Team Fortress 2

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]

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]

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]

6 Truths All Valve Pub Players Know

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There are many, many ways to enjoy Team Fortress II. In the classic modes, you can fight over control points, deliver payloads, steal enemy intelligence, and even deliver booze to alien motherships. You can also hop into a team that decimates robots of all shapes and sizes. Or perhaps go into the dark unknown of community servers that run all sorts of mysterious plugins and curious maps. Personally speaking, I enjoy lingering by the Random Quick Play screen, which means that I typically play on random Valve public servers most of the time. (That’s something you might have probably guessed… [Continue Reading]

Day of the Demoman

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Something strange has happened recently… I figured I’d talk to you lovely people about it. (That isn’t the strange bit, but hang in there!) I’ve always disliked most explosive damage weapons in games, especially in multiplayer. I find them wholly unsatisfying and irritating as they often are capable of the performance of weapons with much higher skill requirements without the need for the aforementioned skill. I like knowing I’ve earned a kill. Not just gotten one via a panic mash of button presses. Hence why when you get killed for the fifth time in a match by a Soldier shooting… [Continue Reading]

Lessons TF2 could learn from Dota 2

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That’s right, I think it’s time we take a break from off-topic threads about Overwatch to talk about Dota for a second. You know, the game that Valve actually spends development time on. As Dota 2 is the most played game on Steam by an enormous margin, one has to wonder what it’s doing (besides, you know…being updated) that TF2 isn’t. While some lessons don’t apply as well since we’re talking about two completely different genres, I’ve compiled a list of things about Dota that TF2 could benefit from. 1. Optimization: Let’s start with the obvious one. Valve has always… [Continue Reading]

TF2 Competitive has a lot to steal…

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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]

Phovos reviews Overwatch – Getting into our heads!

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Hi, Phovos here! And guess what? We’re finally playing Overwatch! After failing to get into every single beta so far, we’ve been playing the Open Beta that lasts until May 9th. Overwatch is a ton of fun. The characters look cool, the maps are amazing, there’s free loot and it’s overall a blast to play. Very chaotic right now, because of the influx of players who don’t know what they’re doing, but still awesome. The maps are the best part of Overwatch, they’re really nice, good-looking maps, even with their long lines of sight and large amounts of choke points.… [Continue Reading]

The Current State of Demoknight

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Alright, so its been a good 5 or so months since Tough Break at the time of writing this article. It’s no news flash that Tough Break severely crippled Demoknight like a sledgehammer to the kneecaps. The Tide Turner went from being amazing and threatening to mediocre and a joke, since it can no longer get those precious charge crits. And the Claid, bless its soul, lost its ever-so-valuable charge duration increase, and fell from stardom, into the realm of obsolete weapons. Not to mention how the dear Persian Persuader, one of the more fun and unique melees, went from… [Continue Reading]

A TF2 Stream of Consciousness Journey

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Today we are going to take a journey through various entertainment mediums, beginning and ending at our familiar game of TF2, through a sort of free association.  At each step of the journey we will find some (hopefully interesting) fact about the work in question which in turn connects us to another work, and from there we will connect to another work via some other bit of trivia and so on, until we finally arrive back where we started.  As Charles Fort said “one measures a circle starting anywhere,” so Team Fortress 2 is as good of starting location as… [Continue Reading]