Did you guys seriously love grinding non-intuitive achievements that much?

I played for about three hours last night; I got one drop. That's not a lot, but with the old system I'd need to get 12 achievements in 3 hours. If I wanted to do THAT I'd have to go to an achievement server, and I don't think anyone agrees that those goddamn monstrosities are good for the game.

I want the Huntsman because it looks like it might make Sniping actually kind of fun. I don't want to have to play Sniper incredibly poorly for 80 hours slowly grinding out achievements to get there. The chance to just randomly get the Huntsman while I play a class I am good at and enjoy is a godsend to me.

(and if you really think there's no reason the backpack lets you have duplicate items, you're not much of a creative thinker. Say it with me: personalized weapons.)

The drop I got, incidentally, was the Axtinguisher, which I already had. Oddly, I am not infuriated by this!

No achievement servers for me and I have all the unlocks for pyro, heavy, and medic (still haven't managed any for scout since I'm lame and only play on dustbowl). :(

Also, since nobody posted it, here's the changes they put in with the new game. I'm going to bold the ones I find most exciting/interesting.

So glad they turned off inputting sounds from .wav files. Now if only they'll do similar stuff for muting players and whatnot in L4D...

I'd love to see what exactly these silly gibs look like.

What are you talking about? I've had 4 bows and a 2nd scout drink so far, I can understand what you're saying about yet more rpg elements and everyone having a custom character, but it would help if you could actually choose which weapon slot the item was used in, for now the duplicates are pretty useless.

The real game breaker for me will be if they take even more inspiration from mmorpgs by adding multiple versions of the same weapon and one completly dwarfs the others in terms of how good it is, but hopefully that will never happen.

I never used any achievement servers, but I did auto-unlock all the equipment from previous updates with SAM. I'll be damned if I'm going to grind for that shit.

I find using enemy teles interesting in theory, but how often will you get to do it? At best this is a good way to quickly locate their tele EXITS so as to camp them, stabbity stab stab

Blutsauger > Needlegun

Oops, game broken, oh no, go home, cry

Meanwhile, on the TF2 blog, they confirm:

- Item trading. This is why you're finding duplicates.

Apparently I'm not explaining well enough, I was talking about if they decided to make different versions of the same weapon i.e. a level 10 Blutsauger for example instead of a level 5 that does something like +10 health per hit. It's one thing making the weapons unlockable based on luck, but a rarity thing like that would be going too far imo.

edit: Well by some kind of good luck I got all the weapons today, and I've seen players with the medic, engie, scout and pyro hats. Although it has to be said valves attempts to remove the need for achievement servers has only created overnight afk servers instead:

YouTube Video

I'll admit I didn't like this system at first, but as long as they don't do things like versions of the blutsauger from levels 1 to 10 I no longer have complaints with it.

Well they finally fixed the Ambassador after a day of it being completely unusable.

It does 100 damage a headshot now instead of a measly 45 damage (which I'm to understand a regular revolver shot did more damage than that). Only problem is, I think they lowered the accuracy of the gun, unless a pyro's head is just litterally impossibly to hit.

Speaking of which, I'm really on ends about how they gave a sniper a few added strengths against spies, whereas spies did not receive one decent item to help combat pyros. You could argue that the Dead Ringer is suppose to deter pyros from constantly flaming you, but what pyro in this game stops flaming after someone dies? It's just a minor complaint from my end, because I love the spy class so much. I know there has to be anti-classes, but I would have given up the ambassador for some flame resistant oil or something to that extent.

Other than that the update hasn't been too awfully bad, but I think that's because I've gotten lucky and got a few good drops after about a day's worth of game time.

I'm kinda meh about all spy unlocks, but spy really isn't my class of choice anyway. I got the propeller beanie for the pyro though, which is awesome.

With the Dead Ringer / Ambassador combined Spies got a massive boost and if not for their inherent weaknesses to paranoiacs setting everything on fire they might be too powerful (well, as powerful as Spies can be with FF turned off).

I'm routinely getting 8-stab-lives with this shit as it is, god knows how long I could just keep running around if ma petit chaud-fleur wasn't igniting random empty corners.

As far as snipers getting bonuses against spies, it doesn't matter too much. The new class of aggro rushing bow snipers just plug arrows into everyone they see regardless of class, and rifle devotees will continue to be a smorgasbord of exposed spines just as they always have been. The offset is that by rushing bow snipers make themselves much more vulnerable to enemies that haven't traditionally been able to bother them (like heavies).

Most chatter I've seen has been pretty negative about the Razorback anyway. Your typical autistic 2fort battlements sniper hates it because it does not entirely negate the need to occasionally put the scope down, and so they consider it useless.

Cloack and Dagger is a definate improvement, Ambassador is ok but it puzzles me why it's the only weapon in the game that can't damage engie buildings, but I'm still getting to grips with the dead ringer.

