Hi everyone. This is the (hopefully) first part of a series of blog posts aiming at making all of you puny mortals fellow TF2Mappers aware of the things happening on Mount Olympus in the TF2Maps Team.

You may have heard about our fresh-faced Staff members Adam, Pdan4, and Sonoma, but what else has been going on? The following is a slightly chaotic breakdown of what is going on in the Team, other than the regular and indeed very heated arguments about cheese...

Goodbye and Hello

This is a late farewell to the TF2M Team members who left our ranks in the past months. We would like to wholeheartedly thank all of you for your work in making TF2Maps.net into the place it is and wish you all the best in your creative ventures in the future.

A huge thank you, from everyone at TF2Maps.net, to:

• Staff Member Suna 
• Staff Member Blade x64 
• Server Mod Cin 
• Server Mod Spleep 
• Server Mod XBMANN 

As is tradition, all of you are receiving a lifetime supply of VIP membership for your service.

In light of the recent team turnover, we are planning to open Server Moderator applications again soon(-ish), with a focus on users in time zones other than the Americas (sorry, Canada and South America!). If you also have a thing for Public Outreach or Tech (server infrastructure, SourceMod), even better. More on this soon.

Major Contest 18: Stack the Deck!

If you haven't been living under a rock, you may have heard about the 18th TF2Maps Contest that only launched a couple of weeks ago! The reception so far has been very good, and the Contest Team is very proud of their work. More on this in an upcoming post.

Staff Meetings - Rarer than TF Comics?

Turns out we had exactly one all-hands-on-deck Team Meeting in the entirety of 2023. You might be pleased to hear that we've already had three this year, and will likely have at least a couple more. There is a lot to things to throw words at, and we are very motivated to also follow up with deeds.

By the way, one of the general things we spoke about was responsibility of roles in the team. Nesman asks that you stop pinging specifically him whenever you stub your toe on our server infrastructure. We do have an IT role (recently renamed to @THE TECH PEOPLE to make pinging easier), and most issues can be solved by a Server Mod or higher. Let him breathe a bit, folks!

Imp Hosts and telephone games

There have been a handful of reports about a decline in imp host quality in the past months, and we would like to address that.

First of all, it's on us, not you. We will try to be more hands-on regarding the training and quality control of Hosts. In fact, we are currently working on revamping the whole system with that in mind.

Copyright, Licensing, Asset Packs

While outright asset theft is exceedingly rare in this community (something we're incredibly glad for) we are aware of many users being unsure about their rights and permissions regarding the use or creation of custom assets.

• When can you edit an asset?
• When do you need to credit someone?
• How do I credit someone?

Some of this has been covered before, but we would like to address it in more official terms as well.

We are also talking to Eminoma, the team behind Team Fortress 2 Classic about this, in case you were interested in using TF2C assets or publishing a map for the mod. Stay tuned for another blog post, as well as some site changes.

Or whatever it is called now

In case you didn't notice, our Twitter X account is active again! The plan is to regularly post noteworthy maps (featured, just released, in development, and so on) and spread the word about the cool things happening in this community. You all deserve the spotlight.

We have the technology, we can fix it!

If you've been around for a while, you may have already witnessed our game servers or main site crapping out at an inconvenient moment. We are happy to report that our server provider, Vultr has allowed us to move some of our infrastructure from their New Jersey to California datacenter, which should offer more stability. However if these issues persist we are prepared to do another uplift to different service provider.

In other (tech) news, there have been a bunch of minor improvements to the site itself: Our map testing queue received a makeover and some extra features a while ago, and there have been some minor improvements to the main site as well, which you can read up on here.

That's all folks

From the whole team, thank you for your trust and support. We all appreciate it.

Feedback? Ideas? Want to submit an article? Let us know by contacting us on the Forums or Discord!