That new Valve blog post.

Since we get incredibly long gaps between blog posts, I can still call the recent one about bad weapon ideas new and still be fairly punctual even if the blog post was released a month ago. I suppose we should be thankful about getting a blog post at all, considering what Dota 2 has had recently…

Anyway, spite aside, the blog post itself is fairly interesting. It’s nice to see that there’s someone in that office, possibly talking to another person about adding weapons for Team Fortress 2. Then again, I might be completely wrong and there’s just one person in the TF2 office space, sitting at their lonely table talking to himself. You never know. The main topic of the blog post is about weapons that were thought about and playtested, before them telling us how they really didn’t work.

There are four weapons ‘covered’ in the article, two of which I’ve seen a couple of times on SPUF as weapon suggestions. The Big Bomb, the rarer of the two suggestions, was considered to be useless because everyone would just blatantly avoid it, something that really, is kinda obvious. The second, the Facestabber, was a bad idea and everyone from the get go admitted it. It’s nice to see a little video about it though. The third idea, the Sucker, was always thrown around the Pyro Subforums. There will probably still be suggestions for it, probably with it being implemented differently to how it was described in the blog post. Biggest issue there was technical problems, what with Valve’s idea of the Sucker being like a vacuum cleaner rather than the exact opposite of the airblast. But people didn’t find it fun.

A small issue raised here is the wording of the last paragraph of the Sucker.

We’ve found that TF2 works best when classes and players support each other, making up for weaknesses and combining into new strengths, rather than giving any one class more and more tools to solve all potential problems.

This quote kinda annoyed a lot of players, and the words Short Circuit, Pomson, Razorback and Wrangler were all thrown out in anger, but to be fair, the Short Circuit only clearly counters Soldiers and Demomen and Pyros with flares and Snipers with crossbows and Jarate and Medics with crossbows and Scouts with cleavers, mad milk and stun balls, and the Wrangler pisses off pretty much everyone, but they’re not solving all potential problems, are they? Oh well.

The fourth idea was actually a feasible idea. A parachute. One for Soldier. The idea behind the BASE Jumper was that it allows you to stay in the air for longer, apparently. And double apparently, the playtesters all had a lot of fun with it. It wasn’t a bad idea after all, and it was hinted at the end that the BASE Jumper may end up in the game after all.

Now here is my problem. Soldier has enough fricking weapons. I know it’s hard to think of weapons, to make them balanced and stuff, and that making Soldier weapons is the easy way out because he’s generally balanced no matter what, but hello, you have 8 other classes. Make that 6, since Scout and Sniper have a lot of weapons too. I very much hope though that we’ll get weapons for everyone, not just the favourite three.

Oh well. Nice to have some communication, at least.