Glitched Weapons

Along with all the cosmetic stuff and weapon balances and all that, the Gun Mettle update brought with it a HUGE amount of glitches and bugs and all sorts of stuff, some of which may or may not be fixed *cough*dropped Medi Guns holding Uber*cough*. A lot of bugs have already been fixed, but it’s worth going over some of them anyway, because why not? Sadly, I couldn’t get many pictures of these bugs, since I’m an idiot who fails to press the screenshot button quickly enough these days.

The first and probably worst bug that’s popped up is the explosive jumping bug. While rocket jumping has apparently been fixed, the other forms of explosive jumping (sticky, grenade, sentry, detonator, scorch shot). Basically explosive jumping was reversed, so that the further away you are from the center of an explosion, the further you travel. Which doesn’t make any sense and ruins the muscle memory of roamer Soldiers and jump-map lovers across the planet.

A far less worrying bug appeared in the form of weapon attachments. Most weapons in the game have their own unique models, but a couple, particularly the Kritzkrieg and the Back Burner, have an attachment that appears on top of a stock weapon. This meant that you didn’t know what Medi Gun a Medic was using. Of course, no one uses the Back Burner, so no one really noticed for Pyro. The same bug affected Festive and Botkiller weapons too.

Some things were simply non-functional. The Vita-Saw was not working at all, no Ubercharge was saved. This was probably due to the weapon-pickup system being implemented. The Scorch Shot and Detonator seem to have the same jump height. The Family Business’s buff turned out to be a nerf temporarily, offering a slower firing speed.

Then there’s the undocumented changes. Natascha for example lost its extra ammo, it now has the normal 200 boolets. The Rescue Ranger’s teleport beam thing was reduced too, costing only 100 metal. I suppose Engineer needed something positive to go by. The worst thing was the Powerjack losing 50 health on kill. Yes, it was too good, but only because the Axtinguisher had been nerfed to death.

There were also some lovely trading bugs that popped up. My favourite one is the sudden appearance of Strange Normal items. Normal is the quality given to the default items in one’s backpack, what we normally call Stock. At some point, probably through unboxing crates, Normal items appeared that could also count kills – hence the name Strange Normals.

On the Market, they appear as normal weapons. Very pricey ones. But in game, they have strange counters, whatever a proper strange would normally count.

The weirdest thing to come out of all of this though is the glitchy Killstreak. There were two bugs that popped up here, the first being useless killstreak fabricators and kits that you couldn’t complete, which has probably been fixed by now. The second bug was the ability to gain kits that could be applied to anything. When I say anything, I mean anything. Killstreak Earbuds, Killstreak Powerup Canteens. Killstreak Spellbook Magazines, anything. This was fixed incredibly quickly, but there’s plenty of examples floating around the marketplace.

Unfortunately, this only applied to Specialized and Professional kits, and the can-be-used-on-anything kits are now incredibly expensive.

Then there was the suddenly-craftable bug that always somehow slips through. This time round, the Black Rose, a Spy knife reskin promo, became temporarily craftable. It’s gone back to being uncraftable now, but at least that should mean they’re easier to get.

I’ll be honest, that’s a lot of bugs. Let’s hope they can all be fixed soon. I don’t want to have to listen to angry explosive-jumpers for the rest of my days.

Thank you to Teamfortressguy and his thread for documenting this stuff, and for Davjo and W0lk for showing me all the weird trading stuff.