Medic’s Sixth and Seventh Ever Competitive Matches – I don’t know any more!

As the season is now over and there’s no more matches, I’ve decided to combine these two articles, as a quick overview of both week 8 and week 9. Both somewhat interesting, both pitting teams of hugely varied experience against one another. Week 8 was the last official match week, and week 9 was the start of the playoffs. The skill levels are all over the place, man! All over the place! And so is the ping. Also included is week 7, which was stupid. Week 7 was a blow out, the other team forfeited. They messed us around, unable… [Continue Reading]

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Why is this still a thing? – Baby Face’s Blaster

Baby Face’s Blaster. No, not Baby Blaster. Not Baby Face Blaster. Not Baby’s Face Blaster. Baby Face’s Blaster. Named after a bank robber of all things. Scout’s not exactly the person to rob a bank, not when he’s smart enough to invest in Tom Jones merchandise. The weapon though is something of a masterpiece – it combines an interesting concept with some stupid as heck implementation. Baby Face’s Blaster – why is this still a thing? Let’s start off with the basic stats. Dealing damage increases boost, which increases movement speed. This is in exchange for 10% movement speed, -34%… [Continue Reading]

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Character Annihilation 2 – Critical

Character Annihilation is a series of short stories based on the people of SPUF. Today’s story features Vintage Keith, or just Keith (whose tagline should be “My name is Keith. Vintage Keith”). Engineer enthusiast, builder of sentries, Shotgun terror and a somewhat rather unwilling Demoman. Keith tapped his foot impatiently. Bastards. Bastards the lot of them. Making him wait around like this. Keith just wanted to dick around and have some fun, but no, he had to wait here, for further instructions. They were all bastards. Everyone’s a bastard. Why was he doing this again? Oh yeah, he signed up… [Continue Reading]

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Confusion’s 4vs4 reflection

I have quite enjoyed reading Medic’s detailed reports about our team’s exploits on the new frontier known as 4vs4, and now the season has conceded for us, I believe now would be an excellent time to write a post about some of it. What have we learned? Silliness is a valid tactic Act bold and audacious, but don’t depend completely on luck. We saw a lot of different weapons and tactics being used; Engies, Phlogs, Demoknights, simultaneous Sniper and Spies… Situational tactics are very useful… in the right hands. A lot of the better teams (on steel at least) have a… [Continue Reading]

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Thoughts on my first season of competitive TF2

Season 4 of 4v4 was my first ever step into competitive TF2, after months of people telling me I’d do really well, that I’d be perfectly alright, that I was plenty good enough, even though I can only play Medic. They may have been right, but I’m still not sure and I’m not sure whether I want to continue or not. At least in 4v4. The first thing I noticed is organization. For 4v4, matches are on Friday, to be completed and scores updated by Monday. But it’s really hard just trying to get a date from the other team.… [Continue Reading]

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Fighting Back against those Metal Bastards!

Mann VS Machine is nice. It’s a twist on normal gameplay, where you can make yourself an ultra strong monster of a mercenary, while defending a hole in the ground from a horde of robot monsters. Normally, you’re defending a control point from the enemy mercenary team, who are approximately the same strength as you, unless you’ve gone and stacked 7 sentries and a bunch of Demomen on Snakewater Last. The thing is though, Mann VS Machine is RED defending from BLU, because Gray’s robot army is weirdly tinted blue. So where is our game mode where BLU attacks RED,… [Continue Reading]

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TF2 is in palliative care, and the signs are all there…

Original article by Sud, as seen here. As much of a downer subject that it may be, I get the feeling reading through threads around here that people are a bit in denial as far as hope for TF2 to receive significant future support, and I just wanted to sound out a bit about the topic. TL;DR is at the bottom if you don’t like words. Unfortunately, Valve is no longer the happy little company that it was when it was developing Half-Life, and Steam was a twinkle (or the beginning of a cataract) in Gabe Newell’s eye. Valve has… [Continue Reading]

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April 1st – April 8th

The first week of April has always been a busy one in Azeroth! Blizzard traditionally spends at least one day each week rolling out some bug fixes, or “hot fixes” as they like to call them, to separate them from traditional updates. April 3rd, 2007 was focused on fixing some pathing exploits. No longer could players exit the bubble in Eye of the Storm before triggering the match and gaining an unfair advantage. They also fixed an exploit where a player could use the Auto-unstuck feature as basically a Eureka effect. Now there’s a 1-hour cooldown for using the feature. Likewise, the gate… [Continue Reading]

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April 1st – April 8th

April Fools! Originally, I was going to write the article on patch notes for League of Legends, following the theme, but there doesn’t appear to be an online archive of every League update since 2009. Even their official blog only goes back 2 years, and posts tagged with actual dates beyond “posted 2 years ago…” But anyway, it turns out TF2 actually has had things happen this week, and I would be remiss not to skip some of these landmarks, the largest being April 1st 2009. See, Valve doesn’t normally do April Fool’s jokes (unlike Blizzard), but when they revealed a sneak peek… [Continue Reading]

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