December 2015 – Page 3 – The Daily SPUF

A late look at pass_pinewood

December 15, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments engineer, maps, pass, pass time, scout

I have had a hell of a time finding a decent game of PASS Time recently. There’s currently a bug that allows a single player to crash a Pass Time server, and Valve’s tardiness at fixing this bug is causing the playerbase for this game mode to wither and die. The few times I’ve succeeded, the map either changed immediately to pass_warehouse or somehow was already on pass_warehouse despite what the server browser would have you believe. It is genuinely possible that people just can’t wrap their head around pinewood, because it’s a more advanced map for sure. It takes… [Continue Reading]

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Gift Tips

December 14, 2015 Medic 2 Comments bah humbug, fun, gifts, holiday, joy, peace, trading

It’s that time of year where a bunch of people go out and buy each other gifts to celebrate a gigantic mishmash of religious traditions all rolled up into one and loosely related to the birth of some kid 2000 years ago. Of course, as people get older and technology gets better, the circle of people we end up getting gifts for has gotten larger and larger. Looking at you, all you online friends! So, here’s a bunch of ideas to make people happy. Why am I doing this early? Well, you’re going to want to get this stuff ready… [Continue Reading]

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Shotgun heavy is an odd beast

December 13, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, heavy, shotgun

Shotgun heavy is an odd beast. While he’s a valid and viable subclass, he’s also decidedly a joke because he’s forgoing his ultra-powerful minigun. Not to mention his signature weapon, the Family Business, is completely unremarkable, serving only as another basic shotgun with one of the few examples in TF2 of boring stat alterations. But really, because of this Valve is free to do more of the same just because it couldn’t possibly hurt. No heavy shotgun’s coming anywhere near the Sandvich in terms of viability, even if it were a Widowmaker that also healed Heavy for the amount of… [Continue Reading]

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Trade Restrictions

December 12, 2015 Medic 0 Comments mobile, steam, steam guard, trading, valve, weird

I recently got a new debit card. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence, everyone’s debit and credit cards expire every two to three years, so they need to be replaced. Like Paypal, I’ll have to re-verify my card. Having online banking makes sorting out Paypal easy (although you couldn’t tell, considering some of my clients!) and that’s sorted out nice and fast. Steam is a bit slower. Since it doesn’t have a card verification system like Paypal, you have to wait a couple of days to be able to trade. I can somewhat understand this, it’s a new payment method, something… [Continue Reading]

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A couple of little tips for all you budding article writers

December 11, 2015 Medic 0 Comments advice, articles, help, writing

Fun fact: I used to run a website called Budding Writers, back in 2011-13. A small bunch of people, mostly friends and family and people stolen from BZPower, came together and wrote a bunch of random things. The site is still online (with registration disabled), and should anything ever happen to SPUF, I actually made a skin mimicking the SPUF style, so we can just head over to there or whatever. It’s either that or the bat cave. I still go there occasionally for nostalgic reasons, and to delete the spam posts advertising kitchens. What does this have to do… [Continue Reading]

Featured The Competitive Corner

Killcams and Comp TF2

December 10, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments competitive, death, mechanics, sniper

Killcams are a masterfully-designed element in TF2. As the developer commentary states, killcams were added due to many Team Fortress Classic players having trouble determining who killed them and what they themselves did to get into that lethal situation. By showing you a quick screenshot of your attacker with some subtle “swoosh” effects showing you his rough location, Valve turned every death into a learning experience while simultaneously lessening the chance the killer can keep farming kills from the same location. But I’m wondering if that behavior becomes slightly unbalanced in a competitive setting. When you’ve reached the point that all the… [Continue Reading]

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“Just a girl with a fucking huge hammer!”

December 9, 2015 Medic 0 Comments league of legends, lore, non-tf2

Poppy as a League of Legends champion has been a pain in the ass for years. She had very little voice lines, a horrible model and a selection of abilities that either made her automatically lose the game or automatically win the game depending on the last time she got buffed, often leaning towards the former, because the latter was fucking terrifying. Poppy’s ultimate ability, for example, allowed her to become invulnerable to almost all damage from everyone except her target. The idea was that she and her target would fight to the death, but most Poppys used their ultimate… [Continue Reading]

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Dawnguard Snipin’ – Part 4

December 8, 2015 Medic 0 Comments dawnguard snipin', dead, nom, Skyrim, sniper, souls

You know what’s bloody depressing? A purple, agony-filled hell-hole. But that’s where I currently am, after the events from last time round. I gotta go and find bitchy vampire girl’s mummy in this nasty place. Alright, let’s get this over with. Huh, this place is creepy. And purple. I suppose it’s as good a place as any to hide from some crazy vampire guy. There are weird glowing things dotted around the landscape, but I have no idea what any of them do. Jumped into one, nothing happened. Like, at all. They just look pretty. There’s a bunch of random… [Continue Reading]

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On Performance Enhancing Stuff

December 7, 2015 Medic 0 Comments criticism, gameplay, matchmaking

On December 2nd, there was a patch. In that patch came things to do with forcing people to use DX9 or higher for competitive matchmaking. This made me very angry. I am now going to proceed by complaining about this. DX 8 does lack some of the features that DX 9 has. You don’t get outlines around Payload carts and around whoever’s carrying the intelligence. You miss out on various cosmetic effects. Some things glitch out and have a strange fire texture on them instead of their normal textures, which looks awesome on Pyro cosmetics but shit on other things.… [Continue Reading]

Featured Now for Something Completely Different

Happy Independence Finland

December 6, 2015 sham1 0 Comments finland, history, nationalism, non-tf2, real life, sham1

First, lets get some music here: Now that we are listening one of the most beautiful pieces of orchestrated music in recent history (and by recent I mean music made from 1800 forwards), we shall discuss what this national holiday entails, and a little bit of the other holiday on the same date, St. Nicholas’ day. First thing to discuss about this independence day is what was we became independent from. Now, I could go into a lot more detail about the entire history of this region from about 1100 (when the crusades started to come into the north) all… [Continue Reading]