Haven't been able to post these for a while for two reasons, big enough tables now cannot be posted anymore in steam announcements, at least here, and I still am procrastinating on finishing the python script that is going to pull data and make graphs of the actual player count similar to teamwork.tf one.

But because I thought of making screencaps of tables I thought I still am going to post an intermediary report.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3460387897

Currently, in general, game modes popularity and overall amount of servers is within typical margins. Nothing of note here. I may have missed a slump though due to the lack of measurements in Jan-Feb, more on this later.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3460389099

Again, nothing of note, business as usual.

But as I kept measuring my own servers popularity, we had a weird slump in Jan-Feb:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3460389798

The table:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3460390180

As you can see the trend continues more or less linearly until December and then in January takes a dip, which continues in Feb and only in March we start going back up.

What was that, I dunno. There was no such a thing in 2024. Or 2023. Hardcore players playing KF3 beta and spending less time playing KF2?

At this point, if you participate in any KF related forums and you haven't been banned yet, this means that something is probably wrong with you, LOL.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3459893674

In one of the IceBeam's topics on KF sub someone brought up Tiger's ban. Today is a good time to go over it. It's because this ban was an unjust ban of one of the elite KF2 players and modders for BS reasons and it's a blueprint for all the other bans.

Here's a helpful source material in one jpeg collected by some unknown anon (thank you gamer hero) back in the day which I've been hosting on ZSDR for a while:

https://www.zsdr.org/aux/tiger-ban.png

The time of the ban is the "Treacherous Skies" update of Summer 2018, the update where EDARs and the upgrade system were introduced, along with the "Airship" map by TWI and a community map "Lockdown".

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3459896582

Discord uses this modern forums feature of marking content with dates like "2 days ago", instead of just adding a timestamp, which is the faggiest thing happened to online forums in years, as it makes it impossible to tell the exact time of any happening, when shared in screencaps. Any and every platform that relies on this approach is gay by definition.

The tiger ban screencap is interesting as it documents interactions of Tiger with "Molly".

"Molly" is a Tripwire's "community" "manager" on some discord both were the members of, right after Molly banned Tiger from KF2 Steam content hub.

Tiger was a KF2 hardcore player, CD player and modder. He picked up the CD where Blackout left and added some features, e.g. the "ready" system instead of trader time, some cycles added and so on.

He's not been happy with the KF2 balance and the direction the game was going for a while. One of the points of contention is the poor quality of their updates, both design wise and development and the fact that fixing simple bugs and imbalances was taking months.

Molly states that the ban reason is because of Tiger's messages are abrasive and disrespectful, so he's banned. Tiger, on the other hand, maintains the the ban is a result of:

1. Him proving Molly factually wrong on multiple occasions.
2. Him banning "Hazardous Monkey" from his discord which Molly may have taken an issue with. Props to Tiger for recognizing the scumbaggery of this dude early on.
3. His disrespectful attitude towards TWI, Molly and Hazardous Monkey is warranted and is a result of a long series of TWI's game direction decisions disrespectful to players Tiger represents. He maintains it's natural and warranted to be disrespectful to entities that do not deserve any respect.

I fully subscribe here and share Tiger's reasons as valid and justified. I consider Molly's actions here unjustified, biased, dishonest and something that led to the game's decline, eventually studio's itself decline and is a big reason why KF3 the way it is.

One of the previous supposed Tiger's transgressions, according to Molly, was sort of a patronizing tone towards some noob whose KF2 takes ages to load due to him not running it on SSD. Per Molly such tone is disrespectful and cannot be used.

It's worth noting that it's another example how Molly's egalitarianism beliefs clash here with the reality of hardcore gaming. According to egalitarianism, every person is of equal value to society and every opinion is of equal value. It's therefore disrespectful to indicate that some opinions may have different value. E.g. opinions that are factual, convey useful information about the game engine, etc are of the same value as an opinion that is superficial, doesn't represent the reality accurately and so on.

Here she demonstrates how she associates with noobs against the elitists. Both that unknown noob Tiger was talking to and Molly herself are bad at gaming. They don't know much about it and KF2 in particular. They are repeatedly proven to be factually wrong. Yet, they think their opinions matter and cannot be disrespected. They themselves also cannot be disrespected as consistent sources of these opinions.

Obviously, the noob that Tiger was talking to, left this poor dead ass game behind years ago. By now he probably doesn't even remember he ever played it. Yet, because of this noob, we have Tiger and a good share of similar hardcore gamers and modders banned and alienated and their "transgression", per Molly, is their disrespect towards noobs and people who are factually wrong, like Molly herself. This is how this game loses talent and its playerbase. Casuals leave on their own, because this is what they always do, and the hardcore players are alienated and banned by TWI.

