Today the crafty econonerds at Mann Co. announced that they would retire a bunch of the very first hats introduced to TF2 back in May of 2009.

I remember that day - getting my first Huntsman, arching arrows from base to base in the first stage of Pipeline, and admiring the lucky souls who received the very first Pyro Beanies. Ah nostalgia.

So much has happened in the TF2 economy since - many, many new items, player to player trading, the Steam Workshop, a plethora of 3rd party sites enabling sales of items for real money, and recently the official way to do the same - the Steam Community Market.

But one thing has remained constant - inflation.

With every active player getting 14 new items (0.77 ref) every week by simply playing the game, and a near zero marginal cost of "producing" new items, it’s kind of like the Federal Reserve printing money continuously (which, thanks to the "global financial crisis", the real Feds are actually doing). It’s the reason why metal prices only ever fall - the price of something given infinite supply is fundamentally zero.

There are several effects of this first step Valve is taking towards limiting item availability. Most traders seem to care about the price effects on these particular items so let’s look at that first.

Everyone knows that price is a function of supply & demand.

In the immediate future the demand side for these items will spike due to speculators who feel the price of these items will rise once the supply is limited in future. Also, anyone who wanted these items already has them, or will buy them before they become limited. So one would expect an immediate but perhaps temporary price rise.

But immediately after these items are no longer available I don’t foresee any further rise in the price because consumer demand will simply not exist. Very few consumers want these hats which is why their prices are so low, and new demand for these items could only come from new TF2 players.

But there is a more important effect. By cutting off the availability of these items Valve is signalling that it won’t allow the economy to debase itself by providing infinite supplies of everything. I think that is more important than the micro effects on the prices of the individual items.

We should see, longer term, that all prices rise due to the implied threat that supply will become limited at some point in future – up til now everyone has worked (read: priced) on the assumption that supply is limitless which is why many items have pathetically low values. There is also the fact that the Mann Co. Store currently sets a price ceiling on every item.

Fun-having players may view this as a negative as the prices of the hats they want will go up. But ultimately it’s in everyone’s interest that the TF2 economy is strong – Valve relies on it for income to pay the salaries of the engineers & artists who provide game updates, and community item & map makers rely on it for income too.

Having played TF2 for 5+ years I’ve been involved in my fair share of debates as to what maps are the "best", "most popular" and so forth. I finally got around to looking at some data.

Here’s a graph of the top 20 most played maps on Australian servers for the period 26 November 2012 to 3 December 2012. There’s nothing special about this period, I simply picked a roughly 7 day period to look at. This data includes only normal TF2 servers - specifically it excludes MvM and all mods that I know of (such as PropHunt, Dodgeball etc).

The full list of (144!) maps is public.

Firstly - over a 7 day period Aussies racked up an astounding 4.4 million minutes of TF2. We played 8.36 years worth of TF2 in one week. Wowsers. And again - this doesn’t include MvM, mods, idle & achievement servers etc - this is purely normal PvP TF2.

Given the number of 24x7 2Forts, Dustbowl, Turbine, Goldrush and Badwater servers it’s unsurprising that these are the top 5 most played maps. It is staggering though that 2Forts, Dustbowl and Turbine make up almost 55% of the total play time.

I’ve never understood the popularity of 2Forts but clearly there is an extremely dedicated sub-population of the Aus TF2 community that enjoys it. Goldrush and Badwater often make up the core of popular fixed rotation servers and clearly that role is well deserved.

After that there’s a few surprising results, at least to me. I would not have expected DeGroot Keep to be up in #6 – though we should note the clear gap between Badwater at #5 (6.7%) and DeGroot at #6 with less than half that (2.3%).

I’m surprised to see Egypt and Hightower up so high - I rarely see these maps played but that is the whole point of this analysis – it’s clear that our own play style preferences bias our perspective on what maps are the most popular.

Doomsday is another surprise at #10 - most folks I know don’t seem to like it but again that goes to show the bias inherent in one’s group of friends. KOTH Kong King is also more popular than I expected – of all the KOTH maps I would’ve thought it’s the worst hehe.

Double Cross is lower down than expected given that it’s regularly voted in on full rotation servers I’ve frequented, and that there are a few 24x7 servers around.

As with all stats, the more you look the more questions you have. I’d love to understand the diversity of players across these map types – is there a distinct set of 2Forts devotees? – and are there specific factors that make the top 5 so much more popular than the rest of the maps?

Are these results surprising to you?

Methodology: I poll every server in Australia roughly every 5 minutes so we’ll miss things like players leaving/joining between each reading but given that we are looking at total play time over 7 days these factors should even out and the relative values should be about right.

