Originally posted by: CP5670
I spent thousands of hours with UT99 many years ago, mostly CTF and domination, but I haven't played it all since 2001. Is there still significant activity on it?
Yes and no. It's impossible to find a populated public DOMination server now, which is very, very sad.
Populated CTF servers are still around, but many of them are instagib, sniper, or modded. There are still a couple populated regular weapons CTF servers around, however, but they run at higher speeds.
In North America, try the FOCR server:
FOCR 125 speed regular weapons: 66.151.7.44
It's 125 speed regular weapons CTF.
Now...that having been said...much of the regular weapons CTF action is at PUG matches. These are spontaneously-organized clan-match style Pick Up Games and they are a tremendous amount of fun. It's real UT CTF the way it was meant to be played! Players on a five-man team have assigned positions and try to use team work and voice comm.
To get involved in the PUG match scene, you need to know how to use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and Teamspeak2 (a free download --
http://www.GoTeamspeak.com )
In a given IRC channel, people sign up to play in the next match by typing .join. A program called the Pugbot (the Abot in this case) keeps track of the number of people who have signed up to play and when it gets to 10, two people become captains and draft the other 8 players in a 1-2-2-2-1 order with the first captain having the first pick and the second captain having the next two picks, etc., with the first captain getting stuck with the last pick. Then they all hop on Teamspeak, join their team's channel, and then hop on the server to play a best of three maps match.
Come give it a try sometime:
Server: irc.GameRadius.net (home of the North American UT99 CTF community)
Channels:
#speedpug (reg weapons, 125 speed)
and
#mlut (reg weapons, 100 speed, need to be logged in to the IRC server, has a higher skill level)