May 2nd – 9th
This week is going to have a lot of déjà vu if you just read last week’s, and that’s because almost all of the patches are either fixing bugs from the week before or adding onto stuff from the week before.
May 2nd 2008 began a long week of Valve fixing all sorts of things with the Gold Rush Update, as to be expected. Crashes with equipping the Kritzkrieg, exploits with cheating the achievements, bugs with achievments not unlocking, two different infinite Ubercharge exploits…the finer aspects of the Medigun were also tweaked, as a number of subtle things weren’t porting over to the Kritzkrieg well. For one the initial damage boost was actually a change in damage type (the otherwise unused chemical type) meaning that melee damage was unaffected, and the charge time wasn’t working meaning that the Kritzkrieg actually charged slower than the Medigun.
May 5, 2010 was on the heels of the 119th Update, and to that affect added the ‘Primeval Warrior’ badge for those who participated in TF2’s closed beta. Robin Walker got a special one that dated back to August 24th 1998, when Quake Team Fortress was first released. Another PropHunt tweak was added, preventing domination particles from showing and giving away the player’s position.
Exactly one year later on May 5 2011 we got the Replay Update! The First Annual Saxxy Awards, the Director’s Vision, the Frontline Field Recorder, and of course the Saxxy itself were all among the new addition to TF2. Also important was the addition of the crafter’s name to crafted items, thus giving birth to a minor fad of popular competitive players (or idle accounts named after them) ‘signing’ items for devoted fans. A number of unrelated cosmetic items were added as well, the two most notable being the Team Captain and the Villain’s Veil. The next day Valve fixed a minor problem where the promo item Fishcake could be craftable using secondary slot tokens. If you ever see a tradeable Fishcake, this is how it came to exist.
May 3 2012 saw the introduction of the Fruit Shoot and the related item set the “Dual-Purpose Fruit”, which supposedly gave the user a 13% ‘hunger’ resistance. As Valve had already added a joke item set before, nobody really gave it much notice, until years later when Eliminating the Impossible became part of the ARG. Of course, in the tinfoil-mania that followed for the next few months, people kept testing things with the Dual-Purpose Fruit (especially during all the teasing about bread), but such speculation was for naught and this item set never turned out to do anything. But you never know… Arguably more important was the change to the Frying Pan that made it equippable by five more classes. These days, most people don’t even realize it used to be a Soldier/Demo only weapon.
Finally, that Valve Store Shipment Box I mentioned last week was added to the Mann Co. Store and almost immediately removed before anyone could even buy it. What was it Valve? What did it do?!?!?