March 2nd – March 9th
Been a while since I did one of these, eh? Well, since real time has finally caught up to how far I’d gotten along the timeline, I thought I could take this opportunity to try and keep something of a real regular schedule going.
March 5th, 2009 saw a number of limits placed on ‘ducking’, aka crouching. A timer was enabled to prevent spamming of the ability while running and a cap was placed preventing the player from crouching more than once in air. This got changed the next day and Sniper mains are unhappy with it to this day. They better not alter the then-new ‘tf_clamp_airducks‘ cvar, which disables this duck restriction and has to be one of the least-used cvars in the game.
The next big thing this week comes from the deceased TF2 Beta, which had a massive stress test on March 9, 2011. All sorts of cool stuff saw the light of day, including the Replay system, Coaching system, non-Soldier training regiments and improved bot coverage. I can only assume the stress test was a success as all of that made it into TF2 shortly thereafter.
March 8th, 2012 was a day of mystery for a number of reasons. The “Eliminating the Impossible” item set was added for the Medic, breaking a few new firsts: first cosmetic-only item set (not counting Halloween costumes), first time an item gets retroactively added into a new set, first item set containing a multi-class item, and the first item set whose set bonus didn’t do anything. SPUF was ablaze with questions regarding that “Reduces mystery solving time by up to 88%” perk, but because this was before the era of the ARG nobody really busted out the tinfoil until it was too late.
My favorite weapon the Sticky Jumper (and its bazooka brother) gained crafting recipes on March 4, 2013, though for some reason crafting numbers weren’t enabled so there still wasn’t any real way to get a special one. (I had to wait until Collector’s quality came to exist). The Tomb Raider reboot also had promo items released, and their existence caused Valve to prohibit further items referencing the game in their TF Tomb Contest 2014.
And to round this action-packed week off, March 5th 2014 had a rollicking update full of goodness that still doesn’t really leave much worth commenting on. Except strange Southern Hospitality finally tracking sentry kills, that was awesome. The humbug over that was so loud nobody even minded when March 6th 2014 brought an update consisting solely of “Updated localization files.”