Lets Play! Saturday 7th September - 21:00 BST / 16:00 EDT / 13:00 PDT

But as flasche said, you're more likely to just know your time zone relative to UTC/GMT than to another time zone.

I know that I'm UTC/GMT-5 in the winter and UTC/GMT-4 in the summer (which is fucking stupid, but w/e).

I've never heard of CET. If I had to work off of that, I would memorize its relation to UTC/GMT and convert time transitively.

Going off UTC is just the standard and we should use standards.

 

All I know is that I'm eight hours ahead of the UK and three hours ahead of the East Coast, and I don't really want to have to bother with memorizing more than that.

 

You guys crack me up. From now on times will be advertised in CHAST - Chatham Island Standard Time.

Anyway - always just check the event in the steam group which will display in your local timezone. It will also popup and give you the option to launch right into the server.

 

Is that pronounced Chat-ham, Cha-tham, Kat-ham, Ka-tham or something completely different?

 

Knowing the ridiculous way brits pronounce other cities, it's probably pronounced Sam.

 

UK timezone is in middle so we just use that. Europeans know they're an hour ahead, Finfags know they're 2 hours ahead, Americans know they're 5-8 behind and no-one cares about Taiwan or Australia.

 

The only thing I have to remember, is to stay the fuck up til morning.
Anyway.

ohboyherewego.

 

I was at a LAN party last night doing table-top games and tag-teaming TF2 until about six hours ago, then I had problems sleeping so I've been up for the past two or so hours.

I'm ready for this.

 

Move to the correct side of the planet.

 

And thats pretty much just because people in the UK dont understand the difference between GMT/UTC and British Summer Time.


Edit: M<cGyver. I bet theres a hell of a lot more players within one hour of GMT/BST than there is one hour of CET.

 

Pretty darn shit games from my perspective.
Whereas the last pug matches were tons of fun, those felt worse than old actual pub matches.
I seems as there were tons of pubbers as teamwork was non-existant. One time someone actually got some shit done was freak sqaud on commandergrad, and thats it. General incompetence as any class really. Sucks we didnt get better comming this time, everyone seemed laid back like hell and not giving much shit, with maybe a single target was given. Also general freeballing and not sticking together at all. Server didnt do much better. I can hardly blame many people outside of us for sucking dicks considering the constant spiking.

I dont want to shit on azk, but this was just bad server performance up there. I dont know the details but I dont recall anyone having any lag issues 2 weeks ago, even though the server was setup ad hoc.

 

So thanks again for everyone turning up. I kept the server up for as long as people were content to play, though I had planned to shut it down. I didn't play any games so I could concentrate on doing some admin and smoking a pork shoulder. From spec it looked like there were some good rounds.

Need some feedback on how to improve next time around. Please keep it constructive, if you have something useful to offer I am listening.

Foreword - I haven't done this much before, I am not a mind reader. If you guys want something you have to ask for it if you have any chance of getting it. I have pretty much all of you on steam friends... For example don't bitch about every map change, then remain silent when I ask what you would like to play!

1. The server was vanilla, but had some complaints that the ticket count was too low (be fair, those rounds were constant apc rushes). I'll look into that for next time. I started upping it but in future I may just edit the values to add 100 or so tickets to some of the maps.

2. Lag - I had 3 lag spikes in one particular map, the rest of the time it seems fine from my spot in spec.

Last week we ran on EPIC because of lag spikes in Viper main server the night before, I've been monitoring the server for the last week and haven't seen any problem but then we haven't had the population so high. So I take that on board and can't really do much other than try and improve it.

It went on a lot longer than I expected/wanted, people stayed much longer this time. Next time I will probably stick to my guns and cap at 2 hours though as the later games were basically pubs. Which is fine - but we have servers for that, ones where I don't have to change cvars every round.

As far as I could tell we were not blessed with the same number of commanders and squad leaders as last time. So long as the population remains high I'll keep doing these and keep trying to make changes to make them better.

