Team Fortress 2 - Heavy Update, New Maps, New Mode are all live now!

Geese_Pants · February 1, 2010, 9:55am

GG’s all…had to go combat medic at times.

My rocket jumping needs alot of work though.

Irennicus · February 1, 2010, 12:02pm

Whatevs. I’ll main Scout next week and see what happens.

imo

Also, I got 1st on points once and 2nd like 6 times. I got ‘third’ twice while tying for second. I had a pretty good round.

Irennicus · February 2, 2010, 2:46am

Also, does anyone here know of a good server to go to that has a bunch of community maps? I’m talking good maps, not the off-the-wall kinda shit.

Geese_Pants · February 2, 2010, 2:54am

Regarding custom maps…I really dislike that toytown map.

Irennicus · February 2, 2010, 3:29am

And WTF is up with the mario kart map? How is that shit even popular? Dumbest map I’ve ever played in an FPS, ever.

FluffyM · February 2, 2010, 4:49am

Some good custom maps to try are:
cp_obscure_rc1, cp_gullywash, cp_freight, cp_labor.

They’re all quite polished for custom maps and play very well. Labor may be an exception but it has a special place in my heart.

Mario kart and orange maps aren’t meant to be played, mario kart is explained below and orange maps were there to show mappers how to do certain things, map-prototypes if you will- people just play them because they like deathmatching and because they are bad at the game.

MURPHAGATOR · February 2, 2010, 4:49am

I happen to know the guy who made the mariokart map (well, know through the internet), and, like most of the maps that guy made, it was more designed as an art project and a proof of concept of a couple things rather than an actual compeditive map. The first several versions of the map didn’t even have an actual goal, and just went on endlessly until a server admin or moderator forced a map change.

Gasp · February 2, 2010, 5:36am

wait that map has a goal?

Hara · February 2, 2010, 6:34am

Mario Kart is a joke map. It’s not meant for any sort of serious match, only for “funtime” servers.

May favorite custom map? The Symmetrical Control Point map “CP_Lazytown_Lazynite”. It may drag on rather long, but each cap lends to it’s own offense/defense strategy.

Pimp_Willy · February 4, 2010, 2:09am

I was glad to see that my favorite rocket jumping soldier woman won a runner up place. Most of them were pretty good! Awesome contest valve.

Anybody from here manage to win anything?

Tweleve · February 16, 2010, 8:21pm

What time do you guys usually go on? I was in the server briefly yesterday and it was empty :3

Geese_Pants · February 16, 2010, 9:27pm

Sunday evenings…

Hara · February 16, 2010, 10:21pm

We should just give up and make it a public server. Nobody is ever on.

Geese_Pants · February 24, 2010, 8:27pm

A Brand New Steam.

Has anyone come across this…signed up for the beta?
Is that why I have no Friends list anymore?

Pimp_Willy · February 25, 2010, 7:34am

Yeah I opted into it, but my friends list went away sometime yesterday; it came back after a few hours though. They were fixing that shit.

Are there still sunday games? Superbowl and stuff really threw off my schedule for sunday TF2

FluffyM · February 25, 2010, 10:14am

Quite buggy atm, would recommend against using it yet.

MaDWaK · March 9, 2010, 4:16am

ooh shit. Finally!!! im hype.
http://tf2.com/post.php?id=3539

tf2blog:

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.

DeathReaper47 · March 9, 2010, 4:28am

UGH Engineer update. Time to break out the Direct Hit

Irennicus · March 9, 2010, 5:00am

Man, and to think that I’ve just now stopped playing TF2 for BFBC2. I’d be interested to play once the update goes live but to be honest I think that this is the most likely class to become completely imba if they update it even slightly incorrectly.

spudlyff8fan · March 9, 2010, 6:22am

Well, Iunno how much any of you played the console versions of TF2…but the patches they made to the engineers are so subtle, yet so important. In the very first version of TF2, which can still be seen on the PS3, the level 1 sentry was insanely overpowered. A pair of level 1 sentries was more than enough to defend an area in 2fort. An unattended level 1 sentry vs a heavy was a pretty fair matchup. Pre-level-up teleporters were near-useless, and they would often be completely neglected, simply because they didn’t teleport fast enough to reinforce a position for long (depending on the game mode, of course).

So indeed, a teeny tweak in the Engineer can totally fuck the game over.