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.
The first was a new building internally known as the Repair Node. We gave Engineers the ability to replace any current building (teleporter entrances and exits were considered one building for this) with the Repair Node instead.
While deployed, the Repair Node would draw from a pool of energy to fix damage to nearby buildings. When the node ran out of energy, it would stop repairing and regenerate up to full, creating a window of opportunity for the attackers. When sapped, the Repair Node's repair function was disabled for the duration of the sap.
The goal of the Repair Node was to solve a perceived problem in the Engineer's play experience: always having to be tied to your base. The Engineer often has little to do after his base is built and fully upgraded except wait for the inevitable Spy sapper attempt, or for the battlefront to reach the base. The Repair Node was meant to buy the Engineer time if he wanted to range out to gather metal or harass the enemy with his shotgun.
This is usually how we approach our game design: Identify a problem, then discuss the ways it could be solved. Our experience told us that even when the Engineer didn't feel immediate pressure, he still couldn't range out away from his base. If a Spy, Soldier, or Demoman found the base unguarded, it didn't take long to blow up. The further away an Engineer was, the fewer buildings he would be able to save from sapping. We also felt that the Engineer invested a lot of up-front work to establish bases that were very easily destroyed. Thus the repair node was born.
Play-testing the Repair Node showed us one expected, and two (somewhat) unexpected, outcomes. The expected outcome was that bases were far harder to destroy, and turtling became a super effective strategy. Fortunately, this is the kind of problem that can be attacked by turning the correct game design knob, and the Repair Node had a lot of available knobs. We could lower the rate of repair, lower the amount of repair energy, lengthen the vulnerable period, and so forth. We tried several options. One change we made was to add diminishing returns so that two Repair Nodes working together were less than perfectly efficient, and adding a third didn't really help at all.
Despite the design choices we had available, we were never really able to get the Repair Node to feel balanced for the attacking team. TF2 maps tend to be designed with very specific predicted Sentry placement locations and length of Sentry survivability. The Repair Node distorted old favorite maps and made testing new ones more difficult by exaggerating intentional choke points and creating new choke points where they didn't previously exist.
The first unexpected outcome of the Repair Node was the team realizing just how valuable the Dispenser and Teleporter were to so many aspects of game pacing. If the Engineer isn't able to build a Dispenser, his team loses the support power that the Dispenser provides. In most games Dispensers are ubiquitous. You don't really realize what you've lost until you've lost it. Fewer Dispensers had the effect of slowing attacking teams down in a variety of ways: Teams were more fragile, metal was harder to get to the front lines, and team rally points were harder to define.
An Engineer who took a Repair Node instead of a Teleporter put his team in an even less viable position. The pacing of many maps became completely broken without Teleporters in play. Teams weren't able to push as effectively and the lines of battle moved closer to the spawn points. This lack of flexibility meant that attackers weren't able to hold gains and matches took longer to complete.
The second unexpected outcome was downstream from the first. Teams perceived Engineers with Repair Nodes as less "friendly", specifically because they weren't building Dispensers or Teleporters. In retrospect, older data at our disposal should have known this would happen. Prior to TF2's release, the Medic had weaponry that was significantly more powerful, leading to highly skilled players playing Medic as a purely combat class. Aside from the balance issues this created, it also resulted in a Medic that wasn't interested in healing anyone, which didn't typically sit well with his teammates. Their perception was that healing is the Medic's job. Medics who didn't do that weren't perceived to be team players -- an identical reaction to Engineers refusing to build Dispensers and/or Teleporters. Like many design exercises we didn't learn what to do next so much as what NOT to do.
- Lesson 1: The problem of the Engineer being tied to his base still exists, but the Repair Node was too heavy-handed a solution. If we solve this problem in the future, it will have to be in a way that doesn't distort the existing balance between attackers and defensive choke points.
- Lesson 2: The Dispenser and Teleporter are really good. We already knew this, but we didn't know that they were really, really good. Encouraging Engineers to either avoid building them entirely, or to build them in weird ways, broke the game's pacing immediately. New buildings in the Engineer update will probably take the form of upgrades, or entirely new choices alongside the old buildings, instead of replacements.
These may seem like obvious lessons, but knowing for certain
why a particular idea doesn't work can often be as valuable as an idea that does. This process highlighted specifically where and why the Engineer is valuable, and how even slightly altering this value can have game-shattering implications.
