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- Posted October 13th, 2007 
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While {MC}Rush is taking a break for school, work and life in general, I thought I would bring you guys up to speed...

The Orange Box has been released and for those who have it we understand why you might be a little scarce over the next few days or weeks.

I haven't even touched HL2:EP2 yet, been too busy with Portal, my new love... It won't last forever though. At least not until the mapping community comes out with some new content. Portal is the most amazing new concept for Puzzle games, Kudos to Valve for having the foresight to realize the potential in Narbacular Drop. Download it and play it to get an idea about Portal, It's Free! They took on the developers from this simply amazing game and had them do it for real on the Source engine, Valve style. The result is simply addicting...

However. in other news.....

Team Fortress 2

We got in on the TF2 bandwagon as soon as the beta was released via the pre-ordering of the Orange Box. The beta was amazing! Hardly any problems. Our server was mostly full and stable as a rock! After a couple of days we started noticing 32 slots server showing up. I did some research and found the there were two ways that this was accomplished. One was a hacked version of the server.dll file, the second and preferred method was a plugin written by Tony P. which can be downloaded from SourceOP's site. Our server was thriving as a 32 slot server for a couple weeks until Valve dropped a bomb on the whole community!

Below is excerpt from my  post in our forums about this:

Valve has decided in their ultimate wisdom, to limit the number of player slots visible in the Server browser for TF2. This is a sad day in the gaming world. Where valve is deciding how we should host our server with thier games. I understand this is their game, really I do. but they should try to understand that we the players and server operators love their games so much because of the variety of things we can change, whether by Third party mods such as our Superhero and War3FT servers or just by changing the default Cvars to suit our playing style like the Starwars2 server which built this community! If we couldn't change the gravity on the starwars 2 server where would this community be right now? Probably wouldn't exist in this form, I can almost guarantee it. It was the low gravity that attracted people to our servers with the 24/7 starwars2 map. Other servers ran that same map but died away with the normal gravity. It allowed us the freedom to play CS our way, not the way the developers had invisioned, true, but nonetheless enabled a new style of playing. Air-strafing was born on our servers shortly thereafter and lives here still! I seriously doubt there are many other Air-Strafers out there like our guys....

Without the flexibility to do what we want within the game and the servers we would not have War3FT, Superhero, Surf,. Climbing, Zombie and many more different style of servers. I think CS would have died if it were not for the mod and mapping community that has kept rejuvenating it with new and creative content.

In any case I posted a message in the HLDS list which I know is frequented by Valve personell such as Gabe Newell and Jason Ruymen to name a few.

here is what I posted:

This doesn't even begin to express my true feelings about this. My first thought was to pull the plug. But I would be selfish if I didn't consider you guys first. So let me know what you think...

Thanks...

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I think Team Fortress 2 is still worth it even gimped with 24 players per server, however I think it is unfair of Valve to not give the community what it wants. After having had a taste for 32 players. I don't think I can go back to playing just 24, It's almost too easy when there are not a lot of people playing together. I love the frantic hecticness of the 32 slot servers. I frankly don't see why they can't just let us decide how we want to play. It's all about Choice. We no longer have one when it comes to TF2 and the number of players on a server...

Eventually I can see them not releasing SDK's for the new games and forcing people to play it Valve's way or Valve's way..

Variety is what keeps the PC Gaming community alive. I don't know about you guys but I get bored really easy with most games.. I need custom content and mods to keep me interested...

Thats all for now...