lol floor never died. He just likes trolling people.

He has been very successful, very successful indeed.

Nearly exactly 2 years since the last update, I'm glad FLOOR_MASTER is still alive
It's amazing how he pays for keeping TF2Lobby running all out of pocket. He never put ads on the site or even asked for donations, what a great dude.
Definitely gonna donate if/when he starts asking for them.

great news

If he put one banner ad on the site he could probably make back a ton of money. I don't know why people are against stuff like that, I have no problem with people putting ads on their site if it means I can use it for free.

Plus I get to learn about sweet new games like DRAKENSLANG ONLINE.

I wonder if he'll be interested in working with other people now to improve tf2lobby. I know in the past people have made ultimately vain attempts to contact him about working on tf2lobby, but now that he's here, maybe he's willing to listen to them.

If tf2lobby had stuff like mumble integration and maybe some kinda stats or ladder ranking it'd be a much better place than it is now. Maybe it could lead to valve directly implanting tf2lobby, or aspects of it, into tf2 itself, but the odds of something like that happening are slim to say the least.

Now if only he sold it to valve like they wanted and this was integrated into the loading menu of the game...Probably wouldn't have to worry about server costs then.

Please elaborate Justin, I was not aware of this. :O

does that mean 2F2F will come back?

Rumor has it that Valve was interested in buying lobby back when it was released. Floormaster said no. Later he dissapeared and nothing more ever happened. Whether this is more than a rumor I can't say for sure, but I would place my bets on it being true.

I don't know about that, Valve already made their matchmaking system. If they wanted a lobby-style thing, it probably would have come with that; all they'd have to do is throw a "competitive" option into the mix.

And then lobby would only be pubs.

It's already basically that. An in-game HL lobby system would be awesome.

Wait... I thought it was the opposite; Floormaster wanted to sell it to Valve but they refused and that is why he stopped working on it? Rumors...

This was before they made matchmaking.

As for why they didn't make their own competitive version of matchmaking I can't say. Perhaps the urge to has passed, they feel lobby does it well enough on its own, or simply cant be arsed to spend the reasources to make it work (espescially when lobby has a solid footing for the most part).

The biggest shame is thinking how large compeititve might grow if a hub to its game-modes were readily accessible through the in-game menu.

While that makes more logical sense, it is not what I heard. I remember thinking how foolish Floor was for not selling. But who knows what hashed up version I got through the rumormil. I think flame told me. Maybe he was cycling a new protien shake that week and mixed the story.

even if lobbies would have even worse skill level think of how incredibly much it would help the comp tf2 to grow, the switch from pubber to comper(`?) would be so much easier

But the thing is it would just be class restricted pubs, it wouldn't be like comp at all

If valve was actually willing to buy tf2lobby, I'd be very surprised. I know they donated servers (dunno if they still have them).

And tf2lobby has helped competitive a lot, despite the shitfest it generally is. Lots of games happen on there, as people still prefer them over pubs. Quality is bad, but it's hard without any real moderating staff (although he could come up with a system). I just really hope valve makes date created public data (cannot be hidden) so that you can prevent people with <1 week steam accounts from playing (and would also be amazing for this site and others that use steam API).

And now it doesn't work :S

I don't know how much an in-game lobby system would help 6v6...most of the games would probably consist of 12 pubbers who know absolutely nothing about 6s and it would just be like a pub. 6s requires a lot of specialized knowledge that has to be learned from more experienced players (classes, rollouts, strategy, etc.). tf2lobby is kind of bad, but at least you usually get several people in each lobby who somewhat know what they're doing.

It would probably be good for highlander though since that is closer to what pubbers are used to, and maybe just knowing that 6v6 exists would get some people interested in it.

Picture CS:GO/Dota2 matchmaking.... but in TF2

Whenever I play cs go competitive matchmaking, I try to help people by calling strats and such. The majority of players are at least willing to follow comms and be instructed on what to do.

Also, a cs:go kind of ranking would be pretty sweet and would help alleviate some problems mentioned here. You get ranked up or down based on how you perform (in total rounds won/lost) against players of similar skill to you. As I understand it there is a specific numerical ELO created by averaging the random team members individual ELOs, and winning or losing by a certain margin of rounds effects this ELO accordingly.

People who already are good at 6s or HL would very rapidly move to the top of the rankings, while fresh-out-of-pubs players would start lower and take a bit of time to rank up. Meanwhile, people would not be playing far out of their skill level.

I know that this makes valve no money, but look at cs:go. Matchmaking there also makes them no money, yet it helps drum up support for the game in general.

in game matchmaking w/ ELO ratings would be huge for the game

Not to mention, Valve could easily implement a basic guide to "competitive" TF2. There would be a HL and a 6s queue, and at the selection screen it would explain the basic concepts or something. Then they could just link to some guides or something during pregame, I dunno. It's doable.

Me too.

Would be great. Would be a lot of fun, even if it wasn't taken so seriously, it would bring a new life to starting up hl2.exe every day.