Lowyat.NET TF2 Servers

First, I would like to apologise for any grammar mistake and this post will be quite long so bear with me but basically it's a collection of thoughts from mainly different TF2 communities within this region. I feel there's a need to share this with you guys, giving you guys a clearer picture of the TF2 scene here.

Let's start off with some history. I believe most of you guys have the best experience playing TF2 before it went free to play. This went all the way back to servers like Starhub HamFortress and Agentcy servers, these servers actually were around way before I started playing TF2. I quote this from Natapon (head of AsiaFortress), "I used to play 12 hours non-stop in Starhub 5 and 6, and it was the best moment in TF2 that I ever had". We came in much later on and as I recalled, there was quite some hate going on, among regular 5&6 players(majority Singaporean) and our regulars(mainly Malaysian) untill a stage where I felt it's like a full blown war among 2 countries and it will bring great harm to the community. I not sure if anyone remember this, but I remember this match where Starhub regulars came to our server and it became 1 team full of our regulars against them. It's the most intense ctf_turbine pub game I ever played for 1 hour. Just imagine 24 tryhards in a server. Well the flame and hate is there back then but looking back at it, it's probably the time that we enjoy TF2 the most.

So let's go much forward especially after the F2P flood, regulars stay for awhile, but eventually 1 by 1 left. Back then, most of us are college students but as time passes, there are more commitment in life and people move on. We was striving to survive that time due to huge influx of players and there isn't much servers around so everyone have to bear the lag but a lot of you still play on. Back then, we are living entirely on donation and to be honest, till now I still can't believe we manage to maintain our server for 1 year which cost RM400 per month just solely on donation. Really thanks all of you for that. That's like RM5000 worth of donation alone.

Just recently, I have some talk with some of the other server host within this region and basically everyone is just fed up with the current situation. These people had been around since 2009, who get to witness how the community changes. It used to be college students with working adult and now it's basically primary school kids. Well age doesn't really matter but the maturity of the player do. I've seen a lot cases from my past 5 years hosting game servers, but now it's that bad that no people wish to touch anymore. I've see personal harassment, scamming cases, and basically acting like a barbarian is the only way I could describe it. I quote someone again, "SEA TF2 have more players now but there is no soul".

I believe most of you heard of a lot DDoS case recently, be it in any game. Back then server war or personal hate are usually settled in game but nowadays it's about ruining innocent people gaming experience as well. Do you want to know how depress server operator are? Shana are thinking to kill off their servers, AsiaFortress been hit by countless DDoS that they just gave up already, and another operator who I will not name, just cramp servers into 1 box because everyone just too lazy to give a damn about it anymore, it's as good as death. Why are we still around? Myself, TF2 taught me a lot on software development and server management, it's just something I really enjoy doing and having able to build stuff and immediately gather people to test it and gather feedback, as a developer, that's the best feeling ever. Other operator I know, told me TF2 taught them so much about server and networking and basically they feel it's just something they should do to return to the community.

Most of us doing for non-profit and to be honest, the amount I used to rent a server now is enough for me to buy a car, and I choose to pay from my pocket, to run some servers instead of getting a car? Yes, because that's how much we really enjoy doing it, till some of you decide to ruin the fun. It's not about the money anymore, I can spend few hundred to give away free TF2 items per month and that save me all the hassle and probably more people will know me if I do that. It's just doing what you enjoy and basically a fun learning experience, who said you can't learn from gaming. Most stuff I developed most closely related to my gaming knowledge, learning from people who designed games and their backend architecture.

Last but not least, since I have empty servers most of the time, seems like the fun day are over. We are now announcing that we are shifting towards CSGO since there are a lot of players over there now with a much decent community. Even when we host back in the early days of CSGO, we get a lot support from the competitive players, players from Orange or MSI team, and of all country, those from Philippines gave you the most respect and I do enjoy hosting and playing with them. We will still maintain a small amount of TF2 servers, mainly those that we have some players on.

That's all from me now. Thanks for all the support for the past 4 years, it was fun.

Regards,
sasaug