Rates Received

1

Quake / Re: Hootenanny?

Nice Job / Good Work

We're planning another one for this August. 

2

tastyspleen.net / Re: remove dm5

Insightful

The classic tastyspleen deathmatch server is gone.

It had high attendance and great popularity for very good reasons, all of them tried and tested.


If only the people in charge could just put things back the way they were in the summer of 2021 whilst keeping only the genuine fixes they've added and not the stuff that most people CLEARLY don't want and have little or no tolerance for - all of that will never happen though, the classic tastyspleen deathmatch server is gone.

I haven't been playing exclusively elsewhere for the past six months for no reason!


The only REAL problem was the lack of effort to discern and remove the most unpopular mymap maps, that's it!


Hey Unh0ly, remember that time you quickly put up a quadz-era version of the classic tastyspleen deathmatch server after the original went down for a while and it was instantly popular despite not even being fully configured properly?

You mean it has high attendance and great popularity for very good reasons. This is the same server as it was in summer 2021 but with some changes to mymap, which is what you describe as wanting just with different changes to mymap. In your proposed scenario it also is not "tastyspleen classic dm" if you're considering 'classic' to be how quadz left it.

Believe me I personally would prefer the dm server to stay the same as how he left it. I mocked the idea of putting tdm maps on the dm server, but I also kept an open mind as several people were suggesting them. We didn't just change the server for the sake of change, we received feedback and suggestions that we discussed and implemented. If you are not happy, I'm sorry. There are players who welcome this change. In fact I've only seen complaints from a small handful of people. I see way more people taking advantage of the changes than I see people complaining.

The server has seen changes before when things get stale or quadz added new features to the backend. One could argue which instance of changes would be THE classic dm haha . I think based on the circumstances though it is fair to call quadz's final iteration of the dm server classic dm. Do you want us to pull a coca-cola and make a dm-classic server. I could even revert the fixes I made to mymap so that panjoo can grief people again. In all seriousness I get where you're coming from, but the dm server isn't dead.
 
"I haven't been playing exclusively elsewhere for the past six months for no reason!" is kinda silly man come on lol... There's people that hop on just for the dm maps, and some people that hop on just for the mymaps. And some people don't mind either one. Have an open mind for the variety of people we have playing on dm and what they like. Frag and have fun!

 

3

tastyspleen.net / Re: IRON-FISTED DRACONIAN FORUM POSTING RULES

Flawless Logic

Ahhhh... users of this web site and the TS quake2 servers had no idea.   No sign of it on the entry link other than due to recent activity.  You have to dig around to find this. I guess I took ten+ years of digging to find it, lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Findability#On-site_findability

You only speak for yourself. It's a bit foolish to think that you speak for "users of this web site and the TS quake2 servers."

This thread has been around for a long time now and it has 85,060 Views. Somehow you were never one of them

It's more of a forum guideline, as the title of this thread indicates. It was written for the forum, posted on the forum, for the forum users to see. These principals can be applied in other areas, but this thread was meant for the forum.

Adding a list of rules to the landing page isn't really how we want to operate. We want to be welcoming to players, not throw rules in their face the first time they visit our site.

4

dm / Re: 888 needs to be muted

Insightful

Perhaps it is just coincidence, but I've notices zero bot attacks since this ban.

They have returned a few times since then. I wrote some new code for our backend system that is helping to keep the spam bots away plus our team has been keeping a close eye on the servers.
When the spammer does connect we've been booting them pretty fast. The noise the clients make has been pretty much non-existent lately and hardly anyone has noticed that they were even there

 

5

Quake / Re: Hackusations on dm server

Appears Not to Comprehend Game Fundamentals

Oh where to start.

First admin unbans KNOWN 100% proof positive cheaters like .skyline then has the audacity to set up that stupid DM auto message.

If known cheaters are going to be unbanned and not even forced anticheat, They deserve the criticisms they are going to receive don't you think?

