Steady's Gaming Blog

Team Fortress is really one of my favorite games. We have a server in the Combat Engineers Gaming Community. It is hard to populate the server sometimes. One of the things that really annoys me about a dedicated server, are knuckleheads. Knuckleheads come in two shapes and sizes.

Knuckleheads that use my server to farm achievements really piss me off. You know that knucklehead who cannot read the server rules, and when you log in, tells you to leave because he and his buddy are farming achievements. Sm_admin, ban knuckleheads for a few. Really, it is stupid, go earn the darn things, play the game right.

The second type of knucklehead is the one that tells you how good he is, how bad you are, and exactly what you are doing wrong. Sm_admin, silence knucklehead. This week as I was reading the TF2 blog, they might have found a way for me to never have to play with knuckleheads again.

It seems that with some of the AI from Left 4 Dead, they have found a way to add bots to Team Fortress 2. It currently only works on King of the Hill maps, seems they cannot handle more then one control point yet. So today after having to hear some knucklehead play his “Bill Nye the science guy” (I was playing on another server, so I could not silence them) music for like the fifth time in five minutes. I decided to give the old bots a try.

I have to admit, I did not expect much, I figured the AI would not be all that good. So I dialed up a King of the Hill Sawmill map. I spawned nine bot buddies, and away we went. My team moves out, no stupid jumping around, or idiots bouncing off walls. None of them had names that told me what they were going to do to my mother. The next thing I know, the other team is taking the control point, what being beat by a bunch of bots. To make a long story short, this was one of the most entertaining hours of Team Fortress 2 that I have played in a long time. The AI seems to work pretty well. The game was not one sided, it was actually rather balanced. None of the bots told me how to play the game, or how good they were. Bill Nye the science guy was no longer a part of my life. Hey, this is pretty fun; it was a pretty good game.

I really hope that they add this to dedicated servers. It would be a great addition to the game. I could round up four of five of my non-knucklehead friends; we can play on our dedicated server with some of our bot buddies, and start to really enjoy the game again. So I have to tip my hat to the folks at Valve, from what I have seen the new bots look pretty darn good. I am pretty sure that Valve is not done with them yet, and they will make them much better. I am a little concerned however, what are the knuckleheads going to do when they have no place to play Team Fortress 2.

If you ever want to play on a non-knucklehead server, (at lease when I am on there), join server 69.12.111.20:27015. I am also looking for some non-knucklehead admins to help populate the server, if you have any interest, post a comment and I will get back to you.