An Odd Interaction Between TF2 Weapon Sheens and Decorations

I noticed something unusual (pardon the pun) after I added a violet killstreak sheen to my Totally Boned Scotsman’s Skullcutter. And before we continue, I shamelessly admit this is one of the most minor observations I’ve probably ever made in TF2. It’s not quite on the level of 500 characters on the wind you can only notice during a single taunt, but it would fit comfortably into that list of nitpick articles in the final paragraph. Anyway, after a couple different times visiting my Demoman loadout page, I realized the Skullcutter’s inventory icon was occasionally showcasing the purple sheen. It’d… [Continue Reading]

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Renegades IEM Sydney Title Hunt

The recently dominant Renegades aim to win their first Major event, IEM Sydney 2019, which will begin this Tuesday April 30th.  We have seen a new contender rise in the last 3 months, with the Counter-Strike world being shocked with the recent performances from the prominently Australian lineup, boasting a recent Semi-Final achievement at StarSeries Season 7, being knocked out with a narrow 2-1 loss to Na’Vi. This run of form can be attributed to a massive team improvement, but specifically to Rifler Justin ‘JKS’ Savage and AWP player Sean ‘Gratisfacton’ Kaiwai, who have shown their skills off with brilliant… [Continue Reading]

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I Attended IEM Oakland!

Hi everybody! I’ve been a bit silent on the blog recently, mostly been working on my first quarter of schoolwork at the UCSC Games & Playable Media Master’s program. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very rewarding, and I’ll be updating you all as soon as the quarter ends and I can catch my breath. One of my favorite parts of the program are the other students; they’re all  driven game developers who look out for each other, and love to play board/video games together! Several of them are frequent Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players, and recently we got the exciting… [Continue Reading]

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Promoting TF2 with other Valve games

Heroes of the Storm is the Super Smash Bros for Blizzard’s franchises, as well as the company’s attempt to break into the lucrative MOBA market. And it’s not doing too well compared to its competition, which is sad since the genre was first born from Aeon of Strife, a StarCraft custom map, and it’s the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients that first popularized the genre. It’s just like how England invented football (it’s football, not soccer, come on America) and has only won once in the FIFA World Cup out of 20 games. So Blizzard decided to use their newest… [Continue Reading]

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I “hate” Dust2

There are many articles about what makes Dust2 a good map, about what makes it popular, and so on and so forth. However there are also many reasons as to why one would dislike Dust2 and that is what this article is about. Now don’t get me wrong popular maps are usually pretty good right? Unfortunately in a game like CS:GO popularity is also a downside. Because it means even if you add other choices into the mix you will still get the popular map 85-90% of the time. Which means a map like Dust2 is gonna get real stale real… [Continue Reading]

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Why TF2/CSGO comp pisses me off

So, recently TF2 got its competitive mode update. That’s all fine – even though I don’t believe competitive in TF2 can work for balance reasons. What really pisses me off though are the eligibility requirements. For that I have to go back to where competitive started. Back in CSGO, initially everyone was eligible for comp, besides the lobby limits on rank disparity. However, issues arose. Issues mainly being smurfs. So Valve had the brilliant idea to use the profile ranks to make it harder for smurfs to be eligible for comp. The idea was okay, because you can only get… [Continue Reading]

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TF2 Competitive has a lot to steal…

Let’s face it, competitive Team Fortress 2 isn’t nearly as popular as anyone had hoped. Apart from b4nny, who is essentially the god of TF2 and can turn almost any invite team into a winner, most people don’t get many views. All the big leagues, ESEA, ETF2L, UGC, AsiaFortress and so on, get a few thousand views for their big grand finals, which doesn’t sound too bad, except when I tell you that a person being banned from League of Legends and sulking got just as many views, if not more. Despite the competitive community’s enthusiasm, the general populace and… [Continue Reading]

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Why TF2 Wouldn’t Make a Very Good eSport

I have over 3300 hours in TF2, and it’s been my favorite game for years ever since I started playing it. I’ve written hundreds of articles about it, recorded videos, organized community events and have watched numerous competitive tournaments on Twitch and Source TV. In contrast, I’ve barely started playing Counter-Strike Global Offensive in 2016 and I only passably enjoy my time playing it. I doubt I’ll ever be getting serious about it to the same extent I love everything about TF2. I’m saying all this to qualify the stance I’m about to take, because I have a confession. I watched… [Continue Reading]

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Decorating ourselves in other ways, a followup

Medic recently published an article discussing the myriad of ways Valve has allowed players to decorate themselves, and it got me thinking about a lot of the different points she brought up. It’s definitely true that Valve’s gotten more and more bold with every new cosmetic addition. We’ve come a long way since the simple character model toggles from Team Fortress Classic. But of course we can go further. As Medic mentioned, stickers are the most obvious cosmetic advancement we’re currently missing, since it’s mind-bogglingly easy to implement (just add it to the texture square the game is drawing the skin… [Continue Reading]

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CS:GO Betting

Most of you have probably heard of it already: Betting on CS:GO, “EZ skins EZ life”, but does it really seem that easy? First of all, betting does require luck most of the time, but it also require knowledge about the teams, how well they performed recently, as well as taking risks; All important factors when it comes to winning or losing a bet. I started to deposit some skins (to be precise, 8 Field-Tested AK-47 Redlines, worth approximately 5 dollars each) onto CSGOLounge in hopes of making “ez money” to fund my needs for virtual hats in TF2. I’ve done 5… [Continue Reading]

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