March 10th – 16th
March 13, 2009 saw Valve tackle the recently-added Sandman, which some people thought was hideously overpowered. This update’s laughable tweaks didn’t fix any of the major problems and the weapon could look forward to a much more severe nerfing in August.
March 10 2011 brought “The First Ever Three-Way Pack Update!” as the Shogun Pack brought new weapons to the Scout, Soldier, and Demoman, because those were totally the classes that needed more weapons at this point. All of the items in the pack were modeled by Larolaro, who also made the Tank Buster set. The next day (which is also my wife’s birthday) Valve spent a fair amount of code fixing bugs brought about by the new weapons and hats. Then they fixed even more four days later. They also took the opportunity to overhaul the crafting system, making all recipes known to all players, reducing costs across the board and creating the second wave of Vintage items.
Exactly one year later Valve added the Cozy Camper, which surprised a lot of people because this was during a period where Valve cranked out regular weekly updates, always adding at least one new cosmetic item if nothing else. The Cozy Camper was the only gameplay-altering content added in 2012 (until Australium Christmas) and some people weren’t pleased at its incredibly lackluster stats. SPUF was pretty excited though because that same update introduced the “Competitive Team Play and League discussion” section, which was seen as a step forward for both SPUF and Competitive TF2. Sadly these good omens all proved false, as SPUF was shortly thereafter replaced with SCUD and the Cozy Camper ended Valve’s streak of weekly updates.
On that same day, the TF2 Beta removes the Enforcer’s downside, replacing it with a 20% slower firing speed. Why they thought this was a downside when all it does is compensate for the otherwise ridiculous bullet spread I don’t know, but two and a half months later the Enforcer got its new and improved stats that have lasted to this day.
March 12, 2013 was a good day for rare item enthusiasts by unlocking the Ap-Sap from the “What’s in the Portal 2 Soundtrack box?” and taking the opportunity to tweak the sapper’s c model to save processing power or something. Salvaged crate 40 got retired, Salvaged crate 50 got added, and the Strange Bacon Grease makes its first ever appearance. The Fireproof Secret Diary got its backpack icon updated, which sent the conspiracy theorists into a tizzy guessing that Valve must have something planned, otherwise why would Valve bother? (They were right.) Gullywash was also moved to the correct map cycle in Quickplay, a change prompted by SPUF’s own Selbi.