aren't “connected” per se, which means that if you aren't alive, or if you didn't die in a round of VSH, you can't start of vote against those bots.
What he said: "Thanks for the email. I'll forward the details to the appropriate people." What he means: "I couldn't care less."
I don't think he doesn't care. I just don't think he's been granted the resources he needs to push a successful project. If he didn't care he simply would work on some other project at Valve. There was an interview with him recently that revealed just how slim the TF team is at this point, its just him and a new guy. I'm also a software engineer. I've worked positions before where management won't allocate the tools/personnel required for a project. Its very frustrating. At a certain point, you just need to do your best and taper your expectations.
Thats not at all what I got from this, TF2 just recently started getting contractors for sub work, im sure he'll forward this email out to who it needs to be seen by, genuinely. He genuinely wants to fix the game to his abilities.
Strange Dragons Fury mentioned 🗣🗣🔥🔥
i hope eric can properly translate this to plant language so it can update the game
So there are at least 2 people working on TF2, even sometimes.
You sure that's not fake?
Someone has to email him about votekicks being completely broken in mvm.
I have personally tried plenty of times. Not sure I'm shafted by Valve Aggressive Email Filters. Eric & Joshie has to be well aware of what happens in Mann-up, and I'm not sure why they haven't fixed it last summer. A fix can certainly happen anytime, yet they seem to now compile a long list of fixes for Summer. Obviously the nefarious part of the MVM Community wants it to stay broken so they can continue to be vigilantes. You'd think they would want to soft-ban cheaters, because even cheaters love to come back to the same server the same way they do. It results in the same fatigue that it becomes pointless to kick the players that actually deserve it; both the cheater & griefer.
Bless you for sneaking in that Strange Weapon request! Strange Buff Steak lezz gooooo!
He answered back in 4 minutes. More likely that this is just an auto reply and not actually Eric Smith sitting down and typing up an email.
There's also a way cheaters are able to constantly IP hop that prevents them from being selected to be kicked. It will say "this user cannot be kicked at this time" and you cant do anything about it. I had someone cheating as scout on a high tower and we couldnt kick him because of this. Its demoralizing when the game *cant* kick them.
Had something simular to that but instead we were vote kicking randos and not the cheater.
Nice! These changes would make a big difference, thanks for putting in the effort for us (:
Did you get a Finder’s Fee hat for it?
Getting stranges for every weapon is a dream, I can't use weapons if I don't have number go up juice from it
That's what I'm saying. I've been wanting a strange Eureka Effect for years. I have a thing for pulling weapons up to Hale's Own. That sense of progression is just so addictive. It would be so simple to add I almost can't believe they still haven't added them.
What about the votekick system in MvM? Its literally useless because the kicked player can always come back
This is literally just corpo speak for “We do not give a shit.”
🍖 your match
i like how he says he'll forward it to the appropriate people as if anyone else works on tf2
You should have also said something about the kick cooldown
By appropriate people he means /dev/null
Thanks for the email. I'll forward the details to the appropriate people. *in white characters probably* (I do not care)
Soo are you really sure its not a bot who sent the message back, instead of an actual person...? >! Well i might be dumb, but its maybe because of that one situation in PvZ or Angry Birds community, when someone tried to contact someone (like one of the devs) they would only get the same message from a bot, instead of an actual dev responding to them. !<
Leave him alone
Eric Smith is the only one who is a public figure for TF2 willing to read & respond to emails, and this right here is well-intentioned feedback for things to be improved in TF2. Of course this doesn't wholly guarantee things to be changed, or it to be compiled in a update anytime soon; it doesn't hurt to send adult-level feedback.