Collecting donations is an annoying problem for server operators and players alike.

The most obvious method is to simply collect money via a payment system such as PayPal. However that automatically incurs a 2.4% fee + 30c per transaction which becomes 8.4% (32c) of a $5 donation or 5.4% (54c of a $10 donation). It’s pretty inefficient, nevermind the annoying UI.

Some GSPs (game server providers) offer solutions such as Multiplay’s Clan Pay. That’s a step in the right direction but it should be much easier.

The biggest barrier to donating IMHO is the fact that a player has to do it outside of the game interface. And if you’ve ever run a server you know there’s not many opportunities to nicely remind players to donate - MOTDs are routinely ignored and spamming messages during the game is futile because people are there to play, not to read your spam chat messages.

Ideally players should be able to pay directly from the game. If Valve were to get involved they could implement a Flattr type system where players could nominate an amount they are willing to spend each month (say $5/mo) and Valve could distribute it amongst the server(s) the player likes, or play on frequently.

But foregoing Valve’s involvement there is a solution that some motivated hackers could rig up. This solution also has the benefit that players don’t have to contribute money but can donate items/metal instead. This has the benefit that anyone can contribute, not just those with credit cards, and people can contribute without spending any money - they only need to play the game to get random item drops. Also, it would mean that truly micro donations would be possible - given a refined metal is worth roughly 55c and 18 weapons go into that, a single weapon is worth roughly 3c.

How could this be done?

The server operator needs a way to automatically accept items from players. The bots implemented by TF2WH and scrap.tf (whose SteamBot code is open source BTW) could handle this.

Some plugin code could make such bots initiate trading requests to players. So a player could type !donate into chat and the player would receive a trading request to accept donations.

The other part of the equation is liquidating metal/items to cash. I don’t really know of an efficient way to do this though one possibility might be to sell items into TF2WH, convert to Bitcoin via TF2WHX, then sell the Bitcoin to cash. This could all be (in theory) automated.

The incentive for someone to operate this whole donation bot+liquidation as a paid service is that the service operator could take a cut of the donations.

Someone build it! I’ll be your first customer.

Smurfy Fortress is my attempt at building the game server network that I want to play on.

Most of the Australian TF2 servers are perfectly fine from a technical standpoint - their servers & networks are fantastic and ye olde problems of lag etc are no longer an issue.

The things that did bother me on other game networks were mostly configuration and community related.

Playing on other servers I felt restricted in the efforts I could make in making the servers better to play on. It’s hard for admins to know who to listen to, and making changes always involves some risk of not only breaking the server, but also alienating existing community members so admins are understandably reluctant to make frequent changes.

There are 3 key things that I hope to make "better" on the Smurfy Fortress servers.

The first is to listen to feedback, observe player behaviour, act quickly, and observe the results. I’m running the servers as a never ending series of experiments. It’s clear after playing TF variants for 15+ years and having been involved in my fair share of theorycrafting that there is no perfect answer. Let’s just try things out and see what works, and do it in a tight loop so players don’t feel like they’re ever stuck with a shitty status quo.

My second goal is for the Smurfy servers to be generally pleasant to play on. There’s two aspects to this.

One is removing bad actors. I have no tolerance for players who want to grief, troll, hack etc, and encourage our admins to ban such players. My feeling is that there’s no shortage of players who will be nice to each other and by banning those who aren’t we establish a co-operative community that will hopefully attract other friendly players.

The second is fair games. Team stacking is a huge problem on many servers. Some servers run gScramble and auto-scramble the teams when an imbalance is detected but finding the right thresholds so that it triggers just enough and not too much is really hard. There isn’t a perfect solution but so far we’ve been trialling auto-assigned teams with good success. At the very least auto-assign prevents deliberate stacking so if you get rolled at least you know it wasn’t due to malicious intent by the other team.

Lastly, one thing that has always bugged me about some community run servers is the abuse of admin powers. Apart from arbitrary kicking & banning it also extends to things such as randomly changing maps on a whim. Another is the use of reserved slots for either paying members or admins - this breaks auto-diallers for ordinary players and basically says "we don’t value you plebs". I think this is a flawed attitude as you need a reasonably large group of co-operative players to make the game fun long term.

Funding & admining the servers long term is a challenge. The sums of money involved are not huge but I would like to get Smurfy Fortress to a point where it is self-sustaining.

It’s been almost 2 months since I last posted and that’s because I’ve been working on the Smurfy Fortress servers.

