Sometimes, when the sun is hiding behind the clouds and I’m feeling too lazy to bother even joining a Teufort server, I find myself wandering into the strange world of modded Mann VS Machine servers. And let me tell you, it really is a silly place…
MvM
Some Quick Fixes To Make The MvM Experience More Fun
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.
Sniper Versus Machine: The Post Dualcity
Valve have recently rolled out an awesome MvM update – Two Cities. For most part it’s great – Medic and Soldier buffs, killstreak weapons (that don’t look too good in most occasions but some are really awesome), Rottenburg. On the downside there is Empire Escalation Wave 4. But that’s later.
Since it’s a blog, it’s kinda logical for someone to get their opinion here, or maybe a story, if they have anything to share, so I’ll do exactly this thing.
Amusing things to be found in Rottenburg
Rotternburg is a beautiful map. Unlike the sad, concrete lump that is Mannhatten, which unfortunately fails to be particularly Mannhatten-y, Rotternburg fills its expectations of being a pretty village in the middle of nowhere. But there’s a lot more to Rotternburg than meets the eye…
Why the Quick Fix Medic* is Now Viable in MvM
*And other healing-centric loadouts
The Two Cities update has vastly improved the medic’s abilities in MvM. Gone is the “kritz machine” of old, now you can do exactly what the medic should be doing in the first place, and be an integral part of the team. And it’s just as fun as anything else.
For reference, there are two major abilities the medic received in this update that attribute to this: revives and the shield.
My favorite TF2 unused content
As the devs of a seven year-old game, the Team Fortress 2 team has had a long time to come up with ideas for our beloved shooter. Obviously not all of them can make the final cut, but a good amount of them have been added in unfinished and relatively inaccessible states. Luckily the community has its ways of discovering this unused content, and here are some I feel a slight pang when I think of because they probably will never see the light of day.
1. “That Dispenser is a Spy!”
Valve is routinely adding new addconds to TF2. For those who don’t know, addcond, or “add condition” is a console command that changes the status of the player. For example, when a Medigun Ubercharges a teammate, the game initiates “addcond 5” which adds Ubercharge textures, negates all damage, and plays the appropriate noses and voice lines. “addcond 11” bestows the player’s weapons with guaranteed crits and the critglow effect, “addcond 32” is how the Disciplinary Action bestows a speed boost and the motion lines in the air, etc. You can get the full list here.
Well, many addconds aren’t tied to any weapons or in-game events, so you can’t use them. But we can see what they do, and there are some gems. To quote the Team Fortress Wiki:
addcond 49: Crouching causes the player to appear to be a Dispenser of the enemy team to enemy players. As a side effect, forces the player’s speed to 450 Hammer Units/second (diagonal movement is at 520 HU/s). Swapping weapons while in this state will cause the player to temporarily stop moving, then return to 450 HU/s.
You heard that last one right. At one point, Valve was toying with a weapon that disguised a spy as an enemy dispenser if he crouched. That has got to be one of the most hilarious, horrifying, and puzzling ideas. Imagine players routinely spychecking your dispenser. Imagine having no engineers on your team, but dispensers are everywhere. The situations are endless, and every one is hilarious. It’s probably for the better Valve didn’t follow up with this one, but I can dream.
“The Hatless Update”
Oh, you thought I meant this Hatless Update? Haha, no, that is so 2011. I’m talking about the November 21, 2013 update, known as the Two Cities Update, though I believe the main feature of this update is the fact that it contains no new hats. If I’m not wrong, this is the only content update this year to not add any hats to the game. Isn’t that interesting? In all seriousness, I’m loving this update. It added so many new amazing things, adding a whole new role for the Medic in MvM, two new maps and added our much-loved Snakewater to… [Continue Reading]