emir

in your opinion, who was the better soldier in our team, Lid or Aycan? SHIET JUST GOT REAL Also, how does one go about surviving gran mid?

HELLO i am emir. you might see me in pubs from time to time. Used to play scout for XGN in 2010, and then Masterful in 2011 (shoutout to Summer, best captain and now best demo) Ex-admin of asiafortress in 2011 before i left for other commitments irl. Writer of the guide to "Getting Started in Comp Tf2" - I swear the links used to work last year before the site changed Also creator of the first iteration of AFA in 2011 - made that engi-graduate logo with no prior photoshop experience ^^ I'm just bored in tutorial goddamn. sometimes i miss tf2

HELLO EVERYONE. what's new.

whoa whoa. i'm not sure whether to put a stop to this drama or let it continue (since our forum visits only increase whenever there's e-drama goin on here). to clarify: the entire debacle with the servers happened the week preceding the afa launch. very simply, what happened was that i couldn't confirm the use of an eclub server for afa, and i approached agent K to host the server, who very kindly consented and helped to set up the server on such short notice. although afa was indeed intended to be a long-term thing, what transpired in the discussion was that Agent K could not host the server indefinitely. I agreed to this, seeing as to how it was only fair, considering that K was already doing us a huge favour by providing a server. it's probably my fault that afa didn't turn out the way i intended it to (as a long term thing). i accept full responsibility for this. the fact of the matter is, an initiative like this requires heavy monitoring by the admins, something which i unfortunately couldn't sustain. perhaps it was a flaw in the planning, in that i made it too contingent upon admin presence to keep things running smoothly. perhaps i didn't appoint enough reliable admins to keep it going well. perhaps it was bad luck that the eclub pickup servers were taken down last week, which drove the regular community to invade afa servers to quench their thirst for pugs. perhaps my trust in the community was misplaced; i thought that the community would at least be mature enough to resist the temptation to troll newbies and ruin their pug experience. whatever the reason was, the bottom line is that afa didn't exactly play out the way i thought it would. the way i see it, agent K here saw the problem that was stirring (with regular players aliasing to play with newbies), and he took the initiative to put things right, or at least, make things better. i have no qualms with that; in fact, i'm grateful that he stepped in to straighten things out (wow looks like i do owe you a lot now K). ultimately, i'm not too concerned whether or not this is "an asiafortress thing", or "an agentcy thing", or whatever. we're all a community of tf2 players in this region, and i'm perfectly fine (hell, i'd be delighted) if someone were to step up and fix any problems which they noticed. there are too many backseat drivers/armchair critics in this community, and not enough players actually willing to step up and effect change. lousy, you'll notice that i didnt mention a single word about agentcy servers in the admin forums. this was all very last minute (1-2 days before the event), and i had a ton of other things to settle, and updating the admin forums was the last thing on my priority list. and why shouldn't it be? take a look at the afa planning thread, and count the number of people who posted in it. it was a fucking monologue between me myself and i, and only occasionally did i get any external input (from you) in the form of constant reminders (which, as much as i'm grateful for, were completely unnecessary). the only other significant contribution from the entire admin team was the namelist you put together on googledocs (and again, i'm grateful to you for putting this together.) So tell me again, why i should have even bothered to update the private admin forums, when i was the only person who seemed to read or care? oh and to all mods, please, don't delete these posts. best to have some transparency so people know what's going on. there you have it folks, our community severely needs reliable people to step up and volunteer to help out with the running of tournaments, events, etc. otherwise, we pretty much won't have much of a community left. tl;dr, shit is all my fault. okay?

because as much as he'd like us to think otherwise, we all know that he has no life outside of tf2. why else would he repeatedly visit this site so much? some pug regulars dont even visit the forums as frequently as he does. banned. talk to me on steam (with a damn good reason) if you wanna be unbanned.

allow me to quote from another post of mine first:

