Meet your Match update – Called it.
I fucking called it. See, I said it in this article.
Unless the ‘Neato’ update comes in the middle of next week (which, knowing my luck, it will), all of next week’s articles will be a bit different in some way.
Anyway, yes, competitive has been released, unranked gameplay is no longer the casual slogfest it used to be and copies Overwatch and every other matchmaking system, at least on Valve servers, Pass Time is out of beta and OMG WHAT THE FUCK THEY FINALLY MADE SUNSHINE OFFICIAL OMG FUCKING FINALLY. There’s also Metalworks and Swiftwater, two major competitive maps that have been waiting for ages to become official.
Sorry, was a tad too excited there.
Actually, saying that, that’s it for today. That’s all that’s on the page. There’s two achievements for Pass Time (still a dumb name!) and not much else. But the important thing is that this is a two-day minimum update. That is something we haven’t seen for a while. If it turns out this is a multi-day update, even better.
Still, so far, it’s nothing special. All things we predicted would happen. Apart from casual play going all just-like-every-single-other-game on us. One of the little things that made TF2 unique, the drop in, drop out system, is likely to disappear, at least from Valve servers. This looks exactly like a Valve Server Only system though, so community servers will probably still maintain the play whenever style. Which is nice. The only thing is that this might kill off community servers even further, as they’ll still be subject to things like Autobalance and few people will want to play on community servers when they can level up their casual badges. Oh well.
Finally, I can totally see how they put their update page together. It’s a bunch of backgrounds (background-size:cover is so handy) and some text. Really simple. Dunno why it’s taken me so long to properly look at how the TF2 team does their update pages.
Guess we’ll have to see what tomorrow brings. Probably some hats. Honestly if there aren’t hats, I’ll be genuinely surprised.
Looks alright so far. Not amazing, but alright.