For anyone arriving on Friday

I'm trying to organize a big group to go out for dinner and maybe drinks. (Like we did at GXL and Buffalo Wild Wings)
HMU on steam.

Flathud has always been my hud of choice so having a nice lil feature added to it would be awesome.

I know :(
Here's a bit of a history lesson people may not know or remember. I created Florida Lan because I had a bit of a fear of flying on planes and could not attend GXL in 2014. I said "fuck it, I'll make my own lan!", since then I got over that fear.
But Florida is a really tough place to for most folks to get to, I get an overwhelming amount of people wanting to come but can't make such a far trip to the very southern end of the state.

the 3DS XL Bundle arrived today!
And TragicServers will be giving supplying a server as a raffle prize as well!!

C U @ FLan

Also of note,
I've made up my mind and decided that after this event I'll be dropping "Florida" from Florida Lan. Starting next year it will likely be called Fragger Lan or something to that effect. The domain and TF2 medal will stay the same.
And in case it isn't obvious, I'll be moving the event away from Florida. I've been considering a more Central state in the US, Maybe Chicago? Post your thoughts.

Well for starters, I'm 99% positive that the department at Valve that handles their VAC system is completely separate from their TF2 group. I'm basing this off of Eric's response to my email containing cheat source code back in April.
Speaking of, there has been about 4 TF2 Vac Waves this year (Big one at end of April and 3 smaller ones after) that all took place only after folks in the community including myself reached out to Valve with information regarding cheats. This tells me that Valve in general is not pro-active when it comes to finding new cheats out there and will just wait until they either accidentally stumble on something or it's submitted to them. This can be further proven with their current system in just TF2 alone where if you report a big exploit to them you get a hat.

I sent them two emails within the past month regarding multiple topics all related to cheating in TF2 such as current cheats out there, ways I've discovered they could be detected in-game, and a few ideas on how to deter cheating on either the client or server end. Neither emails were responded to regardless of how many folks on the TFTeam were CC'd.

This could mean that either implementing any of those concepts are major changes that aren't worth the hassle (as noted in Valve's Communication video) or it could just be impossible to do this late into the games development history; Or it could just mean that they don't have time to do any of those changes. In either scenario one of the things I proposed for helping sort out cheaters from Competitive Leagues was a client-side AC plugin that could be signed by Valve. This would have required very little work on Valve's side of things since all they would have to do was whitelist a small handful of files leaving the rest of the work to the community team making the plugin (Handful of TF2Stadium folks and myself).

The most frustrating part about my attempts at communication and the communities attempt to get some sort of response regarding cheaters has been Valve's complete lack of response. All they really need to say is "We know, we're aware; We're focused on fixing other aspects of matchmaking first before we tackle that subject" but the lack of response almost gives off the vibe that they don't care. Even reaching out to Jill on reddit I was given a general response on sending the tfteam an email directly which clearly hasn't worked.

I can only hope that they are working on it and are just planning on surprising everyone in an upcoming patch.

I started sending out the emails requesting SteamIDs

Keep an eye out for an email with subject line "Florida Lan needs your SteamID for medals!"

Somebody should make Hinckley Jr watch Taxi starring Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon, maybe he might go ape shit again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCjiNBiEUaQ

This is true, I use Cortana for this exact reason.
Also, Chromtana extension is very bueno as using bing is awful

I asked them this during my conference call with them.
It was almost implied that it would be too bothersome for little to gain on their end.

We asked if they could add "PLAYER BANNED" into the API or on player profiles so that leagues could easily find out when players got banned, they said they would prefer just removing (deleting) the accounts.
Oh well, I tried ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

These posts are similar to the ones on the lmaobox forums
bunch of self entitled kids who are asshurt that they spent money and got caught

Do something with your lives, you waste of oxygen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8x81Rpl_FA

And while that is true, it leaves me scratching my head when I do get emails from them...but it's regarding my tf2 medals.

I also had PMd Jill on Reddit at some point with the information that I previously mentioned in my post only to be told to send another email. So even if all my emails do get filtered for containing the words "cheat" and "vac" at least one of their employees are aware of all the information I've sent to them.

They won't.
I have so much I'd like to say on this subject but I'd rather not piss off the Valve dudes.
I would like to say though that I've emailed them more than a handful of times regarding cheats/exploits, ways to detect cheats, and ways they can improve VAC/make it harder for players to cheat and they've only ever replied to me once (When I sent source for F1 and Darkstorm which lmaobox had pretty much stolen most of its code from).

Honestly, it was a huge bummer to get no reply on topics I felt I really could help them out with. I would have much preferred to be old "No, we looked into those and it didn't work too well" rather than getting absolute silence in response.

Even I fixed that in my plugin....

https://github.com/Miggthulu/IntegriTF2/blob/2.0/integriTF2.sp#L79

ConVar g_CvarTeleFovStart;
ConVar g_CvarTeleFovTime;

int g_TeleFovStart = 90;

void initConVar(ConVar convar)
{
	if (convar == INVALID_HANDLE)
		return;
	convar.AddChangeHook(OnConVarChanged);
	resetConVar(convar);
}

void resetConVar(ConVar convar)
{
	if (convar == g_CvarTeleFovStart)
	{
		// if convar is TeleFovStart, change to 90 from default of 120
		// the exploit allows users to keep 120 after teleporting
		convar.SetInt(g_TeleFovStart, true, true);
	}
	else if (convar == g_CvarDroppedWeaponLifetime)
		convar.SetInt(0, true, true);
	else
		convar.RestoreDefault(true, true);
}

public void OnPluginStart()
{
g_CvarTeleFovStart = FindConVar("tf_teleporter_fov_start");
	g_CvarTeleFovTime = FindConVar("tf_teleporter_fov_time");
	initConVar(g_CvarTeleFovStart);
	initConVar(g_CvarTeleFovTime);
}

public void OnConVarChanged(ConVar convar, char[] oldValue, char[] newValue)
{
	char convarDefault[CVAR_MAXLEN];
	char convarName[CVAR_MAXLEN];
	convar.GetDefault(convarDefault, sizeof(convarDefault));
	convar.GetName(convarName, sizeof(convarName));

	if (convar == g_CvarTeleFovStart)
	{
		IntToString(g_TeleFovStart, convarDefault, sizeof(convarDefault));
	}
	else if (convar == g_CvarDroppedWeaponLifetime)
	{
		IntToString(g_DroppedWeaponLifetime, convarDefault, sizeof(convarDefault));
	}

	if (StringToInt(convarDefault) != StringToInt(newValue))
	{
		PrintToChatAll("[IntegriTF2] Attempt to change cvar %s to %s (looking for %s), reverting changes...", convarName, newValue, convarDefault);
		resetConVar(convar);
	}
}

Transparent viewmodels still work, I don't see the issue using those
Maybe there's something I'm missing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