Please add bots to the No Snipers server

[Shard]

A lot of people want to play TF2 without worrying about getting killed by a Sniper on the other side of the map. Snipers existence goes against the design of TF2, as all classes are at their most effective in close range, except Sniper. Even Robin Walker admitted he regrets adding him.

In an ideal world Sniper would get proper balance instead, since players bought and traded items for him, and the devs adding VSH and 100 player servers shows that maybe in the future they would finally make balance changes. But it's only 2 guys working part-time. And I think they would do community fixes first before changing TF2's core that was untouched for over 5 years. I have the feeling we won't be seeing that until next year. So until then, a server without Snipers is the second best thing.

The thing is, even though community servers are relatively obscure since Meet your Match, many players searched for servers with Sniper removed (like me) and found a few like this one, but there is a good chance the server is suffering from players doing a self fulfilling prophecy: they want to play there, but nobody goes there because it's empty with no one to fight.

Many servers don't need bots since they managed to make a name for themselves in the community, players know that others will join soon even if it's like 6 in the morning. But w0wBrigade doesn't, so the 2 guys that joined for a few minutes, according to BattleMetrics, left since no one but them was there.

I really think servers like this one have the potential to be popular, just take a look at all the Sniper hate in the forums. But first players have to know that others will join as well, and adding bots is the first step. Sure, they aren't smart, predictable and do the same thing over and over again (though Demos and Medics with the syringe gun are surprisingly deadly) but it's better than playing alone. Players would stick longer around until new ones join.

Though I guess due to spaghetti-code there's a chance it's not possible to restrict bots from playing certain classes. I would expect something like that from the source engine. But I am pretty sure the game takes it into consideration, depending on how big the team is and who is what class. I played on other servers with 5-6 bots on each team, and they never picked Sniper, or Spy for that matter. I think the game makes sure there are power classes first with enough slots filled before they appear.

Well, there's another problem: even if there are 23 bots with 1 player, sites like BattleMetrics still show there's just one player playing alone, unless they specifically search for the tf_bot_count tag in the server settings, and that's very unlikely. However, that can simply be fixed by adding something like 'with bots if there aren't enough players' to the server name.

To summarize, TF2's Sniper is a big problem that won't likely be fixed by the devs until next year (reminder that Valve Time is a thing, I am looking at you, Half-Life 3) and many people would like to play on servers without him, but they are empty and therefore no one goes there. Servers like these could be popular, but first the snowball has to get rolling by adding bots first, so the players get to do something in the meantime.

In fact, once the existence of these servers gets more well know, and other people make their own servers too, the devs might notice that and Sniper gets a official balance change sooner than expected, considering it would affect the economy and how much money TF2 makes, to some extent.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[proph]

Hi there!
Thanks for reaching out and providing feedback!
Yea filling pubs nowadays became quite difficult. There was a time where I was actively pulling players (which kinda worked for a while), yet nowadays coming home after work this became too time consuming for me. So adding bots actually is a very good idea.
So after some tests we added a bot quota to the pub server, hopefully improving the no sniper experience ;>

Hope to see you soon, and have a nice day!

[Shard]

Thanks. But it appears bots don't work on Frontier lol. They are stuck in spawn. It should be noted that bots don't work on all maps. I seem to remember you could download a navmesh pack on gamebanana to fix it.

[proph]

Yea there are some maps like snowycoast where bots don't work even if there is a nav mesh present. We are still discussing if we are removing these maps. For the remainder, missing nav meshes will be added soon.

[proph]

Quick Update: We got all maps working with bots now, if there are still issues rising up, feel free to let us know :>
Cheers

[Shard]

I noticed sv_pure seems to set to 1 because my custom first person animations don't work. I know sv_pure exists to prevent stuff like looking through walls or make Spy's cloaking louder, but it would be nice to add first person animations to the whitelist.

I also noticed it's only payload maps. I miss Dustbowl, George and Nucleus, but maybe that's to prevent making the map list bloated.

And I realized the best way to advertise the servers existence is through adding the info to the Steam name and playing Casual lol. On community servers advertising others servers is usually taboo, Casual has no admins and is probably more effective than the TF2 forums since not everyone is reading there.

Normally, I don't think such a method would work, but with how much hate Sniper gets, it might.

[proph]

Hi there!
All of our servers are currently set to sv_pure 2, blocking all custom content. We made this decision because back when we were making the configs, sv_pure 1 had some flaws, like this one[www.teamfortress.tv] and this one[github.com]. I will keep an eye on fixes for those and than re-evaluate if we can loosen sv_pure configs a bit.
To the map situation: We plan on adding more maps, possibly even some well received custom/workshop maps in the near future.
And to the advertisement situation: Our main servers are all MGE servers (see here: https://w0wbrigade.tf/ ), which usually are filled with more players. We are currently working on getting a serverhop plugin working again, to "advertise" our server set in-house. We will see if it improves things with the pub server.

As always thanks for your feedback! See you around!