Castaway.tf

Local asian developer @EricZhang456 made a plugin for TF2 which adds a spectator queue. Basically, it allows players to spectate while the server is full, and to be in queue if any of the players on a team leave the game. So if there were 24 people in the server, you could join and spectate, but not join a team until someone in the game decides to leave. This would let people "get in" to the server and to be in a queue without having to spam join, and they'd get to participate in the ongoing game by watching and chatting with those in game, but without breaking the balance of having it be a 12v12

The only downside I see of this plugin would be making seeding a second server harder.

Thoughts on this plugin? It seems like a fine idea to me and would beat waiting on the main menu. It would also be a proper join queue and not be based on whoever is using an autoclicker on the main menu

big if true
try and see

sounds like a good idea made by a genius

If this works out you might as well axe va2

Asmo wrote: Tue Jul 07, 2026 11:35 pm

If this works out you might as well axe va2

Actually DO THIS. VA2 needs to head out, Oregon needs to come in.

Regular queue system should work fine now. Tomorrow I'll iron out the issues with queuers being a part of votes. It's also on EU now, try it out

For anyone who tried it on this maiden voyage, there were two main problems which were resolved

1. Players weren't auto queued when they joined in while full so you had to type !autojoin, caused some people to get afk kicked

2. Queue was removing from the back of the queue instead of the front of the queue

Once I'm confident this works I'll do an announcement explaining it in more detail

the only issues I see, if they even exist is whether or not it will show up as a 24 player server in the server browser and whether or not it will actually let people spectate before the server is full without preventing the server from becoming full

If these aren't issues, I'd like spectators to have a very long auto-kick time from idling if possible to implement

banifatsiy04 wrote: Wed Jul 08, 2026 10:01 am

the only issues I see, if they even exist is whether or not it will show up as a 24 player server in the server browser and whether or not it will actually let people spectate before the server is full without preventing the server from becoming full

If these aren't issues, I'd like spectators to have a very long auto-kick time from idling if possible to implement

It shows as 24 max in the browser, and people in the queue are not considered for idle kicking while they are in queue. If you spectate you still contribute to the server being full, so 23 people on teams and 1 person in spec still makes it 24 and anyone else who joins has to through console

i consistently saw >24 players listed in the game info during last night's session. i don't know if this display is different than what is shown in the browser, i didn't check.