trash

my dude just fix Arena this is much better than graveyard the fact you can fight the get back into the game is so much better make geting cons easier too i be fine if this Mechanic is in more maps even on normal maps

Wow, thanks for the detailed yet concise write-up on the bug, unfortunate that you were so thorough in testing, only for untestable, Casual-specific (and very hard go debug!) circumstances to haunt you.

Also, seems like one of the two hard problems of computer science reared its head here:
Naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one-errors.

In the wake of this, we're trying to make known in the vscripting community that player_disconnect can behave this way, to ensure these issues don't recur in future maps. BeepIsla has also put together what looks to be an offline casual matchmaker tester on github, which may also help catch issues created by differences between casual and community servers.

At this time, the issues are believed to be fixed. Please don't hesitate to let us know if you continue to see any bugs in the map. We hope you all enjoy the map, and have a happy Scream Fortress. (7/7)

Furthermore, once we knew the bug existed, since we had no way to replicate the bug outside casual, our only means of troubleshooting was to try to intentionally break casual servers and take notes on what was happening, and review footage for clues later. We had no server logs, no stack traces or script exception logs in the console, only guesswork based on what was visible to players. And once we determined what we believed was the cause, our only way to actually test if the issue was fully fixed was to push the changes to Valve and hope they worked. This is why it was still broken after the first patch, and why the smaller regression bug happened after the second patch. (6/7)

Based on all the above, we're pretty sure there's a small difference in timing of when the "player_disconnect" fires for vscript on a server hooked up to casual matchmaking versus a vanilla community/LAN/whatever "normal" dedicated tf2 server, when a player disconnects under some uncommon circumstance. This isn't to specifically say that casual does it "wrong" -- only that it does it differently, and because we had no way to test maps in the casual matchmaker until they go live in casual matchmaking, all testing was done in community/LAN servers (AKA the config "quickplay" Valve servers used) so it was never caught. Although we don't know for sure, we suspect that when Valve playtests maps deciding which ones they want to add, they play them as a group in the normal LAN/community server config as well (not in the casual framework) -- so we suspect maps don't get run in the casual matchmaker at all until they go live. (5/7)

Afterlife was playtested extensively on the TF2Maps testing servers, which included people disconnecting and rejoining. It was playtested on other community map testing servers. It was tested on locally-hosted LAN servers specifically checking to make sure players connecting/disconnecting worked. And yes, it was tested with mp_tournament 1, which changes *some* things to be similar to casual, but does not fully replicate a casual server. At no point during any of this testing did this bug occur. After it launched, it was played on Shounic's 100-player server in a forty-versus-forty and this bug did not occur. And once we knew a bug existed, We did everything we could to try to replicate the bug in LAN/community servers, and we could not replicate the issue once outside the casual matchmaker, including using methods that seemed to consistently cause the break on a casual server. (4/7)

The Vscript driving the gamemode in this map maintains an internal list of all active players, arranged by team, plus a second list tracking only players counted as "alive". This cache is updated during play to track players spawning, disconnecting, changing teams, dying, resurrecting, etc. Occasionally, a player disconnecting from the server in a particular way would have their player object invalidated before the player_disconnect event fired. This prevented the reference to the player from being properly removed from the cache, resulting in the script breaking later when attempting to call functions on non-existent players, usually breaking in the middle of functions that were supposed to start/end/reset the miniround. Once this break happened one single time, the script would be completely softlocked, and the server would stay broken for any newly-connecting players until it emptied out and terminated. (3/7)

We are now fairly certain the cause of all the major bugs, from the initial issues of the round not starting (locking people in spawn) or not ending (getting people stuck in Hell) or only partially starting (getting people infinitely respawning in the overworld) -- to the different issue after the first (failed) patch in which minirounds restarted infinitely without incrementing the score, or broke the scoreboard for red -- to after the second patch a less common issue that would result in kills in hell not granting souls -- all to have been caused by different variations of *one single bug*. (2/7)

Wanted to give a quick post-mortem (no pun intended) on the issues this map had on release, now that we believe these issues to be fully resolved.

During playtesting, this map's gameplay was somewhat polarizing among testers. Many players enjoyed the variation on Arena mode that allowed players to keep playing the game after having died. Some players simply didn't enjoy the mechanic outright. We anticipated that the map would be similarly polarizing among the larger playerbase on launch, and that seems to have been the case.

What we did not anticipate was the map being broken on launch. Afterlife was playtested extensively, and in no playtests did these bugs occur. (1/7)

valve adding the best map ever...

I hope to see this being played in competitive or uncletopia soon. Fast paced gameplay with lots of decision making and lots of great moments.

valve adding the worst map ever...

bad map, gimmicky, and small

A fix for the aforementioned bug of not getting a soul for a kill in hell was sent to Valve on Thursday; we are awaiting its implementation

the idea of Afterlife's gimmick being going to the underworld and fighting to get Resurrected is not a bad one. IF all the normal Arena maps had a similar gimmick, I can see the Underworld being the Respawn space where you fight off the other team to get Respawned.

Also, I think all the Arena mode maps would benefit from MVM ReAnimator gadgets as a core part of the game, with same upsides and downsides(the more you ReAnimate, the longer newer Reanimations take) as a way to lightly improve on the Arena game mode, plus the VScript improvement. and of course, put the Arena maps in Alternative game modes.

for reference, I think Territory Control aka Currently only Hydro is a good idea and map, but the Capture rate needs to be from 15 seconds to 45 seconds to be good.

what do you think of all of this?