first and foremost, i must apologise for my infrequent appearances in the afa pugs and in the community in general; as i've told others, real life has caught up to me. i've tried my best to ensure that there will be admins who can take over my job in my absence, but i'd also like to thank everyone who's tried to keep afa pugs as clean and as newb-friendly as possible. i understand what everyone's trying to say here, and honestly, pretty much all the bases have been covered by various people in this thread. on the one hand, we don't want stagnation within the afa community; we don't want to have a community of newbs just circlejerking, and as such we need to mix them sooner or later. personally though, i'd rather later than sooner; the way i see it, the afa community has much more to lose than gain from joining the larger regular pug community. anyone who's been in mumble or seen an afa pug can probably attest to what i mean. some of these new players are quickly getting a grasp of the game; hell, some of them understand advantage-disadvantage better than i do. it's especially heartening to see at least 5 out of 6 players in a team make the effort to get into a mumble channel, for the purposes of communication simply during a pug. most importantly, i see some people trying to take ownership of their community. some players try their hardest to enforce rules (although sometimes it fails due to sheer number of people in the server), and going out of their way to be nice to the even newer players who are in their first pickup game. and then you look at our older pickup community. we're lucky to get a game going where even half the team is in the same mumble. even then, we're lucky if anyone talks at all. most of the time, people just care about frags, airshots, meatshots, and whatever other [P-REC] Bookmark rubbish which they ultimately won't use anyway. and again, most depressingly, is an exclusive community that prefers to pick the same old players, time and again, without daring to give newer names a chance to show their stuff. all in all, what's the difference between these 2 groups of players? in afa, i see a bunch of people willing to learn, willing to up their game, and just taking the game seriously because they really do enjoy competitive tf2 and want to see it grow. it's the older pickup community that's stagnant, with the same old players, doing the same old things, time and again, without bothering to even take the game seriously. so you talk again about mixing the 2 groups of players. most of the afa puggers are very intimated by the older pickup community, and with good reason; we're pretty hostile to newbies, and all it takes is one poor performance before they get flamed out of the game, never to be picked again. sure, you say that "if they're serious, they'll stick around." but really, why bother playing if every game you play, you're getting bullied into playing medic, or just made miserable in general? in the end, why bother mixing the 2 groups so soon? it certainly won't be for the benefit of the afa community. the only thing the afa community stands to gain is the higher standards of play. but are they ready yet for a higher standard? maybe. is it absolutely crucial that they be exposed to a higher standard, as of right now (1 week into afa)? No.

say goodbye to pugging, cherry edit by thelousy: deleted post cause WOT is painful for the eyes but basically he was being an idiot and the above action was done.

keep saying that the comp tf2 scene is dead, and i'll have you banned from every pug server in the region. shouldn't matter to you anyway, since you seem to revel in its demise.

you'd be surprised how many gamers there are in medschool. i've got classmates who are hardcore WoW players (i.e. pon lectures everyday to play WoW at home), LoL champs (no. 2 in singapore), CS pros, competitive DoTA players, etc. Gamers can be pretty cool people irl too y'know.

i am in no position to comment on this issue. however, from what i understand, E-Club will not be releasing an official statement or explanation on this matter. it's time we started looking for alternative server providers. If anyone can think of any possibilities, feel free to step forward with your suggestions.

-noforcemaccel -noforcemparams -noforcemspd -novid -sw -noborder these are my launch options in tf2. im not sure which is the one you're looking for, but using these launch options, your TF2 will look exactly the same, but alt-tabbing is instantaneous. not sure if it affects your performance though.

i gave all 4 AFA server admins the power to move people around in mumble a couple of days ago. My apologies for not publicising this enough to everyone. The admins are Kig, myself, CombatWombat and Agent K (sorry agent K, rufus cant be given admin because he's not authenticated on Mumble, so i gave it to you cos you're the server owner). Talk to any of them if you want to be moved. IF YOU WANT THE POWER TO MOVE PEOPLE AROUND IN THE AFA MUMBLE CHANNEL, PM ME ON STEAM. I'LL GIVE IT TO YOU IF YOU SEEM RESPONSIBLE ENOUGH AND NOT LIKELY TO TROLL PEOPLE. On another note, i'd like to appeal to everyone to not bug the admins for every single minute detail or issue about asiafortress, or TF2 in general. we're not your mothers, we are not paid to do this, and we sure as hell are not waiting to serve you at a moment's notice. No, we don't know why your Mumble is not working. No, we don't know why your TF2 won't launch. No, we don't know why your Steam's not responding. No, we don't know why your mom won't let you play TF2. These problems are not OUR problems. By all means, post in the forums asking for help, or google it. The admins likely can't help you. Also, if you want us to help you with something, ASK NICELY. i've had it with people coming to me, telling me that they're not happy with something, and fucking DEMANDING that i fix it, just because i'm an admin. i've got a life too, (and guess what, it's probably more awesome than yours) and i sure as hell don't NEED to cater to your every demand. /rant P.S. this doesn't apply to your complaint, coldsteel, your complaint is valid.

like i said, it seems to me to be an unfortunate series of events, with mistakes being made on all sides. i understand you feel you've been wronged, and that some justice is in order; but to pin the entirety of blame on a single player/person seems unfair. as such, there is no one person that the admins can or will punish. as far as we are concerned, we can only hope that this incident will serve as a lesson to all involved, so it doesn't happen again.