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March 28, 2012 - The Administrator

Despite my continued efforts to better you by yelling at you through a microphone to do better, it is often difficult -- and thus disheartening -- to figure out if any of you damp piles of mulch are actually improving.

I found the answer, in all places, in one of the insipid gun-themed women's magazines Miss Pauling leaves lying around, where I stumbled on an article about self-improvement. It was a revelation: Instead of screaming at you to improve, I could scream at you while you improved yourselves.

I immediately telephoned Mann Co. and demanded to speak to Mister Reddy. Then that lummox Saxton Hale intercepted the call. I tried to explain my idea as patiently as possible, telling him about self-improvement. ("If they're like me, Helen, they're already perfect. And if you take something perfect and make it more than perfect, you get, hell, probably a wormhole or something. Damned scientists. No, I don't like it.") I explained the possibility of mercenaries tracking their own statistics. ("If they're like me, they win 100% of their battles in the best way possible. If they need to remember that, they can write it on their hands like I do.") Several minutes of this and many clumsy pick-up lines later (something about steak dinners), I lost my patience entirely and told him to put his assistant Reddy on the damn phone, and between us we hashed out a plan.

Interested in self-improvement, mercenaries? Of course you are. Read on.

The Per Diem Perk

Mister Reddy has prepared three absolutely unique one-of-a-kind hats that will rotate through the mercenary community every day. Who will get them? The three mercs who give the most gifts, win the most duels, and purchase the most map stamps on a given day. Presumably wearing these one-of-a-kind hats will make the winners feel like they've achieved something. Or not, I could give a damn. So long as they make you all better killing machines.

Strange Parts

Only found in crates, Strange Parts will help you study specific aspects of (what I charitably call) your performance in battle by letting you customize your favorite Strange weapon. Now you're free to track the number of enemies you gib, projectiles you reflect, heads you've shot, and more. It is Mister Reddy's hope that you will be able to track your performance and celebrate improvements while isolating weaknesses. It is my hope that when you're confronted with the abysmally small numbers you wastes of space are doubtlessly achieving, you'll stop goldbricking around and do something.

Also, Mister Reddy asked me to remind you that Strange Parts are still a work in progress. So if the mood takes you, visit the TF2 forum and let him know what you're interested in tracking. I’m sure he'll do his utmost to accommodate you. Moreso than I would if you came to me with your problems, at any rate, unless your problem is that you love shallow graves and hate breathing.

There. Enough motivation. Now. IMPROVE or I'll DESTROY YOU.

Happy Valentine's Day!

February 14, 2012 - TF2 Team

If there's one thing we know more about than hats, it's probably romance. Remember that romantic scene in Say Anything where John Cusack holds up a boom box in the rain? Well, we hold stuff up in the rain all the time. Golf clubs. Our wallets. An umbrella. Whatever's handy, really. And do the girls go for it? Hard to tell - it rains pretty hard in Seattle, so the limited visibility combined with wind shear makes it tough to see the appreciation on the ladies' faces.

Anyway, today's Valentine's Day, and that means if you're dating or married, you're going to drop somewhere in the area of $600 tonight on flowers, dinner, babysitters, hot air balloon rides, a hospital bill for rain-related holding injuries (Seattle only). It adds up fast, and you might be asking yourself at the end of the night, "Was it all worth it?" The answer, emphatically, is no. Happy Valentine's Day, stupid.

But wait! What if we told you that you could waste as much as 1/6 less money this Valentine's Day? What if we added that you could do it without even leaving your house? Then what if we sweetened the deal further by saying sorry for calling you stupid earlier?

Introducing the "Something Special For Someone Special". It's ring-shaped, it's gift-wrapped, it's basically useless, and it's really expensive ($100!). In short, it's the most accurate simulation of an actual Valentine's Day gift ever made available to the public.

Here's how it works:

First, it's not tradable, only giftable. When it shows up in your special someone's backpack, they can click on it to open a menu that will let them accept your proposal. Once the proposal's been accepted, a message will be broadcast to the entire TF community that will include your name, your special someone's name, and whatever you decided to call the ring. Then presto, the gift turns into two matching diamond bands you can wear in the rain while you smooch up a storm, you crazy kids.

