Team Fortress 2 Forever

The gift that keeps on giving... Team Fortress 2 has deserved its own thread for far too long

love it!

i did this fucked up poll before
favorite class

Latest new mode announced is King of the Hill.
New snow map looks nice too...
http://www.teamfortress.com/classless

guys the orange box thread was totally revived for this already u dorks /:

http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/war/

"The one player you fail to check will invariably be the Spy you are looking for." ~ FixIt's Law of Thorough Examination.

"The longer a player remains alive, the probability of dying due to random occurrence approaches 1." ~ FixIt's Law of Unexpected Misfortune.

"Anything that can go wrong, will—everyone will know about it, and assume it to be your fault." ~ FixIt's Corollary to Murphy's Law.

"If all appears to be going well, you have overlooked something." ~ FixIt's Law of Uncertain Success.

"Your chance of dying as a Medic scales linearly with your ubercharge percentage." ~ Kuiper's Law of Premature Expiration

"No matter what class you are, you will scream at the sight of a crit." ~ Daedric's Law of Critting Your Pants.

http://tinyurl.com/obq23r

ha i only started playing this the other day. I cant get enough of this shitt.

some good nerd lolz there, always feel like i am terribad playing tf2 so it is good to see others frustrated

I may have to get back into this. Any favorite servers to recommend?

Try hitting us up on the ILG Steam group. (Huh, lots of Soccer Manager.)

Update is live!

Misc. thoughts on changes (though I haven't gotten a chance to play the new patch yet):

Pistol now fires at a fixed rate, not based on the speed at which you press the firing button

# Sappers attached to a teleporter automatically place another Sapper on the other end of the teleporter, if it exists.
# Engineers wrenching a teleporter will repair the other end as well, and remove Sappers from both if they exist.

# Disguised Spies no longer trigger On-Hit effects (like the Blutsauger's heal).

Teammates no longer block friendly radius damage. Prevents nearby teammates causing rocket/grenade jumps to fail.

# Update PLR_Pipeline - Increased the starting advantage in the third round if a team has won the first two rounds.

The FaN and Sandman had a ton of changes (most notably no more uber-stun, which was originally one of the main uses of the Sandman) so I'm curious to see how those go.

No single class update but a new gametype, 1 repurposed CTF map, 1 new Arena map and 1 new CP map and the standard mess of tweaks - not too shabby, Valve.

xpost, kind of worrying we both end up doing this in like thirty seconds

one weird change:

Capturing the flag in a CTF game mode gives the entire capturing team 10 seconds of critboost.

and still trying to fix the scout update:

The Force of Nature
- The enemy knockback now only `works in close range and behaves more like the Pyro's air blast.
- Enemies cannot be juggled by the FaN's effect.
- The self-knockback has also changed to respect the firer's view angle. Looking up while shooting will no longer propel the enemy upwards.
- Knockback is now scaled by damage done.
The Sandman
- A Scout will receive 1 point for stunning an enemy and 2 points for a long range stun.
- Stunned players now take 75% of all incoming damage instead of 50%.
- Übercharged players can no longer be stunned.
- Heavies spinning their mini-guns will continue to spin when stunned (whether the left or right mouse button is pressed).
- The minimum distance to stun a target has been reduced.
- The negative attribute has changed from "no double jump" to "-30 max health".

going to go try king of the hill now. also, yeah, plr_pipeline's last round has just been kind of "so what just happened" all the time - i think the way the level's built, like, only three people ever get round to paying attention to the 'cart' 'race'

It's true the "reward" in pipeline felt completely worthless before (haven't played the update yet), but the real problem with pipeline was the way the first two maps just usually turn into insane stalemates. I love the fix for the engineer so you can just hammer on one end of teleporter to remove a sap at the other end (if I'm reading that right). I don't play engy often, but it's annoying to spend a bunch of energy setting up a nice camp for your team, only to have to abandon everything to get your teleporter back up half a mile away. Did play a few rounds of king of the hill on the new valve snow map... not really sold on it, seems frustrating...

tf2 both seems noticably quicker and crashes more often. err

the koth maps are ridiculously frenetic, playing anything other than a damage class on them seems like it'd be just horribly unrewarding

yeah, i have no idea what an organized game of that is gonna be like

yukon seems okay so far, and new surrender animations are fantastic

koth = sniper paradise

ok, sandman is officially annoying again

still love this, i should play it more...

been playing this too much. i just got the force-a-nature (via the actual milestone, oy) — it seems underpowered and useless when i have it, obviously

Nah, it's true, it kinda sucks... and they just toned down the knockback even more - the main reason to even use it - on top of that! Especially considering it replaces the scattergun, which is an awesome weapon as it is... well, the FaN's still kind of barely useful if you run up behind people and double-blast them quickly (like that achievement leads you to do), especially if you crouch and shoot them up into the air.

