Category Archives: Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 – Mac Attack?

4
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 17, 2010 – 9:07 PM
Filed under General, Team Fortress 2

I could provide any number of introductions to this post. I could provide some confirmation that it is indeed the “first” post I’ve made in a while. I could say it’s good to be “back.” But I’ll simply satiate any curiosity by saying I have returned from my extended leave to Antigua. I have no further commentary on the matter.

Or is it there????

Or is it there????

So Team Fortress2 has been ported to Macs! PC users and Mac users will be playing TF2 together. Finally, PC users and Mac users can unite under the tremendous force of the Steam gaming platform in their continuous efforts to virtually butcher their online brethren in the highly inconsequential and extremely fruitless (but somehow satisfying) onslaught known as Team Fortress 2. Right?

Wrong. (That’s right. Bold and italics, motherfucker.)

There are countless reasons that provide for the impossibility of PC users and Mac users uniting (yes, even over TF2). The obvious reason is that human nature simply won’t allow such an armistice—but that’s a bunch of boring philosophical stuff. Let’s look at the real reasons. Let’s look at what the tumorous growth now known as the TF2 Mac community means for PC users that (used to) enjoy TF2.

First off, most Mac users are, for the lack of a more concise description, stupid. Alright, I admit that Apple isn’t quite as no-holds-barred as GEICO is with their “So easy a caveman can do it” advertising, but they’re getting there. Macs are advertised as being “easy to use.” In other words, no matter how stupid you are, no matter how disgustingly comprehensive an options menu bodes for you, a Mac is right for you. Fairly, though, if you’re not convinced of Macs’ subordinate status by now, you’re welcome to read countless articles that eloquently and thoroughly explain the matter by simply Googling the golden phrase: “PC better than Mac.”

For those Mac users in the audience, this influx of stupid players into the TF2 community means that…well…it means there’s going to be an influx of stupid players into the TF2 community. (Yes, stupid compared even to some of the existing players. If you thought the internet was bad already, wait until they let Apple users into it.) The number of bans per server capita will increase tenfold as server administrators face mobs, hordes of inept players.  The number of elitist clans and clan members will spike as normal players begin to (rightfully) develop a sense of superiority and (wrongfully) practice it formally. And as we all fear, the number of games where the players actually know what they’re doing will dwindle even more than it already has with Valve’s efforts to expand the community.

But this update isn’t all bad. The video that goes along with it is actually crafted particularly well. (Leave it to Valve to make a video that you somehow enjoy despite the fact that it idolizes beliefs entirely contrary to your own.) And, finally, the video gives (what one would imagine is) a glimpse of one of the upcoming Engineer weapons. In lieu of further pontification and speculation on the matter I’ll simply provide this screen capture of the aforementioned device for your own viewing and speculating pleasure as any further developments on Valve’s part may compromise the integrity of any such speculation on my part.


Ill bet you never realized the Engineer had such a weird hand until now.

Thank You, Valve

5
Posted by Guitarfreak on December 15, 2009 – 2:32 PM
Filed under General, Team Fortress 2

I’m not sure I can express the unorthodoxy that exists in my support of Valve this past week. Frankly, I’m not used to being for something, because most people generally behave moronically (and oxymoronically, for that matter). For some reason, however, Valve has surpassed, once againm the din of humanity’s incompetence and especially that of the Steam Forums.

The rift drawn between players in the Team Fortress 2 community has tickled me pink. I love the hatred being expressed, the frustration, the anger and the lack of vindication being experienced (or the lack of vindication that they think they’re experiencing) amongst the TF2 community.  And for technical regards, I am greatly satiated by the fact that Valve has, at last, acknowledged that the Soldier is a class that requires little to no skill to play fairly successfully. That’s not to say that everyone playing the Soldier has no skill, it’s simply to say that in order to fare decently in TF2, one could simply play Soldier, regardless of past experience.

What does this recognition mean? Not only was the Demoman outnumbered, but also outgunned; simply put: the Soldier is more powerful, in general. In even plainer speech: the Soldier is “easymode” compared to the Demoman. Valve has squelched all purpose to vomitous forum debates, hate speech and regurgitations regarding the Soldier vs. Demoman issue. The fact of the matter is that the Demoman is a class that requires more grace, more care and, overall, more skill to succeed with.

I could list off reasons why the Demoman is a far more respectable and more challenging class to play, and therefore more deserving of an unlock, but I don’t need to. Valve, the creator of the game, has acknowledged and declared that the Soldier is the “World’s easiest class.”

