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Major Updates
May 24, 2010 - TF2 Team
After slaving away for over a year, the fine folks at Polycount have unveiled their new community site for video game artwork. Given that a year is roughly the time it takes for us to post a blog update, you can imagine our immediate and deeply-held suspicion that they probably used magic. Possibly black magic. I won't bore you with the details, but long story short, we immediately raced to their office, armed with holy water and fire, to confront them. Several police officers informed us that we were mistaken, and then made us apologize to the wizards, and then made us stop calling them wizards.
At any rate, to help celebrate, we've teamed up with them to run The Polycount Pack contest. Whether you're a modeler who's submitted work to the Contribute page already, or a beginner looking for a great community to give you useful feedback, this contest is the thing you're looking for.
And guess what: If you're not a modeler, you're even luckier. Why? You don't have to do anything at all, and you'll still be getting free content from suckers your fellow players.
Remember, if you see someone carrying one of these "self-made" items, make sure you thank them for their work! (But then, of course, shoot them.)
May 18, 2010 - Dave Riller
We're going to ship an update with another small set of Pyro changes this week. Like our previous update, our goal is to increase the degree to which skill can make a difference between two Pyro players. We received a bunch of useful feedback after the last update, and we think we've managed to address most of it, without removing the skill-based additions. As always, play with it for a bit, and then let us know what you think.
While we've been mucking about with game balance, Mister Royzo has unveiled his latest round of creations over on his Fancy vs Nasty Update page. Go take a look, and try not to melt his web server down.
May 13, 2010 - TF2 Team
In between obsessing over hats, we've been trying to keep up with all the neat things the community is doing.
- The fantastic folks over at TF2maps.net have unveiled the results of their latest community mapping challenge: The Competitive CTF Contest. If you're a fan of CTF, or a competitive team looking for some new maps to try out, it's the best day of your entire life. All down-hill from here, sorry.
- The Third European edition of Pros vs Pubbers event is coming up. Like previous events, their goal is to bring competitive & public players closer together. If that sounds like fun, head over and get involved. They also sent us this neat poster to show us that not only are they better at TF2 than us, they're also better artists.
May 13, 2010 - Robin Walker
It's been a busy week for the Team Fortress team. That's right: the police are here again. We're on a first name basis with them, the fire department and the nasal extraction emergency response team at Overlake Hospital by now, so it was like meeting with old friends.
Continued...
May 5, 2010 - Robin Walker
We're shipping a quick update to clean up some of the confusion around the 119th Update badges. We initially chose to calculate which badge to give players based on the beta release of TF2, because that was the date that customers could first play TF2. This turns out to have been a mistake, largely because many players did the math and thought they were getting something other than what they ended up with. So to remove that confusion, this new update moves that date forward to the official retail release of TF2, the 10th October 2007, and reissues updated badges to anyone who would be affected by that date shift.
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April 29, 2010 - TF2 Team
Today marks the 119th (or so) update to Team Fortress 2.
We think that calls for a celebration.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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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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!
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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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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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