Unless their engineers are alone and/or the team is incredibly newbish it seems to have more negatives then positives. It encourages you to play spy badly since you have almost no cloack so you try to use fake death more, it gives lots of sound related clues to the other team that you're using one, and also because it does what I thought was impossible, make the other team even more paranoid about spies then they were already.

I'm liking some of the little details they added. If you look carefully the sniper now has a scar on his left cheek from the cut he got in Meet the Spy. The fact that backstabbing a sniper now results in him reaching for the knife in his back before collapsing is cool too. It's just like the animation shown way back in the class introduction teaser video.

Of course there are some not-so-great changes too. The scout's new noodle-leg doublejump animation is particularly lolworthy.

I managed to get the huntsman the other day, Pang. It's okay, but I don't know if anything can make sniping fun. It is a lot better for the mid range sniper because of how fast you can move and charge up using it, though.

I actually never minded the achievement unlocks because I tended to branch out and play a lot of different classes anyways, so it was just a matter of putting my mind to it in order to get the item I figured I'd need. Plus there was the actual sense of achievement when I got it all done.

Unlocks aside, I hear the second hats are set up for the next update. Highlights include a Russian snow hat for the heavy, and a chef's hat for the pyro.

Scout's legs have always been wacky as hell because of the way the double jump works. I've taken plenty of killcam shots of the scout kicking his own groin, or breaking his spine. Silly scout.

Well that takes care of the Ambassador gripe I had. Weird that valve decides to change the system again now, I somehow managed to get nearly all the hats from a unknown glitch during the week which gave me about 30 items in the space of a few minutes. I doubt that has anything to do with it, but it does mean achievement servers will be back in full force methinks =P

so i am guessing that there's no dedicated server and scheduled playtime (ie days-of-week + time) for GFF? ;)

how do you guys meet?

So notes on the new patch!

Hm. I wonder if that goes the same for the FAN and the leafblower. If so, that changes spychecking quite a bit.

You forgot to quote 1 other thing, the sandman no longer stuns uber charges. Now those serious buissness elitist tourny fags can rejoice and unban the weapon on their servers! Not that it's even that useful any more =P

Yeah, I was pretty surprised they did that one. I'm pretty disappointed by their removal of methods for spy checking. Whenever I was wary I could always hit someone with my blautsauger to see if I got some health. I wonder if they made it so stabbing a spy with your ubersaw doesn't give you ubercharge?

Yep, they made it that way as well, and from the way it sounds a LOT of medics are now pissed that they can't charge their ubers off the ridiculously easy bait that are disguised spies.

I play the spy class a lot, I love it, and in reality I couldn't care less if the ubersaw charged or not on hit, but its when medics cry that "they can't get uber charge off of 'bad spies'", that just irks the shit out of me.

Bad spies, by their definition, are spies that get killed in TF2.

I agree with it to be honest, but I don't agree with all that good spy/bad spy talk, even the best spies get busted by people just randomly attacking everything in the game. There is ammo almost anywhere so you can randomly shoot any corner, attack anyone on sight, besides detecting any spy is easy enough, so I never understood that whole point of "great" spies that never get killed or seen. to be honest if you never run into anyone you are probably not doing anything, I can also cloak all day in my spawn and not die, doubt it makes me good.

I think there are enough methods to catch spies currently, I think the spy is a very difficult class to handle, balance wise, since they want to make infiltration difficult, but not completely impossible.

I'm with snorlax on that, especially on increased max player servers. Less skilled bored players on those kind of matches have a tendancy to switch to pyro, which then results in about 3+ pyros per team and nasty random pyro spam, making the spy suddenly almost useless on some maps because of totally defended map chokepoints.

Going back to the topic of unlockables I've tested an idle program in an attempt to reclaim some hats that were given to me from a glitch on steams end. It also logs all the other users using the program per minute with their rewards and the figures are actually quite scary.

With often over 8000 users using the program I've never once seen the hat rewards go higher then 3 people per minute (normally less then that) in rpg terms that has to be something like less then a 1% chance of getting a hat! I know the hats have no effect on gameplay, but if taking a page from an mmorpgs book of timewasting item finding like this is a sign of things to come, then I can see a lot of players being pissed off in the future.

So recently people who didn't use idler type program got a fancy halo.

Team Fortress 2 Honesty Will Be Rewarded (With Halos!) - Team Fortress 2 - Kotaku

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/image...x_tf2_halo.jpg

Slightly old news by now, but this thread hasn't been updated in a while, and I've started playing it again, so there you go. I can confirm the halos are in-game, as I got them soon after starting up.

I love how most people who didn't receive one are being douches about it and most people who did are likewise bickering and boasting.

I didn't get one and I don't give a fuck. My only issue with the whole debacle is the amount of childish shit that it's left in its wake.