March 25th – March 31st
This week gets the new record for ‘least-updated week in TF2’. Eight years of TF2 updates and a grand total of two fall under this set of seven days.
I remember where I was on the day of March 28 2012, and that’s because it was the day Valve added strange parts to TF2. (For those of you interested, I was being driven home from soccer practice and checking the TF2 blog on my phone). Pyro got a new backpack bodygroup in preparation for the new Scrap Pack promo, the Cozy Camper was added to Medieval mode after a week of SPUF claiming it must be the dangling Jarate keeping it on the blacklist, and the PDA Tool and Sapper suddenly started appearing on the loadout screen. Everyone predicted that unlocks must be in design for these two categories, and the Red-Tape Recorder proved them partially right five months later. No PDA unlocks yet though, I wonder if it was simply going to be that Festive PDA tool that apparently Valve has had to drop for two years in a row, or if they had actually tried to come up with an alternate way for Engineer to drop buildings. You know, except just doing it via console bindings.
364 days later, Valve fixes Engineer bots in MvM building disposable Sentry Guns that upgrade into tiny, red, adorable level 3 sentries. Ready Steady Pan gets its tournament level for Season 2 and the last two paints (A Mann’s Mint and After Eight) finally get added to the Mann Co. Store after a month of being crate-exclusive. Nothing really to write home about.
This week is FAR more infamous among the Team Fortress Classic community, due to the game receiving its first and latest update since 2008. On March 29 2013, in preparation for the conversion to SteamPipe, somebody at Valve hits a button that pushes five years of bugfixes, queued tweaks, and engine updates into the main game. The most immediately notable changes are a complete wipe of any custom content (it literally just got written over by the new default content) and the changing of the super shotgun sprite and Incendiary Cannon held model. Lotta people weren’t happy about that; they’d had over a decade to tweak TFC to their liking and the game was completely understood to be long dead, so I understand the frustration. Personally I don’t mind the new Incendiary Cannon, especially because it and the Soldier’s Rocket Launcher finally have a different held model.