Team Fortress 2 free weekend


Recommended Posts

If I go to File > Backup games in Steam and select TF2, the amount of space reads 6622 MB. I'm assuming the files are delivered to you compressed, so the amount of bandwidth required might be a bit less.

Be ready to play on servers with at least 6 medics. It's great if you are offensive class. I have 100+ hours as medic, but now I don't play as one because there so many. Fortunately medics run to you if you are a Pyro or Heavy.

I've been using steam since its inception during the very early beta days and I have to say it really is a pile of crap.

Slow, bloated, duplicates game engine files due to the file structure and it constantly breaks something whenever a new update comes out (which you have no choice in refusing). That and I can't stand the activation, DRM, connection to the internet to play a single player game horse****.

Valve really cannot leave anything alone, Steam has probably gone through more updates and changes than all the games put together in the last 10 years. Alot of good stuff was replaced with crap and everytime it has I lost favorite servers and settings. Imo, steam is nothing more than a steaming pile of **** and I stay away whenever possible.

Edited by Colin-uk
This free weekend might actually help balance the teams for a bit......Stupid having seven medics on one team....thats another topic for the other thread though lol.

Anyone playing for the free weekend, have fun! you'll like it!

7 medics on one team? God, the last time I played nobody wanted to be a medic...

Late this afternoon Steam was "too busy to handle my request". I was expecting that, with the huge influx of noobs this event was going to cause. And when I say noobs... we were on red, goldrush, and some guy on the team kept wondering why nobody tried to push the cart back, and bothering me with setting my teleporter exit, when I was dead... :laugh:

I've been using steam since its inception during the very early beta days and I have to say it really is a pile of crap.

Slow, bloated, duplicates game engine files due to the file structure and it constantly breaks something whenever a new update comes out (which you have no choice in refusing). That and I can't stand the activation, DRM, connection to the internet to play a single player game horse***.

Valve really cannot leave anything alone, Steam has probably gone through more updates and changes than all the games put together in the last 10 years. Alot of good stuff was replaced with crap and everytime it has I lost favorite servers and settings. Imo, steam is nothing more than a steaming pile of **** and I stay away whenever possible.

Granted it has had many problems in the past, but today's build of Steam is unlike anything you have described (except for the favorites). The only thing that I have ever seen get "broken" as a result of an update is my ability to connect to servers because they haven't been updated. I can see Steam being slow on old systems, but I can't see this bloat you are referring to. It currently sits at 10MB of memory usage while minimized. For comparison, Thunderbird is sitting at 18MB. Duplicate game engine files? I don't really see that in m Steamapps folder atm, but I do see various files for each game that I have, a necessary "evil" so to speak. Activation for HL2 a few years back for me took a few minutes, but when I did it for the Orange Box back in November it was a matter of seconds, so this "activation, DRM" babble is just that, babble.

With all that said, when is the last time you've used Steam? All but one thing you're complaining about doesn't exist today.

I've been using steam since its inception during the very early beta days and I have to say it really is a pile of crap.

Slow, bloated, duplicates game engine files due to the file structure and it constantly breaks something whenever a new update comes out (which you have no choice in refusing). That and I can't stand the activation, DRM, connection to the internet to play a single player game horseshit.

Valve really cannot leave anything alone, Steam has probably gone through more updates and changes than all the games put together in the last 10 years. Alot of good stuff was replaced with crap and everytime it has I lost favorite servers and settings. Imo, steam is nothing more than a steaming pile of **** and I stay away whenever possible.

No wonder you're from another world. STEAM isn't as bad as you think. I haven't had any issues whatsoever, other than the occasional clearing of my favourite servers. And that's not even a real problem. In your last paragraph, you make it seem like updating software is bad. What if I said Microsoft can't leave anything alone because they constantly make patches and updates to their existing software? It may seem like something dumbfounded in your world, but it's quite reasonable in mine. STEAM, in its current form, is a wonderful content delivery platform. Kudos to Valve for coming up with the idea and implementing it. They're geniuses!

Now, about this free weekend thing. I've told as many friends as possible about it and they didn't seem too eager to try it. I guess they weren't too fond of downloading gigs and gigs of game data just to play it for two days.

