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Steam SupportVisit the support site for any issues you may be having with the game or Steam.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
