Thanks for standin still, wanker.

April 20, 2010 - Erik Johnson

Today we're shipping some significant changes to the item drop system.

• Previously, we rolled randomly at intervals to see if you got an item drop. Now we roll to determine when your next item drop will occur. So you're guaranteed to find items at fairly regular intervals. The bulk of drop complaints we've received in the past have been from players having unlucky streaks, where they didn't find any items for weeks. That won't be possible now.
• We've significantly increased the rate at which item drops occur, compared to the previous average interval.
• There's now a maximum amount of playtime per week in which you get item drops. Playing beyond that amount won't find any more items. The amount varies, but if you play an hour or so a day you're good. Some of your unused time will rollover to the following week, so if you're an intermittent player you'll also be fine.

What are the net effects of these changes? Here's the quick summary:

• If you're an idler, you're going to find fewer items than you were prior to this change. Sorry. On the bright side, there's less reason to idle, because it won't earn more than players who are playing regularly.
• Everyone else will find items more frequently, and with greater regularity.

We're still thinking about how to allow you to influence your drops. When we see discussions on the forums, people often ask why we don't tie it to some in-game performance (like your scoreboard position, or number of kills, etc). Many players understand that if we did this, idle servers would simply change into servers running plugins that generate those in-game events frequently (as we saw in the Soldier & Demoman WAR!).

There's another side of it that we care about just as much, which is the message it would send to all the players who don't want to idle. Any in-game performance metric we chose would result in there being specific maps, classes, tactics, and so on that resulted in more drops. We really don't want that to happen. When it's simply playtime, you're free to play the game however you like. If you love Payload, you can play Payload maps without worrying about whether you're earning less drops than the guys playing Arena maps. Community mapmakers don't have to worry about whether their maps earn item drops fast enough. Similarly, server operators can configure their servers however they like, without worrying about reducing the rate at which their players are earning drops. In short, while it's far from perfect, not tying to in-game performance is a lot less poisonous to your minute-to-minute game experience.

It is a good day to be giant man

April 15, 2010 - TF2 Team

At Valve, we like to play games made by other people, mainly because a) we don't have to make them, and b) they're generally more fun than ours anyway. In particular, games made by other people don't have Pyros named Eric Smith, who makes our collective lives miserable on a daily basis in playtests. (If you ever wonder why features like "Pyro now gets assists for airblasting enemies into environmental hazards" keep getting added to the game, thank Eric. Not content with killing us by just holding down W+M1, he persists in finding bold new ways to get points by any means necessary.)

It turns out that not only do we play other games--other game developers play ours. Last year Telltale Games' TF2 Team went head to head with us in the TF2 Studio Rumble tournament, in the process dominating our own Adrian Finol so hard that he made up an excuse about "picking up my kids somewhere" and went and sat in his car for an hour. After the match, we all agreed that one of these days we should do something cool together, because they're big fans of TF2, and we're big fans of getting advance copies of Sam & Max episodes.

Fast forward to now, and doodly-doodly-doot: We're doing something cool together. To celebrate the release of The Penal Zone, the first episode in Sam & Max's new adventure, The Devil's Playhouse, the Telltale team has provided us with some awesome TF2 items. We're going to give them out to everyone who buys The Penal Zone in the next week.

That's right: one week only. It's like the Soldier medal all over again, except this time you have no excuse about being too asleep in bed to download it in time. The items:

Max's Severed Head

• It's not often you're given the gift of a beloved character's decapitated head by the very studio responsible for that character. Still, we're not complaining. It's soft, it wicks away moisture in the heat of battle, it highlights our eyes. It's got us thinking about all the other game characters we could be wearing around as clothes.

Max's Pistol

• Who wouldn't want to squeeze off a couple rounds with the murder weapon of choice of a sociopathic cartoon rabbit? Probably quite a lot of people, when you get right down to it. Luckily, those people are all well-adjusted contributors to society with no police records, spotless credit ratings and few unresolvable moral failings. They also probably have no interest in playing TF2, so that means more murder-rabbit gun shooting for the rest of us.

Sam's Revolver

• This might look like an ordinary revolver, until you realize that it helps a talking dog solve crimes. How many crimes has YOUR dog solved lately? And let's face it, his revolver kind of sucks too. Man, we want to talk about this gun more, but we can't get over how much your dog sucks.

So there's the loot, folks. Get over to Steam and take a look at The Penal Zone. (And to answer your question, no. We asked. It doesn't mean what we thought it meant.)

Gotta move that gear up!

April 8, 2010 - Tom Bui

Just a quick update to point out some of the fantastic community activity out there that gets emailed to us every so often. Hopefully you're aware of some of it already. If not, you're in for a treat.

• About a billion or so people (we counted) emailed us links to the amazing Law Abiding Engineer trailer. If you've already seen it, make sure you check out the side-by-side comparison with the original trailer, so you can truly appreciate OneMoreUser's work.
• The mysterious person behind the Guard Dog update has raised the bar on fake updates to an insane height with his latest opus, the fake Engineer Update! We're going to warn you ahead of time: Whatever we end up actually coming up with probably won't be as cool as the Chicken Cannon.
• The talented folks behind Gang Garrison have just released version 2.2. With reworked weapons, new game modes, and fancier menus and HUDs, it's pretty much better than TF2 in every possible way now. Except for the total lack of hats. Guess we know who the real pros are around here. Go download version 2.2 and let them know how much you want fancy headgear. It's been scientifically proven that hats improve any game they're featured in.

