A couple items, both related to the TF2 loading screen.
First off, since I’m sure everyone at The Valve reads my blog and then gathers excitedly together to discuss my current bitchings and babblings, I have a bit of a niggle about the “Cancel” button, and how it doesn’t work when it really needs to work.
For example. You’ve just finished a hearty round of Gold Rush that has ended, as it generally does, with the defense holding the first stage. The scoreboard comes up so you can see just how badly you got pwned by that one demoman, and the scoreboard stays up so you know the map is about to change. The loading screen then comes up, but it doesn’t tell you what map the server is changing to. Not yet, anyway.
At this moment, the “Cancel” button works just find and it will dump out out of the game to the menu. However, once the text comes up that says “You’re on your way to Gravel Pit”, and you frantically try to hit cancel because, let’s face it, you don’t want to play Gravel Pit, you want to play more Gold Rush, the “Cancel” button cannot be pressed no matter how determinedly you click on it. The game, having decided where it is going, is taking you with it.
So, what would be cool would be a “Cancel’ button that works once you know you’re going somewhere you don’t want to go, or perhaps a loading screen that tells you where you’re going to go before you’ve started going there.
Secondly, there’s this:
These are my “best moments”. I’ve heard on a few forums that the option to clear our stats will be made available to us, as it once was, in the future. To this I say: rah. See, my stats just don’t paint an accurate portrait of my ability, and haven’t for some time. The medic achievement grinding I did is to blame for some of this, but even before that, I knew my stats were a lie.
First off: Demoman. 31 points. That’s a much better demoman than I usually am. The 31 points I got was due to playing demo on 2Fort back in the early days. A scout on the other team had gotten our intel out in front of our base before dying, and so I ran to our doorway and littered the briefcase with stickybombs. Another scout rushed across the bridge, grabbed the intel, and then I detonated. I’d just planted some more stickies when another scout tried the same move. Again, kablooie, scout parts everywhere. The first scout, having respawned, made a beeline for the intel, and, once more, I got some stickies down just in time to blow him up as he grabbed the briefcase.
This continued. For a while. Fourteen straight times, in fact, giving me fourteen straight defenses and when finally one of them thought, hey, let’s kill the demoman before we try to grab the intel, I was up to 31 points.
I don’t think I’ve gotten too close to that record since then — I’m just not that good at staying alive and I rarely hang back strictly on D as a demo. At any rate, I don’t feel it’s an accurate representation of my less-than-l33t skeelz.
Engineer. 80 points. 80 kills. Yeah, right.
When I was fiddling around with making my map, I was testing sentry distances, which is hard to do while playing alone. So, I set up some spawn points on my map, enabled cheats, and spawned some bots to get shot while I built and moved sentries. While I was doing this, I suddenly wondered how long it took sentries to run out of ammo, and what happened when they did, as it never seems to happen during a game. So, I just let my sentry kill a bunch of bots for a while to see. (The sentry clicks when out of ammo, if you’re interested). After slaying apparently 80 bots with several sentries, I was a little dismayed to see that it had been added to my stats. I didn’t think stats were recorded when cheats were on. Oh, well. I happen to know my previous record for sentry kills was 17, because I tied it four freakin’ times but never broke it.
My soldier stats are unmolested, at 23 points, and my sniper points were at 23 until Goldrush pushed them up a bit (I wub Goldrush) at 27. My spy score of 23 is also valid (seems to be a popular number for me, just like that unpopular Jim Carrey movie). Pyro, 16, yeah, I stink at Pyro.
That leaves the medic, at 33 — no way. I’m not a medic who lives very long, that’s purely from grinding (and isn’t even impressive to boot). As is my 20 points as a heavy, also from helping someone grind their medic achievements. I’m a horrible heavy — I think my actual record was somewhere in the teens. And the 44 scout points, I have no idea — I think I ran pl_dustbowl locally and capped all the points to see what the explosion at the end looked like, and those points come for all the solo caps.