Please guys - use steam group to figure out when you need to be in game. Its so simple, I spend the hour before each game just telling people when to get there - even though I have provided multiple ways for everyone to see when the games starts in their locale.

See you in 2 weeks.

 

We got a lot of good footage, I ruined all of it.
But I had fun commentating on the matches and talking with the people in spec.

 

I didn't really find the server to be laggy at all. Games were fun and I enjoyed myself, but I will concur that the teams certainly weren't as organised as in the previous pug. Most rounds consisted of us really just playing fairly laid back, then Zeke screaming that he had the enemy CV with his apc after like 20 minutes or so, at which point we won the game every single time. I know it sounds silly, but it just felt a bit too easy. I know some people would claim stacks but it really had little to do with it. No-one was really putting their heart into it and with the lack of reaction to Zeke's APC, it didn't matter who it was as long as they would killspawn, there was very little opposition to stop it happening.

Maybe commanders have to step up their game, or maybe players need to listen to their commanders more. I don't know but either way, those games were really fun, but maybe a little too easy.

 

I enjoyed tonight, but did get a fair few big lag spikes (im talking 5+ seconds) unfortunately.

Not really the easiest things to track down either.

AFAIK: Tickets on maps are pretty much set for lower playercounts these days so adding 50-100 on the pug server probably wouldnt do any harm. (even just change the emp_sv_reinforcement multiplier (thats not the right cvar but its close enough) to be a value > 1 in the server.cfg and your set. (Needs to be done for both BE and NF remember)

 

I saw a lot of really effective infantry squads working tight early game but I would say generally base defence was lacking & there weren't that many people really making the most of the engineer class.

Had no problem populating the server for 3+ hours and lots of people made the move to public server afterwards so its just nice to see people playing again.

Regarding the lag spikes I think it is CPU bound, I may put it on a dedicated core as per Viper Main server but then I'll need to make sure the two servers don't run concurrently so I'll have to run it by Vicki.

I'd have like to have played, especially on commandergrad.

 

I'm not sure how wide spread this was - some people I talked to had problems, others did not. I personally had 2 disconnects for 3 seconds so I recognise it definitely is an issue. I do know in yesteryear we had ~60 player games of slaughtered in full on heavy battles and not had problems. Last time we had the PUG we did it on EPIC because the previous night Viper main server had some lag - but that was due to a DoS. Since then I have installed remote monitoring software to try and get some idea of what would cause it and I do see some pretty peaky CPU stats so all I can do is apologise for it and say that I am looking into it.

Last time did seem to have more teamwork, I think we also had more commanders & looking down the board we also had a lot more vocal players - I think we might have lacked talismen. I'm not sure why but I don't think you can put it down to an abundance of inexperienced players. At any rate I'm not going to make these things closed events.

Not every one of these events is going to be gold like the last one, but its really important to me that anyone can come and play. I'll be completely honest and say that it is more important to me that new players can come and experience the game properly than it is for 10 year old vets. Each time we play these open games I see new players exclaiming how its "the biggest battle they ever saw" or "this is great, I thought nobody played anymore" & whilst they might not be the most exciting people for you to play with, you probably are the most exciting person they have played with.

That said if there is the demand to have organised, closed matches with a bit more organisation I would put the time in to set them up providing I had some support, but not just yet. For now, at least the next couple of events I want to stick with this format, but later on there is room to shake it up a bit and I've got some ideas on how to stop them from becoming stale and repetitive, but first I think we need to look at just establishing it as a regular thing.

The games are what people make of them, but I definitely still put this one down as a win. Server was full, no drama, we recorded hundreds of gigs of gameplay, I had a blast in spec pretending I was a pundit with Teef & JustGoFly... As time goes on I think they can only get better & at least we are playing Empires once in a while.

Note: I can't stress enough guys, help me help you. Steam message me before or during these things if you think stuff could be tweaked like vote times, maps you want to play, etc. I can't give you what you want unless I know about it. So far though I feel its been a positive experience and support has been great from all different kinds of players.

 

honestly i had fun, though the lag was certainly prevented me from playing completely seriously