the last 2 days the map rotation for regular battlefield, road to rome and secret weapons, have been messed up. the server seemed to randomly pick a map from either of those 3 mods. u had no idea what map would be next.
we eventually realised it was playing maps in ABC order, and it would flip back and forth from each mod depending on what the next alphabetical map would be.
turns out this was cool as hell, nobody complained, nobody was map voting, and it kinda seemed to bring in more people. also we all ended up playing maps that havent been played in forever. all night we bounced from mod to mod, the server never crashed.
it made me think, why not set up this as a permanant map rotation, it really seems to work, maybe not ABC order, but maybe make a new order and mix the mods up with in it.?

I think the problem was caused by one of the admins clicking on the headings in the map list in BFSM (it was either me or David - or both of us). At least that's my best guess right now. Normally the map list is not sorted, and clicking one of the headings to sort it seems to change the sequence. No changes are made to the preset map lists on disk, but the only way to clear the sorting is to shut down the server and BFSM, then restart both. That's how I fixed it earlier today anyhow.

Regarding the new players: the CKUA server is down, and until that server is back up, CKUA players are coming to TPU. They seem to be playing on both teams. It's kinda fun to see that much traffic on TPU, just too bad it's not really co-op a lot of the time. I see Sisko is in there kicking people, but it's kind of a losing battle as there are so many of them. I dunno, what does everyone else think?

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-- Jeff (boot13)

The first initial random map order change was done by mistake last Sunday, the 24th of June. I am the one who accidently changed it. The problem has been fixed, but yeah it was kinda fun last night not knowing where you gonna be sent. However, I think a random map order may not be practical and may cause further unexpected problems for the server [some players may not have the other mods,rtr and sw] Also, if the server were to stay in a random order, the racetrack could pop up very early causing players not to join if they don't have the map pack.. Then again I maybe wrong on my info, but it sure was cool not knowing where you gonna be sent next, kinda had that real feeling of the war.

Sisko, you're right. A truly random order would cause too many problems. Of course, it's not really random, just sorted by map name. Which is not really all that useful, in my opinion. The proper map order was based on ideas from the TPU admins. By the way, we can change it up any time you want, if anyone has any good ideas along that line.

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-- Jeff (boot13)