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February 25, 2009 - TF Announcer

Honestly.

Please, do take a cursory glance at the missive directly below this one. Take care to notice its author, and the dismally recent date of its posting.

Now imagine how profound my disappointment, to be called back again so soon to administer justice to the melon-headed few of you who persist in fraudulence. I'd just sat down with the two things I enjoy most in life — the most recent issue of Punishment Monthly and a carton of cigarettes — when the alarm sounded. I feel like a dog owner who's rubbed her pet's nose in a mess on the carpet, only to turn around and discover it setting fire to the drapes.

This time it seems a number of you used an external application to unlock all of your achievements in order to get items unfairly. Coming as a surprise to no one with the ability to retain memories of the recent past, I have taken these items from the perpetrators for one week.

Can I trust that this episode has finally taught you a lesson? I should live so long. Having watched how the sorry lot of you comport yourselves on the battlefield and in the forums, I would consider it a small miracle to trust one of you enough to lick stamps without asphyxiating.

My magazine awaits.

The Administrator

February 18, 2009 - TF Announcer

It saddens me that despite my best efforts to instruct and better you, some of you insist on finding new ways to fail.

We have sounded the alert and released a quick fix for an exploit that some unscrupulous players were using to wield items on invalid classes. I have considered an appropriate punishment for the good-for-nothings responsible for this horrendous breach of conduct. Death, of course - but death is too good for disappointments such as these. Instead, their unlockable items have been removed for a month.

To the majority of you who did not see fit to cheat, you have my congratulations: I await the countless other ways you will inevitably disappoint me in the future.

Yours,
The Administrator

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.