update – Page 11 – The Daily SPUF

The Scotsman’s New Skullcutter

July 11, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments balance, comparison, demoman, update, weapon

On Smissmas 2014 Valve made my dream come true. The Scotsman’s Skullcutter became elevated from the dregs of poorly-optimized demoknights and Trolldemos to one of the best melee weapons for Demomen who treat their melee weapon like an emergency weapon instead of an intergral part of their loadout. Is it overpowered? Maybe. That’s a hard statement to make, what with the state of Demoman’s melee at the moment. The Ullapool Caber and Half-Zatoichi are pretty kickass weapons that fill the same role after all. And while the Skullcutter lacks the crippling downsides inherent in those two weapons, it also doesn’t bring anything new… [Continue Reading]

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The Gun Mettel Update – Pre Update thoughts

July 2, 2015 Medic 0 Comments counter-strike, hype, skins, um, update

So, um, er… Well… Um… I don’t know what to say. Well, let’s start off with the good stuff. Loch-n-Load and Baby Face’s Blaster are getting nerfed. Holy fuck that is a vast amount of changes. Spy essentially got a rework and Engineer got a lot of changes when it comes to wrenches and jag-whacking. It all seems incredibly ambitious. Huge stuff everywhere. The balance changes seem rather overwhelming. Lots of good and bad there. And there IS bad there. The Vaccinator is now a Uber-and-Leave-Them thing, It’s good that you can’t fuck with Snipers any more. That’ll need testing… [Continue Reading]

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Please do something.

June 30, 2015 Medic 0 Comments fun, please do something, SPUF, thread, update

Maybe I am taking this a bit too far. Maybe. *Sniff.* Maybe. But I’ve yet to see someone who can outsmart bullet any real progress this year. The only thing of note so far is the Workshop Beta, but that’s peppered with holes and stuff. It’s also like 5 years too late, TF2Maps and Gamebanana have been helping us fine good and bad maps since TF2’s birth. And let’s not get started on Quickplay. Then there’s Mannpower, which was introduced, got some balance patches then got ignored. Before that there was End of the Line, which was probably the first… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 25th – June 2nd

May 27, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments history, items, soldier, spy, sticky jumper, update

This article will wrap up Ketchup week. We’re back on track for “This Week in TF2 History”! Congrats everybody! I know it wasn’t actually a week, but the only alternative was to wait to fall behind an extra 14 days before starting, and that’s just the sort of logic that got us into this mess. Speaking of messes, the Spy weapons added as per Sniper vs. Spy were all decently buggy due to how strangely they messed with the mechanics of the game. The Dead Ringer in particular had more bugs than any other weapon before or since, and the… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 18th – 24th

May 26, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments glitches, sniper, spy, update

The first notable date this week takes us back to 1996, way before TF2 was even remotely on the radar. Version 2.9 was released for Team Fortress Quake, and it turned out to be the last update that game got before Team Fortress Classic usurped it as the Team Fortress of choice. Fast forward 13 years, and TF2’s Sniper vs. Spy update was getting released on May 21, 2009. This time, Valve tried to fix a problem where every time they released a class update the entire game got flooded with 90% of every server playing the new class. To this effect, Sniper… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 10th – 17th

May 25, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments crates, MvM, trading, update

Remember when last week I expressed disbelief that Valve cranked out so many patches the week after so many big updates? Well, apparently Valve waits two weeks to take some time off, because this is the week where not much happened. In fact, in TF2’s eight years of existence, only four of those years had updates during this week. 2010 saw the inclusion of a few tweaks to the new crafting system. The gunboats were flagged as a Soldier secondary, and the crafting requirements for tokens was reduced to only two items of the same class. This made tokens actually… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

May 2nd – 9th

May 24, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments crafting, replays, update

This week is going to have a lot of déjà vu if you just read last week’s, and that’s because almost all of the patches are either fixing bugs from the week before or adding onto stuff from the week before. May 2nd 2008 began a long week of Valve fixing all sorts of things with the Gold Rush Update, as to be expected. Crashes with equipping the Kritzkrieg, exploits with cheating the achievements, bugs with achievments not unlocking, two different infinite Ubercharge exploits…the finer aspects of the Medigun were also tweaked, as a number of subtle things weren’t porting over… [Continue Reading]

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Every year the same damn thing…

April 17, 2015 Medic 0 Comments boo, cheese, criticism, drought, recap, update, whine

Why do they do this to us? Torture us with nothingness and promises that never fade away and instead bubble in the depths of our minds, occasionally surfacing to torture us? It’s the exact same thing every damn year, year in, year out. Yes, I’m talking about the bloody early year update drought. The big updates every year are Smissmas, Scream Fortress and the Summer Update, which has a varying name. There used to be more big updates every year, generally with one or two big updates around Scream Fortress and the Summer Update, but as the game has grown… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 9th – 15th

April 14, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments cosmetics, melee, scout, trading, update

With post-Easter candy on sale and taxes looming on the horizon, perhaps Valve can be forgiven for not doing a heck of a lot this week. Lord knows none of the game teams for whom I’m developing ever do anything of merit around this time; save creativity for a time where it won’t get you audited. Back in 2009 on March 13th Valve did push a minor Sandman nerf; stunned players now took 50% less damage. This gave you a slightly better chance of not insta-dying just because some Bostonian twerp nailed you with a baseball while you were trying… [Continue Reading]

Featured This Week in TF2 History

April 1st – April 8th

April 2, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments cosmetics, glitches, update

April Fools! Originally, I was going to write the article on patch notes for League of Legends, following the theme, but there doesn’t appear to be an online archive of every League update since 2009. Even their official blog only goes back 2 years, and posts tagged with actual dates beyond “posted 2 years ago…” But anyway, it turns out TF2 actually has had things happen this week, and I would be remiss not to skip some of these landmarks, the largest being April 1st 2009. See, Valve doesn’t normally do April Fool’s jokes (unlike Blizzard), but when they revealed a sneak peek… [Continue Reading]