Anyway, most of it just feels like a pack of lies to me. Plus, when you have stats that are so much higher than what you’re generally capable of, you miss out on the little positive messages between lives that tell you you’ve broken your old records or at least come close. Sure, I guess I could get better at playing, but it’s much easier to simply erase my marks and pretend I’m getting better at playing.
I’m not sure how the stats reset will work — will it completely wipe your slate? Will you be able to pick which stats you’d like to clear? Will you lose achievements and gear? No idea. But I’m keen to come clean.
45 responses so far ↓
1 Anon // Jun 9, 2008 at 4:30 pm
I swear I’ve seen the option to clear stats before, whether ingame or the steam browser. Poke around, see if you can find anything.
2 Christopher // Jun 9, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Yeah, it used to be an option ingame, right on your stats screen, but they took it out some time ago.
3 WeakLemonDrink // Jun 9, 2008 at 4:46 pm
The thing is, that clear stats button never worked. Hence why it was removed.
4 DeliriumWartner // Jun 9, 2008 at 4:47 pm
This is totally something I’d go for. I actually have a medic score of 2800 or thereabouts, cos I did the million points achievement all in one go on a MarioKart level. You know the ones, you’ve seen them, with the ubercheating going on.
Anyway, I can’t even SEE my normal stats now, the ones that weren’t destroyed by the grindfest. Sucks.
5 WeakLemonDrink // Jun 9, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Also, I share your annoyance at not being to click cancel after a certain time. This seems to be a wider spread problem, as if you try to bring up your Steam overlay it all stalls until the map loads up. I wonder what exactly is causing it?
6 Core Xii // Jun 9, 2008 at 5:08 pm
You forgot to mention that the option to select between what the stats screen displays (I’d like Avg. Points rather than Most Points since it more accurately portrays my skills with each class) isn’t remembered when you close TF2.
My 153 most points as Engineer completely dwarfs all other graphs. And I got it on a surf server, on some horribly designed map where we managed to set up 5-6 sentries in the enemy spawn.
(by the way, you wouldn’t believe the aggregate NOISE they made!)
7 Rabid Weasels // Jun 9, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Yeah, I really hope you can just reset one at a time. I joined this server once that was instant spawn, small arena, and was a great map to grind healing points as my medic for my million point achievement. However, after about 5 seconds it said I had gained said achievement, when i was originally only half-way there. After dying I checked my stats and was amazed to discover I had healed 800,000 points worth due to some stupid server mod. As such I now have several thousand points as a medic, and my other classes (including my engineer I was so proud of - 97 points with no cheats) look like small, pathetic numbers in comparison. I want my points reset :(
8 Galenor // Jun 9, 2008 at 6:04 pm
I would like a point reset as well. Once on Dustbowl i was playing a Soldier, while my friend on VoIP was a Demoman. Some weird glitch occured that basically wiped my friend’s Demoman played time to 0. Weird, we both thought, but not such a huge problem.
I then spawned as a Soldier, ran out to defend the point like a lunatic, was blown up in about a minute, and have the game applaud me and throw flowers at me in celebration of my new Soldier Longest Life Record.
27 Hours, 15 Minutes exactly.
Yeah, that pretty much dwarves my other times.
I also borked up my Most Assists on some weird map, and doubled my Most Damage when i was helping medics get hurt by being a pyro. Stat reset please!
9 AR // Jun 9, 2008 at 6:30 pm
And after the reset , they should only track stats on official maps with no server-admin tiddly-winks. (Or at least make it an option, or track two sets of stats, etc).
Fortunately the cancel button *does* work if it starts downloading resources related to those “server-admin tiddly-winks” and you recognise it in time.
I’ve had to work hard to keep my stats “clean”. And I’ve had to forgo an Ubersaw. Really, Valve, I shouldn’t have to.
10 jordan // Jun 9, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I dont know what you are all complaining about, I’m grateful for every point I get if it will make me look like I’m better than I actually am.