Sandman is a little more effective now but the health penalty is painful... I do like that they made the ball the right-click and regular swings left-click.

the class limits really wrecked this game on xbox.

I've been playing this on this clusterfuck 2fort 24/7 server with no respawn timers. It's so chaotic that it is almost mind-numbingly relaxing. For the first time since I started playing TFC 10 years ago, I am loving the Demoman. I find myself switching between Demo and Soldier depending on whether I want to provide offensive cover, or defend (demo). I'm glad I gave this game another shot.

xp What were they, out of curiosity?

keep reading thread title in head to tune of 'strawberry fields', feel huge dork as result

rackpads - I can't stand norespawntime as it basically breaks the game. That said, 2fort has basically devolved to usually just deathmatch anyway, so it probably doesn't matter. I do really appreciate the great variety of experience the game offers - almost to fit any mood. I'm quite horrible as demoman though, probably the hardest class to play well(?), though in certain places they can be used easily and effectively as pure spam.

bnw - some pc servers have class limits too. isn't it an optional setting on the 360? aren't the host of bugs and exploits the real problem? the lack of new content...

on the flip side, engy-stacking breaks the game quite often too

yeah the lack of pc updates definitely.

problem with class limits on xbox is that there is no easy way to see them before you join the game. and you get a bunch of hosts who 'game' the map or situation because they are butthurt about losing.

definitely sucks, that is.

Some servers started using them on PC because the class updates thing had some people playing for achievements instead of actually playing... and jumping on a team to find it had ten medics healing each other was a drag. Or when the pyro update came out briefly overpowering the pyro, people just didn't like dealing with a bunch of that. Some kind of balance is so important though (if you're playing to win). It's very frustrating getting stuck on an unbalanced team that makes it impossible to win a map, yet nobody is willing to change up their class to make the match work. For instance, if the other team goes engy, you need to load up on medics and time up some ubers - in theory not hard to do if the other team isn't pushing you back, but just sitting there banging on a sentry gun with a wrench.

The main problem I have with the engy stack is that, usually the stackers are smart about it and using the multiple sentries to cover each other, so the standard anti-sentry tactics won't work unless a)you can uber a really good demo who knows he's doing - not likely and not super effective against 3+ sentries or b)min. 2 or 3 good spies who can also time their saps with the rest of the team, or just ninja them out solo - even more unlikely. On top of that, if you have 3+ sentries covering each other you can always leave at least 1 engy free to go offensive. Granted on some maps this whole strategy works better than others (esp. Egypt).

what did the pyro update have when it came out? when i started playing i found the backburner the MOST annoying thing. it seemed to be what was killing me like nine times out of ten. i can't imagine it having a state when it was more annoying

i was just playing on some bizarre french server — i'd seen none of the maps before, gravity was set to one-third, and whenever you killed someone they dropped a green mario mushroom which restored full health to whoever picked it up

When the backburner first came out it also granted the Pyro an extra fifty health.

Haha, really? That is ridiculous. I'm was glad when they added that flame extinguish ability to the regular flamethrower blowback.

pyro was god tier for a few weeks, except almost everybody was only playing pyros.

I love extinguishing people on fire, except I hate that a lot of people still don't realize you can do this for them and are running away from you looking for health making you waste a couple compression blasts trying to get to them,

sounds like it was terribly un-fun — am i right in thinking the pyro was the first class to get the new stuff? that makes it sound kind of like valve were thinking of the weapons as being just straight up buffs, before they decided it needed an element of trade-off

also i did not know i could extinguish ppl. that is kind of clever

medic was first

Jeff - I agree with what you say about norespawntimer. Even worse on this server, is that it's 2fort and a 32 person server. Ridiculous. It really is basically team death match with extremely long games (I've seen them last over two hours). I'll probably get sick of it soon and start trying some other maps and game modes. I've seen a Well CTF map around, but no servers running it that give me a good ping. I always loved Well in TFC, but never dug the capture point version of it. I miss the really large scale capture the flag stuff from TFC sometimes.

I am a classic noob Demo right now, btw. I had some medic uber me to take out a sentry and I was out of sticky grenades so I tried to take it out with normal grenades and got us both killed. :(

out of 30+ hours on this game i have spent 4 minutes and 32 seconds playing demoman. just don't like the feel of them.

rockapads are you in the ILG steam group?