I Can't Taunt Without My Radio

February 9, 2012 - TF2 Team

My radio's bad from the Boulevard.
I'm a hip-hop gangster and my name is Todd.
Terrorising my neighbours with the heavy bass.
I keep the suckas in fear by the look on my face.
-LL Cool J, 1985

Most people only know LL Cool J as a rapper, actor, fashion designer, record producer, and author. Now, though, you can add "spooky-ass Nostradamus" to that list, because we've just released a misc slot item for the Scout called "The Boston Boom Bringer" that pretty much exactly matches the lyrics LL penned almost thirty years ago. Is it a radio? Yes! Is it "bad"? Yes! When you taunt while it's equipped, will it play music to terrorize your neighbors and scare suckas? Yes! Are you a hip-hop gangster named Todd? That's gonna vary from person to person, obviously, but it's not totally out of the question! The point is, there's probably an LL Cool J song that predicts your death. The secondary point is everything we just said about the sweet new boom box item.

We went through LL Cool J’s back catalog looking for other prescient rap songs that described musical items available for the other eight classes, but apparently one of the Ls stands for “lazy”, because it doesn’t look like he wrote any. So just in case anyone out there wants to succeed where LL Cool J failed, we've added a special "Sound Device" category to both the in-game item submission UI and in the Workshop so that you can tag your sound-themed submissions. Make something good enough and it may join the ranks of Aladdin’s Private Reserve, The Conquistador, and the Lucky Shot, all great community-made items we’ve shipped this year that were mentioned by name on rap oracle LL Cool J's 1987 album "Bigger and Deffer".

TF2012!

February 2, 2012 - TF2 Writers

If you thought the end of the world was the only thing to look forward to in 2012, guess again. There's a ton of TF2 stuff on the horizon, running for their lives just slightly ahead of the Mayan blood tornadoes.



A Secret TF2 Project!
The TF2 team is working on something brand new for 2012. We can't tell you what it is, because they won't tell us, but what they WILL say is that it isn't a hat, it isn't a map, and go away. From this we can only conclude that the TF2 team is working on some ungodly hat-map hybrid that you can wear on your head while you run around in it. You heard it here first. Also last, because they just told us it's not that either. But it's
really cool.



A Steam Workshop Blog!
You might think we went a little overboard putting an exclamation mark on that title, but hear us out: we bought a gross of exclamatory punctuation on eBay, and we've got to get rid of these things before someone finds out how much we spent on them. ($7,000!!!!!!) Anyway, the blog is live! Check it out here for the latest workshop news and announcements! There've been nearly 4000 user-generated items submitted so far, and we're going to keep shipping them throughout the year(!), so head over to the Workshop and vote on what you'd like to see.



The Last "Meet the Team" Short
That title probably deserved an exclamation mark, but we over-estimated how many we had and now we're out. This year, the lovable, indecipherable Pyro finally gets some time in the spotlight. There will be blood. And not like in the movie There Will Be Blood, either, where there was only blood at the end, and not even very much of it. Ours has lots of blood pretty much all the way through. If the butterscotch mint-sucking old mummies who pick the Academy Awards thought Look Out, There Might Be a Little Blood was great, wait’ll they see how many gallons we managed to cram into our movie. They’re going to have to melt down Fort Knox to make all the Oscars we’re going to win.



The Second Annual Saxxy Awards
Just in case the Oscar mummies don’t recognize the subtle dramatic undertones of the uninterrupted blood explosion that is Meet the Pyro, we can always stack the deck at the Saxxys, our own awards show. This year, expect the Saxxys to be much bigger and better, due to the imminent unveiling of another secret. Is it that we’re giving Meet the Pyro five Oscars? That’s not the secret, but let’s just say we’d like to thank the Academy. More specifically, we’d like to thank the Academy’s lawyers for not reading this blog post.

The Australian Christmas Update... UPDATE!

December 21, 2011 - TF2 Team

With all the hustle and busty fustle of Australian Christmas, you probably thought we forgot the most important part of it: The gift-giving. Well, we didn't forget. We were hoping you would. But you didn't--you guys are sharp! So get your Gift-Gettin' Pants on, because you are about to get gifts, and we'd prefer you were wearing pants for it.

