As a relatively new user of TF2C, though one with my own server, when I first went to host a lobby, I naively thought that selecting a configuration from the lobby creation screen would push that configuration to the server via RCON somehow. This (obviously flawed) perspective was reinforced by the documentation stating that almost any server would do, and that the server passed the checker mechanism in the new lobby creation dialog. Needless to say, since it was a brand new server instance I'd just set up myself, I'd not loaded the UGC configs on it due to this belief (assuming anything pushed from here would be automatically up to date, etc...) and people in the lobby were ... displeased with me.
Anyway, with that in mind, I'd like to make the following suggestions:
1) Update the documentation to make clear that the configuration files for the appropriate league setup need to already be on the server. (Maybe even add a note / tooltip in the lobby creation dialog by the dropdown for this too.) This may also want to include a note on the recent apparent necessity of metamod / sourcemod to prevent weapon pickups for obvious medigun reasons.
2) Perhaps add a mechanism to the server checker that will verify the necessarily configuration can be executed on the server before reporting OK. I've not looked into the feasibility of this yet myself, but it seems possible at first blush.
3) A longer shot, and absolutely not a priority, but it might be worth, someday, looking into actually pushing up-to-date configuration to the server over RCON. I suspect this may be possible, but not worth the effort right now probably.
I'd like to think #1 can and should be done, with #2 a maybe, and #3 an unlikely.
Thanks in advance for reading this, and thank you for providing such a great service to the TF2 community.
-slashproc