Hmmmm...
Evanescence reference(Afterlife song)

yes, please do, added

Plogre, I watched the steam recording of the match in question and it turns out the round ended because all members of RED died very quickly. So there was no bug, that was a mistake on my end.
I did however rediscover a moment where I did get a kill in hell, but wasn't given a soul. If you'd like, I could send that clip to you (add me if you're interested).

thank you for quickly acknowledging and fixing the bugs!

Soggah, glad to hear you enjoy the map.

I'm curious about the details of the unexpected round endings -- the "Blu won because they hit the score limit" is probably due to a bit of trickery under the hood, every "round" played in-game is actually a miniround, and the real "rounds" are best-of-three minirounds (each one scoring one point) -- likely what you're seeing is a "real round" ending because one team won their second miniround, if not by capping then by wiping out all the enemies in the overworld (this wins the miniround, just like wiping the enemy team in arena).

If you're seeing a miniround end and you don't believe it should have (both teams have "living" players and the point is not capped), please try to get a screenshot or video of it or something, as that's NOT supposed to happen.

From my experience so far, it feels like you might have "solved" Arena! I'd love to see a non-halloween map added to the game and I'd especially love to play this without casuals random crits, because this gamemode is actually really fun to play seriously and I feel like the map itself also works well for all classes.

The only criticism (except the now hopefully fixed bugs) is that I experienced rounds ending before the point was capped, with the win-reason reading something like "Blu won because they hit the score limit". That was very frustrating because I didn't even know such a counter existed and it was quite a letdown in that moment.

To all involved in the creation of afterlife: thanks for your great work!

- a long time TF2 player

Now that the game-breaking bugs seem to be fixed:
Thank you so much for making this! I keep queueing just for afterlife because it's genuinely the most intense action I've had in TF2 for a loong time.

I really like what you've done with arena, I think the design of afterlifes gamemode is actually kinda genius. In normal Arena, an unlucky death means you are forced to passively spectate for ages. In afterlife, because you can immediately try to fight your way back into battle, it's the complete opposite, almost no respawn-time, barely any downtime from the action!

Also, if one team is dominant in the "overworld" the opposite team will have a big player-numbers advantage in "hell", meaning they will be able to respawn quicker. The last player on a team getting a damage boost helps him feed his team souls so they can respawn too.

I'll admit that I hesitated playing on this map because of the game breaking bug but now that it's fixed, I gotta say I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Love the new announcer, love the Hell layout, love how you turned a forgotten map into a spooky Halloween variant with an interesting take on a very mediocre gamemode.

Please let us know right away if you continue to see bugs after today's patch.

Yo Hirsch, you should do some voicelines for the Soul Gargoyle.

The playerbase being the testers is not the map-maker's fault. Individual map makers would never be able to get as many people testing their map out as Valve can with their distribution. Community playtests before Valve adds a map get a couple dozen people, maybe a few hundred. When Valve publishes a map, suddenly THOUSANDS, or tens of thousands, of people are playing the map. That's many orders of magnitude more people testing out the map, ensuring that unknown bugs are found that weren't found with the small number of playtesters before Valve distributed the map.

Cool concept, but unfortunately the playerbase ended up being the testers

@Piogre You don't need to apologize for anything. It's all Valve's fault and their "neato" matchmaking breaking everything.

i'd rather stick my penis in a volcano

good map, hope valve will fix it

Не работает!
Баг не позволяет завершить раунд. После захвата точки раунд перезапускается, при старте плюсует одного ненастоящего чела к счетчику игроков.

worst map ever, made me cronically depressed. and the bots plagueing the maps make the map worse than death. literally

this map was very fun in the singular non-bugged game i could play. sorry valve ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up your map

congrats on getting added! super fun to playtest

YOU SHOULD HAVE TESTED IT PROPERLY, not us

Reposting to keep this visible:

We want to apologize for the continued bugs in this map, and the disruption to people's contracts. A new fix was sent to Valve yesterday which should hopefully put these issues to rest.

None of these bugs manifested during playtesting, and we have not been able to reproduce them outside the casual matchmaker, including using methods that seem to consistently cause them in the casual matchmaker. We're fairly certain the issue is caused by a desync in the script's internally-retained player cache, which isn't tracking connecting/disconnecting players correctly in casual. The new fix should address this.

We hope as much as anyone that the newest fix will be out soon and will put an end to these issues so that people can enjoy the map as it is intended to be played.

this is a new low for both valve and the mappers. a simple reskin of Ravine wasn't enough?

Map is broken, you can't win or lose

do not ract this map rn, i cantg beat it

3 of the 4 times I tried to play this map its been broken in unique ways, truly incredible

if did not have VAC i would dislike it 100 times

Thank you very much!

@Dmaninme "Welcome to my Kingdom! Far better to reign in here, than to serve elsewhere!"

Was this map killing my frame rate when I played on it for a bit or is Acer Nitro Laptop slowly starting to show it's age? I just noticed a dip a few times when checking it out.

thank you

Update: We believe we've narrowed down the issue to a desync in the player cache caused by players disconnecting in casual matchmaking but still holding team slots. A fix has been pushed to valve.

Still broken. Rounds just not awarding points to anyone resulting in the same infinite game........

What does the Devil say in intro06.mp3? It's kinda difficult to understand

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ass map, why is it broken

i HATE HATE HATE this map >:(