• Slightly older, but if you haven't played Dylan 'Steaky' Loney's Great Class Dash yet, you should head over and grab it right away.
• Community Fortress continues to do a much better job than we do of tracking competitive TF2. We really liked their latest Moments of Glory, because Riki's engineer moment reminds of why all the most awesome players are either Engineers or Australians (usually both).
• ETF2L is gearing up for their Highlander Community Challenge. It's a fun tournament aimed at getting lots of people into some fun competitive matches. If you feel like you're crushing everyone in pubs, this'll be a great opportunity for you to find a new challenge. In addition, we're providing them with the ability to give out in-game medals to players who participate in the tournament. Everyone knows there's only one thing that beats a fine hat-wearing chap: a hat-wearing chap who's also covered in medals. We're not making any of this up, people. These are game design facts.

• We love jsparakov's TF2 & L4D mashup, especially the "gassing up the cart" bit. If he'd only thought to cover the zombies in hats and medals, it'd be the greatest map ever made.
• Pink Royale has done some neat reproductions of the snapshots in Meet the Spy. Pretty hot stuff. Don't email this to the Scout.

Nice goin', pardner

March 18, 2010 - TF2 Team

In the past we've shipped features that came from community suggestions. Now we've taken it one step further: we're shipping game content that was directly built by the community.

Continued...

Your Mac Questions Answered

March 9, 2010 - TF2 Team

Yesterday, we announced that Steam and all our Source engine games will be coming to the Mac. Sound too good to be true? Well, guess what: It is true! There are no catches! Sometimes life actually works like that. The bad news is that we've just truth bombed your hard-earned lie detector back to the stone age, and you'll probably lose all your money to the next international lottery scam that sneaks through your spam filter. Still, Steam on the Mac!

Continued...

Dammit dammit dammit dammit!

March 2, 2010 - Brandon Reinhart

We're plugging away at the Engineer update. He's an interesting class to work on, because he creates a larger footprint in the game than any other class. This means we have a lot of options to work with, and the resulting set of ideas is truly daunting. Since we've already built and playtested some things that haven't worked out (with no false modesty, I think we've mastered the art of rapidly making things that aren't fun), we thought it might be interesting to give you some of our failed experiments.
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Propaganda Contest Runners-Up!

February 2, 2010 - TF2 Team

As the Administrator mentioned last week, we've sorted through the 11,000 submissions to the Propaganda contest and picked some of our favorites from the frankly jaw-dropping number of first-rate entries. Scroll and enjoy!
Continued...

Cheaters, Winners and Busybodies

January 28, 2010 - The Administrator

Firstly, as should come as no surprise to anyone, it is my sad duty to reprimand the various con artists and charlatans in our community who insist on making a mockery of the hard work of others by cheating to win. The following is a list of the top twenty kill counts of the recent Demo/Soldier competition:


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Better Late Than Never

January 25, 2010 - TF2 Team

In the latest update, we've finally fixed the Double Crouch Jump bug—a longstanding issue involving Scout not being able to double crouch jump without looking like his legs are made of raw bacon strips held up in a wind tunnel:

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Yo, a little help here?

January 13, 2010 - TF2 Team

Today we're unveiling the TF2 Contribution site. This nifty site will allow anyone who's made a custom piece of TF2 content to submit it to us, with a view to it appearing in-game. Many of you have been building fantastic TF2 work for a while now, and we wanted a way for you to get it in front of all TF2 players, and for everyone to see that you were the one that built it.

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Erectin a dispenser

December 21, 2009 - Mike Booth

With the success of the AI systems of Left 4 Dead, we've been continuing to develop these technologies to create new kinds of game experiences. Team Fortress 2 is an excellent "sandbox" for explorations of this sort, and we've been quietly doing so for much of this last year. Some of the results of these explorations are TF "bots" — AI-driven player proxies with simulated humanlike senses, reaction times, and tactics. Although the TFBots are not yet complete, they play a pretty decent game of King of the Hill.

We thought you might enjoy testing your skill against these work-in-progress digital killing machines.


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Update Update

December 21, 2009 - TF2 Team

We've got one more update to go out to our backend item system. After that, we'll be granting all the missing items that weren't granted properly when you finished achievements.
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And the Winner is...

December 17, 2009 - TF2 Team

...the Soldier!

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VI DAY!

December 17, 2009 - Robin Walker

Victory on the Internet Day has been declared! The war is over! Who won? We don't know! Yet!

Luckily, I, Robin Walker, was up all night building a kill-calculating machine for just such an eventuality. We turned it on, the building filled with smoke, and right now a fireman is yelling at me to leave the building with everyone else. I'll leave when they pry this tiny netbook out of my cold dead hands. Or when an angry fireman fireman-carries me out of the office, which is what is happening right now. Anyway, once all the firemen calm down, we'll announce the War results with today's huge update. To pass the time, go get yourself a fresh mouse and start reloading this page as fast as you possibly can.


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Countdown: War ends in less than an hour

December 17, 2009 - Robin Walker

You heard right As of noon PST today, the Demoman/Soldier WAR! is over. The score is, as of this writing:

Demoman Killed: 6,323,921

Dead Soldiers: 6,298,465

It all comes down to this. I'd give you a motivational speech right now, but the time you wasted reading it would be less time you spent making a difference on the battlefield. Go ahead and break the bad news to your grandfather: YOU are officially now the greatest generation.

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