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February 17, 2009 - Robin Walker

The news you've all been waiting for: The Scout Update!

Also, we released an update yesterday with a change that needs some clarification. The update notes said this:

• Sticky bombs now get a reduced close range damage ramp up (like Rocket Launcher & Syringe Gun)

From the response we got, there's some confusion around this, so we thought it'd be good to do a post that explained what's going on here.

In TF2, almost all damage done to players is modified based on the distance from the player to the enemy who did the damage. There are several reasons why this is done, but the general purpose of it is that it makes close combat resolve faster than long range combat, giving approaching players more time to make tactical decisions (like whether to engage or retreat). The ramp centers around the 512 units (roughly 40 feet) range, and linearly remaps damage done from 150% at 0 units down to 50% at >1024 units. So if you're fighting someone closer than 512 units, you're doing extra damage.

Sticky bombs have an additional complexity on top of this: they use the distance modification for the first 5 seconds of their life, and then turn it off. This is because it's generally a dual purpose weapon: used offensively like a rocket launcher, and defensively to create traps. The 5 second rule essentially means distance matters in the offensive mode, but not at all in the defensive. So if you're a trap laying Demoman, you don't need to get near the stickies when you set them off.

So, yesterdays update reduced the amount of bonus damage that the stickies earned at close range during that first 5 seconds of their life. Their old distance-based damage ramp range was 150% -> 50% variance around the base 120 damage, and the update reduced that to 115% -> 50%. Here's a handy graph with the details, and it shows how the remap only affects damage closer than 512 units.

Why did we do this? We didn't think that the Demoman was overpowered at medium & long ranges, where the charge up time provides an existing penalty. If we did a straight damage reduction across the board, we would affect that. In addition, by weakening the Demoman specifically at short range, we've created a weakness that enemies can take advantage of in combat, and makes the Demoman wary of specific enemy classes (like the Scout and Pyro).

February 4, 2009 - Greg Cherlin

On Tuesday we shipped an update that added a bunch of features / bugfixes / balancing tweaks that came out of the community's feedback. In particular, it made some changes to the underlying TF damage system, and as part of that, it modified the way critical hits are determined. We thought it might be interesting to dig a little into the change, and hopefully give you some insight into our thinking.

First, a quick primer on how the critical hit system works. Each player's chance of successfully rolling for a critical hit depends on two factors:

• A base chance, which is fixed per weapon (2% for all non-melee weapons, 15% for melee)
• An additional bonus, which is based on the amount of damage you've done to enemies in the last 20 seconds. This bonus linearly scales with damage up to a maximum of 10%.

There are two paradigms used for when to roll, and what happens on success:

• Rapid-fire weapons roll for critical hits once per second, instead of every shot. If they roll a crit, the next 2 seconds worth of their fire are marked as critical hits.
• Non-rapid fire weapons roll for critical hits each time you fire, and if they roll a crit, only that shot is marked as a critical hit.
• The sniper rifle and spy knife only score critical hits on headshots and backstabs respectively. They never roll for critical hits.

We had a few things we wanted to change with the old system:

• Reduce the overall number of critical hits occurring in the game.
• Make critical hits more skill / performance based.

Here are the actual changes we made, taken from the release notes:

• Base critical hit chance is now 2% (was 5%)
• Bonus range based on damage done changed from 0%-15% to 0%-10
• Damage range required for bonus changed from 0-1600 to 0-800

Lets dig a little deeper into these. First, the base critical hit chance was reduced from 5% to 2%. This means that if you haven't done any damage to an enemy, your crit chance is now just under half what it was previously. Secondly, the size of the bonus range was reduced by a third, but the amount of damage needed to earn that bonus was halved. To understand the effect of that, it's useful to graph it:

As you can see, the new crit chance is slightly lower across the board, which we wanted. More importantly though, is that the rate at which the crit chance increases based on the amount of recent damage you've done. We like to think of that recent damage total as a rough measure of your performance.

In thinking about the change we wanted to make to critical hits, we decided that there was a point on the graph of particular interest to us, and that was the point at which your critical hit chance was as much a result of your performance as it was the base chance. If you look at at (A) on the old line, you'll see that point isn't reached until you've done 550 recent damage, a feat that occurs about as often as our backstab code works correctly. That point is reached at (B) on the new line, around the point where you've done 175 recent damage. This means that if you've just singlehandedly killed an enemy Demoman/Soldier/Pyro/Heavy, your next 20 seconds worth of crit chances are already more a result of that kill than the base chance. As a result, if you're a highly skilled player, you're going to fire significantly more critical hits than those around you. And remember, if you've just killed 2 or 3 enemies, now's the time to push!