Ultimately, the Repair Node was cut because it made the game more of a grind. While it definitely made it less stressful to manage a base as an Engineer, it wasn't
fun. The Engineer gained a little bit of fun, but nearly everyone else in the match suffered as a result.
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In other news, our minds were blown this week when we saw
Andrew Kepple's amazing Spy & Pyro cartoon. We've decided this is final proof that TF2 fans are smarter, more creative, and much better looking than fans of all other video games. On the competitive side, we've been addicted to watching
CommunityFortress's eXtv series of commentated competitive TF2 matches. If you haven't watched any, take a look at some great European and North American matches. If you haven't watched much competitive play, eXtv's commentary does a great job of helping you understand the tactics being employed.
Propaganda Contest Runners-Up!
February 2, 2010 - Shawn Zabecki
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! (Oh, and to the runner-up winners below: Keep an eye peeled for an email from us so you can claim a little something for all your hard work.)
Most Unique Likenesses of Soldier and/or Demo
 |
 |
| - Draw |
- Brown |
Best Use of a Term We Don't Know the Meaning of,
But That is Probably Filthy
 |
| - Matthias Rigling |
Best Incorporation of Another Class
 |
| - Reese |
Most Likely to Get Us a Cease and Desist Order From Bethesda
 |
| - LARATRON |
Best Use of the Time-worn Maxim "Sex Sells"
 |
| - Agent Melon |
Best Attempts to Make Soldier Look Adorable
 |
 |
| - Delicious Spyger |
- Anneka |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Heroic
 |
| - metalpiss |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Jet-Propelled
 |
| - B0nd07 |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Manly
 |
| - Commissar K |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Normal
 |
| - Brooke |
Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Melting
 |
| - Nick Pearce |
Best Attempt to Make Demoman Look Cowardly
 |
| - huzzah! |
Best Attempt to Make Demoman Look Like a Drunk
 |
| - The Fox Fanfare |
Best Attempts to Make Demoman Look Evil
 |
 |
| - Chanicle Bullie |
- Daimao |
Best Attempt to Make Demoman Look Like a Kamikaze Pilot
 |
| - ?Faction |
Best Attempt to Make Demoman Look Like Billy Dee Williams
 |
| - The Wenny C's Pride |
Best Alternate Entry by a Contest Winner
 |
| - J.Axer |
Best Ironic Resuscitation of a Long-dead Genre
 |
| - Prototype |
Best Use of Euclidean Space
 |
| - Hollohill |
Best Attempt at Iconography
 |
| - Viva La Demo! |
Best Poster to Take Into a Tattoo Parlor While Pointing at Your Chest
 |
| - BAO |
Most Convincing Argument for Evolution
 |
| - Rawr/TankTaur |
Most Convincing Argument for Education
 |
| - Plank |
Most Convincing Argument for Learning How to Contract by One Pixel in Photoshop
 |
| - Cliff Hanger |
Best Poster Evidently Scanned From a 14-Year-Old's Binder
 |
| - Ryan "Danger" Ohlemeier |
Best Attempt to Raise Awareness About the Dangers of Alcohol
 |
| - Christian Grund |
Best Attempt to Raise Awareness About Sticky Bomb Tragedies
 |
| - Esk |
Best Use of Eye Patches
 |
| - Christian Kaiser |
Best Reference to Conan the Barbarian
 |
| - UnidColor |
Honorable Mentions in Catchphrase Creation
 |
 |
 |
 |
| - rEJ |
- Wofiel |
- Shenanigans |
- nik. |
Honorable Mentions in Catchphrase Borrowing
 |
| - kris aubuchon (awesomerobot) |
Best Use of Garry's Mod
 |
| - Eric Salama |
Best Reference to William Wallace
 |
| - Alan Longstaff |
Best Reference to Uncle Sam
 |
| - Dan Tyler |
Best Reference to Loch Ness Monster
 |
| - Wade "Nineaxis" Fabry |
Best Literal Depiction of Larvae
 |
| - Christopher Martinez |
Most Inevitable Incorporation of Urine
 |
| - Christian |
Best Use of Sticky Bombs
 |
| - Michael A. Szymanski |
Best Use of Gratuitous Violence
 |
| - Kyattsuai |
Poster that Made Us the Most Hungry
 |
| - Swankery |
Poster that Made Us the Least Hungry
 |
| - Yoplatz |
Best Weapon-Centric Posters
 |
 |
| - Saturnian |
- Ben Holland |
Best Attempts at Authentic WWII-Era Propaganda
 |
 |
 |
 |
| - CaptainCube |
- AGENT MELON |
- KILOMONSTER |
- THE KAMINATOR |
Best Attempt to Write Soldier Dialogue
 |
| - Eastman's Cranium |
Most Incorrect Statement
 |
| - BLOB |
Best Use of the Most Primitive Computer Art Program Available
 |
| - Zachary Lindemann |
Most Disturbing Use of the Most Primitive Computer Art Program Available
 |
| - Johan |
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:
Now, I have no actual proof that these men cheated. Lucky for me, then, that I am still in possession of basic common bloody sense. The top Soldier, for example, would have had to kill a Demoman every 2.5 seconds for a week straight, somehow circumventing respawn timers or the need to actually traverse across a map, without once pausing to sleep or go to the bathroom. In other words, he is either cheating, or he is a hallucinating sleep-deprived psychotic with severe constipation and unerringly good aim. In either event, I am confident he is ashamed of himself.