It all started with the release of MvM. Fletcher Dunn from Valve posted a notice saying that a MvM server would require as much CPU as a regular TF server. At that point I had never run a TF2 server so I had no idea how much CPU that actually meant but one thing was obvious - every CPU currently dedicated to a 24 player server could only handle 6 players in MvM.

In other words, at MvM launch the vast majority of players would want to try it out, and unless there was a 4 fold increase in hardware dedicated to MvM Australia wide there was bound to be massive queues for MvM.

The other realisation was that if there’s only 6 players and the recommended minimum rate per player was only 30kB/s the peak bandwidth required is roughly 180kB/s or 1.5Mbps. My cable connection is 100/2.4Mbps. Woah, that means it’s entirely possible to host a MvM server on my cable!

There didn’t seem to be any good guide out there about how much CPU was actually required but keeping in mind that TF2 came out in October 2007 it’s fair to assume that one doesn’t need to have the most modern overclocked CPU to host a server.

Being a Linux nerd I fired up a KVM on my dev box (a Q9400 quad core) with 1GB of RAM and that was perfectly fine for MvM.

On the network side an MvM server averages around 600kbps, and peaks at less than 1Mbps outbound.

I’ve written down the full specifications for an MvM server.

I ran an MvM server on my cable connection for about 2 months and continued to play regular PvP TF2 on the games.on.net servers. Unfortunately in early October all of the GON TF2 servers disappeared. It turns out they were doing a massive platform upgrade.

As a regular 24p TF2 server requires more bandwidth than my cable can handle I began looking at VPSes. I managed to get a couple from GloVine and Exigent to experiment with, and thus Smurfy Fortress was born. It’s been an interesting experience finding VPS hosts that allow game servers but I’ll save that for another post once I have more data.

reddit user Xovaan has created a series of awesome Dilbert-ified TF2 characters:

Dilbert Medic:

Alice Demoman:

Dogbert Spy:

World’s Smartest Garbageman Engineer:

Loud Howard Scout:

Elbonian Soldier:

Pointy-haired Boss Heavy:

Wally Sniper:

Catbert Pyro:

They’re hosted here, with Xovaan’s permission, for posterity since the original images were posted to Imgur where they will eventually expire. Each image links to the original full sized version.

The original reddit threads are, in chronological order, oldest first:

• Dilbert as the Medic didn’t exist so I decided to put this together in Photoshop for some reason
• You guys liked Dilbert Medic, so here’s Demoman Alice. I don’t even know anymore.
• Dilbert the Medic, Alice the Demoman. The next installment: Dogbert the Spy.
• Alice Demo, Dilbert Medic, and Dogbert Spy, SAY HELLO TO LOUD HOWARD SCOUT
• I solve practical problems. Dilbert’s practical problems. Here’s World’s Smartest Garbageman the Engineer
• It costs $400,000 to fund this department for twelve seconds. You requested it: Pointy Haired Boss Heavy (Office ‘97 Clipart Edition) and a bonus Elbonian Soldier!
• They’re finally done. The cast of TF2 recreated as Dilbert characters– with a bonus special guest!
• Hey r/gaming, I recreated the cast of Team Fortress 2 as Dilbert characters and r/tf2 said you might want to see

Being a network & datacentre nerd I wondered who hosts the multitude of game server providers in Australia.

I took the most recent 72 hours of Australian & NZ TF2 data and mapped the server addresses to ASNs using Team Cymru’s IP-to-ASN service which gives us a rough idea of who the underlying network providers are. Keep in mind that "networks" in this post refers to the underlying IP networks, not the game networks (e.g. 3FL, GamersUN, games.on.net) that most players are most familiar with.

It’s important to note that as this table aggregates servers based only on their IP-to-ASN mapping it hides a lot of the relationships. For example an end user might rent a server from provider X, provider X may in turn be renting the servers "wholesale" from provider Y, who in turn may be leasing datacentre space & bandwidth from provider Z. We’re viewing things here mostly from the viewpoint of the Z providers.

The main purpose in generating this table was to get a broad picture of network diversity as it’s clear from the length of the Whirlpool list that not every provider could be large enough to justify running their own datacentre and/or routing.

By far the largest network in this context is Servers Australia. If you expand their row you’ll see that GamersUN is the bulk of the servers hosted there (117 of 167). My understanding is that GamersUN uses Hypernia, and Hypernia hosts with Servers Australia.

One interesting quirk about Servers Australia is that they apparently run a gaming specific network separate to their regular network on which their mostly business customers reside. This seems to be about isolating their business customers from DDoS attacks targeted at their gaming customers.