Not yet - but I will join it!

The worse thing about Demos is the close quarters stuff. I've been syringed to death by medics who dance around me while I impotently poop grenades out, which usually end up hurting me even worse than they are. I've gotten better at killing certain classes with the broken whiskey bottle because of this.

Whiskey bottle actually is pretty decent as a melee weapon... Then again I can't think of a "bad" melee weapon except maybe the Heavy fists or standard Medic saw. Close quarters game for Demo is often about the sticky gun, lay bombs to create a wall or more likely run backwards and lay the bombs in your path, blowing them up as they chase you. Or detonate the stickies in mid-air for supression. You'll get better with the grenade gun with practice, though...

Whoa - is that title screen with the Blu engineer new or did I just not notice it before?

They added the blue backgrounds with the classless update. The change is nice, even it seems a little dark. My main pet peeve now is these random drops. It seems like every time I log on I get a flare gun the first time I die. I had to actually clear out the stupid briefcase thing, because it got full in the middle of a game! Also I've still never got a hat!!!

If the demo hits somebody with a grenade before it bounces, it does a lot more damage, I think. A good demo is an expert at aiming those so they hit you right in the face (one hit usually seems to kill my pyro).

I hadn't played until a week or two ago, but I've had some good matches recently on Hoodoo. A confusing map sometimes, but it seems to take the right amount of effort to push across.

I probably played between 50+ hours of TF2 since they added hats - I got 1. (And that's with no idle cheating!) Definitely glad they added the "multiple select" thing to the briefcase, it was incredibly tedious to delete things all the time... well, it still kind of is actually, but what can ya do.

Hoodoo is a pretty fun map but like Egypt is pretty stacked for Red. Check out those stats!

Don't want to just keep c+p'in the official blog but this I love these kinds of videos, and the narration just puts this over the top:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj5k32BeKis

I did not realize Hoodoo was so unbalanced, though I've only been playing it since the update (which added and tweaked some stuff on it, I believe) and have won on blue a couple of times (and only lost once that I can remember)... it's definitely a challenge though.

I joined the ILG group - my name is Facepunch.

I am starting to hate spies.

Spies need to be countered by pyros and heavies, but so often on pub servers they rarely seem to do their job. Spies have also seemed to have gotten more powerful post update. It's very frustrating as I've been concentrating more on medic not getting the proper support from pyros and/or heavies to keep spies of my back right before charging an essential uber. It's one of the most frustrating aspects of trying to play medic, you have people screaming at you all the time to heal them, but they rarely make the easy steps to watch your back. As I've played more medic, I'm definitely getting better at becoming my own spy check, but having to do two or three jobs at one time gets more exhausting than it should be. Demos in theory probably have the hardest time with spies as they have no good weapon to spy check, but on the other hand they are probably the least targeted class.

Snipers are my real most hated class, since they almost always do nothing but set up in a safe space and press off shot after shot. Sometimes it's a real pain to get all the way across the map to their hideout, but whenever I'm playing a class that can, I make a special effort to target 'em. Really annoying to get shot by a sniper as soon as you step out of spawn from some crazy angle. But yeah, it's more annoying to see a spy that could have been easily stopped run through four or more members of your team in a second or two of back stabs.

Hate Spies more especially since they got their recent superbuffs. How would Heavies counter them though, they're the easiest to backstab!

http://www.teamfortress.com/war/part3/index.htm

I can't stop loving how much effort Valve puts just into the presentation of their updates, even as the game is slowly turning into a terrifying MMOFPS. Crafting is pretty cool, I'll admit, but I actually want the item trading to come in first, just so I can hand off a bunch of spare weapons to a friend who doesn't play the game as much.

Been sick all weekend so I haven't had a chance to play, though I'm tempted to avoid playing for the next few weeks so avoid the Demo/Soldier achievement glut... Ah, who am I kidding. (I'm rootin' for Soldier, btw.)

http://www.teamfortress.com/war/saxtonhale/poopyjoe.htm

Hmm pickaxe and giant sword...

I wonder if i am reading too much into Valve's stuff now, or if that Fred Astaire rocket launcher ad is a hint about a new maybe health sucking launcher?

haha! i wouldn't put it past them - jarate was "announced" long before it actually arrived in one of these things

So the two new maps are valve designed maps, not community maps?
http://www.teamfortress.com/war/maps/

"Nobody can deny that, measured solely by their ability to blow people into chunky clouds of tomato soup, rockets are an incredible force for good in the world."

