official Team Fortress 2

[PixilEyes]

Or Valve's making fun of us for focusing on the hats.

I should sell these hats on ebay. (real life ones) :D

[Minifig]

I am really, really starting to like the Medic.

I've been giving him a try the past four days and I'm getting better and better.. I carried a whole team through CP today.. and it felt great.

[Denis W. Veteran]

Aww, ain't that pyro doing a girly stance...

[Nagisan]

I am really, really starting to like the Medic.

I've been giving him a try the past four days and I'm getting better and better.. I carried a whole team through CP today.. and it felt great.

A halfway decent medic can turn the tides in TF2. Sometimes, when I am doing horrible enough and my team has no medic, I'll go medic and, even if I have bad timing on my Ubers or only get an few ubers, its still infinitely more useful than none at all.

I was playing in my usual server a few days ago and people were raging because our medic was not the greatest.....not horrible, but could definitely use some improvement and they were walking through us. So one of the guys, who mains medic, switched over and we ended up turning the game around and walking through them a couple times, it was awesome.

Above post - It looks like he took an arrow for the sniper, hopefully the sniper counter-sniped for revenge.

[Denis W. Veteran]

Some of the most infuriating things about pub 2fort matches: when one team is getting steamrolled, because they either a) don't have medics, or only have one healing everyone, b) NO ONE switches to engineer after two scouts run out with the intel twice, or c) there are engineers, but despite scouts or spies running out with the intel, they still insist on building in the sewers. -_-

[Minifig]

A halfway decent medic can turn the tides in TF2. Sometimes, when I am doing horrible enough and my team has no medic, I'll go medic and, even if I have bad timing on my Ubers or only get an few ubers, its still infinitely more useful than none at all.

I was playing in my usual server a few days ago and people were raging because our medic was not the greatest.....not horrible, but could definitely use some improvement and they were walking through us. So one of the guys, who mains medic, switched over and we ended up turning the game around and walking through them a couple times, it was awesome.

Above post - It looks like he took an arrow for the sniper, hopefully the sniper counter-sniped for revenge.

Well a funny thing happened today; I was playing, I noticed we had no medic.. seizing the opportunity, I jumped onto medic and started playing .. 15 minutes later some guy says over the mic "Our medic sucks.." I keep quiet and keep going with what I was doing (getting ready to uber a heavy as we cap the intel) and three people say "if you think he's so bad why don't you go medic.. we've started winning since he went medic.." and one guy said "You do realize he's playing medic by himself.. he has no other support medics.."

I just kind of smiled to myself..

I was the only one on our team that was playing a medic at that time, and shortly after the other guy said the "you do realize.." line two other people went medic and we dominated the map.

:laugh:

[Minifig]

I should mention that I reset my stats every year so I can see who I'm better with year after year. :happy:

[Nagisan]

Well a funny thing happened today; I was playing, I noticed we had no medic.. seizing the opportunity, I jumped onto medic and started playing .. 15 minutes later some guy says over the mic "Our medic sucks.." I keep quiet and keep going with what I was doing (getting ready to uber a heavy as we cap the intel) and three people say "if you think he's so bad why don't you go medic.. we've started winning since he went medic.." and one guy said "You do realize he's playing medic by himself.. he has no other support medics.."

I just kind of smiled to myself..

I was the only one on our team that was playing a medic at that time, and shortly after the other guy said the "you do realize.." line two other people went medic and we dominated the map.

:laugh:

I had a somewhat similar situation last night, but no one was downright complaining about no medic, and we didn't start winning as soon as I went medic.

Instead though, we went from being rolled, with my at the bottom of the scoreboard, to pretty much holding them off for 10+ minutes (they had the middle capture, but it kept going back and forth for 10 minutes) and me at the top of the team (and only behind 1-2 people on their team). I was a bad medic, but I was exhausted last night and was doing horrible.

Some freaking demo though ended up dominating me, killing me and the heavy I was ubering into points with random crits every few deaths, so I decided to go soldier to get revenge on him (I hate ending a round with someone dominating me). :p That particular round ended in sudden death due to hitting the map time limit, in which I proceeded to kill half their team. It was me and a medic, a heavy and a medic, vs that demo that was dominating me earlier, and his medic. We made a push to the next point and start capping it, and he and his medic jumped on our first pont, due to the cap speed differences, they capped it less than a second faster than we did and we lost. But we did come extremely close to winning after I switched to soldier (once I played medic for most of the round and helped hold them off).

