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The Desuroom was a Team Fortress 2 game server operated by a fellow named JTFish that ran the map Harbl Hotel 24/7. It was an almost-vanilla server: friendly fire was enabled, respawn times were reduced, and the gravity was set slightly lower than the game's default (probably to make movement around some parts of the map easier), but otherwise there were no other mods or non-default settings I was aware of. I am quite certain that I first discovered it during the summer of 2010—at the very latest, I remember for a fact that I had been playing on it regularly for a little while by the time the Mann-Conomy Update came out on 30 September 2010. JTFish also set up a Web site for announcements, information, and the status of the server, on which you can see that, sadly, it was shut down on 27 February 2016.
Although JTFish was not the person who made the Harbl Hotel map, and although the Desuroom, a server, is obviously not the same thing as Harbl Hotel, a map, the fact that the Desuroom was (I believe) the only 24/7 Harbl Hotel server throughout its entire existence meant that the distinction between server and map became rather blurry. As far as I know, the 4CHAN PARTY VAN, another Team Fortress 2 game server, had Harbl Hotel as part of its map rotation, and so it would occasionally play it, but most of the time the Desuroom was the only server where you could play Harbl Hotel.
This server appealed very strongly to 4chan (really, /b/) culture, which was one of the reasons I played on it so frequently. JTFish is one of us, and he established a server with a very freewheeling and libertarian atmosphere, much like 4chan itself: nearly everything was allowed, and there were no rules against any sort of player behavior or conduct. We could type and say anything, curse and insult anyone; sprays were regularly pornographic; and very rarely did anybody ever get kicked—and if they did, most of the time is was due to an admin screwing around rather than as a punishment for breaking a rule. (There did exist a few rules, but I remember that most of them were applicable only to the server admins, as a way to prevent them from abusing their admin powers too much. Some abuse was expected, of course.) The Desuroom was also one of the few servers that encouraged micspam, something that I and many others regularly participated in and enjoyed thoroughly.
Whenever I joined the server, I could never predict what I would be getting myself into: sometimes everybody would be goofing around, sometimes everybody would be fighting seriously (although actually capping the points was considered bad manners, as doing so would reset the map), and sometimes it would be somewhere in-between. The amount of activity in the server varied greatly, from being completely empty (even in the middle of the day) to being completely full. Eventually, though, I do believe that the overall level of activity declined to the point that JTFish decided to shut it down.
In 2018, however, a new server calling itself the Desuroom appeared, with IP address 162.248.88.175:27015; it was not established by JTFish, but it runs Harbl Hotel 24/7, and also imitates very closely the original Desuroom, including the low gravity, friendly fire, and short respawn times. In February 2021 the founder of the server passed its ownership to me, whereupon I renamed it to the Desuroom Revival. This current server has now been up and running for a few years, but it suffers from a want of activity, and is hardly ever populated. If you, like me, enjoyed playing on the original Desuroom and have fond memories of it, then you should give the Desuroom Revival a look, add it to your favorites list, and check back on it frequently. If it becomes popular, then it will be like the original Desuroom never even shut down.
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This page last modified on 3 May 2021.