Hello, over January I have spun up a series of new servers. These new servers have better hardware and the occasional lag spikes should be gone.

The new servers are:
Oregon #1 - or1.castaway.tf
Virginia #1 - va1.castaway.tf
Germany #1 - de1.castaway.tf
Singapore #1 - sg1.castaway.tf

You can use these to connect with in console. Domain names work the same as IP addresses as far as the game is concerned, so you can use the connect command in console to join on the IP, and you can even use the domain name when adding a server to your favorites via IP. They're easier to remember and to type out, and they'll all use this scheme going forward. I did not set up DNS records for existing old servers, I'm only going to do it for the new ones.

The purpose behind this is because our existing provider, Linode, has cheap servers but they're only 1 core, causing the CPU to get overloaded. The new provider, Hetzner, has the same price (or cheaper) and double or more the amount of resources. Overall, you should not see any of the lag spikes anymore (other than at 5am, when the demo uploading happens).

Note that Hetzner only has 6 locations. Two in Germany, one in Finland, two in America, and one in Singapore. Because of this, I can't spin up servers in any other region on the new provider. If you really want one somewhere else, it'll be on the old provider and will suffer from lag spikes occasionally. Australia is such an example, as Hetzner does not have any data centers on the continent. Luckily for Aussies, at least Singapore isn't too far away.

Over time I want to spin down the old servers and have these numbered ones be our only ones left (other than australia). I know some people have attachment to the existing servers, especially Atlanta, but I think it's for the best to migrate to the new servers, both for performance and for scalability.

I have made a few changes over the past few days and would like to catalog them here.

I have enabled SourceTV auto recording on all servers. What that means is that a demo file will be automatically recorded for every match, from this day going forward, and will be publicly available for download. Thanks to Eric Zhang for pushing me to implement it and helping with the cvars.

The goal was to boost the community's ability to create clips, though you can use it to save your favorite games.

The archive can be found here[mega.nz], and it is also available on the website. Demo files are uploaded to the mega at 5 am local time for the server. The demo uploading process, specifically the compression aspect, takes up a ton of CPU and lags the server.

Replays are stored in the archive like so:
Where Year/Month/Day are the date when the match occurred, and HourMinute are the start time of the match.

Demo files are large, especially when recording 66 ticks per second and 45 minutes of gameplay. In order to save space in the long run, I have compressed all demo files using zstd[en.wikipedia.org]. To extract the files, you will need a tool capable of decompressing zstd. You can view the github[github.com] for the zstd tool and download it from the latest release. For windows users, it will be zstd-v1.X.X-win64.zip (v1.5.6 as of writing this) and for Linux users, you can get zstd with your package manager. I apologize for not putting it in a more common format, but as I said these files are decently sized so every percent saved matters in the long run.

For assistance regarding editing demo files, you can view this thread by castaway member ejv2 for a guideline on how to use the replay editor with demo files.

I have spun up a Singapore server, our first server in Asia. Singapore was chosen just based on feedback from some of our members in Asia. As per below, it is also a weapon revert server.

I made an executive decision and converted all remaining Vanilla servers to weapon revert ones.

Let's be honest, at this point a regular vanilla server isn't enough of a draw for a consistent playerbase. The overwhelming majority of our community wants to play weapon reverts instead of modern balance, and it's reflected in player counts. Therefore, I have converted Newark, Dallas, and Frankfurt to weapon revert servers. This has the added benefit of giving people an overflow server if the main one is full, as before there was only 1 revert server per big region. More servers can be added for AUS/Asia if the demand exists and there's consistent server fills.

Hello, inspired by a discussion post I have gone ahead and created an official youtube channel for our community.

You can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/@castawaytf/videos

The purpose of this channel will be mainly to post gameplay clips from players. Get your funniest clips, or your most impressive frags, and submit them for upload!

You can submit your clips here: YouTube Clip Submission Thread

All guidelines for submission will be included in the thread. I hope to see more user submissions soon.

