5 Things You Didn’t Know About Payday: The Heist

Okay, you might have known some of these already. But after talking to some of the best players in the community and getting engrossed in Youtube videos of high-level play, I’ve picked up a few little known facts about Payday: The Heist, enough that I felt like putting them in an article. How many of these did you know? ———— 1. You can dominate snipers. But it’s bloody difficult. I’ve searched a lot of profiles of the biggest names in Payday:The Heist and only ever found one guy who did it a single time, and all he could tell me was that it happened in… [Continue Reading]

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Arena Respawn – Not at all serious fun

On Saturday 11th of July, Confusion hosted the SPUF Arena Respawn event with some help from Sham and Davjo and I got to try out Arena Respawn for the first time. Now, I’m a bit of a purist, I like things unmodded in TF2. Plus, Arena was my original game mode after 24/7 Junction, and I was quite good at it, particularly the Arena-only maps that no one else really plays. Not great, since I’ve always been bad at Deathmatching, but I’ve played safe and strategically and also know when to go “who gives a fuck”. So let’s have a… [Continue Reading]

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The Scotsman’s New Skullcutter

On Smissmas 2014 Valve made my dream come true. The Scotsman’s Skullcutter became elevated from the dregs of poorly-optimized demoknights and Trolldemos to one of the best melee weapons for Demomen who treat their melee weapon like an emergency weapon instead of an intergral part of their loadout. Is it overpowered? Maybe. That’s a hard statement to make, what with the state of Demoman’s melee at the moment. The Ullapool Caber and Half-Zatoichi are pretty kickass weapons that fill the same role after all. And while the Skullcutter lacks the crippling downsides inherent in those two weapons, it also doesn’t bring anything new… [Continue Reading]

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The Light Machine Gun Plight

LMGs have always been a misunderstood and under-appreciated weapon genre in first-person shooters. Whereas mechanically they fill an obvious role in the sniper rifle>assault rifle>machine gun progression tree, in practice they’re often left off the list entirely or locked into specialist roles due to lack of developer support. Mechanically, LMGs focuses on spewing huge magazines of high-damage bullets very inaccurately. In theory its wielder assumes a suppressive fire role, ensuring that somebody is still firing while all the more-accurate teammates are reloading. Unfortunately its often the case that devs shoulder the LMG with a whole host of downsides; I can… [Continue Reading]

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On Reputation

SPUF is what one would call a forum or a bulletin board. Steam Community User Discussions (SCUD) is less of a bulletin board, more of a discussion board – it is a very trimmed down version of your standard forum software. Reddit is, well, um, something else. A strange, messy thing that has really taken off. Then you have a combination of the two, a bit like the League of Legends ‘boards’. Many forums just have basic features. You can make a thread. You can reply to threads. If you’re lucky there’s a personal message system. Some allow you to… [Continue Reading]

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TF2vOW: Scout versus Tracer

Welcome to the first-ever edition of the “TEAM FORTRESS 2 VERSUS OVERWATCH” series.  Inspired by the ongoing flamewars between the two fandoms and Screwattacks own “Death Battle” series on Youtube, TF2 vs OW is where I theoretically pit one or more of your favorite TF2 classes against their counterparts from Blizzard’s upcoming TF2 rip-off (and revenge for Valve stealing DOTA): Overwatch! We’re probably never going to be able to see this in this reality, so doing it here will be the next best thing!  I will try to go through each characters weapons and abilities as objectively as possible in order to decide who would win… [Continue Reading]

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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… [Continue Reading]

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GEOFF, NOOOOOO!

GEOFF! NO, WHAT HAPPENED? SPEAK TO ME, GEOFF, SPEAK TO ME! KEEP YOUR EYES ON ME, GEOFF! WE’RE LOSING HIM! HE’S FLATLINING… We’ve lost him. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m referring to the Vaccinator. The Fourth Medi Gun. The one that is now dead. I know Medi Guns can’t die, as they’re not alive*, but the Vaccinator has been driven into complete uselessness. Okay, the original Vaccinator, when it was released, wasn’t exactly helpful. It charged incredibly fast, but because critical resistances weren’t factored into the three resistance types as a whole, it didn’t see much… [Continue Reading]

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The New Eureka Effect

Edit: Written before the new update, because Valve won’t let me write about the Eureka Effect without immediately changing the weapon. I remember being awe-inspired by the rebalances of the Eureka Effect. You can teleport directly to your exit now! No more waiting for your idiot teammates to stop hogging your teleporters, now you can take your battlefield transportation into your own hands! Then I basically tried to play with the Eureka like I would the stock wrench and quickly got bored like I always do. The real kicker didn’t come until a friend let me know that it works… [Continue Reading]

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Stupidly Simple Fixes – Part 2

A note before I start: these are just ideas and thoughts, both my own and combined with other people’s thoughts, particularly SPUFers. Do me a favour and don’t take them as absolutes or anything. Should have put this at the top of the previous article, really. And probably should have published this before the Gun Mettle update, but oh well. Bad timing and all that. Still, I like my ideas better. Anyway, considering that Valve hasn’t really been doing much lately when it comes to balance changes, I’ve decided to take things into my own hands and try and fix… [Continue Reading]

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