<3

as expected the spamfest is 0_0

http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/crazylegs_small.jpg

Cool that they officially made Highlander mode (9v9, one of each class) part of the game, definitely a good change of pace and a little more competitive than usual. Of course, that also often means one team steamrolls the other and there's less room to screw around, but capped at 18 players it's not as crazy as 32p matches. I just had a crazy round on the last part of Gold Rush as Medic and reached a personal all-time best of 16 assists in one life - dominating six players on the other team! We held them off on the second point for what seemed like ages, then Blu busted through and rolled straight to the last point in less than two minutes - it was pretty crazy and fun.

They just need to fix the bug where players can stack extra classes during setup, and hopefully more servers start running it and tagging it (haven't seen more than 7 or 9 up at a time). I'm also considering signing up with TF2Lobby at some point, though it seems to be just a little more effort than I want to put in...

Big things are happening RIGHT NOW at Valve. Things involving cultivated tree-fruit. BIG things. Things that rhyme with "grapple." Things that rhyme with "Speem Gortress zmavailable on the Babac."

Not today. But tomorrow. BIG THINGS. Stay tuned...

http://teamfortress.com/post.php?id=3923&p=1

already copied my .gcfs over

Really glad this made it over, but boy there's a LOT of optimizing to go - i'm getting less than half my XP framerates in a lower resolution window. Didn't really care about this for Portal but for TF2 it does matter that i can't get a steady 30 fps. Granted i have an old-ass video card but it ran great in XP

i shudder to think how badly L4D is going to perform when they finally get it out

I logged in for the first time in ages last night to see how things had changed and ended up having a hell of a time- I was worried about the newer weapons being unbalancing (I hadn't played with any of the new stuff since the Heavy pack) or unnecessarily complicating things, but it's still as smooth and elegant as ever. Well, maybe with the exception of the Demoman's close-combat stuff, which just seems like it's changing his class role way too much in the service of a joke.

I do wish they'd kept in achievement unlocks along with item drops and crafting, though. The better achevement packs gave people rewards for playing the class well, concentrating on objectives and helping teammates, and even the weirdest achievements led to a fun weekend of people going crazy trying to do dumb shit for goodies. If last night was any indication, the item drop rate is awful- I played for about three hours and aside from a medal for buying the Orange Box at launch and a halo for not cheating (and a battered top hat for dominating the poor bastard wearing it), all I got was a jar of piss for a class I barely play. And looking at the crafting blueprints, it's going to take LOADS of drops to try and come up with anything I'll actually want to use.

Coulda sworn achievements unlocks are still in there?

They are still in. Once you set your mind to it, it really isn't that hard to get your class' first two unlocks within a couple of hours, and I don't even mean going to a cheat server, just in regular play. Crafting was toned down a bit too, it used to be three weapons for one scrap, now it's two. I usually get about two drops an hour or more with the increased drop rate now.

But TBH, in terms of competitive advantage, the only one that REALLY matters is Kritzkrieg for playing Medic on Red. And then maybe Huntsman for Sniper or the other watches for Spy, but the fact is, I use default loadout for most chars the majority of the time. It's nice to have stuff like Direct Hit or the goofy Demo sword, but it's really just for fun - most of the unlock weapons give you slight advantages in specfic situations, and you always lose something (w/the exception of some melee weapons).

Even the demo stuff, which is pretty much a joke, I think is just to give him something for close combat so decent pyros and scouts don't completely dominate him. And if you use the chargin' targe, you have to give up the sticky bombs, which means you're not really trying anyway... pretty much agree with you TT.

Find out there was a bug with changing your video settings mid-game on Mac - when I booted up TF2 this morning the performance was a lot better than last night. Still not as good as Windows (as expected) but very playable.

xp nhex - sorry to hear the game is chugging on your mac. A good framerate makes a huge diferentce in TF2. I know with all the stuff they added to the game it became a lot more resource demanding. Since I've built my new computer and can play at 60+ FPS with everything maxed the game feels so much better than it used to for me, it alsmost feels like a whole new game. I need to start playing this more again.

It bums me out that they toned down my pyro's flamethrower - I know they gave it a slight boost again, but it still feels way less powerful, to the point of semi-uselessness - takes forever to toast most guys now :(

It does but they buffed the air reflect (which i always loved since they introduced it) so EVERY projectile mini crits. You can get more mass BBQs than ever with the counter spam! But it does make the Backburner is even more useless now, they need to buff that even more to balance it.