And of course, one will try to argue that Valve’s newspaper is sarcasm. Of course it is. But a few ounces of foresight and stylistic analysis will reveal that Valve is conveying the fact that, their creation, the Soldier, is a class that requires relatively no skill to succeed with. The entire purpose of Valve’s newspaper is to relay information in a comical, yet informative manner. This one is no exception. The bottom line: the Demoman requires more prowess to do well with than the Soldier does.

In other words: suck it, Soldiers.

What has Valve done?

2
Posted by Guitarfreak on December 12, 2009 – 3:51 PM
Filed under General, Team Fortress 2

DISCLAIMER: The contents of this article might reside in your brain for the rest of your days. And the rest of your life might be increasingly shorter as you read this post, as what I have to tell you, though important, can never be unseen nor unheard. The magnitude of this information is extremely severe. You’ve been warned.

The genius working on the marketing for Team Fortress 2 (and that’s not sarcasm, this guy’s a genius) came up with a way to divide the TF2 community and spark an immense amount of support for the Demoman and the Soldier.

What I can’t help but notice, though, is the parallel being made to the disgusting Twilight Series. Maybe Valve didn’t intend to start such of a disgusting plague of bitter hatred, based around two sides, in the TF2 playerbase, but they’re succeeding in it. This is a plague like we’ve never seen before, a plague in which the Demoman is Robert Pattinson and the Soldier is Taylor Lautner (oh God). A plague in which thousands of thirteen-year-olds stick tags on their name saying “[Team JacobSoldier]” and soon enough, thousands of products will be marketed off of this. Take your pick.

Valve says WAR but I ask Wrrrryyyyyy??

Valve says “WAR” but I say “Wrrryyyyyyy??”

So I ask: Valve, what have you done?

Classless or Clueless?

4
Posted by Guitarfreak on August 15, 2009 – 1:02 PM
Filed under Team Fortress 2

As most of you already know, Valve recently released the Team Fortress 2 “Classless Update”.  Some players are heralding it as a wondrous gift given to them by the Valve Gods, others are making snide remarks about it and it’s supposed lackluster qualities.

Well I have a statement to make: the update DOES suck. But not for the reasons anyone’s talking about. There are some pretty crappy features like the update on Engineers’ teleporters and spies sapping them and the increased advantage for the winning team on plr_pipeline (as if the team stacking on this map wasn’t bad enough), but the worst feature, by far, is the new King of the Hill gamemode.

Valve introduced this KOTH gamemode with the assumption that the TF2 Community would understand it and people would work as a team to capture the hill and protect it and a whole bunch of other common sense crap. But why? The Team Fortress 2 Community can’t even comprehend the current gamemodes let alone an entirely new one. At this point I’m entirely convinced that whoever had the idea at Valve to offer this new gamemode is just as dumb as the majority of the TF2 Community for assuming that a playerbase that lacks so much intelligence, could comprehend so much more than they already don’t. Did you get all that? TF2 players still don’t understand how to block captures, yet Valve implements another capture-point-based gamemode. Before long they’ll have us doing algebra problems.

In-game footage of a RED soldier attempting to stop a BLU capture

In-game footage of a RED soldier attempting to stop a BLU capture

I also heard something about Valve claiming that the Sandman takes away 30% of the Scout’s health when it really takes away 30 health (not 30 percent). It was a while before one player with a calculator made a post pointing it out on the Steam Forums. Either Valve (Chinamen) can’t do math or they thought nobody would notice.

This update would’ve been good, it would’ve been fun if the Team Fortress 2 Community had a majority of players with a decent IQ, but it doesn’t. Valve has good programmers and good designers but they just don’t understand the playerbase. They praise this update as cost-free and “better than expensive”, but while it may not cost any money, I feel as if this update is costing me my sanity whenever I attempt to play Team Fortress 2.

At The Bottom of Everything: =(eGo)=

6
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 27, 2009 – 9:12 PM
Filed under General, Team Fortress 2

Bill Maher once said that in the event that you find yourself on an airplane going down, you should look at the person next to you, go into the bathroom with them and make sweet love. In the event that the plane somehow fixes itself and doesn’t crash, Bill Maher said, you and your partner should both straighten your ties and never speak of the event to anyone, ever.

I’m not sure what the above statement has to do with anything in the post, but I know what the above picture does. You’ll have to excuse my distraught state right now, I just had to explain to my mom what “that’s what she said” means.