Now that being said most of the time it's just muck around nonsense, however there are many suspected players mainly coming from europe who no doubt use euro hack paks. All you need to do is look at Davids youtube videos to see what's out there

Item timers, damage count downs, weapon timers, ammo timers, loud water sounds, loud elevator sounds the list goes on, And these are only modifications he shows in his videos. What else has he got that he isn't showing? Some of the things he uses i have actually never seen before or knew existed

If somoene is going to go to such lengths to gain an advantage and hell yes all those things are an advantage, then there is no doubt they are willing to go further. And if there is any doubt euro cheat this was on a euro server not long ago....


(rul): i need to send you my model's folder
(myrmidon^): that would be nice, thx
rul): you will just put it in q2 directory
>purri: did u get kicked out from US?
>david: yes
>david: too much timers and too good at quake

I don't know of any US server that kicks for item timers. David was kicked multiple times for an unknown items in his quake folder.


These people deserve the scrutiny they get

The intention of the message is to address the constant cheat accusations against people who aren't actually cheating. It was getting to the point that anyone who gets a frag gets called a cheater by certain individuals. We have seen numerous times where admins and good players were getting accused of cheats every time they join the server and those certain individuals were on.

Trash talk all you want in the server, that's expected. The cheat accusations that go on for days against people who don't cheat is what this is about.

 

6

Quake / Hackusations on dm server

Flawless Logic

Greetings,

I have temporarily added a new timed console message that reiterates a stance we have: Accusations of cheating should be officially reported (privately or publicly) and not just chatted about in the server. Accusing someone of cheating has always been taken seriously at tastyspleen. Admins at tastyspleen have analyzed hours and hours of cheat accusation demos since the beginning of tastyspleen. Heck I have US Mail correspondence with Bill (quadz) from when I was on vacation and he was updating me on current cheater suspects and what he saw in the videos that were uploaded.
As r1ch developed r1q2 and anticheat, we had some nice options with anticheat that allowed us to investigate things more, but that's pretty much out of the picture now. Still, how we operate with reporting suspected cheaters hasn't changed.

Repeatedly accusing so many people of cheating in the game chat doesn't help catch anything. It's just unnecessary noise that makes our job diluted.
There's other ways to respond when someone frags you and you feel something was off. First off, before you accuse someone go back and watch your demo (set your client to auto-record).
If you still feel the same way after watching the demo, upload it so that you can get more eyes on it. If you want to catch cheaters, help us help you.

I've seen on more than one occasion where someone is being accused of cheats that aren't even technically possible. Like giving yourself ammo or shooting through walls (not the old glitch hehe).
Staff here at tastyspleen know this game really really well. We also have experience with pro play and know how good someone can be at any of the games in the quake series.

If you suspect something report it to us in a way that we can work with it. 

7

dm / Re: Racism on dm server

Flawless Logic

We received your multiple messages from the weekend and today "Pasta Ssempa: the 20 ping racist is again on DM server"
(dm) Pasta Ssempa: ping 20 racist is again here, admin does nothing

I have muted both of you for excessive hate speech, and you can stop trolling now.

8

Quake / Re: Quadz, the Loquaciously Multiloquent Member

Insightful

Hearing about and seeing the other ways that Bill has made peoples' lives better is a testament to his greatness.
I will share some of my experiences with my friend and mentor, Bill.

I first met him in quake2 at the end of the xquake days when things were transitioning to tastyspleen. I was a big tech nerd as a teenager, building PCs and taking 2 years of Cisco Networking training before graduating high school. I was working at [and eventually owned] a PC repair shop and was trying to learn about linux servers when I met quadz. He took me under his wing and showed me how everything worked on fragbait [the tastyspleen server]. At one point we set up a local infrastructure of his custom q2 server admin software on a debian pc at my house and connected it to a q2 server I had running on fragbait. In our early days he also introduced me to using a linux box as a home router and firewall, and since then I had always utilized a linux box as a router and firewall at home until very recently when I moved to a new place. We worked together for a good while on fragbait server maintenance and various things. His natural ability to communicate very clearly combined with his kindness and good heart made him an irreplaceable mentor. He was incredibly smart and was always humble.