Well the weekend has ended, albeit it's a bit early, it should go till midnight to be honest. While it wasn't bad and was kinda fun, even though i suck at anything but sniper, i'm not really sure if it wowed me enough to buy it.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • With the current hardware prices Microsoft should lift the restriction. Then if you have the correct TPM then allow you to use X feature, if you don't have the correct TPM then don't but still actually let you run windows. 11. With a disclaimer during install that X features would be unavailable.
    • It's good for recycling of course. But commence inflation of a second hand RAM bubble and price gouging on DDR 4 inventory in 3... 2... 1...
    • Bypassed Windows 11 shows surprising stability on ancient, completely unsupported hardware by Sayan Sen When Windows 11 was first released, one of the most complained-about issues with the new desktop Microsoft OS was its higher system requirements, which pushed many relatively modern and powerful processors and devices onto the officially unsupported list. Thankfully, they have not been updated again for the base OS, though systems require four times the memory and storage if they want to run AI-powered apps and features. As such, Windows 11 technically runs on 4GB of memory, and there is no imposed restriction on the generation of memory it supports. Speaking of memory, prices are extremely high nowadays for hardware, especially DDR5 and DDR4 kits due to the current silicon shortage, and there are also reports of it affecting DDR2 as well, and it might only be a matter of time before even DDR1 gets affected. Before that could happen, an enthusiast took an ancient DDR1-based system and decided to try out Windows 11 on it to see how well the modern OS would fare on such hardware. The system runs an outdated graphics card interface standard based on AGP, or Advanced Graphics Port, called AGP 3.0 or AGP8x. AGP was essentially succeeded by the modern PCI Express (PCIe) bus standard. The user behind the experiment is retro hardware enthusiast Omores, who built the system around an ASRock ConRoe865PE motherboard based on Intel's i865PE chipset from way back in 2003, around the time when AGP was still in fashion. What made this board special back in the day was its unusual support for newer Core 2 Duo and even Core 2 Quad processors while still retaining older DDR1 memory support and an AGP8X graphics slot, making it an ideal bridge or link between two vastly different generations. Powering the machine was Intel's Core 2 Quad Q6600 alongside 3GB of DDR1 RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card, one of the final and most capable GPUs released for the aging AGP interface. While installing Windows 11 itself was relatively easy by bypassing Microsoft's hardware checks, getting the graphics card fully functional proved to be some challenge. Microsoft had quietly dropped native AGP support after the earliest releases of Windows 10, meaning newer versions of Windows no longer include the necessary Graphics Address Remapping Table (GART) drivers required for proper AGP acceleration. Without them, AGP graphics cards typically boot up, though with limited functionality, and can often throw a Code 43 error in Device Manager. To work around the limitation, Omores extracted Intel's legacy AGP440 SYS driver from an early Windows 10 release and paired it with a modified INF file so Windows 11 would correctly recognize the chipset. Following this and combined with AMD's final 64-bit Catalyst AGP drivers from 2012, the Radeon HD 4650 was able to operate with full AGP 8X acceleration intact. The result was said to be surprisingly usable for hardware that is over two decades old. Hardware-accelerated H.264 video playback worked correctly and benefited apps like Firefox, while legacy applications and games ran without major graphical issues. The system also successfully completed the 3DMark 2001 benchmark, although performance naturally lagged behind what the same hardware achieves under Windows 7, which is significantly lighter than Windows 11. There was, however, one unavoidable limitation as Microsoft's Windows 11 version 24H2 introduces a mandatory SSE4.2 CPU instruction requirement that cannot be bypassed through installer modifications or registry tweaks. Since no AGP-era processor supports SSE4.2, Windows 11 version 23H2 effectively becomes the final release capable of running on such systems. Regardless, it is still a very cool feat and quite fascinating to see just how stable Windows 11 turned out to be on such unfamiliar hardware. Source: Omores (Patreon) via O_MORES (Reddit)
    • That will only really help other players that are also responsible for creating the problem.
    • Well, it's good to know that they have found a workaround to a problem that they helped create, I guess...
  • Recent Achievements

    • Reacting Well
      NovaEdgeX earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • Week One Done
      NovaEdgeX earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Year In
      BA the Curmudgeon earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Conversation Starter
      rosiecharles earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
    • First Post
      KMilenkoski1202 earned a badge
      First Post
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      538
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      266
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      151
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      98
    5. 5
      macoman
      66
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!