The fact that such person as Molly is hired to be a community manager/coordinator is one of the ways TWI has been alienating their core player base. They don't like hardcore gamers and they use Molly as a tool to persecute them. John Gibson's anti-abortion tweet was just one of the reasons they kicked him out from his own company. It was somewhat easy to rally employees and other owners behind this idea because John Gibson was too hardcore to them and they hated him for it.

The notion that Molly is just a tool, a senseless NPC, a retarded femoid is highlighted by this comment in the convo between her and Tiger:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3459916883

She doesn't even get the ambiguity of her situation. It's very similar to how IceBeam counteraccused her of gatekeeping. I bet she doesn't get it here either that she, in fact, gatekeeps their customers and has been a big reason of why their customers leave them. She is a big reason behind the TWI's financial woes that are coming, but she has zero clue. If confronted on this, she remains oblivious and blind to such arguments. And it's natural, in general it's futile to argue with NPCs. Do you argue with NPCs in games?

This also highlights a pattern of what happens when females are put to "coordinate" hardcore gaming spaces. It was absolutely inevitable and the conflict was breeding from day 1. Hardcore gaming is demanding and competitive intellectually, which ensures that mostly males end up at the top.

There are capable females, but they are extremely rare and Molly definitely isn't one of them. All these arguments, all this bickering and he said/she said captured on that screencap are immaterial and 100% determined by the fact that a stupid femoid is put to manage a hardcore predominantly male gaming. This is a result of every such situation and happens everywhere.

You can accuse me of misogyny all you want, but what I say here is just reality. The reality is misogynistic. Males are more capable intellectually, therefore, they end up constituting almost all top performers. They have very low tolerance for incompetency and will always fight it with predictable results.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3459928984

That said, not ALL women are like that. Molly is very typical and standard. Some are not, but they are so rare, here's a good representation of their share at the top:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3459920867

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J0vwMwO3dM

Kinda off topic, but it's a blog about KF2 (mainly) and a huge part of this game is gun porn.

Obviously and absolutely EFT overshadows KF2 in this regard, especially after the initial quality was diluted by all the nonsense scifi toy guns with neon outline added later on through garbage TWI updates.

The only EFT downside is no zombies and you don't get to shoot as much as in KF2. It's not an action game, it's a complex positioning, looting, optimization, but mostly positioning game. It's all about setting everything up to have a good drop on someone.

Too bad, TWI whored out themselves from being a company which was making uberrealistic wargames into a company that is making/publishing garbage fortnitized nonsense.

EFT, being at least 50 times more popular than all TWI games combined, alone, puts this stupid idea where it belongs -- dirty toilet bowl. Not every game has to be a fortnite game. And EFT isn't even release ready yet, LMAO! It's in beta!

TWI did well with uber realistic games. It was their core competency. They never did well with their fornitized garbage games approach. They've lost their core competency and it doesn't look so far they've gained any ground securing that fortnite audience either.

TWI's history is a great example of how for a business to survive it must stick to its core competency where it can create the most value for the market than any competitors and how challenging, and sometimes impossible, it can be to "transition" to something else they are not, if you catch my drift, LMAO.

IceBeam with a new great finding:

https://old.reddit.com/r/killingfloor/comments/1jnj40o/now_its_official_twi_can_censor_your_comments_and/

Basically, now "misinformation" is the official ban reason on KF3 Steam discussions:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3458527489

This is another sign that they are a woke company. This whole "misinformation/disinformation" thing really picked up during the covid scamdemic era and was the main argument to enact new laws and reuse the existing to silence any alternative narrative to the scamdemic, such as the mRNA gene therapy being anything but safe and effective, or that it prevents transmission, or that "2 weeks" lockdowns actually do more harm than good, or that it was all a big scam to grab power and destroy small business owners all over the world in favor of power consolidation and cannibalizing smaller businesses by megacorps, print ridiculous amounts of money and make us all poorer through inflation and so on.

If you ever accuse anyone of "misinformation" you are a woke flaming globohomo ♥♥♥♥♥♥, plain and simple.

As it's usual with TWI, they do it in the worst and incompetent way possible. Before that they banned at least 2 gamers I know for "misinformation" in myself and Polite Killer and there has to be a lot more who I don't know. The issue is you can't ban people for violating a rule that doesn't exist yet and pretend that it's anything but blatant injustice.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3408105896

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3458535742

Punishing people first and then enacting a law according to which they are punished is called "ex post facto" law application in jurisprudence. In most judicial systems it's prohibited and typically is considered as a sign of major corruption. Yet, this is what TWI do and don't ever feel bad about it.

This recent reporting by IceBeam on reddit is pretty valuable for all gamers. Nobody wants to get suddenly banned for unjust reasons or for not violating any rules at all, so it's in every gamer interests to be aware of this abuse of power and act accordingly.

However, both IceBeam posts on KF sub were downvoted and are full of "touch grass" comments. Why is that? Who are all these gamers who did that and what is their reasoning?