January 28, 2009 - Robin Walker

The Scout was one of the first TF2 classes we worked on when we decided to try out a more stylized approach to the game. As a result, his concept art is further afield, and in the eyes of our artists, much more embarrassing. This might be exacerbated by their desire to not have people looking at a piece of their artwork and not liking it, from an artistic point of view. Concept art has a different purpose than that, and so the effort to make it look great is usually unnecessary. In short, there's a special place in hell that all our artists hope we'll go to for showing you their concept art.

Dhabih threatened us in various ways not to show anyone his Scout concepts, so we told him we wouldn't do that. Luckily, he doesn't read the internet much, preferring to spend his time sipping lattes at locally owned organic vegan coffee shops, so if you don't tell him you've seen this concept art, we won't.

January 27, 2009 - Robin Walker

We're just about done with the Scout pack, and our design and coding has already moved on to the next pack. The weapons and achievements are all nailed down, and we just have to finish up the final artwork on them. We like to do the final art as late as possible to ensure that we don't waste any work, which turned out to be a good decision this time around due to the large number of unlockables we tried out as alternatives to the Scattergun. Balancing his replacement weapon has been very tricky due to large threat difference of the Scout between skilled and non-skilled hands. More on that soon.

In the meantime, here's a few answers to some questions we get regularly:

"When's the next update going to be out?"

• We've got an update that should be out tomorrow with a bunch of bug & exploit fixes. Later this week we hope to have another update out that changes the way we store your unlockable items. You shouldn't notice much difference, other than if you play on multiple computers we'll now propagate your item choices. You can think of that update as the one that moves your inventory into the Steam Cloud. Once that's out of the way, we'll be able to ship the Scout pack.

"Why did you change the minigun's muzzle flash away from the original one shown in Meet the Heavy?"

• That muzzle flash was one of the earliest effects that we put in the game and it was done before our new particle system was in place. As we moved forward with the effects we decided that such a cartoony hard-edged look to the effects didn't help the readability of the overall game. If the muzzle flashes and all the effects had well defined edges, they would visually compete with the rest of the TF2 world and the players. So it was decided that the effects should be much softer than the rest of the game so as to not overwhelm an already visually dense game.

"Why should I use Natascha? And doesn't she only do 66% damage, not 75%?"

• You're correct, there was a bug that caused her to lose 0.75 damage off each individual bullet she fired. She spits out so many bullets that a tiny amount like that added up to a significant difference. Tomorrow's update will fix that, and also includes a slight boost to the amount of slowdown she delivers. Our internal playtesters have been finding her much more useful, especially on the large number of Scouts running around with new toys.

"Why is the Sniper such a fake Australian? Aren't several members of the TF2 team Australian?"

• Yes, it's true, the Sniper is a fairly unconvincing Australian. Most of his lines make him sound more English than Australian, and the voice actor is clearly an English actor faking an Australian accent. As for why we didn't fight to make him more authentic, we though it was appropriate that he was about as convincing an Australian as the Demoman is a Scotsman, or the Medic a German.

December 10, 2008 - Robin Walker

We've been pretty quiet lately, but thankfully, that's about to end. In the next few days we'll have an update out that has a couple of new features for the Engineer and Spy, and a variety of other smaller fixes.

• Teleporters will be upgradeable to level 3. As the teleporter is upgraded, the cooldown will decrease.
• Dispensers will be upgradeable to level 3. They will heal faster and generate metal faster as they are upgraded.
• Spies will be able to recharge their cloaking ability by picking up ammo off of the ground.
• We've made a bunch of minor changes by adding particle systems and upgrading the HUD to show things like deaths by critical hits, players that are overhealed, and giving more information to medics when people are calling for them.

These are just to work on some class balance and depth issues that we've seen in the wild with these two classes, but aren't meant to replace their entire class packs. They will be getting more attention further down the road.



While that's in testing, we're off working on several things that folks have been emailing us about, so we thought it'd be good to provide some detail:

• The next class pack will be the Scout. One of the main goals we're focusing on for him has been to provide tools that make him useful in maps like Dustbowl & Goldrush. If you have any ideas for what you think would work well, post them over on the Team Fortress 2 Forum and we'll take a look.
• We are actively working on a massive XBox 360 update, which will include pretty much everything we've shipped on the PC in the last year. We'll provide you with a rough date when we have one.
• We're also working on bringing over a variety of engine improvements from Left 4 Dead into the TF2 engine, but it won't be a wholesale replacement of the engine. This means we'll get some of L4D's performance improvements, like the better multicore support, but not all of them. For example, we can't bring over some improvements without dropping support for DX8, which we're not prepared to do.