Valve has made yet more changes to the core gameplay of Team Fortress 2, the latest update reducing explosive reserve ammo.

It’s seems Valve felt that the Demoman and the Soldier had an unfair advantage with all that excess ammo they were carrying around with them. To balance the classes a little more they’ve slashed the reserve ammo for both classes by roughly half their original amounts.

The soldier can now only carry a maximum of 16 rockets and the demoman can only carry 16 sticky bombs and 24 standard grenades. At first i thought “they can’t do that!”, but after thinking about it some more the ammo cut does make sense and should make running around as either class a little less haphazard and a bit more cautionary. Without the ammo safety blanket players should be a bit more selective about what the shoot at.

Besides when you think about it, you probably wont be around long enough to blow your load anyway.

Full update details below.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Added “Custom” tab to the server browser

• Servers can now specify metatags describing the custom rules they’ve adopted
• Players can use tag filtering to find servers running the custom rules they want to play
• Added options for servers who want to become custom games: Disable critical hits (tf_weapon_criticals), eliminate respawn times (mp_disable_respawn_times), and raise maxplayers above 24

Initial release of Tournament mode (mp_tournament)

• UI for handling team naming, ready mode, and win results
• Disables team player limits, autobalancing, and intermission

Class balancing

• Reduced Soldier’s maximum rocket reserve ammo from 36 to 16
• Reduced Demoman’s maximum sticky bomb reserve ammo from 30 to 16
• Reduced Demoman’s maximum grenade launcher reserve ammo from 40 to 24

General

• Added protection against voice command spamming. Dramatic reduction in teleporters needed
• Fixed mp_timelimit ending the map during the middle of a round on maps like Dustbowl and GravelPit
• Fixed “lastdisguise” command not remembering if you were disguised as your own team
• Added “Toggle Disguise Team” binding in Options->Keyboard to toggle the disguise team for the Spy’s PDA
• Changed PDA menus to accept keys bound to “slot1″, “slot2″, etc., and “slot10″ cancels
• Fixed Spectator targetID not using team colors
• Changed team autobalance code to not balance the teams when the active round timer shows less than 60 seconds
• Fixed “-maxplayers” on the command line not correctly setting the maxplayers value for the server
• Fixed Badlands never having Sudden Death triggered
• Fixed Engineer being able to detonate buildings that are being sapped
• Changed Engineer buildings to detonate when a player disconnects instead of blinking out
• Fixed potential client crash for players being healed by a Medic or dispenser
• Made several improvements to server-side stat reporting (not related to individual player stats)