11 AlphaHawk // Jun 9, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I never remember seeing the “clear stats” option…wish I could undo my 1033 medic points. Hate it when you realize you’re on an accelerated score server.
12 Dan // Jun 9, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I assume the Cancel button doesn’t work while the map is loading because the map loading code runs on the UI thread… so the UI can’t respond until that finishes. They really should move it to another thread to fix it (and make sure stuff doesn’t blow up if you cancel while a map is loading).
I got 817 points as a medic because of grinding. Specifically there are servers where there is no upper limit on the health you can have, and medics can heal you faster than normal. So we have medics gaining 10-20 points a second (it’s easy to get Intern, Specialist, and Chief of Staff if you find one of these servers).
I also have a 500,000 damage dealt record as spy from backstabbing a single medic who had been healed in this fashion.
Also I’m using this same blog theme for my blog now since my old theme totally sucked and I couldn’t find a better one. So thanks.
13 Alex // Jun 9, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I had messed up my stats long before the Medic update came along (which removed the button)
Now my medic stats have skewed it even more.
14 Jay // Jun 9, 2008 at 10:36 pm
I’d much rather reset only a few of my stats personally -_-
The only illegitimate stat (I feel empty inside) is my engineer stat, as I was being a dick on a jump map. All the rest however are fine, particularly my Soldier stat
15 Baggie // Jun 9, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Lol, my stats are legit (apart from scout, goldrush alone again), but amusingly I have a longest life as an engie as 27 minutes. This was on a clan match that was particularly interesting cause they didn’t even attempt to get the Intel bar a few lone scouts. You can imagine my reaction when that popped up.
16 Stranger // Jun 9, 2008 at 11:10 pm
I detailed several examples of how I unwittingly/unthinkingly skewed most of my stats the single-minded pursuit of the Ubersaw on the “Achievement Box” Map Massive thread. However, there have also been a few weird glitches here and there (mostly in the early days) that I can’t explain — like the one that lead to my being credited with a record 9 Invulns in one life (despite, so far as I can recall, never managing more than about 3 before getting impatient for action or a knife in the back)
In other words… reset button, please!
17 Snuffleupagus // Jun 9, 2008 at 11:28 pm
I think I found a way to reset stats I typed in resetplayerstats in my console and it worked. I don’t know if it works on everyones though as my friend tried but his stats stayed the same.
18 Aftershock // Jun 9, 2008 at 11:55 pm
My medic grinding skewed my stats over aswell..
33003 heal points in one life? bah. Hour and a half life? bah. 75 points…
Prior to the medic pack, the only problem i had was a longest life of 15 minutes as a spy when i did the developers commentary.
I’d really love to clear my scores, but not my playtime..
19 Mr_Wizard // Jun 10, 2008 at 12:27 am
I recently destroyed some of my medic stats while in an achievement server. I am never doing that again.
Most of my stats are rather “pure” I recently beat my sentry kill number, from 11 to 19, on 2fort. I am really good at flushing enemies into my turrets line of sight. Was finally killed when a heavy, 2 medics, a demoman and a soldier all attacked. A spy accused me of hacking, because I did a 180 and killed him right as he decloaked behind me. I knew he was behind me because he was disguised as a pyro and I saw the nozzle decloak on my screen. :D He wasnt a very good spy.
20 Slamhound // Jun 10, 2008 at 4:02 am
FYI, resetting stats using the resetplayerstats command works fine…
BUT, and it’s a huge BUT (”I like big bu-”) if you do so before completing Chief of Staff (Heal 1,000,000 health) then the progress in that achievement resets to zero, whether you had 10 or 500,000 or 999,999 health healed. Short of grinding all that healing lost on a high-healing server, you can’t get it back.
21 JakubK666 // Jun 10, 2008 at 4:37 am
There’s an easy way to reset your points! Enable command console in Options>Keyboard>Advanced and type in either resetstats or statsreset or something like that.Steam command pop-up will help you on this one.