Hello, this is yet another reminder to join the group chat if you'd like announcements on play sessions.

In the #Game Announcements channel, one of our members will ping everyone when a session starts on a server. If you're online at the time, you'll get a sound notification for this to remind you.

I am making this announcement because we still only have around half the group's members in the chat, which means half the group isn't getting notified for sessions and likely aren't playing.

We do not have enough people to have a server up at 24 players at any given time on every day. If we had 10 times the number of people, we probably would, but barring that the only time servers will be alive is during scheduled play sessions. There are some rough times written down on the front of the group page and on the website but as always these are heavily subject to change, and in particular which server people decide to play on (particularly for EU), and the exact start time.

If you join the group chat, you will get an exact time and a notification for game sessions.

Hello, I have two announcements to make so I will be combining them together.

The first is that I will be concluding the scream fortress map vote now. I was expecting the update to come out sooner but I guess not. We've had enough time in any event.

You can find the results of the vote here[docs.google.com]

The maps which made it in are:

• Gorge Event
  
• Maple Ridge Event
  
• Monster Bash
  
• Laughter
  
• Graveyard

Maple Ridge Event was the lowest that I deem to be acceptable, with 60% positive and 16% negative. The highest was Gorge Event at 80% positive 8% negative. Other fun notable stats are Terror receiving 80% negative 8% positive, and Spookeyridge receiving an astounding 0% positive.

I apologize if your favorite "underrated" maps didn't get in, but the goal here is to introduce maps which won't rock the boat too much.

You will see these maps available for nomination after a map change or server restart, whichever comes first.

After a long time waiting in the discussion forum, I have converted Paris and Atlanta to Pre-Gun Mettle revert servers. What this means is that they have weapon reverts for any balance changes for weapons from Gun Mettle onwards, as well as some server settings and cvars from back then.

Please note that ALL the following changes apply ONLY to the Pre-Gun Mettle servers. They do NOT apply to the Vanilla servers.

First off, you can view the plugin here[forums.alliedmods.net] and the source code for it here[github.com]. I did not write this plugin, so I did not make any of the decisions the plugin author did on reverts.

In terms of what it actually reverts, there's no list anywhere but the easiest answer is that all weapons have been reverted to their Pre-Gun Mettle states. A few changes (like engineer buildings being destroyed on wrench change) are not implemented, however I can't provide you a list of everything because there's too many. You will have to read the source code of the plugin to verify the exact changes made.
If you want to see what official changes were made by Valve:

• Gun Mettle Balance Changes
  
• Jungle Inferno Balance Changes
  
• Blue Moon Balance Changes

The plugin is supposed to come bundled with a separate plugin that reverts flamethrower effects to how they used to be, but that one does not work so it is not included.

The plugin itself also changes the following cvars:

• tf_airblast_cray 0 - Old airblast mechanics (hitboxes unchanged unfortunately)
  
• tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime 0 - Disables weapon drops
  
• tf_parachute_aircontrol 5 - Full air control for B.A.S.E. Jumper
  
• tf_damageforcescale_pyro_jump 6.5 - Revert Detonator/Scorch Shot jump mechanics
  
• tf_stealth_damage_reduction 1 - Non-DR cloaking does not provide damage resistance

Additionally, I have implemented a few extra cvar changes:

• tf_damage_disablespread 0 - Yes, this is re-enabling damage spread. I would like to at least give it a shot. Damage spread was disabled back in the Gun Mettle update, but before that it was a vanilla setting, so I think it'd be fun and more authentic to try it out. We can always disable it if it's universally hated.
  
• tf_preround_push_from_damage_enable 1 - You can boost yourself with damage during the pre-round freeze again
  
• tf_spawn_glows_duration 0 - Disables the spawn glow effect. I don't know if this one actually works or not, I hope so

As always, if you have feedback on the topic, you can reply to this announcement or for a better discussion experience, make a thread in the discussion forum.