A bad medic can, at times, be better than a good soldier or pyro or other things, depending on current class balance and what not.

I should mention that I reset my stats every year so I can see who I'm better with year after year. :happy:

I have less times as Demo then I do as soldier, scout, pyro and even medic (I think), but yet when I go demo I end up topping the scoreboard and taking out sentries that other people just cannot seem to take out. Its weird, I have little time as demo but I can rock at demo on a good day. Yesterday I was playing demo, got multiple airshots in a row, and nailing a heavy from way up on a cliff ledge with nades, taking barely any damage from him....it was just epic.

[Lewism]

Is anyone else having problems with Steam Could lately? When I play, I sometimes loses connection with Steam (my friend list still works) and I can't use my load outs. I have to restart TF2 and hope it connects properly. It really ****es me off, especially when I play Spy with the C&D. All of a sudden, I am stuck with the InvisiWatch which I really hate to use and I end up killed because I am visible while standing.

[Nagisan]

Steam Cloud does that every now and then.....but if you are already on a server with the cloak and dagger equipped before you lose connection, it should stay equipped even after you get disconnected. The only time it will change from an unlock to the default is typically if you have no connection when you launch TF2, or if you lose connection, then change server without getting the connection back.

[Nagisan]

Well, for the fun of it (and to gain a bit of extra knowledge), I emailed Robin Walker asking if DX8 support was the main reason the Orange Box engine (or at least, TF2s engine) has not been updated to the L4D engine, he confirmed that DX8 support was a major factor, as apparently there are thousands of TF2 players that are stuck on DX8 hardware. But beyond that, he stated that the primary reason is because the L4D engine is so vastly different it would simply be too much work for the TF2 team to be able to handle.

So, those of us (including myself) hoping Valve could drop DX8 support in TF2 to upgrade the engine, that is not the case, its simply too much work to upgrade it to even the L4D engine, so we are not likely to see any major upgrades to the engine (which would lead to major performance improvements) until the next installment of Team Fortress (which is unlikely to happen for awhile, since TF2 is still receiving active updates).

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

That's understandable. I don't think Valve has ever ported any of their games to the L4D source engine. The most they've done is port to the "Orange Box" engine (e.g. DoD:S and now, CS:S).

Personally though, the only time I encounter performance issues is if I set textures to 'very high'. I experience infrequent drops in performance and it kinda ruins the experience. So, I leave it on 'high' to get stable performance no matter the situation.

[Nagisan]

That's understandable. I don't think Valve has ever ported any of their games to the L4D source engine. The most they've done is port to the "Orange Box" engine (e.g. DoD:S and now, CS:S).

Personally though, the only time I encounter performance issues is if I set textures to 'very high'. I experience infrequent drops in performance and it kinda ruins the experience. So, I leave it on 'high' to get stable performance no matter the situation.

I agree, but considering the horrible performance issues TF2 can have, its slightly annoying to hear its not going to get any major improvements.

One thing you can try, is adding "-threads x" to your launch options , with X being equal to the number of cores (or threads, for i7 users) your computer has. In my own testing on my own local server with bots (15 bots on my team in the spawn room), I would get drops down to around 85 FPS when all of them were jumping around firing (with bot_mimic 1), with adding "-threads 8" to my launch options and keeping all other settings the same, the bare minimum I could get it down to doing the same thing was around 95, with the average during the test being at 100 or so. So a 10+ minimum FPS increase for adding a launch option is quite good IMO......I went from a max of 29-30% CPU utilization, to around 32-34% utilization......not a huge increase, but as that % is the total of 8 threads, it was a decent load balancer that definitely had a noticeable increase on FPS.

[Vice]

Anyone noticed a lot of hackers recently? Had one today, one yesterday, two the day before that. Never noticed so many before.

The one yesterday was a heavy and he was swinging around 360 style 1 hitting everyone in sight even cloaked spies of the opposition team. Then the day before that there was two speed hackers then today had an aimbotting sniper.

Is there like an epidemic of cheaters I'm not aware of or is this not a new development?

