Welcome to the catch 22 problem of getting a social service up and running. People will come back if people come back... how to start the cycle to begin with?
Most server farms fill in the maps with bots, without advertising this in the server browser. That's really awful, especially because you tend to have dumb, but accurate enemies. Bots can be remarkably human like (they don't have to chat after all), until they fail utterly (I screamed at my teammates stuck in the spawn room in stage 3 of cp_egypt for half an hour before realizing the obvious truth.) you can usually tell those servers from others because they have 23/24 players online, always, to make the game (and donating) inviting.
So the niche of filling a server with bots is filled, and so are the 24/7 servers niche, the achievements niche and the idle niche. What TF2 needs is more actual TF2 servers.
I have been regularly playing on the servers generously run by the ATF clan. Why?
- An actual map rotation! It's small but varied enough to keep things interesting and changed periodically. It features a mix of stock and custom maps.
- No voting. Clan members have access to some commands to scramble or advance in the rotation and that's it. No map is allowed to be dragged out past its welcome.
- Actual human beings! With as little life as I have! And they're better than me! And they actually play for the map objectives! And they use voice chat!
The server is run in the US, so I have 170 ping. This is quite annoying (using any shotgun or melee weapon is an exercise in frustration) but do I really care? Shit, I'm actually playing the damn game. That's all I care about.
Now. What can you do to make a successful server?
- Bring your server. The server must be well configured so that it can't be hostaged by people mistaking 2fort as an excuse for mindless DM. This is crucial.
- Bring your rules. Be strict about actually playing ghe game: no farming, no idling, no trading, no crafting. That's not your niche. You want to play the damn game.
- Bring your friends. Bring people that share your vision and passion, and with which you have fun playing the damn game with. Enable alltalk for banter if you want to. Give those people access to the server, so that only trusted members can nextmap, callvote or scramble. Optionally, encourage everyone to use voice chat by using voice chat yourself.
That's it. Now you have a decent vanilla server where you're playing the damn game with your friends. Embrace your guests and make them want to come back, not for access to a clan or servers or whatever, but because you're playing the damn game. Then play the damn game.
Congratulations! You'll have built your little loyal happy community on the internet.
I'm pretty sure cosmetic refers to Hats and Misc items.
To my knowledge items are only referred to as rare on the new crafting screen (Screenshot).
At first it looks like they describe the same as cosmetic, but I think they mean the 5 set hats which are not only cosmetic, but actually have an influence on gameplay.
Following by that, I would assume free accounts miss the blueprints for headgear.
There's also the special category in the crafting screen (Screenshot) which currently contains blueprints which require special ingredients that could only be acquired during the Halloween event.
Best Answer
To fully understand
cl_interp
andcl_interp_ratio
, you need to understand what these numbers are actually doing behind the scenes. Setting them randomly can actually make your connection worse off than it was with the defaults.I'm going to give a short overview of Interpolation, what this means in terms of games on the Source engine (such as TF2), what the different values of
cl_interp
andcl_interp_ratio
mean, and how to test your connection to find the value that works for your connection.Interpolation
Interpolation is a mathematical term. It is a means of guesstimating data points based on previous data points. As a very simplistic example, imagine you're waiting to receive eight numbers, but instead you only receive five:
Now, based on the data you did receive, what do you assume is the next 3 numbers are? If you said
24
,28
, and32
, that is because you recognised the pattern was going up by 4, and were able to assume that the pattern would stay the same.When we talk about Interpolation in regards to games, it's usually as a form of lag compensation for dropped data. The game receives data from the server continuously, however it may lose some packets of data along the way. According to Valve:
What this means in Source games (TF2)
Without Interpolating, other player's would seem to 'stutter' or 'jitter' around on screen as they run, especially on bad connections that regularly drop packets. However, the implementation of Interpolation adds artificial latency to a player's view of the game world, as it needs to buffer a few updates in order to interpolate missing ones and display them all smoothly. So fiddling with these values is a balance of regular latency (bad connections) vs artificial latency (interpolation)
So what does this mean for
cl_interp
andcl_interp_ratio
?cl_interp
should (almost always) be 0, as this will ensure that your client is tuned to the precise update rate of the server. Changing this value affects the minimum interpolation delay ("lerp"), and raising it will increase lerp, and therefore increase the artificial latency.By default it is set to
cl_interp 0.1
, which is 100ms of lag, and a carryover from the days of dialup internet.cl_interp_ratio
Can vary, and is the setting you want to fiddle with in order to tweak your interpolation settings.By setting
cl_interp_ratio
to 1, you’re only using one update from the server to guess what the next (missing) one is. If you happen to drop two updates in a row, then the client is forced to randomly guess (which leads to 'jittering' positions). So this value really depends on the quality of your connection.What you should use
cl_interp_ratio 1
if you have little to no packet loss. This buffers one server update for interpolation.cl_interp_ratio 2
for connections with light packet loss. This buffers two updates, and helps with clients that may regularly drop more than one packet.cl_interp_ratio 3
(or even 4) for heavy packet loss. This will buffer 3 (or 4) updates, and is used for clients with very high packet loss.You can also use real numbers, not just integers, for example
cl_interp_ratio 1.6
, however this just adds interp time without actually using more updates. Most people stick to whole integers.How to test
You can turn on your Net Graph in TF2 using
net_graph 1
from the developer console. This will show your current lerp value:cl_interp_ratio 1
it should say around 15ms.Of course, you can also just test by spending time playing on different settings and tweaking it if you run into any issues, but netgraph will give you a more precise overview. You should leave it open while you play some games, and keep an eye on the value.
Conclusions
To directly answer your question: the differences between
cl_interp_ratio 1
andcl_interp_ratio 2
is the difference between buffering one or two updates from the server, in order to compensate for bad network connections and dropped/missing data.You should only fiddle with
cl_interp_ratio
(notcl_interp
), and generallycl_interp_ratio
should be a number between 1 and 4.References