First Look at Recent Changes to QuickPlay

Perhaps one of the smallest and yet most influential changes that Valve has made to the game was not too recently ago, summed up by one small note at the top of the patch notes: – Add quickplay option to only connect to official Valve servers This change was subject to much heated controversy, spawning several rapid threads about the topic on SPUF, Reddit, the HLDS mailing list, and other such communities. It also reflected growing divisions between important parts of the community, as server owners protested a change that would deprive them of a major source of traffic and… [Continue Reading]

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Bush Sentries: When Man & Machine team up with Nature to ruin your day

Being one of the elders of tf2 at nearly the age of thirty, I’ve been around since the release of the Orange Box, before the game was stuffed to the gills with trickle content and inevitably released for free to the public as a means to extend it’s life, Before the Beggar’s Bazooka and it’s inevitable sky flying nerf; Before the Axtinguisher’s reign on close quarter encounters and it’s inevitable demoknight contenders and even before before The Mini Sentry and it’s widespread loathing and unavoidable slandering towards one’s sexual preference for choosing to use it liberally on King of the… [Continue Reading]

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Mod Showcase: Dodgeball

Hello. I’m Brickinator and this is another instalment of Mod Showcase; the column that watches back. This time we’ll be taking a peak at Dodgeball, a mod gamemode that combines the ancient arts of dodging things and not dying. In Dodgeball,  everyone plays as the Pyro. The two teams spawn on opposite sides of a floating court and can only use Flamethrowers. You can’t pass onto the enemy side and if you fall off the edge of the court you scream and disappear into a gaping hole, just like your mum last night. I have a very patchy memory of my… [Continue Reading]

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