Loss of players is not necessarily my point. A lot of those lost players in ESEA went to CEVO, so the competitive TF2 community did not immediately lose that many players after CEVO opened up.

What did happen was our community was split. Some teams refused to play in ESEA, while others refused to play in CEVO, for various reasons. Our writers were split, our teams were split, overall our collective resources as a community were split. We used to have paid writers on a somewhat highly regarded league website making articles about TF2. Sure, they were a bit silly sometimes and weren't entirely professional, but this at least gives our scene some legitimacy to the outside viewer.

This this this.

I feel the ESEA-CEVO split caused a lot more harm than people realize, and it really hurts me to say it knowing how much time TheFragile, Lange, Nahanni and countless others put into it to make it happen. The split separated our small communities into even smaller communities. Neither league was really as competitive as it would have been if one just died and the other survived.

Some numbers (ESEA Season on left, number of teams across all TF2 divisions on right):

S10 | 68
S11 | 83
S12 | 68
S13 | 89
S14 | 102
S15 | 85
S16 | 52
S17 | 63

S14 was the highest in terms of registration. Shortly before S14 began, the bitcoin fiasco occurred. S15 was when ESEA added the "Main" division to TF2 due to its growth the previous year, and an extra team in invite. The first time TF2 ever had the Main division. A lot of people argued it would make the game more competitively balanced and I'm inclined to agree. With more teams, you need more divisions so that you can play against similarly skilled opponents. Nobody wants to get rolled week after week. Good things are happening, finally TF2 is getting some of the things CS has had for awhile in ESEA. I'm also pretty sure the TF2 prize pot increased substantially to allow the fourth place team to come away with a small profit. It wasn't much, but before this point, every season we'd have LAN fundraisers, similar to our fundraisers for the the i-series LANs, to get 4th, 3rd, and sometimes 2nd and 1st place teams to LAN.

Then CEVO introduces its TF2 division and lots of people switch leagues due to ESEA's lackluster TF2 support. CEVO seemed to be a great, almost community driven league that didn't come with all the stuff we paid for (but didn't use) in ESEA. The downside? It's smaller in scope and potential. A reliable LAN wasn't guaranteed. Even if there were LANs, they wouldn't pay back travel expenses, and it wouldn't be as highly regarded as ESEA for the simple fact that it hasn't been serious competition for ESEA in years. ESEA at this point has an international LAN. People fly from France to play in its LAN event, and we're splitting our numbers with a league that might not even have a LAN every year?

I'm not defending ESEA at all for their lack of support for competitive TF2. There are times when their support has been dodgy at best. However, they have always kept TF2 in their league, even two seasons after the huge dip in numbers shown above. They finally gave us a Main division and a balanced 9 team invite. The very next season we dump all that progress we as a community made in ESEA because they did something really stupid that didn't even affect the TF2 community nearly as much as it did the CS community, which relies heavily on the bitcoin-mining client.

After that season I took a break from TF2, partly forced due to real life, but also partly because I knew how bad it would be in both CEVO and ESEA in terms of numbers. Now CEVO is not having another TF2 season, and I don't blame them with the numbers they got (although starting a season in the middle of the holidays is a questionable business move).

The only thing that I think will keep TF2 alive is if the community realizes that ESEA is the best we got, and we have to stick with it if we want a competitive environment. ESEA LAN generates views, interest, its something to talk about and watch as a community. ESEA pays TFTV's production crew for their work so it doesn't seem like a complete waste of time for them to fly over. They have the best CS players in the world in the same building, and that comes with sponsors, money, and recognition.

We don't have the resources or players to be split between two leagues, and I think CEVO letting TF2 go will reunite the TF2 community again if we're all willing to accept what little we have and make the best of it. We'll see what happens from there.

12 Pains of Christmas

http://www.ourwatercounts.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/8-ball.jpg

Mars for sure. The other inner planets are unlikely, but who knows. There are also dwarf planets in the asteroid belt that could be potential targets (already a probe going to one next year). Other than that, there are already plans to send a probe to Titan to search for water and possibly life.

