Team Fortress 2 Contest

[gdead]

Speaking of co-mingling contests...

Some members of The Shmoo Group would like to put on a hacker-themed Team Fortress 2 tourney last year. I had a small (very small) LAN party before my sunday morning talk at DC16... While only a few ppl had machines capable of playing the game, many came up to me afterwards indicating they'd come prepared for next year if we could organize something earlier and bigger.

We're working on a custom scoreboard to make TF2 a spectator sport in much the same way CTF is. We'll be debuting this at ShmooCon for the TF2 tourney there. We'll also be building a custom DC themed map for competition at DefCon if this all goes as planned.

Anyhoo, we're hoping that whoever wins the CTF CFP would be willing to work with us (assuming this all gets approved by whoever approves this sort of thing). It would be fantastic to piggy back on the CTF network in the off hours for the TF2 tourney. We'd like to run the tourney at night when CTF isn't going on... that is assuming the same type of scheduling as previous years. We have similar needs (fast network, AV, etc) as CTF and don't really want to reinvent the wheel if we don't have to.

Food for thought for whoever has made it this far in the thread and is thinking of applying to take over CTF. It's clearly a more complicated idea than I've laid out here. But I wanted to at least make folks aware that we were hoping to come storming in with our virtual guns blazing at DC17.

[Chris]

Re: DEFCON 17 CTF Call for new Organizers!

Speaking of co-mingling contests...

Some members of The Shmoo Group would like to put on a hacker-themed Team Fortress 2 tourney last year. I had a small (very small) LAN party before my sunday morning talk at DC16... While only a few ppl had machines capable of playing the game, many came up to me afterwards indicating they'd come prepared for next year if we could organize something earlier and bigger.

We're working on a custom scoreboard to make TF2 a spectator sport in much the same way CTF is. We'll be debuting this at ShmooCon for the TF2 tourney there. We'll also be building a custom DC themed map for competition at DefCon if this all goes as planned.

Anyhoo, we're hoping that whoever wins the CTF CFP would be willing to work with us (assuming this all gets approved by whoever approves this sort of thing). It would be fantastic to piggy back on the CTF network in the off hours for the TF2 tourney. We'd like to run the tourney at night when CTF isn't going on... that is assuming the same type of scheduling as previous years. We have similar needs (fast network, AV, etc) as CTF and don't really want to reinvent the wheel if we don't have to.

Food for thought for whoever has made it this far in the thread and is thinking of applying to take over CTF. It's clearly a more complicated idea than I've laid out here. But I wanted to at least make folks aware that we were hoping to come storming in with our virtual guns blazing at DC17.

Hey Bruce. Russ is the person you want to talk to initially about this. I forwarded this info to him along with your contact info.

Chris

[TheCotMan]

Re: DEFCON 17 CTF Call for new Organizers!

Hey Bruce. Russ is the person you want to talk to initially about this. I forwarded this info to him along with your contact info.

Chris

Looks like there is progress on this. I received a notice from Russ on this today.
Now I am just waiting for a few pieces of information from Bruce before making a forum forthis and moving this thread into that forum.

(These posts were copied out of the original, and remain in the original as well as here.)

The forum for this may go live as early as today.

-Cot

[The Dark Tangent]

Re: DEFCON 17 CTF Call for new Organizers!

Looks like there is progress on this. I received a notice from Russ on this today.
Now I am just waiting for a few pieces of information from Bruce before making a forum forthis and moving this thread into that forum.

(These posts were copied out of the original, and remain in the original as well as here.)

The forum for this may go live as early as today.

-Cot

Sounds good!

[TheCotMan]

Re: DEFCON 17 CTF Call for new Organizers!

We have the information I needed. Forum Created.

Good Luck!

[g3k_]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

:3 I wanted to go to the impromptu one last year, but I didn't have a PC and I was too drunk to find it. I'm 100% figuring out how to get my rig there this year

[gdead]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

No need to worry about bringing your own rig. We'll be supplying them thanks to some very nice equipment donations from AMD and sponsorship from ShmooCon. As a matter of fact, the way Valve does licensing for their tournament licenses, you're not supposed to mix their tourney licensed boxen on the same system as normal licensed box. Seems odd, I know. not sure why they do that.