[Nagisan]

You can use a glitch in TF2 to speedhack without using an external program, allowing you to speedhack without the risk of getting VAC banned. I have only seen a few noticeable hackers throughout my entire TF2 playtime though, it was a crit hacking soldier that just couldn't aim his crits. There are a couple snipers on my normal server that a new player would swear is aimbotting, but they are infact just really, really good. Kritz medics krit him and he just crit noscope bodyshots everyone. :p

Also, VAC is not instant nor perfect. Completely private hacks are virtually completely Vac-proof (VAC bans similar to how anti-virus detects viruses, so if Vac is unaware of a hack, it cannot ban for it), and its bans are delayed, some someone may be detected and flagged for hacking for a month or two before they are finally banned, this makes it impossible for people to know when a public hack is detected, all they can do is know when it is actually banned, which will be too late for many users.

Your best bet is find a good server with active admins, or easy-to-contact admins, so if a hacker does show up, an admin can get rid of him quickly.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

There's one glitch/exploit (might be the one you're talking about), where you join a local listen server with the sourcemod plugin (which you can mark cvars as unrestricted with), change your speed then join a normal server (the cvar doesn't get set back to restricted).

[Nagisan]

There's one glitch/exploit (might be the one you're talking about), where you join a local listen server with the sourcemod plugin (which you can mark cvars as unrestricted with), change your speed then join a normal server (the cvar doesn't get set back to restricted).

Yup, you can change (I believe) time_hostscale or whatever it is, which, while you still have a limit on firing speed (I think), you can use it to increase your movement speed.

And, what is up with TF2......until yesterday, it has been weeks since I played scout for more than 5-10 minutes. Then, yesterday, I play scout on Harvest, and I just dominate......3rd place overall by map end, top MVP on final round, etc etc. In one life, I ran in the right side of the enemy building, killed a scout with only getting slightly nicked once, ran farther in, 2-shot killed an enemy medic around the stairs. Went upstairs at around 50% health, and 3-shot killed the sniper that was up there without getting hit. Grabbed the health, ran back out, and killed a soldier that had just jumped on the point. I was doing freaking epic yesterday as scout, but its been weeks since I have really bothered to play him. o.O

[Denis W. Veteran]

On another topic, did anyone watch The Losers? Thought it was just me that saw the uncanny resemblence between the TF2 sniper and Cougar... and this guy sees more connections between characters.

[Minifig]

Sigh. The Engineer pack needs to come out. :(

[Nagisan]

Sigh. The Engineer pack needs to come out. :(

It will soon, last week Valve seemed to be teasing us a bit with the multiple blog posts, they know the second 90% of their forum-goers see a new blog post they will assume it is something interesting or relevant to the Engineer update which is "coming soon", so they post practically useless blog posts just to create hype.

On top of that, its been quite awhile before the last major update (while the 100/119 update was posted as major, I do not think it was enough to be on the scale of most other major updates).

I have a feeling the engineer update will start this week or next (typically they start around Thursday), but knowing Valve it will be another month at least. :p

[Denis W. Veteran]

http://www.tf2.com/post.php?id=3835&p=1

PLEASE restore the pyro's fire damage or give it a buff...

[Denis W. Veteran]

Oh and by the way, TF2-related contest:

http://www.evga.com/articles/00547/

[Nagisan]

http://www.tf2.com/post.php?id=3835&p=1

PLEASE restore the pyro's fire damage or give it a buff...

I hope so, its good to see they are finally trying to make the pyro a better class....I honestly think a good way to improve the skill ceiling is doing something like I suggested before. Increase damage, but decrease range. That way a pyro cant just spam fire and catch everyone within 20 feet of him on fire, but if he does get close, he can dish out some major damage.

Either way, that means there is likely to be any Engineer update info this week, typically they reveal major updates during weeks that have no huge update or major changes (class balance, I would consider major changes), so heres hoping for Engineer update info next week!

[Nagisan]

Hmmmm....interesting thoughts on the pyro picture in the blog post....the pyro is very similar in his post to the team lineup at the end of each Meet The Team video. The background is also very similar.

Blog Picture: http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/pyro-changes.jpg

Meet The Team Lineup: http://www.tfportal.de/gfx/screenshots/tf2/tf2_group_new.jpg

The main difference is the reflection on his mask is purple, could the similarities be a sign of meet the pyro coming up?

[EmuZombie Veteran]

With permission of our lord and master Neobond, Neowin now has an official TF2 server!

Its location: Chicago, IL, United States. (sorry those on the other side of the world)

IP and port: 8.9.16.185:27015

You can also easily find the server by setting the game to show the filter of "neowin"

See the official forum thread for the server.