HL:TV

A lovely concept, wasted on morons

Halflife TV gives server admins the ability to let literally thousands of halflife players watch a match in semi-realtime. Yet this wonderful feature lies almost unused. Why?

There have been several theories, mostly wrong. Let's bust a few myths.

Clan servers

First myth - clan servers want to use it.

Clan servers make up most of the halflife server population, but most of the time, thy lay empty.

Clans don't WANT to let anybody watch their games, they consider that it gives away their secret tactics. They are also worried that the other clan could use it to cheat in some way.

Ok, a few myths. First of all, you can't cheat using hltv. It deliberately delays the information it sends out - watching it you actually see an action replay of events a few seconds ago, or even a few minutes ago. Great for TV, no good for cheats. You get better cheating out of an irc bot.

Clans - please use hltv, if for nothing else than to record a proper server side demo to look at later. Single person POV demos are pretty useless for actually finding out what happened.

The problem there is secrets getting out, and that *is* a problem.

Public servers want Hltv

Do they bobbins. Why watch a match on a public server when you could play in it?

Match servers - the only candidate

This is a tiny proportion of servers, but probably the most highly skilled portion. Skill stealing definately becoes a problem here - but the main problem is simple...

Cost

Hltv needs hardware and bandwidth. Leagues are running entirely on charity, and clan servers are usually paid for by starving students clubbing together.

It takes effort to set up, and costs money. the advantages it gives the community are tangible, but the advantages it gives you are not.

To Close

Of course, the final reason is simple. There aren't that many halflife players who hang around in IRC and find out about realtime things. And those that do are mostly playing in games, rather than watching them.

Halflife TV won't really take off until it is a lot easier to set up (it runs as default on every halflife server and client, and the bandwidth is managed between them all automatically) and especially, until more halflife demos are available online to play back and see the wonderful things it does.