We soon decided to try and use our skills together to start a game server hosting business. We set up the business, rented some servers and got to work making it happen. It was a challenge, but we got things going and learned a lot in the process. Planning for growth was definitely a big hurdle, there was a lot of work involved in just maintaining everything related to the business and disk space needs were projected to start becoming a big expense as we expanded. We ended up being kinda late to the party on paid game server hosting as more and more new games were starting to use their own matchmaking systems. We had a great time, but eventually decided to end the business.

After I drifted away from q2 and went to quakelive, we were still keeping in touch and playing other games together with friends. We eventually started having a weekly Friday night game night with quest and Xav. Lots and lots of Left 4 Dead. We would try a new custom map on l4d almost every week. I think his custom map collection for left 4 dead may be comparable to the quake2 map collection. My collection of l4d maps was so big that I had to move them off my gaming ssd onto a storage drive and make a symlink in the l4d game folder. Some other titles we enjoyed playing were Dungeon Defenders, Dying Light, and GTA V. These were some really amazing times with him.

We were heavy into the game Dungeon Defenders when I met Xavagus, and soon after meeting him it was brought up that there was a job opening in IT at the software company where quadz and Xav work. quadz and Xav got me the job, and 10 years ago I closed my business and they moved me from Alabama out to Portland, Oregon where the company's HQ is.

quadz was an amazing co-worker and a true genius. I will forever cherish being able to work daily along-side the greatest man I've ever known. Words cannot express how grateful I am for the opportunity that both quadz and Xav gave me in my life. I soon found more amazing opportunities here in Oregon to work on linux server network driver development at Intel, and server product development at Oracle. I learned [and taught] an incredible amount at Intel before finding a head IT job that I really like. I miss the time when I worked at Intel and Bill and I shared a lot of fun dialog about the servers and equipment at work. I worked in a datacenter lab, and he and I would both have a blast just nerding out. We talked about some of the high end servers and networking gear I worked on and the equipment I used to debug issues, like pcie protocol analyzers to read the data going between the nic and the cpu. We've always had our nerding out moments over the years about servers and hardware, the ones with Intel were definitely some of the koolest.

I had the pleasure of meeting his wife at company events. She is an amazing person and was perfect for him. I wanted to share a story about her too. One time at a company dinner here in Portland, she sat right next to me and had a cell phone cover that made her phone look like an audio cassette tape. She laid it down on the table between us and when I noticed it at first I thought it was an actual tape. I kinda laughed and asked her about it. When she looked at me and grinned, it suddenly hit me what it was... and we all had a good laugh. Good times.

Even during times where I wasn't playing games much, we would still talk about music. He was a talented musician, and would always find musicians' music. He'd find bands that weren't mainstream but had super talented musicians. I often shared that music with other people who enjoyed it as well. I was a drummer and he’d also share some outstanding clips of percussionists that always dropped my jaw. The SD card in my car is loaded with many of those bands, and I thank him for sharing that art with me. I will miss those talks.

During times of personal struggle, he was there with his positive energy and sense of humor. He was my buddy, my friend. On the road of my life, we paved many miles together.
I miss him.




Bill in my office in Portland. I had a collection of DOOM books and he picked one up.
http://railwolf.tastyspleen.net/bill/_DSC2588_00004.JPG

When we used a chinook helicopter to take a car to the top of the roof of the tallest building in GTA V. Then drove off.
http://railwolf.tastyspleen.net/bill/20160923215144_1.JPG

When he, quest and I walked onto a pier in GTA V to enjoy the view.
http://railwolf.tastyspleen.net/bill/20161014231337_1.JPG

Bill and I were messing around in GTA one day, and we pushed the wanted level as high as we could. We drove into the hills in an armored vehicle. We lasted a pretty long time, and took down quite a few helicopters that were after us.
http://railwolf.tastyspleen.net/bill/20161014235232_1.JPG
http://railwolf.tastyspleen.net/bill/20161014235241_1.JPG
http://railwolf.tastyspleen.net/bill/20161014235243_1.JPG

GTA V, took a screenshot because it was funny.
http://railwolf.tastyspleen.net/bill/20160910011935_1.JPG

Some Left 4 Dead fun. Many of my older screenshots with him in L4D are on an older machine that I haven’t booted up.
http://railwolf.tastyspleen.net/bill/20170609224203_1.JPG