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The main category of the Daily SPUF, containing all sorts of articles from games like Team Fortress 2, Warframe, PAYDAY 2, Left 4 Dead, League of Legends and more!

Meet your Match update – Called it.

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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… [Continue Reading]

It all dies in the end…

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The SPUF Conga. Every character in this conga line is a former member of the Steam Powered User Forums.

When was the last time you played something other than Payload, Attack/Defend, Capture the Flag, King of the Hill or Control Points? Was it a while go? Probably. You might not have touched some of the letter game modes in years. Not that I blame you, there’s a lot of excitement right now for matchmaking, everyone’s all geared up for it. The chosen maps are mostly 5CP, with the odd other random map thrown in. Apparently Viaduct is in there somewhere. I like Viaduct, always been a fan of King of the Hill. Normal Viaduct isn’t the greatest map, the… [Continue Reading]

Medic Week and other Announcements

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Oh hey, Medic is saying stuff again! This is just a little blog post to announce a few things, related to the site and logging in and a little mini-event and things like that. It’s boiling hot right now and so much stuff has broken or fallen apart or needed fixing that I’m losing my mind a bit, so this will seem a little blog-post-y. More itsurblog and Hello! than informative Daily SPUF stuff. Oh well. Anyway. You may have noticed that the Unofficial SPUF Network login button has been missing. I don’t know why it’s broken, and tsc has… [Continue Reading]

DC and the F2P: Initiation – TF2 Pub Tales

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These excerpts were found within the diaries of DC’s sister, among some cinders and next to a pair of Pyrovision Goggles.    The Prologue So there my sister DC was, sitting around in her chair, mumbling about hats and projectiles and typing away some kind of nonsense. She’s been at it for nearly a year now, a year of me waking up in the middle of the night sometimes when she screams for a doctor or just madly cries out to no one in particular. I have reason to believe that her participation in Team Fortress 2 has caused her to… [Continue Reading]

If TF2 Competitive wants to ever get off the ground, it needs to stop being so pretentious

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That’s a long title, I know, but this is a problem I’ve had for ages with competitive TF2. In all competitive games, you are going to get some snobbery based off ranks and the like, but here, in our tiny little competitive community, we can be incredibly snobbish and pretentious. I want to start off with a personal story. I played in 4v4 EU Silver. Most of my matches were against platinum or gold 6v6 or Highlander teams, playing casually for fun. My team on the other hand had only played a season of 4v4, and were at the same… [Continue Reading]

Over 500 Articles of Mediciness

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By the name of this article, I think you can guess what I’m writing about. No, not the 500th Daily SPUF article. That was a really damn long time ago. Now, as we close in to the 1200th article mark, I think it’s time I pointed out just how many articles I write here. I should point out that this is legitimately the 500th article I’ve published. I checked it in the Users section (which I only have access to) and it shows me how many articles each user has published, not how many are in drafts or are pending.… [Continue Reading]

Concepts

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Valve doesn’t like adding new concepts to the game, which is why there are so many +/- weapons, even the ones that don’t look like they are. The Airstrike for instance, is entirely +/- but the description doesn’t show it as such. Anyways Valve occasionally figures out they can change around a concept for new weapons and balancing, and then do it to a bunch of weapons (cough, switch speeds in tough break getting added to like 30% of melee weapons, cough). This seems like a new thing but switch speed has been around for ages in the Degreaser and… [Continue Reading]

Planetside 2

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When I started playing Planetside 2 on Aug 14, 2013, my motivation was extremely straightforward; I wanted to participate in giant battles with hundreds of players slugging it out in first-person shooter combat. Far as I knew, Planetside 2 was really the only option if playercount was your single defining criteria, as it’s the leading juggernaut in the relatively niche MMOFPS market. I wanted to be a tiny pawn in a giant, unfathomable war machine, where powers larger than myself or the hundreds of soldiers around me waged a never-ending game of dominance. For that reason, I did almost no research before plunging in. I… [Continue Reading]

Why is Competitive Matchmaking coming out of beta?

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The SPUF Conga. Every character in this conga line is a former member of the Steam Powered User Forums.

After 11 mediocre stress tests, TF2 Competitive Matchmaking is coming out of beta. And tons of little things that we’ve complained about don’t seem to have been addressed. The game doesn’t run much better on DX9, so those needing DX8 (some of whom may be on plenty strong enough computers that just don’t play nice with TF2) are locked out of competitive. Other graphical settings, mostly ones only accessible via console commands, are also turned off. Matchmaking seems to have trouble matchmaking people of varied ranks. The issue of class limits and class composition is still… an issue. Those ‘small’… [Continue Reading]

Overwatch – The Double-edged Sword

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I really like what Blizzard have done with Overwatch. They’ve made a really awesome game. It’s genuinely a blast to play, with lots of variation, despite its little flaws. But I feel that Overwatch has been a double-edged sword in quite a few ways. The first way is in the TF2 community. Overwatch has completely split the community in two. You either hate Overwatch and its existence and want it to go away or you love Overwatch and wish that TF2 would just die already. Of course not everyone is like that, but an annoyingly large number of people seem… [Continue Reading]