Brand new video game articles, every day!
It’s no secret that some of the senior staff here at SPUF really like Special Delivery and the only map that supports it, Doomsday. However, one common thing that many people I talk to about Doomsday tell me is that the entire map is a horrendously mapped, broken pile of garbage. And they’re absolutely right. As aabicus put it when I spoke with him several nights ago, “It’s like Valve forgets about the Sticky Jumper when they make maps.” The opposite seems to be true as well, in that the folks at Valve forget about maps when they made the Sticky Jumper. Doomsday… [Continue Reading]
Ever since the dawn of Mann, men have been wearing hats. In fact, it’s because the social norm to be wearing hats. Trust me, brother, you don’t want to be a man without a hat. Would you believe me if I told you that there were over 1,000 cosmetic options for your character to wear (even if most of them are competitive badges)? That is a lot of items. Would you also believe me if I told you that more than half of these items won’t look good with any other item that you wear? Fact of the matter is, committing your character… [Continue Reading]
Don’t worry, Airborne Armaments, not all of us have. It seems that whenever I decide to write an article about changing weapons or changing MvM, the very next day, Valve will release an update! So… let’s try that again! This time, I’m here to talk about the Soldier, my #2 class and go-to Rage class. Specifically, I’m here to talk about the Liberty Launcher, the Gunboats, and the Market Gardener. In the Two Cities Update, Valve rolled out some weapon changes that brought weapons like the Baby Face’s Blaster to the forefront, and took the Crusader’s Crossbow out behind the shed… [Continue Reading]
So. It’s been a long time since July 10th, when this update arrived. With it, Valve sought to rebalance some common staples of TF2 play, and bring some new weapons to the forefront. In those five months… what’s changed? Has Valve done what it set out to do? Did they change the face of public servers forever with their weapon balance?
Well… No.
Ever since the Two Cities Update, the face of Mann Versus Machine has been invariably altered. With the obscene buffs the Medic and Soldier received from this update (I’ll complain less about the Medic, because he really needed some love, and now he’s basically indispensable), MvM, for some, has come to an irritating middle-ground, where the older missions, namely Operation Steel Trap (and, to some extent, Gear Grinder. Yeah, remember them? Me neither) have become laughably easy, or something you run through with your friends as six Demoknights for a chuckle, and the newest missions are hair-pullingly difficult. To me, and hopefully at least one of you, this is bogus.
As someone who has sunk a considerable part of their TF2 experience into MvM, I remember the soul-crushing agony of trying to find a match on the night the update dropped, those encounters with blokes who had been on the same Expert Mission server for three hours trying to find a winning team, being a bloke who has been on the same Expert Mission server for three hours, and screaming in unison with the Announcer when an Engineer bot showed up (more on them later). And now, after slaving away at Empire Escalation for as many hours as I once had at Mannslaughter, I realized that, with all these updates to the Medic and Soldier, going back to those missions and still expecting a challenge would be impossible.
That being said, there are things that are positively infuriating about the way MvM currently works that could also make the experience more enjoyable. So, I’m going to propose some changes Valve could make to the way MvM works in order to keep MvM (all MvM) exciting for players at all levels, as well as improve the experience over all.