thesupremecommander

Updates to User Policy

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Listen up, maggots! It’s your friendly no-fun tech admin Commander here. Recently we switched to a brand new blog theme, complete with author boxes letting you know whether or not the guy who’s writing is qualified to write on whatever they’re blabbering about. Of course, we already had a way to display the authors on each article, so we had to go and do complicated things in order to make sure we only display the info we need to. Unfortunately, that caused even more complications with adding descriptions for those of you who submit articles via a staff member. In… [Continue Reading]

The Simmering Over of Long-Held Dislike

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If you’ve been keeping in touch with more exotic TF2 news recently (or e-sports news in general), you might have heard of the recent settlement of a case brought by the New Jersey attorney general against E-Sports Entertainment Association, or ESEA for short, a gaming league with major divisions in Counter-Strike: Global Offense and Team Fortress 2.

Obviously, if you’re involved in competitive, you’re probably monitoring the situation and seeing what comes of it. If you aren’t, and are wondering why this is such a huge story, consider this analogy: say the owner of a very well-known price guide for TF2 items was accused of price manipulation and then agreed to give up hundreds of buds without admitting whether they did it or not? That event would certainly lead to a major switch to another pricing guide which the community would place its trust in and primarily use. In both cases, the community is at a critical juncture, where a major decision affecting the entire future of the community lies in the balance. In the trading case, the community successfully rallied behind the new community-based alternative, although not without some regrets being voiced with its current state today.

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A Few Changes

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With the world of Team Fortress 2 being such a huge universe with so many different aspects, it’s difficult to cover all of them at once with a single article featured a day. In addition, we’ve been unable to try some new ideas we’ve had since we don’t want to disrupt the many articles that we have just waiting to be published. Thus, The Daily SPUF is announcing a new initiative: columns. We’re inviting you, the loyal readers and contributors, to think of something interesting to cover within the world of TF2 and write for us regularly about that topic. Interested… [Continue Reading]

What IS the SPUFpowered Network?

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thesupremecommander here with a Public Service Announcement. No, not a Team Service Announcement (though you should definitely go watch those). (And maybe this doesn’t count as a PSA since we’re technically advertising, but then again I run this blog, so is it really advertising if I’m talking about things related to this blog?) Anyway, I digress… I’m sure that many of our loyal readers have heard about the SPUFserver before. If you haven’t, the SPUFserver is a server started by some moderators of SPUF and continued on by me today as a place for the denizens of SPUF to hang out within… [Continue Reading]

You Shouldn’t Rely on Glitches

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It seems like SPUF is always in two minds when it comes to glitches within our expansive game of TF2. Whether it’s high-fiving someone into the enemy spawn or staying invincible as a Medic, we’ve certainly seen our fair share of bugs that Valve has accidentally exposed over the years.

Of course, the latest one on the public mind (but not a recent one, dating back to just after last Halloween when it occurred) was the persistence of Halloween spells on items beyond when they were supposed to expire. This glitch was patched during and after this year’s update, with all spell items expiring but all items with spells applied to them allowed to keep the spell (with the caveat that the spells would only be visible during Halloween/full moon). This recent action has caused quite the outpouring, with a thread gaining steam on SPUF and a blog post on this very site, showing how much SPUF is in two minds about every issue.

Since every stance has a counterstance, I’m here to offer the opposing point of view: to all those complaining, deal with it.

You can still rock your stuff on full moons! Picture by FeelGoodInc.
You can still rock your glowy paints on full moons! Picture by FeelGoodInc.

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The Trials and Tribulations of Running an Event

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So some of you may know me as an admin for the SPUFserver. It’s a job that comes with a lot of pain because running a server is very hard work. However, it’s a job that can be quite a bit of fun, knowing that you are the god of the little TF2 universe stuck within that server.

SourceBans admin console
POWER! UNLIMITED POWER!

One of the interesting things I get to do is pop up on SPUF and offer to host events that are being floated around. I like doing this because events are a fun thing for the community to enjoy, but there’s a lot of work that goes into running them, and I thought I might share a little bit with those of you that might possibly be coming up with (and then proposing to my admin staff) events in the future.

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