Month: November 2013

Scout melees and you!

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Who wants some-a this? Picture by Gen. DeGroot.
Who wants some-a this? Picture by Gen. DeGroot.

If you had a baseball bat, and you were insane enough to hit random people with it, you wouldn’t really care about its looks. If it’s hard enough to crack some skulls – it’s good. However, you wouldn’t really hit people with wrapping paper, now would you?

That’s just your preference. If you would like to hit people with wrapping paper, but some federal laws and such nonsense forbid you to do so, you have TF2 for that.  Play Scout and you get to hit people with baseball bats if that’s your thing. Unfortunately, you deal less damage (35 base damage per hit). Fortunately, you swing the melee faster. If you fancy some frantic beating while screaming nonsense and double-jumping around, you found your class.

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Amusing things to be found in Rottenburg

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What a nice view.
What a nice view.

Rotternburg is a beautiful map. Unlike the sad, concrete lump that is Mannhatten, which unfortunately fails to be particularly Mannhatten-y, Rotternburg fills its expectations of being a pretty village in the middle of nowhere. But there’s a lot more to Rotternburg than meets the eye…

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Updates to User Policy

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Listen up, maggots! It’s your friendly no-fun tech admin Commander here. Recently we switched to a brand new blog theme, complete with author boxes letting you know whether or not the guy who’s writing is qualified to write on whatever they’re blabbering about. Of course, we already had a way to display the authors on each article, so we had to go and do complicated things in order to make sure we only display the info we need to. Unfortunately, that caused even more complications with adding descriptions for those of you who submit articles via a staff member. In… [Continue Reading]

The Simmering Over of Long-Held Dislike

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If you’ve been keeping in touch with more exotic TF2 news recently (or e-sports news in general), you might have heard of the recent settlement of a case brought by the New Jersey attorney general against E-Sports Entertainment Association, or ESEA for short, a gaming league with major divisions in Counter-Strike: Global Offense and Team Fortress 2.

Obviously, if you’re involved in competitive, you’re probably monitoring the situation and seeing what comes of it. If you aren’t, and are wondering why this is such a huge story, consider this analogy: say the owner of a very well-known price guide for TF2 items was accused of price manipulation and then agreed to give up hundreds of buds without admitting whether they did it or not? That event would certainly lead to a major switch to another pricing guide which the community would place its trust in and primarily use. In both cases, the community is at a critical juncture, where a major decision affecting the entire future of the community lies in the balance. In the trading case, the community successfully rallied behind the new community-based alternative, although not without some regrets being voiced with its current state today.

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Why all Melee Unlocks should be Balanced like the Demoman’s

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SPUF enjoys arguing about TF2’s balance. A lot. One of the most common issues to sprout up involves TF2 melee weapons. It’s no secret the vast majority of stock melees are underpowered, except those with utility like knife and wrench. If their only job is to deal damage, then they’re gonna suck because every class has a plethora of primary or secondary weapons that deal more damage at longer ranges more effectively.

So when most competetive TF2 players agree that the bottle is the best Demoman melee weapon, this may seem unusual. How can it really be the best choice for its slot when it has no gimmicks beside emergency damage?

In my opinion, it has to do with the way Valve has handled the unlocks in that slot. Using demoman as an example, here is what I think the golden rules should be for designing melee unlocks.

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Why 300 Ping Is Horrible Except When You’re A Sniper

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I don’t know why I’m really writing about this, but after having played on the SPUF standard server (which you really ought to visit because it’s fun and all that) with ping that fluctuated between 270 and 400, I feel like I should. Normally, I’m okay with high ping. It depends mostly on where the server is, but I get more issues with American servers than, say Asian servers. Probably because there’s more sea between me and the physical location of said server.

So, the first thing I ought to mention is that the game isn’t really laggy. I do get random lag spikes and such, but game play is normally fairly fluid. My frame rate is almost always steady unless a Sentry Buster just blew up next to me. The problem is with the details.

Picture by Medic.
Picture by Medic.

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The Guillotine Games are over!

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Last Saturday our very own SPUF server was home to a new tournament, the Guillotine Games! There were 14 participants in total who fought for the title ‘Cleaverest guy on SPUF’ and a trophy to take home with them and show the world that they were the last scout standing! The tournament started off with a King of the Hill on koth_harvest. What started off as something that seemed an endless match, during the match the point switched hands several times and both teams were struggling to cap the point and wipe out the opposing team blocking the capture point.… [Continue Reading]

The Wrench in Balancing Plans

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Whoo doggie, the Engineer. If people are not playing rock paper scissors over who between him and the Heavy has the lowest skill floor, they’re having arguments over his weapons so bad that they make [insert appropriate argumentative body here] look like a teen romance! How can one guy cause such a fuss that has SPUF so evenly divided that it could be the motivation for a community made WAR update? Well, if I was to answer it in a reasonably sized sentence (which as an academic, should be impossible) I’d say it’s because the Engineer is, in many ways,… [Continue Reading]

E is for MEDIC!

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I think that Medic is trying to tell him something... Picture by Medic
I think that Medic is trying to tell him something… Picture by Medic

Yes, E is for Medic. Okay, fair enough, it’s also for Engineer and everything else beginning with E, but I’m not talking about what words start with. I’m talking about the default key that the Medic! call is bound to. Some people bind the Medic! call to other buttons, but most people I have spoken to leave it as E. It’s close, it’s handy, it’s easy to spam.

It’s also the bane of all Medics.

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Why the Quick Fix Medic* is Now Viable in MvM

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*And other healing-centric loadouts

New MVM Medic

The Two Cities update has vastly improved the medic’s abilities in MvM. Gone is the “kritz machine” of old, now you can do exactly what the medic should be doing in the first place, and be an integral part of the team. And it’s just as fun as anything else.

For reference, there are two major abilities the medic received in this update that attribute to this: revives and the shield.

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