Anyway, for those interested, we're working on the signup process right now and hope to have something up early next month. We'll have signups available for full teams, partial teams (ie: you've got a couple friends you want to play with but can't field a full 8 person team) and individuals.

Also, expect to be using a custom DefCon theme'd map. We've got it about ready for play testing. We'll make some announcements regarding play testing and map downloads as we get that sorted out.

The tourney will be 8v8. We're not exactly sure on what sort of tourney we'll have. We'd like to get ppl a reasonable amount of seat time, but 8 team double elimination can take a long time to run, even with 30 minute matches. Once we know the space we've got, how long we have it for, etc, we'll get serious about formalizing that.

Any preferences on rules, match setup, etc? We're open to suggestions.

[SkYzOpReNiCk]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

Hi

Thanks for organizing this event once more time. Last year was very funny. Not sure if this is included on the rules but spawn camping shouldn't be allowed. Also will be a second sudden death if the match is declare stalemate?

Will be funny if sudden death is melee only could be a little more challenging.

Thanks again

[gdead]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

Ahhh.. spawncamping... the holy war of comp debates.

For a while I was on a comp team, and when we first started scrimming against other teams, the first thing we realized that when you're playing to win, anything goes as long as its not outright cheating. We got spawncamped for about 30 mins (over the course of several rounds mind you). It was a mess. But we realized that its generally accepted as a valid strategy in all the leagues and it was something you had to defend against.

Soooo... I think it'll be in play at the tourney. Thankfully most teams probably won't be organized enough to pull it off. ;)

[davez0r]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

I tried to start a thread for this question, but my user lacks the rights...

Will we be permitted to bring peripherals for these gaming machines? i.e. our own mouse, headset, or gamepad? I use a Belkin Nostromo for TF2.

[valanx]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

From http://www.nomoose.org/dctf2
"Play will occur on our systems which have been provided by the Shmoo Group and you can not BYOM for this tournament."

Even playing field and all.

[gdead]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

I think if you want to bring your own peripherals, that's fine as long as Vista has native drivers for it. We'll be airgapped so there will be no d/ling drivers from the net, etc.

We're supplying the machines for 2 reasons:
- Simplicity. It allows us to get this all setup and running sans huge tech support issues. Everything is the same and should work uniformly.
- Valve's tourney license. When you run a tournament with their tourney license, they prohibit non-tourney steam ID's from joining in. We have enough licenses for the machines we're bringing, and that's it. Honestly, it's not like valve would know if other steamID's were involved since we won't be online and connected to steam... but given that we're already giving a talk on cheating and the Source Server, I'd rather stay on their good side as much as possible ;)

As far as a level playing field... eh. I think if ppl want to bring in their own gear to plug in, that's cool. We're certainly not controlling that type of stuff during the quals, so we shouldn't control it during the event.

[gdead]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

So, I've been pinged about this a few times, so lemme provide some details.

We're supplying everything :) The machines are Phenom II 940's with all the normal interal bits and a 512MB 4850 video card (ATI branded.. we got them straight from AMD). 19" Acer LCD monitors. Standard 101 key Logitech keyboard. Microsoft Sidewinder X5 gaming mouse (on the fly DPI settings). And run of the mill logitech headphones.

You're welcome to bring different keyboard/mice/headphones. but if they cause a lot of problems driver wise, you'll be SOL.

[davez0r]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

Thanks for looking into that gdead, and for pulling this all together- it should be a lot of fun.

I'll bring the drivers on a USB key; I just wanted to make sure that using a gamepad wouldn't violate any contest rules, and that loading the driver would be OK with the system's owners. (at this particular convention no less...)

[gdead]

Re: Team Fortress 2 Contest

How about a CD? USB keys make me a little.. gunshy.. not like a CD is much better, but U3 on a CD is really hard to do. ;)