TRUST ME IT WORKS AS I’VE USED IT THREE DAYS AGO!
22 Chijts // Jun 10, 2008 at 4:45 am
But then if you guys hadn’t used those special servers then would some of you not be wishing that you could make it easier on yourselves to unlock the stuff? Some of those med achievements seem quite hard.
It’s a shame that it is possible to grind them specially, because someone may have earned up to the ubersaw normally, yet no one will go “wow he has an ubersaw” as they’ll assume he probably “cheated” to get it.
I thought the cancel button not working was just a fault on my PC lol.
23 macho // Jun 10, 2008 at 5:23 am
dude. Demoman is so uberpowerful, I got ~36 points with him when I played with him ~10 hours. Now I have 35hrs and 55 points. And all those were earned fair and square, no ubernoobs on the opposing team (if there were, then I would’ve gotten 80, which was my total round score).
Anyways, I like my points because all of them are earned normally. And I have to say that you can earn a LOT of points with a heavy in Granary (if there’s not a particulary smart spy).
24 Lagged2Death // Jun 10, 2008 at 7:50 am
You know what bugs me about the loading of TF2 (and so many other games)? Those animated-logo-movie things that tell you who developed and published the game. Again. And again. And again.
Most Valve games at least let you skip the logo. But often you’re stuck watching this ad for the publisher (which conveys nothing that could be called information by your second load) while the game resolutely *does not* load in the background. Then you have to wait again while the game loads. Sure, it’s just a few seconds each time, but how much time gets wasted in aggregate? Multiply a zillion games by a zillion players playing a zillion times each and you’re looking at quite a lot of wasted time, for (at best) dubious benefits for the developers and publishers.
How about it, developers? Why not at least load the game while you show us your logo? Is that really so much to ask?
25 Slamhound // Jun 10, 2008 at 8:12 am
Hey, at least with Valve games you get the -novid command line switch.
Speaking of agonisingly poor loading times, anyone played the latest Dawn of War expansion, Soulstorm? Apparently the reason why the campaign mode loads with absolutely glacial speed is because it’s attempting to load two movies that don’t exist. Ouch. Hopefully, when Relic (Who weren’t responsible for the game, Iron Lore were) gets around to releasing the patch in July it’ll at least be playable for someone with less than seventy years to live.
26 Mr. Munchlax // Jun 10, 2008 at 8:49 am
My stats glitched the first time I played badlands and my time alive as a soldier was and still is set as 4:17:47. And if you really want to reset your stats, there’s a console command to do it as someone has already said.
27 Slamhound // Jun 10, 2008 at 9:05 am
This just in: resetplayerstats cannot reset Chief of Staff if you’ve achieved it.
Was hoping to find a server with a boosted healing rate in order to rebuild the 600k healing I’d lost in testing resetplayerstats, but the server I picked was a little *too* boosted. Flew past Chief of Staff before I noticed. Feh.
So I disconnected, ran resetplayerstats, and yet the achievement remained unlocked. Probably obvious to most, but this should waylay any fears people have about resetplayerstats fudging up your achievements.
So in short: Yes, it will if you haven’t unlocked the achievement(s). No, it won’t if you have.
28 WeakLemonDrink // Jun 10, 2008 at 9:13 am
Surely that command only resets your local stats and they’ll just be restored from the Steam servers?
29 Slamhound // Jun 10, 2008 at 10:19 am
Apparently not.
The local stats are stored in a local file, naturally enough. This file is in the \steamapps\\team fortress 2\tf\ directory, as a file named tf2_playerstats.dmx. Go open that file in WordPad (NOT Notepad) and have a quick peruse. I’ll wait.
This opens up a non-console version of deleting your stats, just delete (or rename as a backup) the file and TF2 will create a new file on starting up. The resetplayerstats command doesn’t purge or delete this file, but simply sets all the values to 0, at least to my knowledge.