To think NASA does all this with only a half a percent of the U.S. budget. They need a serious pay raise.

My bad!

To add: Orion will circle the Earth twice, then ending its test mission. A NASA spacecraft with humans on board hasn't been outside of low-Earth orbit since the last Apollo mission, over 40 years ago. This test will help bring us there and beyond.

Lots to be excited about.

By "new version", what version are you referring to?

I have 2.0.5 installed and is working fine. You may have installed 2.0.6, which is the "newest" version of P-REC, however it crashes. It was introduced after a TF2 patch that broke 2.0.5. Then a subsequent patch broke P-REC version 2.0.6, however, due to the nature of the patch, 2.0.5 now worked again, and should still work.

You can download the working version of P-REC (version 2.0.5) here.

If you already have 2.0.5 downloaded, then I'm not sure what else could be the issue.

You can check what version you are using by opening console as soon as the game launches. It should say it in colored text.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6ctb-Pb3lc

Do you basically want to revert it back to the way it was before the update that added this? If so, just use:

tf_hud_target_id_disable_floating_health 1

What you are describing is a bug with Valve's new TargetID system. Whatever they changed, its a problem with TF2, not with HUDs that use the floating health numbers above targets.

There are way too many variables and the problem could be anything since you've maintained the server for a long time. If you want, add me on Steam and I can try to look into it if you're willing to give me FTP access and RCON temporarily. I got some spare time tomorrow.

I really wanted to enjoy EVE because I love the idea of an open world sandbox space game... but there is so much time you have to invest into the game if you want to do anything of importance. There are times when you are kind of overwhelmed by how large the game is, how much there is to do.

You really can't play EVE solo. You have to commit yourself to a corporation to get the most out of it. This can be fun, if you find the right people. You have to be on top of your skill training, which is done passively, so you gain skills even while you're offline. Downside is, skills can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, even MONTHS to learn.

For me, this was the deal breaker. Knowing that whatever I do, everyone that started before me will have an overall skill point advantage on me was something I couldn't get over, even with people telling me it doesn't matter so much in the long run, it's more about skill and knowledge than anything else, etc. That only made it seem more a job than it already was.

I can see how people would find it fun if they can get over that fact, but not the game for me I suppose.

umm...

The only thing keeping me from playing this game at the moment is the tactical view. It doesn't go nearly as high as it needs to to be useful. Also, the "hold-down-the-button-to-auto-attack" thing bugs the hell out of me. Really doesn't make any sense, auto attacks should be... automatic. Having played a lot of Dragon Age: Origins, I'm having a real hard time getting used to this unintuitive control scheme.

Click to move needs to be added in some form without having to go into tactical view. I also get strange frame-rate issues now and then when I turn my camera. The looting is also strange, but I can get over it. I haven't got that far into the game, and I can certainly see the potential, but some small changes to how the camera works will make me enjoy the game a LOT more. I like to play these games strategically and right now its making it really hard to do that.

Its barely recognized because its downsides included not being multi-platform. C# was developed by Microsoft as a response to Java. C# is more feature complete than Java. Some of the things C# has had for years, despite being a newer language, are just now being added to Java, like lambda expressions.

Java is so high on that list because its the go-to high level language for developing multi-platform programs. This makes it the perfect language to teach in schools to students with different operating systems. It also certainly helps to be the language necessary to learn for developing Android apps. Objective-C is also pretty high on that list, but I doubt anyone here has ever heard of that unless they developed iPhone apps. I haven't even mentioned that Microsoft's Visual Studio is a much more comprehensive IDE than Eclipse, which many consider the best all-around IDE for Java.

In the short run, you're right, it probably won't mean much. For people like me that enjoy writing in C#, but always thought if I developed a program that became public I wouldn't be able to share it with Linux and Mac users, it means I don't have to write Java programs anymore unless a professional job demands it or if I'm writing an Android app.

Having spent most of my time programming in Java, I finally have no good excuse to stay with it, and I'm pretty glad.