Every competitive game has an issue with a large part of their player-base being toxic. This may be the old and jaded part of my mind talking here, but I don't think there is much that can be done about it.

The underlying issue is that young men in their teens and early twenties have an existential need to express their adulthood and alpha-male supremacy (Not a judgement, as I was a little fucker when I was young myself... just speaking from experience), When you put a bunch of these young males together in a competitive environment mixed with a modicum of anonymity, or at the very least, a buffer that assumes that your actions/words won't end in physical confrontation, you end up with the sort of trouble that this thread is bringing up.

What can you do? Not much, aside from understand why it's happening and ignore it the best you can.

Hawler messaged me through the site with this:

"Suave, it is also a fix for my system and it's not an old one (2012+) so I think the command might be related with internet stability issues, because it made my ping a little less variable as well.

I might be wrong but that's my perception of testing these commands for an hour on a full pub server:

Before
*cl_loadondemand_default 0
*mat_queue_mode -1
*snd_mixahead 0.05
(stuttering every 15-25 seconds, loss@1-3, choke@1-50)

After
*cl_loadondemand_default 0
*mat_queue_mode -1
*snd_mixahead 0.08
(stuttering every 5 minutes, loss@0, choke@1-5)

So IMO, snd_mixahead at 0.05 might be just for non-fragile internet connections."

So, at least I know it's not just me. I don't know about the internet connection angle, as my connection SHOULD be pretty damn solid... but at least it helped someone and I didn't write this stuff out for nuthin.

I played some more at snd_mixahead .08 and i only stuttered twice in about 90 minutes of play... and those stutters could very-well have just been weird lag or something else at this point.

So, as far as I am concerned... FOR MY SYSTEM, this is the fix I was looking for. So, I would check it out if you are as desperate for a fix as I was. It can't hurt giving it a shot, eh?

My question now is... why can the majority of players with snd_mixahead .05 get the game working just fine? I have a decent system... i5/gtx 660ti/ 16 gb ram, etc. Could it be that I'm using on-board sound and maybe my motherboard from 2012 doesn't like this setting? That's the only thing I can think of...

For any of you still having issues... I seem to have found a "fix" that doesn't fully cure the issue, but seems (for me, at least) to lessen the issue immensely.

It dawned on me that my audio was cutting out during these hiccups, so I took a look at my sound settings and found:

snd_mixahead .05

The new fps configs seem to be using this command. The stock setting is .1

I changed this to .07 and went from hiccuping every 20-30 seconds to maybe once every two minutes. I haven't had time to mess with this further, but later on I will set it back to stock .1 and see what is what.

So yeah, try that if you are having issues with hiccups and have that setting in your autoexec. I have a feeling that if I set it back to .1 it should go away completely -- that's my hope, at least.

I'm getting the stuttering as well... maybe every 30 seconds or so. Sometimes it's less, which is odd. It's very jarring, as not only does the fps stutter, but the game sound cuts for a split second as well.

On the sound note, every once in awhile... maybe one out of ten startups, the sound in the game is all static and weird. If I restart tf2 it generally goes away, so it's not a huge issue. But it doesn't bode well, right? Any ideas anyone?

Hahahahaha. Vanilla is STILL mad at me for this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=131196410

Let it go, man! Yeesh!

p.s. -- I'll second Jening, which was a great call seeing as he hasn't played in years. He was a good weird, though... I miss that guy.

check out my twitch.tv if you want to see the greatest sniper of all-time complain about how the stream lags his game and makes him not the best sniper of all-time! www.twitch.tv/suavepeb

I love you all.