aabicus – Page 49 – The Daily SPUF

April 9th – 15th

April 14, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments cosmetics, melee, scout, trading, update

With post-Easter candy on sale and taxes looming on the horizon, perhaps Valve can be forgiven for not doing a heck of a lot this week. Lord knows none of the game teams for whom I’m developing ever do anything of merit around this time; save creativity for a time where it won’t get you audited. Back in 2009 on March 13th Valve did push a minor Sandman nerf; stunned players now took 50% less damage. This gave you a slightly better chance of not insta-dying just because some Bostonian twerp nailed you with a baseball while you were trying… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 1st – April 8th

April 2, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments Filler, fun

The first week of April has always been a busy one in Azeroth! Blizzard traditionally spends at least one day each week rolling out some bug fixes, or “hot fixes” as they like to call them, to separate them from traditional updates. April 3rd, 2007 was focused on fixing some pathing exploits. No longer could players exit the bubble in Eye of the Storm before triggering the match and gaining an unfair advantage. They also fixed an exploit where a player could use the Auto-unstuck feature as basically a Eureka effect. Now there’s a 1-hour cooldown for using the feature. Likewise, the gate… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 1st – April 8th

April 2, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments cosmetics, glitches, update

April Fools! Originally, I was going to write the article on patch notes for League of Legends, following the theme, but there doesn’t appear to be an online archive of every League update since 2009. Even their official blog only goes back 2 years, and posts tagged with actual dates beyond “posted 2 years ago…” But anyway, it turns out TF2 actually has had things happen this week, and I would be remiss not to skip some of these landmarks, the largest being April 1st 2009. See, Valve doesn’t normally do April Fool’s jokes (unlike Blizzard), but when they revealed a sneak peek… [Continue Reading]

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4 More Reasons to Bind a Key to Suicide

March 30, 2015 aabicus 1 Comment glitches, MvM, scout, soldier, strategy, TFC

Never thought I’d find another quartet of justifications to click a button and shuffle off one’s mortal coil, but it turns out dropping dead on the spot has more combat uses than I thought. And no, ‘cheating your way out of a Holiday Punch tauntkill or Rock-Paper-Scissors loss’ isn’t on the list. People who do that are insultingly lacking in sportsmanship. Reason 5: Give health to your teammates as Scout. Remember the Candy Cane? Some of wish we didn’t. But it has a little-known use for the scout literally willing to die for his teammates; when you hit the suicide button… [Continue Reading]

This Week in TF2 History

March 25th – March 31st

March 24, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments MvM, Strange Parts, TFC

This week gets the new record for ‘least-updated week in TF2’. Eight years of TF2 updates and a grand total of two fall under this set of seven days. I remember where I was on the day of March 28 2012, and that’s because it was the day Valve added strange parts to TF2. (For those of you interested, I was being driven home from soccer practice and checking the TF2 blog on my phone). Pyro got a new backpack bodygroup in preparation for the new Scrap Pack promo, the Cozy Camper was added to Medieval mode after a week of SPUF… [Continue Reading]

This Week in TF2 History

March 17th – March 24th

March 17, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments balance, cosmetics

Sometimes it’s hard to remember, but Valve really does love their community. Really, they do. They’ve given us all sorts of things completely for free that most other companies would never consider even developing without selling it; Source Filmmaker, Alien Swarm and the Steam Workshop being particularly large examples. When we get mad at Valve for seemingly ‘forgetting’ about us, we have to remember that they’ve already gone way above and beyond the call of duty for the gadzillions of free updates they’ve pumped out for so many of their games. All right, Jeeves, I’m done with the soapbox. You… [Continue Reading]

This Week in TF2 History

March 10th – 16th

March 10, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments SPUF, update

March 13, 2009 saw Valve tackle the recently-added Sandman, which some people thought was hideously overpowered. This update’s laughable tweaks didn’t fix any of the major problems and the weapon could look forward to a much more severe nerfing in August. March 10 2011 brought “The First Ever Three-Way Pack Update!” as the Shogun Pack brought new weapons to the Scout, Soldier, and Demoman, because those were totally the classes that needed more weapons at this point. All of the items in the pack were modeled by Larolaro, who also made the Tank Buster set. The next day (which is also… [Continue Reading]

This Week in TF2 History

March 2nd – March 9th

March 4, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments Coaching, medic, update

Been a while since I did one of these, eh? Well, since real time has finally caught up to how far I’d gotten along the timeline, I thought I could take this opportunity to try and keep something of a real regular schedule going. March 5th, 2009 saw a number of limits placed on ‘ducking’, aka crouching. A timer was enabled to prevent spamming of the ability while running and a cap was placed preventing the player from crouching more than once in air. This got changed the next day and Sniper mains are unhappy with it to this day. They… [Continue Reading]

Featured

One Last Heist…

March 3, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments criticism, dosh, non-tf2, Not TF2

…until I can go Infamous. That’s what I told myself as I broke into the ATM at the Four Stores convenience mart and waited for the escape vehicle. Despite my best efforts to dislike the blatant grinding aspects of Payday 2, the lure of the co-op Left 4 Dead 2-inspired gameplay and the TLC (and DLC) the devs showered the game with on a weekly basis was too much to ignore. Somehow, despite still feeling like a complete newbie to the world of bank robbery I had reached the $200 million required funds in my offshore account, and after this ATM I’d… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Leave Impracticality 4 Dead

February 28, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments advice, l4d, mod, mods, non-tf2

Every single element in Left 4 Dead 2 is there for a reason. Its features, weapons, zombie types, etc are balanced between each other and have their own role to play. All unnecessary aspects of the setting have been trimmed out, boiling the zombie apocalypse into a polished and nuanced nutshell. It’s a great game for players new and old, as a standard normal-difficulty campaign can throw enough curveballs to keep veterans on their toes while also letting the inexperienced focus on reaching the next safe room and surviving. However, if you limit yourself to only the base game, you’re… [Continue Reading]