In less disheartening news, the goldbricking simpletons calling themselves the TF2 team around here have apparently paused long enough from picking chiggers out of one another's hair to select a number of Propaganda Contest runners-up from the 11,000-odd entries we received late last year, the results of which will be posted here soon. I must grudgingly admit an astonishing amount of talent on display. I hasten to add, however, that I find it astonishing only because, in observing how you comport yourselves in-game, on the forums, and presumably in your day-to-day lives, one would be forgiven for assuming you bereft of the cognitive skills needed to operate a mailbox. At any rate, congratulations: You are all excellent artists. Perhaps you could draw a picture of me giving a damn, so I'd know what that looked like.
Lastly, I would like to remind those of you writing in with questions concerning a supposed past relationship between myself and one Mister Saxton Hale: A lady never tells, and a gentleman never asks. More pertinently, an Administrator never forgets. Or forgives. Or relents. The Nosy Parkers among you would do well to remember that the next time you decide to paw through my confidential affairs like junkyard dogs.
You have found this instructive,
The Administrator
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:
Throughout Team Fortress 2's years-long release and update cycle, many people have asked us, "Seriously, how could you guys not have fixed that yet?" The majority of these queries are directed to TF2 animator Matthew Russell, who is technically responsible for fixing this kind of thing, and most of them pull no punches. "Is it because Matthew Russell is too stupid to fix it? Why would Valve even hire someone with a horseshoe-shaped divot in their skull?" is an email we see a lot. "Does Matthew Russell have a disease that makes him lazy?" is another popular one. An astonishing number of them are simply a .jpeg of Google Maps with Matt's house ominously circled. The rest could be summed up as a long, unbroken string of expletives and grammatically questionable racial slurs.
What a lot of people don't know is that this "bug" isn't a bug at all, but rather an embarrassing result of the degenerative leg disease our motion capture actor, Del Bluskin, has bravely endured for over a decade now, which has turned the lower half of his skeleton into something that looks like two raw bacon strips held up in a wind tunnel. To be honest, Del's been a part of the Valve family for so long, we just didn't have the heart to fire him simply because his ailment had rendered him grossly incompetent at his own job. To be even more honest, we didn't have the heart to engage in a long verbal sparring match with Valve's legal team, who told us that under no circumstances could we fire Del.
Luckily, things have a funny way of working themselves out for the best. Del was hit by a bus this morning, and our new mocap guy, Phil, is a sharp, enthusiastic go-getter with a functioning skeleton. Jump forward an hour, and here we are with an upgrade that finally addresses the Double Crouch Jump bug that has long plagued the Scout-playing faithful. Enjoy, and in the words of animator Matthew Russell, "Anyone wants me, I'm gonna snag a couple z's in the server room. If Newell asks, one of my kids has chicken pox again."
In non-crazy-legs-related news, our friends at TF2maps.net have just finished up their Swamp Theme expansion. Head on over and download it today.
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.
Also, we've now added an official feed for harvesting TF2 inventory data for all the folks out there building nifty web pages around items. Technical details are as follows:
- The TF2 client installation now includes tf\scripts\items\items_game.txt. This is the item dictionary most of you have been working with for a while now.
- A JSON feed describing the TF2 items in an account can be reached at this URL:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/<vanity URL>/tfitems?json=1
or
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/<steam ID>/tfitems?json=1
Use the definition indices for item types, attribute types, and quality levels in the JSON feed to index into the items_game.txt dictionary, and you're good to go. Note that it will respect the privacy settings on steam profiles, so it won't report the inventories of players who've marked the profile as private.