Amazingly, a good share of them are accounts who post extremely rarely and one of them was even called out by IceBeam as NEVER posting in the KF sub before:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3458541147

Note how this comment is upvoted and all IceBeam comments are downvoted into oblivion. Why is that?

Obviously, it's a coordinated campaign. Aka "brigading". There's a chat, a discord chat somewhere, where all these ♥♥♥♥ get together and plot their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Think about what is it they are unhappy with here? Do they enjoy the bans? Do they want TWI to ban every player with IQ higher than room temp? Do these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and cross dressers engage in gerontophilic fantasies of how they are pounded by "Molly" grandma screaming "govern me harder, granny", LMAO?

Just do this homework and try to come up with a benign reason for this brigading event. How exactly does it benefit the gamers or the game that TWI's unjust moderation cases are swept under the rug.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3447504968

LMAO:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3457026820

But, upon further examination, it's a meh criticism to be honest.

John coded weapons feel, yes. Guess what, both recoil and RoF in this game depend on FPS and break the game with high FPS. I bet he doesn't even know about it, LMAO! Then, why do we have different mouse sens for ADS which further is different depending on FoV? Makes it nigh impossible to aim quickly. Even more, why on a good share of weapons the ADS isn't properly centered?

Zed time desaturation visual effect is garbage, because it's blinding to a point one cannot see ♥♥♥♥ on bright maps like outpost or through medic gas or through grenades effects. ♥♥♥♥ that.

"AI Conductor" is a non-existent thing. The ♥♥♥♥♥♥ probably forgot everything what he coded. There's a KFAIDirector and KFGameConductor and both are garbage. The first thing NotBlackout did was removed the game conductor altogether to make the spawn intensity stable and it was the right call. And that was even before the game release.

However, later down the road it was discovered that on "Hell on Earth" it doesn't even matter, as with the default KFGameConductor behavior the spawn intensity is such that it maintains AIAliveCount almost always equal or close to the MaxMonsters variable. Until a player dies. So, because teams do not plan for mates dying in general, it makes it not even important.

Then, a reminder that their MaxMonsters scale with the difficulties from normal (0) to HoE (3) as follows:

PerDifficultyMaxMonsters(0)=(MaxMonsters=(10,14,32,32,32,32))
PerDifficultyMaxMonsters(1)=(MaxMonsters=(11,18,32,32,32,32))
PerDifficultyMaxMonsters(2)=(MaxMonsters=(12,18,32,32,32,32))
PerDifficultyMaxMonsters(3)=(MaxMonsters=(12,18,32,32,32,32))

What is this retarded bovinae excrement? Why on earth do we have the amount of monsters present on the map at the same value for 3 players as for 6 players? Which ensures the difficulty doesn't even grow past 3 players present as it pertains to small/medium zeds and the only factor contributing to difficulty is a modest HP increase on big zeds (e.g. +200 HP on FP head for each new player)?

Then, they likely took this idea from L4D series that the game should be wavey and go up and down in intensity all the time. It was a bad idea, the game doesn't need that. This whole thing about variety of spawns has resulted that most of the time in the vanilla KF2 game there's nothing to shoot at, while other times everyone is overwhelmed. It's not fun at all, we play this game to shoot non-stop and have a chance at killing the spawns, not getting railroaded, like vanilla intends with stupid 2 FP + 6 QP spawns, 1/3 of which are spawnraged, LMAO.

I'll just let NotBlackout cover this BS:

https://github.com/notblackout/kf2-controlled-difficulty/blob/master/spawn.md

Instead, the millionaire who made his money by swindling immature brains from their parents money by luring them into gambling RNG lootboxes, a scheme that isn't considered gambling just due to the delays in legislation not catching up with games yet, all while pretending to be a "Christian", should have thought more about the gamers. Not about himself and his supposedly otherworldly skills in "AI Conductor" design, LMAO.

The gamers are now left with an inferior product in KF3 and recoil or spread issues is one of the smaller issues with it. This is, in part, because John refused to fire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and mediocrities from his own company, who couldn't refuse a small temptation to gang up and kick him out of his own company for an opinion on Twitter. These harpies he himself hired now own the intellectual properties for the franchise and persecute us everywhere they can. Does he even know how many fans did these morons ban from everywhere they can? Does he know what they are banned for? Does he know that a good share of them are banned for violating a power grabbing EULA he himself had to sign off on?

Moreover, the lesson hasn't been learnt even:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3457031588

1. He still is open to hire SJWs
2. "Judeo-Christian values" is a non-existent oxymoron. He probably has no idea that Jesus Christ is a hated person by a good share of religious jews, according to Talmud, suffers in hell in boiling excrement.

Not to mention, that according to the book he's supposed to know, the jews are proclaimed as the enemies of all mankind.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3457032832

PATHETIC!

Although I'm critical of his past, I wish him the best in the future. It's good that he parted ways with TWI and doesn't take part in their sins, LMAO.