Beta 3 - It's almost like we planned this

Our third beta test (now with Even More Fixes) is up! To coincide with this, other lobby sites seem to *not* be up, so if you usually use another Team Fortress 2 Lobby site, why not give us a try this weekend!?

Some of the key things fixed over the last week:

• Massive fixes to substitutes - hopefully no more erroneous reporting of players
• Non-standard characters now supported
• SourceTV is ignored when checking for players on a server
• More fixes for lobbies failing to launch
• Server setup handled at creation of lobby, so launching it when full should be much quicker
• Logs cleaned up - less unexpected-but-recoverable errors, and cleaner logs so we can tell more easily what's happening
• Various UI fixes

There are some known issues - we're working on them but they're tricky to nail down and fix. We know of problems with the following things:

• Page is slow to auto-refresh
• TFTrue map delay on server can cause problems. Fix for this will go out over the weekend.

Please leave feedback in the usual ways. Apologies if I haven't replied to you directly - I promise we've read all the feedback so far, but sometimes I hold off on replies until things are fixed. If you have any questions about feedback you've raised, feel free to contact me directly (foxy@tf2center.com, or add me on steam). 

Hope you find TF2Center even better this weekend! Let us know!

Beta 2 - Success

Hi again!

The second open beta will come to an end on Monday (19th Nov) at 09:00 CET.

On almost all fronts, the second beta held this weekend went well and we had steady progress seen from last week. Thanks again for all of your help - because of the time you guys put in we discovered some more issues, but also confirmed that we have a strong platform to build on. Unfortunately having said that, we didn't feel the site is ready to stay up at this stage due to some pretty important things that need fixing first.

From last week, we spent a lot of time fixing the lobby creation and launching functionality. On the whole this worked well - there are currently some known problems (TFTrue plugin and map-change delays, serveme.tf servers and expiring registration) that we'll be working on, but we've fixed most of the big problems on our side. We do need to make the failure reasons more obvious though!

The biggest issues that people have reported is with the automated substitutions system. As you may know, we monitor the server to see when players fail to join the server and report them as missing (and thus request substitutes automatically) - however there have been cases where this was being handled incorrectly and lobbies either had subs reported, or the lobby closed, when they shouldn't have been. This is one of the highest priority things on our list, and we'll be looking into this week.

The second issue from our point of view is server performance - things got a little sluggish towards the end and that's not what we're aiming for, so we'll be looking into that too!

Despite this being a beta, we had some overwhelmingly awesome stats we wanted to share from the ~36 hours of uptime:

• Over 2,300 unique players
• A peak of over 500 players online at once
• Over 420 lobbies created
• Over 2,600 mumble logins (players are duplicated, but still)
• Peak of 100+ simultaneous users in mumble

Thanks again for your support. Numbers like this, and the positive feedback we receive about the site, really show us that the work is worth it. Honestly we're pretty overwhelmed with how well it's been received, and will continue to enhance the site as much as we can!

I also want to point out that I've been receiving a lot of the congratulations on the site, which is an awesome side effect of being the guy doing the public announcements. However I really cannot overstate how much time and effort Mother Tereza and MasterNoob have put into this. I joined the project in June, pretty recently in comparison to them, and yet take all the plaudits!

Thanks for your support guys!

Foxy


P.S. I want to add from myself that without Foxy's invaluable technical and PR help, his huge patience, politeness and kindness this project wouldn't exist. So mr. Foxy you deserve all these plaudits. Cheers!

Mother Tereza

+1
MasterNoob

Open Beta - Tonight onwards

Hi All!

We'll be opening up TF2Center to another open beta from tonight onwards (in about 30 minutes from writing this, so ~21:00 CET). Please come have a play!

http://beta2.tf2center.com --- note the beta2 URL, for the new server -- this will be active in 30 minutes

We know there's a small issue with lobby spectators not updating and we're working on it now :) However, most if not all of the major bugs from last weekend are fixed, and as ever anything you find can be reported via email or the feedback tab. There will be members of the team around for most of the evening at least should any issues come up. Hopefully you won't need us :)

Please also check out the new FAQ page (work in progress!) for some of the common queries!

For those curious, here is some of the things fixed this week.

Foxy

Open Beta

Progress on TF2Center has been steady, and when TF2Lobby went down on Friday we had many questions from the community about whether we were good to go. We thought we needed a little more time, but keen to take advantage of this situation we went for it, since so many people were asking.

Firstly, we'd like to say thank you. The site has been built for all of you guys, and it's so pleasing to see so many players trying it out. As I write this, we have 8 lobbies being played with over 90 people in mumble, and throughout the day we've seen about two thirds of players using mumble during the game. We've peaked at over 200 simultaneous active users, and the performance of the site as a whole has been great.

There have been issues. Most of you will have seen some of them - particularly when launching lobbies. We know how frustrating this is, and again would like to say thank you for the patience and understanding shown. Hopefully all the biggest issues are now fixed and the majority of things Should Just Work (tm).

The feedback we've obtained in the last 36 hours or so has been invaluable. Our inbox's have exploded with bug reports that would have taken us an age to find otherwise, and we've taken a massive step towards release with what we've learned over the weekend. However if you see any issues, they can be reported through info@tf2center.com or using the feedback tab, on the left hand side of the pages.

At the time of writing this, the Open Beta is live and (largely) working. We plan to keep this running until ~09:00 CET tomorrow (Monday 11th), and then we will shut it down. This will give us time to focus on fixing the bugs that came up and making sure things are in a better state, and all being well the site will re-open next weekend, with things running a lot smoother.

However, if TF2Lobby stays down tomorrow morning, we'll keep the beta running until they come back up.

We'll post updates as and when we have them, but a great big thank you from all of us!

Foxy