GIFTED! All the community items previously only available in the Nice Crates are now craftable, droppable, and available in all the ways you're used to getting them!

ALSO THIS GIFT! A free Secret Saxton for every premium account!

DUCK! GIFT COMIN' ATCHA! To acknowledge all you generous souls who've been handing out Secret Saxtons and piles of gifts since the formation of the TF economy, everybody is receiving a Spirit of Giving badge. It's a plate-sized x-ray illustrating to your peers exactly how big your heart is, and consequently, what a good person you are. You—and more importantly, everybody else—will actually be able to see your heart grow over time depending how many gifts you're giving. We strapped an actual decommissioned Soviet-era x-ray machine to several team members' chests, and trust us, the science checks out: The people in our experiment with the biggest hearts were in fact the nicest guys on staff. How do we know? You should have seen how many people showed up at their funerals.

STOCKING STUFFER! In an effort to get the gift-giving juices flowing, we've made every map as Smissmassy as possible by wrapping lights around every rope!

BUT THE GREATEST GIFT OF ALL... was inside you all along. It's blood! Turns out you can sell it! See you at the plasma center! Merry Smissmas, everybody!

The Australian Christmas Update
is HERE!

December 15, 2011 - TF2 Team

Board up your chimneys! Bury your milk and cookies in the yard! Load your shotguns and stuff all of your turkeys! Part 2 of the update has been announced and the update is now live. In case you missed out on Part 1 of the announcement, check it out now.

"Wait, which holiday?" you may be wondering. "Australian Christmas? Or Smissmas?" Both! Read this comic to find out what happens when holidays collide! Two special days enter the squared circle! ONLY ONE LEAVES!

In the spirit of Australian Christmas/Smissmas/Your Holiday Here, we'd like to give a few shout-outs to all the hardworking boys and girls who made this update possible. First, a big thanks to all our community holiday item creators. Thanks also to the Dr. Grordbort guys for their cool retro-futuristic Engie and Pyro weapons. If you think they look nice in-game, wait'll you see their real-life equivalents, on sale right now at drgrordborts.com!

Happy Australian Christmas Eve

December 14, 2011 - TF2 Team

As strongly implied in yesterday's educational Australian Christmas comic, Dr. Grordbort has once again landed a steam-powered rocket directly into the gravelly fields of the TF2niverse. Only this time the rocket's a little roomier, and has arrived bearing gifts for two classes, the Engineer and the Pyro.

Click here for Part One of our Australian Christmas Update Announcement, and don’t forget to check back tomorrow for Announcement Part Two and, more importantly, the update itself.

Just because the update’s coming tomorrow doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be playing RIGHT NOW, because guess what: Double drop rates start tonight! They’re only around until next Wednesday, so get in there and take advantage of all the double dropping!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Australian Christmas

December 13, 2011 - TF2 Team

What is the true meaning of Australian Christmas? Some say it is a hamfisted attempt by the Australian government to turn a notorious felon into a beloved folk hero. Others say it's a calculated ploy by the novelty munitions industry to sell guns that shoot mistletoe.

And then there are those who look past all that, and maintain that it is a time to reconnect with friends and loved ones, and to be thankful for the blessings in our lives.

And then there are those who are still licking their emotional wounds from all the reconnecting with friends and loved ones they did at Thanksgiving, and realize that the true true meaning of Australian Christmas is zero human contact, eating candy, and getting as many presents as possible.

And those people are correct—that is the true meaning of Australian Christmas. We looked it up.

But don't take our word for it. Ask the Engineer.

Mann Co. Spotlight Items

December 1, 2011 - TF2 Team

Today, we're introducing a new item from the Steam Workshop, voted on by the community and buyable by everyone. The “Itsy Bitsy Spyer” is a miniature Spy voodoo doll that clips onto the Engineer's belt. It's featured in our Mann Co. Spotlight box at the immediate right of this post!

And for you traders out there, there's a link right underneath the Spotlight item that'll let you buy keys without going into the game. Plus, we’ve removed the three-day trading cooldown for anyone whose first Steam purchase was 30 days ago or more.

