Haha, good stuff.

How equipped were you in the finale on the bridge? I think we were poorly equipped, no shots and maybe 1 pipe (ocram). I also think equipment is the decider between smooth runs and troublesome runs. E.g. The panic even on Carnival, where you have to open the gate and run down that corridor of Z's, I think that's mainly down to pipes and shots.

as for the server thingy... i didn't initially think it would be worth the bother, but given that you guys had trouble getting connected too, this might be a common problem worth fixing. If renting a server fixes this, $10/ month isn't much really, but then again we're not uber gamers. For 6 months, and if we get all of us 6 interested, that's $10 each (maths ftw). That's how i'd prefer doing it. O'cram would prefer 3 months, but he's a cheap little jew. I'd also offer to collect money and make the payments, but in terms of renting, i know Jack Schitt. $10 bucks prepayment from everyone for 6 months is sensible for me.

Also, for the record, regarding the "can incident" ... I was going all obsessive-compulsive at the sight of all the firepower, so I couldn't stop stacking them, moving them, re-stacking them, etc... Also, it was like 1 am or somthing, so it was just a matter of time until i'd slip on the trigger.

We were well-equipped, I didn't even have a GL with me this time. All I know for certain is that I had an autoshotty and took point together with Satis, who probably had the combat shotgun. Deagles for secondary.

I actually ran outta ammo halfway and had to switch out for a combat shotgun I found along the way. I tend to get a bit enthusiastic when autoshottying.

I think we all had a pipe and I found another one along the way, which may well have been our salvation. They, and bile bombs even more, are indeed almost necessary in some parts of the game when fighting "upstream". Too bad bile jars are so rare outside of Dead Center.

yea, bile bombs are freakin' awesome. Very handy.

Re: the cost, I'm not too worried about it. I'd have no issues renting the server and taking care of the admin parts of it. The biggest issue is finding a server.

Here's the host I was eyeballing:

http://www.gameservers.com/game_servers ... server.php

there's a list of demo servers.. if you guys feel antsy, try connecting to a couple of the demo servers in New York... see if the pings are decent. If not, try London. I'm not sure where the atlantic fiber comes up into Europe, but my guess would be England. Maybe the Netherlands.

Anyway, let me know if the pings look doable and which server location(s)... then Shiny and I can try it from our end and see if it's acceptable.

Alternately, you guys can try to find other hosts.

I'll try it when I'm home tonight. Looks decent!

For the rest of us at home: in order to get to a specific server, open the console and enter "connect IP"

with IP being the, erh, IP address.

found a map (from 2008) of the world fiber optic undersea cables.

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/ ... ableHi.jpg

Looks like the majority hit southern england or France, with a new hitting the netherlands. Did I call that shit or what?

Watch my geography be off.

Anyway, most of the cables originate from NYC, so you guys may actually get some decent pings to NYC.

For Pev in case she decides to join us!

I should really be in bed but tested them quickly before turning in:

- tried 3 NY servers, all landed me a stable 150-ish ping.
- tried one Amsterdam server, great 44 ping.

not sure how the whole admin and/or lobby thing would work though...since I could only connect to games that were "in progress", ie once I joined I was at the start of a campaign with 3 bots. Of course, we'd need to be able to set up a lobby at "our" server, and I'm not really sure how that is done using the console commands. Will look into it further tomorrow.

not having looked into it, I would surmise you just all 4 connect, then vote to restart campaign. Or use server commands to select campaign and difficulty and all that, I don't know. Just a quick guess.

ok, just took the time to do some tests.

NY is about 60ms, tested against 2 servers
Amsterdam only 1 server was available and I hung around 175ms.
UK 4 of the 5 servers were bad (bad protocol, my guess is no updated properly)... the 5th I got a ping of 200ms.

So, UK seems out. NY or A-dam are workable, though I obviously would prefer NY.

I think Peltz needs to check, since he's most likely going to be the bottleneck.

in bed with laptop (not like that, ya perv ) and figured you're right, could be helped with simply calling votes even. Try connecting to a server again and call a vote to return to lobby satis - see what that does.

Night!

Tried it yet? Doesn't have to be you, Derf or Peltz perhaps? I'm at work so it's not much of an option atm.

Derf, Peltz, want to try Hard Rain on expert on Thursday evening? I should be home...and I want to combine the magnificence of Hard Rain with some 1337 pro L4D2 gaming.

(and before you ask...realism is best saved for a weekend day Derfmeister :p if last time was any indication it'll take us at least twice as long as a regular, already long, expert campaign, and I do still have to work Friday. )

Alternatively, we could do Hard Rain on realism on advanced. Or finish The Parish!

i have soccer thursday night, so it'll have to be after 2130 my time.

i'll give the server thing a test today sometime.

Yea, I didn't try it, but my guess is there's no lobby. My understanding is the lobby happens separate from a dedicated server.

That would probably make sense. Maybe there's a console command to transfer an entire group from the lobby to a specific server...I mean, there IS a console command for that, but we'd need to know what it is. Maybe the openserverbrowser works from the lobby. I'll check that out tonight.

@ Derfalicious: that's cool, I gotta clean up my place anyway. Late is fine.

Because Satis is a lazy ho I tried it myself late last night and yup, the return to lobby option just kicks you back to the main screen when logging in via the console.

I'll check how to get from a lobby to your own server.