The above picture is a policy every community should have. But at the bottom of every (overall) gaming community, there is a community or clan that does the exact opposite of this policy. The groups at the bottom of everything in any game, just say fuck it and embrace the bullshit as much as their twelve year old, Canadian arms will allow them to. I don’t know what’s at the top of everything, but today I’ll provide a little story about what’s at the bottom.

Before I get too far into things, I’ll let one thing be known: The EdgeGamers Organization (eGo) is, by far, the worst, relatively large sized, clan/gaming community currently standing. EdgeGamers Organization is the sheer definition of quantity over quality, because the amount of servers they own and players the amount of players that play on those servers, is the exact amount of quality they don’t possess. (Yeah, I too thought TnB was originally started out as a Garry’s Mod charter of this clan, lets be glad GMod is still safe from them).

The first time I played on an EdgeGamers server was some time ago in Day of Defeat: Source. DoD:S happens to be my favorite game, I like playing it non chalantly, while still being able to express myself freely. During this time on the EdgeGamers server, I was doing quite poorly for whatever reason. I wasn’t in a DoD:S mood. One of my (non-clan member) teammates killed me, and I was aware of their censorship rules so the only thing I could think to yell out at him was, “YOU CHINAMAN!” Now, this was in no direct violation of their rules, as it’s not racist, it’s not a swear word, not disrespectful of the admins, none of that. It was just some silly phrase I thought to yell into my mic at the time. As one could imagine, this made the guy quite mad. He sounded to be about 30ish and he started talking about his time in the army and how he could “kick a Chinaman’s ass all day long.” He began a harsh use of invective while I just remained quiet. After a few minutes a ranking admin with his authoritative “=(eGo)=” tag came in and told the guy to stop. Save for a short, stupid exchange between the teamkiller and the admin, the guy wasted no time permanently banning me from the server. The interesting part is the reason he banned me: indirectly causing other players to break clan rules.

There exists no synonym, no better word, no other adjective to describe this action than just plain stupid. Do I even need to talk about the stupidity here? Their rules are so arduous and bureaucratic to begin with as they include censorship, requiring players to show more respect for admins than they would normally show to other players and preemptive banning. I should’ve gotten a medal just for putting up with their stupid rule system, let alone being banned for causing someone else to break them.

Aside from this instance of stupidity, EdgeGamers servers just suck. Most of the admins and moderators are complete, self righteous assholes who are either way too old or way too young to be playing whatever game they’re playing, and most of the members are self righteous assholes who act even more self righeous in the hopes of becoming an admin.

With this in mind, everyone playing Day of Defeat, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, Call of Duty 4 or Insurgency should boycott eGo servers. If you don’t want to do that then go troll them or say “hell” or “shit” and get yourself banned, because if you can somehow stand to be on their servers for more than five minutes at least make it hard on them.

And remember kids, bullshit is bad, stay away from it. If you know someone who’s in an EdgeGamers division or thinking joining, do anything in your power to stop them. Show them this, show them chat logs from TnB members, do SOMETHING. If anyone has stories of this or other eGO related shennanigans, post them below and maybe you’ll get a medal.

There IS a sign on my garage that says, “Dead Ringer Storage”

0
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 24, 2009 – 9:52 PM
Filed under Team Fortress 2

That’s right folks, the Team Fortress 2 server is up. It’s on a standard map rotation with default maps with vanilla settings so far. I plan to keep the server pretty standard as a lot of mods take up space and appeal to a smaller audience. As always, however, I’m open to suggestions. Without further ado:

Dead Ringer Storage

Dead Ringer Storage

If anyone wants admin they can contact me or TKFT. We’re pretty lax right now and don’t have some dubious admin application or donation process to go to. So if you like the server and frequent it feel free to ask. (As long as we need admins.)

For those of you unfamiliar…

Is there a sign that says Dead Ringer storage on my garage?

1
Posted by Guitarfreak on June 4, 2009 – 9:46 PM
Filed under Garry's Mod, Team Fortress 2

Finally, as it has been spoken of for quite a while, Our Benefactors is getting a Team Fortress 2 server. The server will go up on or around June 20th and will have the same IP address as the Garry’s Mod server. As such, the Garry’s Mod server will be going down. This is largely due to the slowing playerbase, along with the fact that I’ve neither the mettle nor the determination to maintain it any longer. More on that later. Regarding the server, perhaps it will return some day, perhaps it won’t. The concept plot below will be addressed at a later time. Overall, everyone can look forward to enjoying the angst of the new weapon lottery system in Team Fortress 2 on an OB server.