What do you think about the new price of keys in refined metal?

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Brickinator: I don’t trade keys so I have no idea. aabicus: Sweet, I sold my strange festive Ambassador for 6 keys, and now those keys I’ve ignored are worth eight keys! Or something. I’m not a math major. Now of course I don’t like the rampant inflation, but it’s not like we haven’t seen it coming. This has been a steady uphill climb ever since Halloween 2012 when the keys rose as expected but then didn’t go back down. At this point, I find the most intelligent move is to either eschew key trading entirely or get as many keys… [Continue Reading]

Why moving turning to the booties would be a terrible idea

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By Reima As a confirmed enthusiast of the knight, I want to put my official opinion piece on the pseudo-controversy that is the turncharge and the potential use of booties all together. Although turning has been recently recently green lighted, it currently remains under a conditional equip. I believe it’s a fair compromise, albeit a temporary fix. Still a step in the right direction. The public gets the equivalent of Vjoy being injected into the coding, and Knights are universally nerfed as they make that trade for maximum control. Turning knights are stripped of their heavy resistances and super shield… [Continue Reading]

Life is Rough When You Lose Your Stuff

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I’ve gotten some pretty funny comments about my Loadout cosmetics (or lack thereof) since my Loadout article went live. Some were wondering how I could justify spending $55 on in-game cosmetics, since unlike in TF2 I couldn’t possibly have prior backpack wealth to rely on. Am I one of those rich senator’s sons who can frivolously drop wads of cash like spy does in his newest taunt? Well, actually I sold almost my entire TF2 backpack to afford that birthday suit in Loadout, and I’m still selling most of what remains. So now I get to be nude in two different… [Continue Reading]

Conga Contagion

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Well, who would have thought that a bunch of new taunts would have gotten people so excited? Actually, I take that back, the taunts were hinted at ever since we got that gif animation of an Engineer sitting in a chair drinking beer. That taunt is now in the game, alongside a bunch of other class-based taunts, all of which can be bought in the Mann Co. store or unboxed via the reel crates (which are actually rather uncommon). Among these taunts, there are single, class-based ones, like the aforementioned Engineer one and the lovely Buy A Life taunt for… [Continue Reading]

Loadout Uncovered

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Sometimes I get annoyed at how nobody in TF2 is a blanket generalist who has something to do in any situation. Sometimes I don’t want to rely on my teammates for crap, I just want to go be a versatile tanky health-regenerating speedster who laughs at the term “competitive weakness”. Once upon a time, I would then go play Team Fortress Classic and their combat Medic. Nowadays, I’m finding that Loadout has been scratching that itch for me instead. Loadout has done a great job of carving its own little niche out of the cartoony multiplayer FPS genre. (That really… [Continue Reading]

The Phlogisticast

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I’m selling my soul for advertising again but it’s for a good reason, really! You know that guy Dekky who’s been providing newbie-friendly articles around here? Well, he’s starting up a newbie-friendly podcast too! It’s also vaguely related to SPUF because I dunno, we all kinda wanted a SPUF podcast and we never got around to it. But with serial lurker Dekky, we might finally get one. And the best bit is that I’m in it, so you can all totally hear my horrible, completely-not-German-in-the-slightest, worryingly-not-Medic’s-gender voice. Oh, and you also get to hear the wonderful voices of Dekky and… [Continue Reading]

The Sticky Launcher Nerf got reverted

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So it seems that some people listen after all. There’s always been hysteria over the Demoman and his stickies, ever since he’s been able to explode them before they touched the ground. Some think he’s fine, some want him altered a bit, some want him nerfed, some want him nerfed into the ground, some want Demoman’s head on a pike and some people want him removed completely. Alright, we’re not going to get the last two, but discussion is a good thing. The problem is, which side of an argument do you take? In this case, Valve tried taking the… [Continue Reading]

How to Fail Official Valve Spy Training

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Have you tried out TF2’s training mode? It was added back in June 2010 as a way to familiarize new players with the Soldier, Demoman, Spy, and Engineer. Even if you vaguely remember doing them back in your TF2 career, you should check them out again, because at some point in history my progress was reset. And good thing too, because I quickly learned that I needed spy training. He’s by far my worst class, I can usually average .05 kills per life after hours of playing him. I tried to sap a stickybomb once. Even lone buildings are a threat. … [Continue Reading]

Pyro vs Machine

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Time and again, I ask myself the same question. I spin in my sleep trying to answer it. When it’s finally time to log in and load up another MvM server, it springs to my mind again when I see another player use these five words: “We don’t need a Pyro.” If this statement is uttered I will either switch to Engineer (if I agree) or ask why we don’t need a Pyro. “Why,” ask I, “do we not need a Pyro?” An innocent enough question, surely. But on certain servers I’ve had a variety of Pyro-trashing results. Apparently some… [Continue Reading]

Meet the Director

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With the recent 15-minute TF2 short finally released, Source Filmmaker has been on the forefront of many SPUFers’ minds. SPUF’s preeminent videomaker, Nethero has been a longtime mainstay in the SFM community. He has a popular Youtube channel showcasing his high-quality Source Filmmaker videos, and as we learned in this interview, he’s got a lot more happening in his life than that. 1.    How did you first get into video game film-making?   Not gonna lie, it was when I saw Practical Problems by James McVee.  That video made animating looks so easy, simply for the fact that it looked just like a… [Continue Reading]