Back in 2009 iiNet and Hypernia announced a partnership but sometime in 2012 Hypernia migrated many of their customers to Servers Australia. This Whirlpool thread suggests at least some are still at iiNet though as you see from the servers at iiNet today the vast majority are 3FL and games.on.net. However, note that Hypernia and iiNet host many game types, and we’re only looking at TF2 data here.

As you go down the list there aren’t too many surprises - Telstra hosts mostly GameArena servers, Internode mostly hosts the games.on.net servers, Primus hosts iPGN. These are all game networks owned by the respective parent ISP. However the handful of servers that don’t belong to one of these game networks are all customer run servers - presumably either on a DSL or Cable connection.

Who’s noticeably missing from this list of ISPs? Optus. They show up as Microplex being the name on the ASN. They killed their games network in 2005 so the handful of servers on their network are presumably run by customers.

Outside of Hypernia and the ISP networks DEDICATEDGAMING.com.au has a nice chunk of the independent community servers.

I couldn’t find much out about the mysterious "2 Grantham St". It belongs to Yatcko Data Solutions whose customers include CLOUDCUBE.com.au.

One question that crossed my mind is how big the TF2 server rental market is in AU & NZ. If we take away the ISP run servers: 3FL (32), games.on.net (46), GameArena (31), iPGN (10), Orcon (7) you’re left with about 350 servers.

Most providers charge in the realm of $35-50/month for a 24 slot server making the monthly value between $12,250 and $17,500, and the annual value between $140,000 and $210,000. Of course someone like GamersUN would not be paying such prices given that they have 117 servers so this is an overestimate.

The stock MvM maps & missions are fun but I guess a problem with MvM as a game mode is that your opponents (the bots) only do what they’re told to do. In PvP much of the fun and longevity comes from playing with other hoomans who individually improve over time, and develop strategies & team work.

As a quick intro how MvM works is that besides the map which provides the game environment each mission is defined in a population file which have a .pop extension. The population file defines the waves, i.e. what bots get spawned & when. To get more variety from a MvM mission you could change the map, or the population, or obviously both.

Even though the game mode is barely a month old there are already quite a number of community made maps, and many missions! Too many to actually review in one post so I’ll mention just a few highlights and link to useful repositories.

Probably my favourite missions so far are LittleBigWorks, a mission for MannWorks, MannWorks Garden War and Sleepy Coaltown. They’re all reasonably easy but some of the bots are absolutely hilarious. I won’t say anything more so as not to ruin the surprise but strongly recommend you try these missions.

MvM DeGroot Keep is one of the funniest maps around. As with traditional DeGroot Keep it runs in Medieval mode so most classes can only use melee weapons with the exception of Demoman, Medic and Sniper. In it’s default config it’s quite easy but still fun.

MvM Manndarin is probably the most polished of all the custom maps I’ve tried – it’s about on par with the stock MvM maps advanced difficulties, you’ll need a decent group of 6 to finish it.

MvM Gateway is a very challenging map. I’ve only finished it once and failed many, many times on it’s final two waves.

There’s plenty more custom maps at Gamebanana. This facepunch thread has a good list of maps & missions too.

One thing to note is that the community made maps are quite buggy and will crash your server regularly. But on the whole they are good enough to be playable, and fun!

G’day mates!

It struck me recently that although there are global TF2 stats and graphs there’s precious little data available about the Australian TF2 community, especially data about servers .

About a week ago I began polling all the Australian TF2 servers I can find and I hope to share whatever interesting tidbits I discover via this blog.

Feel free to ask any questions, and also share anything you think may be of interest to the Australian TF2 community.

One quick note is that I’m not so interested in the competitive scene - the OzFortress folks have that covered.  I’m more interested in stuff would be of interest to the fun-having Aussie TF2 crowd.

Yesterday I started collecting data for all TF2 servers in the Australian region as returned by the Steam master servers. This includes NZ but misses some Aussie servers which don’t have a region setting (I might look for these based on latency and contact the server owners later).

There’s lots of questions I have about the Aus TF2 player & server base but by happy coincidence Valve released an update around 7am this morning (Sydney time, AKA Australian EST) so here’s a simple graph of total players && servers starting at 2am and ending at 2pm (7 Sept 2012).

The total number of servers hovers around the 470 mark. Within 5 hours we’re back to over 400 servers and during a time when most operators are probably at school && work. No doubt auto-update scripts and server rental companies help here.

And at 2am in the morning each player could have their own server, forever alone! :)

Random factoid: the player base last night (Thursday) peaked at ~2,800 around 7:30-8pm. Raw data here.