All of which brings us to the last new feature we're introducing today: "Buy Now" links that you can create for any item and embed anywhere. Visit the FAQ for more details!

We want holiday-themed community items!

November 14, 2011 - TF2 Team

Update: The deadline for holiday-themed item submissions is this Friday Dec. 2 at 4:53pm PST. Any items submitted to the Workshop after this time will not be eligible to be included in this year’s holiday update.



It's that special time of mid-November, where nothing is special yet, but you can feel the tingle of impending specialness right around the corner. All the signs are there. When you kill a man, you can actually see his last breath hanging in the chill mid-November pre-specialness air. Turkeys have retreated to their bunkers in a vain attempt to weather the upcoming onslaught of holidays devoted to gleeful turkey slaughter. And are those sleighbells we hear? Because our legal department assures us they aren't. That's right, TFers. It's beginning to look a lot like an upcoming holiday our legal department won't let us mention, but that rhymes with "Smissmas".

Everywhere, that is, except in our item submission queue, where there doesn't seem to be any Smissmas joy at all. No Smissmas trees. No smazzletoe. Not even a smamukkah bush, which is a different holiday we can't mention but would also have been acceptable.

So it's up to you, item crafters! You've got until December 1st to have your hearts grow three sizes, be visited by spirits in the night, and get in the Smissmas spirit by submitting holiday-themed items to the Steam Workshop. What holiday? Your guess is as good as ours!

Merry Bazzlebarp, everybody!

Vote Now! Help Me Beat Up a Doctor!

November 7, 2011 - Saxton Hale

First order of business: Some DAMNED WEBSITE is asking any know-nothing mope with a keyboard and an opinion the preposterously self-evident question of whether I can BEAT UP A DOCTOR IN A FIGHT. Let's put aside that unlike with Mann Co., when a customer isn't wholly satisfied with a doctor's services, the doctor won't even CHALLENGE THAT CUSTOMER TO A FIGHT. In fact, he CAN'T challenge that customer to a fight, since doctors take a cringing oath of cowardice to "do no harm". Let's also put aside the fact that this contest doesn't even specify what SORT of fight this doctor and I would would be engaged in. (Let me answer that: A VERY SHORT ONE.)

Let's ignore all that and stick to the facts: I have PERSONALLY MANSLAUGHTERED 1,593 physicians in various forms of unarmed and/or unwilling combat, and let me tell you, that statistic carries a lot of weight at the doctor's office. Let's just say a "Beaten to Death in the Head by Fists" can turn into a "Natural Causes" on a coroner's report PRETTY FAST when you're cracking the right knuckles at the right people.

Still, if some online poll insists on propagating lies that I can be bested in fisticuffs by any Scottish-Japanese doctor who wants to throw on a ski mask, then I must turn to YOU, the fine customers of Mann Co.'s top-notch line of occasionally combustible products, to PUT THAT LIE TO REST. Click here, and RIGHT an INTERNET WRONG with your FINGER-FIST.

In other news, one of you FINALLY REMEMBERED that the U.S. postal service is a THING THAT EXISTS and answered the conundrum I posed during the Manniversary update about making an ostrich disappear:



Thank you, PVO, for your (relatively) prompt reply. Far too late to be useful, of course, as the police knocked in the door to my office weeks ago and I was forced to think on the spot (I ate the ostrich). But you get a hearty Mann Co. RELAXED-FIST CLAPPING SOUND for your inventive solution to my problem.

I have manslaughtered 1,593 physicians,

Saxton Hale

Enter... MONOCULUS!... AGAIN!

November 2, 2011 - TF2 Team

Monoculus is tough for a floating eyeball with no big arms to slap you around with. But apparently he's no match for the TF2 community's passion and ability to kill floating eyeballs.

To up the ante, and to challenge those of you who can best Monoculus with one eye tied behind your back, now every time he is defeated, he becomes tougher when he respawns. Go get him! And remember, if he defeats you, it's considered proper etiquette to push away from your computer, ball up your fist, shake it at the ceiling, and shout "MONOCULUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUS!" as loudly as you can. Don't worry about the police showing up. Well, worry inasmuch as they probably will show up. But once you explain the rules of etiquette to them, they'll likely understand.