Btw, I can't believe it took me this long to bother with this, but holy crap when you turn on the options to a)confirm your hits with sound AND b)show damage numbers when you hit somebody, it gives you a HUGE advantage, it's almost like cheating. I am used to the cycle of soften w/ primary weapon > whip out shotgun/pistol to finish but this makes it all the easier, especially with pistol sniping.

xpost That's great news about the unlocks- shows how much attention I've been paying. Time to grind out my Scout weapons over the weekend...

http://www.teamfortress.com/loosecanon/index.html

I love how this game, which basically had no backstory whatsoever on release, is gradually being given a totally bizarre universe with these comics

Here we go again...
http://www.teamfortress.com/engineerupdate/

What is the list of 100 users? also, there's a 'hidden' link on that page and this is all that it is
http://www.teamfortress.com/engineerupdate/radigan/

Every time you craft something over the next week, you get a random chance to get a Golden Wrench. Every 25 people that get it, another engineer unlock tease is revealed.

I was in a match last night one of the Hoodoo levels & after a looong struggle, had just got the cart right to the door of the final little shack, really just a centimeter left to go, when I got killed by demo spam, then balanced over to the defending team :(

little moments like that can make the game so frustrating

So uh holy shit, the Wrangler is kind of crazy, yes? I'm kind of wondering how it's going to work- immobilize the engineer while you control the turret in first person, or point at stuff for the turret to shoot, or what? Either way, it should make playing engie much more fun.

My guess is that, since it's a pistol replacement, you're going to have to be in the field aiming at your targets. Definitely should be interesting and fun to mess with, not sure how and when it's going to be more effective than a standard turret, though.

The new Hightower map looks pretty cool too

Portable sentry?
http://www.teamfortress.com/engineerupdate/engineer_photos/

Also looks like a community-made wrench:
http://www.teamfortress.com/engineerupdate/evolutionaryman/

Engineer update is out. New maps (4!) are kind of confusing, but I guess new maps are always like that at first. Game is spy heaven right now. Tons of stuff to sap and stab, nobody spy checking.

Game won't even start for me - says Steam servers are too busy!

I kind of forgot how tense, frantic and exhausting this game can be, since I haven't been playing it too much for a while. It's dangerous how time flies when I get into a series of matches. It's really crazy how well Valve has supported this game and how much content they've tossed in there at no extra charge + custom maps and all that. Such a great game - definitely going to be playing more again, now.

Yeah, I still love it. The ability to move all buildings now is a nice boon to engineers. Psyched that we got three new payload maps, too. Can't believe this is the last class update, and probably the last major one (though maybe they'll still put out another classless update). Also can't believe I just passed the 500-hour mark on this...

I'm only @ 213 hours. It'll be interesting to see if this is pretty much a wrap, or if they figure out a way to keep going with new updates for a while yet... new maps, game types, maybe some new classes, who knows? Even if they do nothing more, they've done so much more than I ever expected for my $20 it's absurd. It's definitely the best game this gen, in terms of the fun I've gotten out of it.

haven't played this for years, but yeah it was probably one of the few multiplayer games that I found to be pure fun and frantic. would be playing it today if i had dece PC.

http://www.polycount.com/2010/07/15/the-team-fortress-2-polycount-pack-winners

This stuff is going to make it in officially. Some of them look really great!

I was all set to bitch about some of those (the Scout loot is pretty weak, and the Soldier stuff looks like it came from a different game entirely) but that Pyro pack is genius.

I like how easy it is to spot the Mac players, easy kills ftw!

http://www.ubercharged.net/2010/08/08/your-guide-to-tf2-classes/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfiOmo2jr6M

headless horseman boss is HILARIOUS

:D

am I enough of a tool to get Poker Night at the Inventory for those items? probably... i did just spend the last couple weekends completing my vintage weapon set through trades

the market is kinda weird, especially w/regard to hat values

lol, double drop rate week

might as well just make this game F2P

ooh! they're giving out festive keys! yay

My screencap of killing Mr. Snrub didn't come out. :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36lSzUMBJnc

Meet the Medic!

(btw the game is now Free to Play... forever)

http://www.develop-online.net/features/1325/Free-at-last

http://www.teamfortress.com/mvm/

still lovin' the comics they make for these updates. there's a lot of wacky lore behind this game now

oh yeah, and i guess this looks like some kind of official DOTA-style mod

Team fortress 2 forever indeed. Funny that the console version has probably never seen one free update since it came out with the orange box.