TF2 uses this file to display the loading screen and personal stats. While knowledge of what this file does is probably as old as the game itself, it only really captured the attention of the community when the original Chief of Staff achievement (Ten million, remember) was announced and it was also made clear that all your accumulated healing would count towards the stat. You can clearly see this value in the file: Just do a search for “medic” in the file and read the stats ABOVE the classname string. The value you’re looking for is “iHealthPointsHealed”. At the time of the medic announcements, a statfile parser was doing the rounds that basically took the file and displayed the stats in a more user-friendly format. People were checking their iHealthPointsHealed long before the achievement pack was released.
Now for the oddly clever bit:
The file is remarkably resistant to tampering. Try it, edit a stat to something ludicrous (I set my number of invulns as a medic to 666) and then run TF2 and check your in-game stats - They remain unchanged. If you’re thinking that you can cheese your way through CoS by editing the iHealthPointsHealed to 1000000 (Or if you’re savvy enough to see the problem with that, 999999 and jump into a game and heal a single point) you’ll be sorely disappointed to find that it doesn’t work.
So this indicates that the stats are not just stored in tf2_playerstats.dmx, but somewhere else. However, it also doesn’t seem to be from the remote Steam stat server, since your stats aren’t replaced with your community stats.
30 tm.Mr.Sin // Jun 10, 2008 at 12:11 pm
What about a graph like NYSE has for stocks?Break it down by class. Wanna see your Demoman stats? Click on a link that can show time played, scores on dates, % of hits, etc etc. BF2142 has something like that and it shows my progression twards 40 as my reflexes and vision begin to go so do my numbers. I miss you reflexes.
31 Lenny17 // Jun 10, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Some stats are stored locally, and others are stored on the Steam servers. Stuff like head shots, points healed, and games won are stored at Steam. But some of the other ones, like number of nemesis kills, or Head of the Class are stored locally.
I’ve tried to stay away from the nerfed servers, I don’t want high numbers without earning them. But I did find one server where I pulled 31 points on engie (my next highest is 10 as heavy and 9 as pyro) on goldrush, where I had a sentry sitting pretty just past the first point. Between the sentry kills and the spies/sappers, I managed 23 kills. It feels good to have a high number, but also feels out of place.
32 Mr brit // Jun 10, 2008 at 12:30 pm
31 as engineer is not unreasonable…
I have 32 and that is without nerfed ervers or spawn camping or anything. It was on the last cap of Dustbowl, on the little balcony that overlooks the route just from the area by the first cap. Only red can get there by a door in the spawn. Most teams are competent enough to take down this sentry placement pretty quickly, but we were playing against some morons who kept either scout rushing or having a sldier stand in plain view and fire away.
With regards to cancelling stats, it should definately be an option that isn’t a code. Maybe with the Pyro pack….? And hopefully with the (eventual) Medic pack on PS3 + 360…
33 n00bie51 // Jun 10, 2008 at 4:03 pm
The most amount of points I’ve achieved in one life was 41 as Medic. Totally legitimate, I was bored one day and decided to play as the class and was healing a Heavy and got numerous assists.
34 Joe // Jun 10, 2008 at 4:19 pm
You damned cheaters! All of my points are 100% legitimate, including the 150K points of damage or whatever it is as sniper!
Actually I’d love to just be able to keep the stats I got when not goofing off on a Mario Kart server which I have as a guilty pleasure, having autofire duels with the sniper rifle is just too damn fun.
35 kyle // Jun 10, 2008 at 6:44 pm
All my stats are stacked tremendously in the medics favor. I have like a record 1000 points or something because I had god mode,, etc. while grinding medic achievements. Anyways my stats are basically all medic stats and by like 10000% of anything else I’ve done so everything else is just tiny slivers.
And the cancel problem has been around since STEAM FIRST LAUNCHED you think by now they’d fix it, oh well..
