Development Update: September is (almost) here! Here is what you can expect on next Midseason Update.

[RoonMoonlight]

Hello everyone! It's been while since the last Season 02 update happened. Season 02 update was one of scuffed update ever, I know that. I am sorry about that happened.

Anyways, let's talk about what will happen on next Midseason update and beyond.

Recent Server Issue, and the solution

As you may know, but we have changed the hosting provider to newest one, the company where I can trust. However, the frequent out of memory errors happening which caused our Docker container to be shut down, leading the TF2C server to be shut down unexpectedly, and sluggish server performance compared with other hosting provider led me to move back to previous server hosting provider. Because of that starting with next Midseason update, the server address change will be inevitable. However we will provide first IP address to allow people to add server to favorite list. Here is server IP for new TF2C server, make sure you save this address on your favorite(If you haven't added): 45.76.192.35:27015

New requirements for community maps

Until August 2023, we have used TF2Maps.net to retrieve community maps. However, the recent outage caused website to be set on maintenence, and the owner of TF2Maps did NOT made any backups during outage, resulting myself not being able to obtain the recent map updates which would have caused the postpone of Midseason update. Because of that, we had no choice but to enforce the requirements of be published on Steam Workshop to be added to the map. Steam Workshop is the only place where maps can be stored and can be obtained 24/7, and this also means TF2Maps will now be fallback method to obtain the map, and will NOT be the main priority.

From now on, community maps can be only added if the maps meets following criteria:

• The map has best quality, polished so anyone can enjoy playing the game on several places not on TF universe
• The map is present on Steam Workshop (Reuploads are NOT counted)

Tons of clean-ups

Because of the new requirements mentioned above, any maps that does not meet the criteria WILL be removed on this update. However, this leads lack of CTF maps, we will consider adding more CTF maps in the future update, if possible.

Focusing on quality rather than several new maps

Adding several new maps led the map rotation to be same, and repetitive map styles, rather than quality. Because of that, starting with this update, every map rotation update happening on new season and midseason, and more will be limited to 3 maps per update, rather than adding tons of same style of maps which makes it boring.

Also, we will focusing more on five popular TF game modes, which is Attack & Defend, Capture the Flag, Control Points, King of the Hill and Payload. These gamemodes will be first priority, rather than other modes.

Thank you for reading this blog post, and see you on next Midseason update!