With the RGL season active and more people at home due to COVID, the NA system is very full every night. We've also had to seriously look at the real server cost for NA, since dedicated servers are quite a bit more expensive in NA (I was paying the overrun myself, since serveme.tf is a non-profit by design).
That means I've had to raise the monthly goal in NA to cover the costs. That increased goal was already mostly being met, but I've also cut some costs by switching to cheaper dedicated servers, of equal or better specifications.

On the plus side, NA regularly has more active players than EU, so we've increased the amount of NA servers to 101. Depending on demand, COVID, and how the seasons go we will adjust the amount in the months ahead.

https://i.imgur.com/RnS4xly.png

No, the ending betrays everything the creators promised up to that point. Lost was made right when TV shows got really good, so you have much better options to choose from now. I've watched all the seasons, appreciated the online stuff they did at the same time, but still I recommend you don't watch this show, it's a waste of time.

https://i.imgur.com/AELobFy.gif

This gif makes more sense than the show ultimately did.

It's such a waste too, because the actors, the story, the music, everything was so great (for a TV show at the time), but in the end it's all bullshit because the writers didn't know where to take it. I won't spoil the big reveal, since you asked not to in the opening post, but please, watch a better, more recent show instead.

Closed back headphones typically don't have a great soundstage, if that's something you care a lot about and you don't use the headphones in a noisy environment, open headphones are generally better at it.

The ACL892 is just the chip (it's fine, not amazing, although who can really tell), the chip alone doesn't tell us the rest of the circuitry. You should never have an output impedance of 200Ohm. I hope the spec sheet is really talking about a max suggested headphone impedance of 200Ohm.
An average 80Ohm headphone on an average mainboard will very likely work fine, a 250Ohm will also work in most cases, but you might have to turn up the volume quite a bit.

Yeah some motherboard have very poor circuitry, and some cases come with terrible front panel audio connectors. In those cases a cheap USB DAC can be an easy fix (or try the rear panel audio connectors instead).

There's nothing wrong with the HyperX Cloud II, especially for the price. If they're not broken, consider keeping them.

If you want to upgrade, there's the Beyerdynamic MMX 300, about 240 EUR (straight from Beyerdynamic). It's basically a Beyerdynamic DT770, which is a proper hifi, closed, over-ear headphone, but coupled with a great microphone.
No RGB, no wireless, no bullshit features. If you don't need the microphone, the DT770 suggested by yak404 is absolutely wonderful and half the price (get the 32Ohms version).

Don't spend any money on DACs and AMPs, on-board audio is so good these days, you're better off just putting the money saved towards beter headphones or ice cream.

Cheers for that link Wiethoofd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwRc-BWAhws

Download

Enjoy, if you have to watch on Youtube, use 1440p60 due to Youtube's bitrates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=906spinekm0

Download

GG lag even happens on my servers with SSDs and NVMe SSDs.

I'm not sure all of ETF2L's staff fully understands the requested change. First of all the ETF2L announcement is confusing since it lists and links 3 separate plugins. Groundfix (ramp slide fix), FallDamageFixer (consistent fall damage) and Twikkuu's comp fixes plugin which includes the other two and some other stuff. So really only 1 plugin is needed and that's Twikkuu's comp fixes plugin.
Second, they still need to release updated configs to enable the fixes they want to use. Twikkuu has thankfully released the plugin with all fixes disabled by default, allowing leagues to pick and choose what they want, but that does require updated league configs.
And last, the ETF2L admin asking me about adding the plugin to serveme.tf was up until that point unaware that only premium customers of serveme.tf can enable plugins, requiring serveme.tf to allow this feature for free or force every ETF2L team to become a paying customer (we're opting to make plugins free).

The AI really fails at the PREM intro, but the 60FPS video overall looks quite nice, hard to watch the 30FPS version again. The killfeed looks a little weird with certain movements and the crosshair goes wonky every now and then too, specifically when rocket jumping.

I've sent CUBE the finished 60FPS version and asked for his approval to share it here.

https://i.imgur.com/XE54J8C.png

The coils in this workstation are making some interesting sounds....

Due to continued DDoS-ing we're adding some extra servers in NA. Starting with 2 more Chicago servers (online now) and 8 new Dallas-based servers (online this weekend now).

There have been many exploits for Source/TF2 over the years, see the big rewards over at HackerOne for some of those. This one, this one and this one are quite scary (and got big rewards).

I advise you to not play on public servers until more is known about the RCE exploit. Play on password protected servers and use a decent sv_password so no randoms can join your server, just in case there's really an exploit that can be triggered by any player for any other player on the server.

In general, don't connect to servers hosted by people you don't trust, or RCON-ed by people you don't trust. Because of TF2's server-client model, as far as I know, all the exploits have been from client to server, or from server to client. So a client could crash or RCE a server, or a server could crash or RCE a client. That doesn't mean a client-to-client RCE couldn't exist, so use common sense to decide who you play against for now.

EU serveme.tf passed the 1 million reservations mark last month, while NA passed the 300k mark. Meanwhile human malware is causing a spike in usage in both NA and EU, basically since March when the lockdowns began. Today we peaked at 673 players, I can't remember ever seeing that many concurrent players.

This is causing some strain on the system but we're OK for now and can easily scale up if needed. Currently just operating at higher capacity than normal. Please let us know on Discord if you experience a laggy server (for all players) or if you have premium and can't get a server.

http://fakkelbrigade.eu/i/chrome_gx4jYpxoOl.png

http://fakkelbrigade.eu/i/chrome_lW5KCIpQAH.png

http://fakkelbrigade.eu/i/chrome_1TmhAp5GJ9.png

All this extra activivity is driving more people to buy premium, which is great, but it also causes us to overshoot our monthly goal. The monthly goal covers the server costs (we're a non-profit), and we've used the overshoot of March to cover some losses for having to rent extra NA servers and tools due to DDoSes.

For April, it looks like we'll overshoot the donation target again, by a large margin (it's April 9 and EU is already at 109%). We might have to use this to get some extra servers, but we'll donate the excess to a good cause, currently considering Doctors Without Borders as the recipient, but we're also considering contributing to some TF2 projects like demos.tf and whitelist.tf. If you have better ideas or strong opinions, let us know here or on Discord.

No, sorry. The CSGO version had basically no donations and very few players, so I couldn't justify keeping it running for free while it ate into capacity for TF2.