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Today marks the 119th (or so) update to Team Fortress 2.
We think that calls for a celebration.
To coincide with today's update, we are pleased to announce that our friends at The IP Factory will be releasing a limited edition collector's statue of the Heavy, which is the first in their 12 inch Team Fortress 2 line of collectible statues. The Heavy will come in both BLU and RED team versions and numbers are strictly limited.
The IP Factory will begin accepting Heavy statue pre-orders on Monday 3rd May 9.00am.
To grab a sneak peak of the Heavy statue in all of his glory visit their website at www.gamingheads.com.
Today we're shipping some significant changes to the item drop system.
What are the net effects of these changes? Here's the quick summary:
We're still thinking about how to allow you to influence your drops. When we see discussions on the forums, people often ask why we don't tie it to some in-game performance (like your scoreboard position, or number of kills, etc). Many players understand that if we did this, idle servers would simply change into servers running plugins that generate those in-game events frequently (as we saw in the Soldier & Demoman WAR!).
There's another side of it that we care about just as much, which is the message it would send to all the players who don't want to idle. Any in-game performance metric we chose would result in there being specific maps, classes, tactics, and so on that resulted in more drops. We really don't want that to happen. When it's simply playtime, you're free to play the game however you like. If you love Payload, you can play Payload maps without worrying about whether you're earning less drops than the guys playing Arena maps. Community mapmakers don't have to worry about whether their maps earn item drops fast enough. Similarly, server operators can configure their servers however they like, without worrying about reducing the rate at which their players are earning drops. In short, while it's far from perfect, not tying to in-game performance is a lot less poisonous to your minute-to-minute game experience.
At Valve, we like to play games made by other people, mainly because a) we don't have to make them, and b) they're generally more fun than ours anyway. In particular, games made by other people don't have Pyros named Eric Smith, who makes our collective lives miserable on a daily basis in playtests. (If you ever wonder why features like "Pyro now gets assists for airblasting enemies into environmental hazards" keep getting added to the game, thank Eric. Not content with killing us by just holding down W+M1, he persists in finding bold new ways to get points by any means necessary.)
It turns out that not only do we play other games--other game developers play ours. Last year Telltale Games' TF2 Team went head to head with us in the TF2 Studio Rumble tournament, in the process dominating our own Adrian Finol so hard that he made up an excuse about "picking up my kids somewhere" and went and sat in his car for an hour. After the match, we all agreed that one of these days we should do something cool together, because they're big fans of TF2, and we're big fans of getting advance copies of Sam & Max episodes.
Fast forward to now, and doodly-doodly-doot: We're doing something cool together. To celebrate the release of The Penal Zone, the first episode in Sam & Max's new adventure, The Devil's Playhouse, the Telltale team has provided us with some awesome TF2 items. We're going to give them out to everyone who buys The Penal Zone in the next week.
That's right: one week only. It's like the Soldier medal all over again, except this time you have no excuse about being too asleep in bed to download it in time. The items:
Max's Severed Head
Just a quick update to point out some of the fantastic community activity out there that gets emailed to us every so often. Hopefully you're aware of some of it already. If not, you're in for a treat.
In the past we've shipped features that came from community suggestions. Now we've taken it one step further: we're shipping game content that was directly built by the community.
Today's TF2 update includes a bunch of new items and weapons, all of which were made by members of the TF2 community and uploaded to the Contribute! site. The overall quality of submissions we're receiving is fantastic, by the way, so there'll be plenty of new additions to follow. The submitters of these items will find nifty unique versions sitting in their backpacks, so they can show everyone their work.
This is really exciting for us here at Valve. Starting from our core belief that entertainment products should be services, we've tried to increase the set of ways our community can impact our games, and the ways in which we can reward you for it. From the implementation of features requested by players and mapmakers, to unique community items given to valuable community contributors, to the purchasing and shipping of popular maps, to the ARG-style product announcement of Portal 2, we've tried to include our players in the ongoing challenge of improving our games and their communities.
This update represents the next step in that process. The line between developers and players is getting very blurry, and we think that's a great thing.