36 Stranger // Jun 10, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Thanks guys — typing resetplayerstats into the developer console totally worked! It reset all of my personal stats back to zero (not exactly selective, but a price I was willing to pay). I actually got a kick out of playing soldier for about 90 seconds while killing one guy and setting new records for doing both. The unexpected bonus is I got to keep my Ubersaw and all the other achievements…
37 Icarus Tyler // Jun 11, 2008 at 6:05 am
I’ve got 4400 points on medic, and about 30 with my best class, the Engie.
Thise 4400 points were given to me from a map that automatically gave every player every few seconds a point, so this is in no way represantable. Also, my real achievements look crap besides this.
38 Sam // Jun 11, 2008 at 8:35 am
Most point I’ve gotten was with an engie on 2fort. 18 points.
39 Pie21 // Jun 11, 2008 at 8:59 am
I’m a ardcore advocate for pure, unadulterated stat tracking and achievement earning. Someone else noted that when you see an ubersaw you immediately assume they’ve ‘cheated’ for it, so it’s really not all that impressive, even if they slaved over it legitimately.
At the end of the day however, stats and achievements are meant to make you feel like you’ve accomplished something more than to impress others. That’s how I look at it, anyway. I get mildly annoyed when bugs in the game throw my stats off, but hearing from you guys, I really can’t complain. My worst bug was on Badlands where I died and had apparently been alive 2 and a bit hours.
Still, my 70 points as medic was legit, with some commentary and pics to boot:
http://tf2strategy.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=101
Helluva game that was. Shame it makes the rest of my 20’s look so small and insignificiant.
40 Slamhound // Jun 11, 2008 at 1:04 pm
News just in: Apparently, TF2 does pull stats from somewhere, possibly remote.
Today, for some strange reason, my stats were set to something appropriating my online stats, so it’s a temporary measure at best.
41 Stranger // Jun 11, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Correction: it totally temporarily worked… today all of my skewed stats were back. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. C’mon Valve.. make with the “clear stats” feature please!
42 Wossname // Jun 12, 2008 at 8:18 am
Along with a reset option, I would really like to see an option to gather and filter stats per map. Stats in their current (and possibly, *any*) state are pretty much useless as an indicator of skill as shown by the above anecdotes about achievement servers and abusing surf map chokepoints. But I’d still find it personally useful to see a per-map, per-class breakdown.
43 spacedoubt // Jun 15, 2008 at 7:03 pm
My sniper stats have been skewed for a while after I picked on an engineer that didn’t seem to realise that sentry guns have a max range and kept trying to set up in the same place. I don’t mind having it there now but for a while it was practically the only stat I could read. An average score per class would be handy.
I agree with the cancel button btw, thats really annoying. Why it hasn’t been fixed is because it doesn’t have anything to do with the gameplay/balance issues that they focus on in patching. Best guess anyway.
44 Ravu al Hemio // Jun 21, 2008 at 8:18 am
I may have some insight on why the loading screen’s Cancel button doesn’t work. It has to do with the loading process and threads.
It may have already happened to you in a few GUI programs that when you activate a feature that needs Internet access (such as Check for Updates), the program freezes until it receives a result. This is because of how the GUI is maintained.
The programmer calls a few functions to set up the window and all its controls, then sets up a loop which draws the window with its controls and handles the user interaction. (In some cases, you can set up a set of event handlers and “callback” functions that are called when, for example, someone presses the “Save” button.)
Now, some software, such as Internet browsers, is a bit smarter: it doesn’t freeze while it’s trying to connect to a web server. This is done by means of threads (a concept of concurrent computing), where one thread cares for the window, another cares for the downloading of the website, and another cares for all the rendering.
In the Source engine, the loading and GUI rendering is all done in one thread, which means that the game can EITHER load OR listen to the user’s pleas for canceling. If the loading process itself were factored out into another thread, which could then be alerted in case the user presses “Cancel”, the problem would go away. However, Valve would have to make sure that the threads don’t interfere with each other, and I’m not sure how intertwined the GUI is with all the resource management.
45 browen // Jun 21, 2008 at 8:54 am
your lucky your not stuck with the medic having a record of 2700 points
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