So what happened to the other SPUF mercs?
It’s weird how we don’t actually have that many SPUFers named after their mains over in the TF2 forums. Unlike SCUD, you can’t change your name on SPUF at all, and using a bad name will just get you banned. Which begs the question, where are all these other SPUFers? For now, I won’t be including people like The Pyro! or The Heavy. who cheat the system by using punctuation. There’s a few of these, but they all have small post counts anyway.
The sad news is that they’re not really anywhere. Every The ____ account apart from The Medic, i.e. me, has under 500 posts. Almost all of them apart from me and one other have less than 300 posts. Worse, the only account with over 300 posts is banned. The Engineer is a banned account with 358 posts on it, many of which have been deleted over time, due to SPUF’s auto-pruning system that deletes posts and threads over a certain age.
The Demoman and The Soldier though are exceptions. They’re actually newer than the other accounts. I know these to be alt accounts. The Soldier posts more than The Demoman. The Demoman is apparently a low-level friend of one of my other friends, who’s only really played Team Fortress 2, probably some random F2Per who got the game on a free weekend or something. The Soldier is more of a mystery. I remember him being brought up in a conversation with l’interdit, but that’s about it. The Soldier’s SPUF account IS linked to an actual profile, but it’s been inactive for a looong time and has a VAC ban on it from over 1000 days ago.
The Heavy is the only other account with a Steam account linked to it and who really did anything. This account was genuinely used a bit, and I am pretty sure that we interacted a few times. He posted like a normal account, rather than actually being a gimmick like I was at first. Unlike him, my original posts have been lost to the Spontaneous Pruning Universal Function (haha). Unfortunately, he’s no longer active on SPUF and has been mostly inactive this year.
The Scout is a complete unknown, with 120 posts and no activity since August 2011. The Pyro is even more mysterious on SPUF than he is in TF2, with a grand total of 4 posts over the space of two months, two of which are “Mmmph Mphhphh ” and “Mmmph hu hudda hu”. There’s also The Sentry, who only ever made 7 posts but did kinda stay in character.
The other classes, The Spy, The Sniper and The Civilian, don’t have any posts at all. These accounts have been registered but their owners never got round to making threads or posts. This also makes finding their accounts very hard to find since I found the others via the Advanced Search to see if they’d posted recently. Most of these accounts were made before it was required to link a Steam account to them as well, so they’re just that, dead SPUF accounts.
Still, it’s an interesting little thought. Shame it means that we’ll never be able to have a full party of SPUFers on SPUF. Oh well, still better than SCUD.