Killing Floor 2: Now With More Fire and Stuff Blowing Up

I’m going to be honest, I’ve been pretty ticked at Tripwire. Ever since Killing Floor 2 was first released in Early Access back in April, Tripwire had succeeded in adding a single map and no other game-changing alterations for over four months. I hate to be one of those people who clamor for new content, but when a game is released into beta you kinda expect additions and stuff since the whole point of a beta is to allow the devs to change and tweak content without worrying about needing to commit to anything. Even the graphs where they reminded everyone that developing new content takes… [Continue Reading]

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Help me! The importance of knowing where everyone is…

Let’s face it, I am a spastic twat with all the coordination skills of a donkey wearing ice skates. I’m bad. And in organized play, this is multiplied tenfold in my awfulness. No seriously, poor old Jensen so rarely gets healed because I can’t damn find him. Okay, to seem less cruel to myself, Jensen is a good old Scout who never stands still, which makes even just locking onto him very tricky, but you get what I mean. Knowing where everyone is could be considered the second most important thing in the entire game, the most important thing being… [Continue Reading]

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Confusing Comms: Health Callouts

An important part of competitive TF2 is communication. Being concise, clear and understandable are vital, especially as the environment you will be speaking in could have anywhere between 3-8 others all speaking at once while each listener is distracted by what is happening onscreen. It is no secret that the SPUF EU 6s and 4s team require improving with their co-op skills, so today I will talk about a simple aspect that is often overlooked: friendly health callouts. Enemy health callouts are well known, and the skills well practised. The term “lit” has entered even the vocabulary of non-competitive TF2… [Continue Reading]

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Pestilential Pumpkin Presents Part Two

“It’s pretty safe to bet that new cosmetics will have something to do with the next generation of presents, due to a “Scream Fortress 2014″ Workshop tag being the only clue we’d received up until the recent blog post, but for more specifics, we’ll have to wait and see. I just hope Valve’s execution doesn’t cause too many complaints.” ~aabicus, as Scream Fortress 2014 approached Valve’s execution caused many complaints. Honestly it was the worst possible interpretation of the present system yet. For those who weren’t there (or blanked the experience from their memory banks) Valve’s first clue as to how… [Continue Reading]

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What have they done to him?

So I spoke to Garen recently and asked him why he wasn’t posting on the Daily SPUF as of late. Turns out, his balance changes came through and he’s absolutely loving them. He’s gone crazy. He’s… I don’t know. He’s someone else. What have they done to him? What have they done to my poor Garen? No, seriously though, it’s pretty bad. Garen used to have an average win rate. As did fellow so-called juggernaut champion Skarner. Fellow updated champion Fiora had an average win rate, which dropped after they reworked her then shot through the roof after they kinda… [Continue Reading]

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TF2’s Unlock System is Truly Unique

Can we take a moment just to explore how revolutionary TF2’s unlock design is? Think back to the days before the Gold Rush Update. TF2 was a complex and nuanced game, with 9 classes and 25 weapons, and then Valve announces that there will be unlockable weapons added, starting with the Medic class. What would you predict these weapons will be like? Taking the standard dev theme for designing alternate weapons for a slot, probably something like this: I’m running through a list in my head of shooters with swappable inventory unlocks, and I’m seeing a very tedious trend where the closest thing to… [Continue Reading]

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Scout – the Village Bicycle

The Scout main and the Medic main got together on Steam after an amusing conversation on the League of Legends boards. It was the Scout main’s birthday and the Medic main had made a very silly picture to celebrate. Then it turned out that they were both women who had spent way too long playing their respective classes and thought that really flirting with their husbandus (like waifus but better) was rather silly. Especially once you start to tumble into, well, weird stuff. The weird stuff is everywhere though. Even if you’re not actively looking for it, it somehow seeps… [Continue Reading]

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The Cutting Room Floor

Not everything Valve playtested for TF2 made the cut. From the moment Brotherhood of Arms and then its replacement Invasion was completely excised, Valve showed themselves committed to the possibility of axing whatever needs to be axed in the name of quality. Through avenues such as item schemas and the TF2 Beta, us players have had the ability to witness a lot of these ideas get introduced and later bite the dust. Thing is, we don’t always get to hear the rationale behind why they didn’t make the cut. For every Repair Node and Facestab Knife that got a blog post… [Continue Reading]

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Getting rid of 2 years worth of memories.

So, recently I liquidated my TF2 babies and turned them to raw cash. And by babies I mean my favourite and most sentimental items. And by raw cash I mean Steam wallet money. It’s a weird feeling parting with something you’ve been with for so long, as embarrassing as it might sound, after spending so much time with them, I felt like those cosmetics were a part of me, mostly because before buying them I spend hours deciding on it, and even more so because of them being acquired via trading instead of actual money which means that a lot of… [Continue Reading]

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TF Comics #5 is FINALLY here!

The fifth installment of the TF Comic series is finally here, after a stupidly long wait. Amazingly, it actually landed on the Monday deadline, disappointing those who hoped it’d miss the bi-yearly and yearly deadline. This comic is 79 pages of your normal Team Fortress comic-y action, featuring not one but two teams! And some other people. And crazy stuff. As always. So what are you waiting for, go read it! Meanwhile, I’ll just sit here, waiting for you to come back. Because I want to bulk this article out a little bit. I don’t like short articles really. *waits… [Continue Reading]

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