Gift Abuse: The Gift That Keeps on Abusing

November 2, 2011 - The Administrator

I was enjoying my only hour off of the year, in the park feeding pigeons, when Miss Pauling called and notified me there was an issue in need of prompt resolution: gift abuse. Apparently some game servers are abusing the system and making the gift system unfair.

Nothing stokes my ire like a cheater. Deception, duplicity, murder -- these are merely tools in a toolbox one can use to ensure a job done well. But cheating? I cannot even wrap my head around the point of it. Wouldn't you know you had cheated? How on Earth could you maintain crisp certainty of your superiority to all others? And if you're unable to do that, what's the point of anything?

At any rate, I have already taken action against several servers and will continue to monitor the situation and revoke privileges -- with prompt relish, I assure you -- from abusive server operators. I will also be monitoring the in-game Abuse Reporting Tool, which you can and should use at any time to report abusive players and servers by pressing F7. Don't think of it as snitching. Think of it as making the world a better place. One where you can more fairly estimate how much better you are than your contemporaries.

Well, I'm off to enjoy the last ten minutes of my annual hour-long vacation. When I left the pigeons I had already managed to split them into warring factions and planted seeds of doubt about the capabilities of their pigeon leaders, so I'm interested to see how things play out once I take away all of their bread.

Scream Fortress Very Scary Halloween Special

October 27, 2011 - TF2 Team

Welcome—IF YOU DARE—to the Third Annual Scream Fortress Very Scary Halloween Special!



Let us be frank with you: Last year's special was pretty darn terrifying, even by our impossibly high standard of scary. To cite just one example: Dracula was taken to the hospital after witnessing just the loading screen of last year's update. That's not Terry Dracula your greengrocer, either. This is the Dracula we’re talking about. And if it scared Dracula, who eats ghosts and craps Frankensteins, we shudder to imagine what it must have done to you.

As an apology, we’re debating taking all of the scares out of this year's Halloween Special. For instance, one playtester thought the Pyro was a little scary, so we’ll probably remove him as a class. Someone else swore he remembered reading something about somebody getting hurt by a gun once. And that sounded scary. So probably no more guns, either. Then Dracula called from the hospital. "Hey guys," he said, "hats are pretty scary." Well, now, that must have been the morphine talking. So we’re adding more hats just to be safe.

Long story short, we guarantee you that nothing's going to scare you this year. There will be no ENORMOUS HAUNTED EYEBALL to terrorize you around an island filled with tons of SECRET LOOT, and a GIANT SKULL! There will be approximately zero percent chance of you getting your trembling hands on a spooky costume FOR EVERY CLASS! And we certainly wouldn't DRAMATIZE THE BACKSTORY of this hypothetical scary update with a FEAR-CHOKED TERROR-COMIC!

No, dear reader, we wouldn't do any of these things. Why? Because we're MUMMIES! Mummies can't make updates, we live in pyramids! What are you, insane? For the answer to that question, keep reading:

YES! YOU ARE!* TWIST ENDING!

* You went insane back in the second paragraph! YOU actually wrote this blog post! The only thing that isn't a figment of your imagination is THIS UPDATE! TWIST FOOTNOTE!

Note: The random gift drops and loot are only enabled on game servers with registered accounts. The easiest way to make sure you are playing on a registered server is to use the "Start Playing" button in the main menu of the game.

Enter… MONOCULUS!

October 27, 2011 - TF2 Team

There are some questions in the TF universe--questions like "Is Pyro a boy or a girl?" or "Who will be the tenth class?"--that get asked so often that they become, in a sense, unanswerable.

Then there are the questions nobody has thought to ask. Questions like, "Every time you explain something supernatural in TF2 you say the Soldier angered a magician. Who is the magician?" Questions like, "If the TF mercs went out trick or treating, what costumes would they wear?"



These are the questions we ask, because unlike those other questions, these ones we have an answer to. Answers like, "His name is Merasmus the Magician, and he's in a Halloween comic!" Answers like, "The TF mercs would wear awesome costumes that you can pick up by collecting scattered gifts in the Halloween update--which will be live very soon!"