Jul 30, 2008

Team Fortress 2 Update

Categories: PC / Mac

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Hopefully you know the drill by now, as updates go general improvements or fixes aren’t really news worthy and they don’t really affect your gaming experience. While Valve are busy making major changes to the classes of TF2, occassionally in their minor updates they slip in additions that have the potential to change the game too.

That is the case with this latest update, a casual glance down the list will show general house cleaning fixes, but tucked away about half way down is :
“Players killing themselves will now give a kill credit to the last enemy who damaged them”

On the surface this might just seem like a minor adjustment, but it does have the potential to change the outcome of a game. The thing about TF2 is there is a lot of killing and to quote the Heavy class “so much blood!” and up until now a suicide, accident or otherwise had no affect on the team scores.

I am aware that there are people who would rather suicide than get killed and you could argue that is a tactical element to any game but is it fair? From the look of things Valve doesn’t think so, but what about the accidental death like falling from a great height or getting run over by that train on CP_Well?

Is it fair that the opposition should gain from you blundering in front of a locomotive, or not looking when you leap? I suppose the real question is whether or not anyone actually notices the difference and then if it’s deemed unfair.

Team Fortress 2 Update list

Fixed team switches on Attack/Defense maps spamming the console
Fixed the Kritzkrieg not working on servers with crits turned off
Fixed some clipped localized strings in various in-game dialogs
Fixed several cases where files were synchronously loaded while the game was running
Fixed a shutdown crash in the material system
Cached rendering of item model panels to improve performance, in particular while weapon selection was visible
Added a gear symbol behind the health bar for Engineer buildings, in both target IDs and freeze panels
Players killing themselves will now give a kill credit to the last enemy who damaged them
Fixed grenades, rockets, and flamethrower being able to fire through grates at round starts
Fixed players being killed and creating ragdolls during team switches
Fixed various exploits and performance problems in CP_Badlands, CP_Well, and CP_Fastlane
Removed health bonus from the Backburner