TOM FRANCIS
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Plan B Is Live

The first entries of my new GalCiv2 diary are now online, and new ones will go up three times a week from now until the heat death of the universe. You can read the whole thing if you’re able and willing to get the UK edition of PC Gamer, which subscribers are receiving nowish and shops are getting in on Thursday.

It comes as a pocket-sized book for convenient reading on trains, planes and buses, to leave lying around on tiny coffee tables, or, since it is nearly black, for giving the impression that you have 15,000 words’ worth of ex-girlfriends’ contact details on file. In fact, because the cover bears the title “PLAN B”, particularly credulous observers may conclude that this is your second of two such books, containing only your deprioritised relapse hookup candidates.

In fact it is a story about me trying to bring a vast galaxy to peace, despite my slightly hot-headed approach to interstellar diplomacy and a chronic lack of patience. The species I created for this are distantly related to the angry warmongers I played as for the last one, since they are both essentially me and I haven’t mellowed particularly in the last year.

Update!

CVG, the site I wrote this diary on, is gone forever. PC Gamer have all the text and images, and are gonna put them back up at some point, don’t know when though.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume One

Sound is sort of a menace on the internet – we browse at work, we browse when we’re tired, we browse when other people in the house are asleep, and sometimes we browse shortly after watching a video whose sound was really really quiet, so we’ve turned up the volume really, really loud. And there are some sites, people and link-sources that you can’t trust not to point you to something loud, obscene, offensive, terrifying or Rick Astley. Even the venerable Waxy.org is guilty: Andy once posted one of those links where everything seems normal, then a giant zombie face appears and screams at the top of your speaker’s volume.

I would like James to be trustworthy. I hope that it already is for a small portion of the people reading this. So I’d like to leverage, possibly confirm, and possibly expand such a trust by occasionally posting sound files with absolutely no explanation. I think it would be nice to sometimes hear something without any clue what it’s going to be, only that someone thought it was worth sharing, and do so knowing that it’s not going to be a nasty shock.

They will sometimes be speech, sometimes just sound, sometimes music, but when they’re music, the music itself won’t be why I’m posting it. Music is too divisive, I want these things to be interesting or entertaining independent of your tastes. Sometimes you’ll find out what they are when you listen, sometimes they’ll leave you with no clue. I’ll wait a few days then explain what they were in the comments, so don’t read the comments before listening.

I hope you’ll also trust that I would not find embedding a Rick Roll at the end of this post even vaguely amusing.

He Looks Truly Mortified

Sorry Peanut, I know you were in the middle of your own taunty thing. But I had to try the Heavy’s kill-o-taunt.

I’ve also been punching people’s blood out a lot more lately, and can now see the point of the KGB. If you’re not familiar with Team Fortress 2 and its unlockables, that sentence may have sounded strange.

Having the Sandvich cleverly lures you into the business of punching, because your fists are now your only backup weapon. That in turn makes you realise it’s more viable than you’d expect, and suddenly the idea of getting a bonus for doing it is rather tempting. Five seconds is a long time in 100% critsville – switching to Natascha and spinning up probably only takes one and a halfish.

Lumber Yard Wallpapers

Want to feel like you’re in Valve’s new alpine vistas without actually having to play Arena mode? Then sir, I can save you seconds of effort. Click for big.

Edit: That big blue space looked like it needed some banner text to me, so I knocked up an alternate version for those of us whose cup of tea the new mode is not:

If Valve would like my permission to use this poster in their marketing materials or to otherwise promote the game, they are most welcome.

Heavy Update Thoughts So Far

I know it’s just because it’s early days, but I haven’t hit a single impenetrable Sentry nest, and the alternate routes are deliciously labyrinthine. It feels teeming with nooks and crannies to hide out in, recharge and take an unexpected angle from. And I love having a section of track that runs underneath the main play area. Tim and I skewered the enemy team repeatedly as they tried to escort the cart through that underground tunnel, he as a Sniper from the front, I as a Spy from the back.

I thought at first it was just a superior Spy map, but I played it solely as Heavy for some time today, and it was among the most fun I’ve ever had as that class. In fact, for the first time in ten months, I broke my all-time score record. 36 points from 16 kills as a Spy defending stage 3 of Dustbowl, replaced by 37 points and 16 kills assaulting Badwater Basin as a Heavy with incalculable aid from Doctor Graham Smith. I think we survived the entire round, and were with the cart almost every metre of the way. Cap score grind plus plus.

I know, I know, you’ve got 48 kills as an Engineer and 39 as a Demo – shut up.

Chris sums up a lot of what saddens me about this mode very eloquently at 1Fort – the lows are as low as Sudden Death, but the highs aren’t nearly as high because a two-minute victory doesn’t feel significant.

I’m not yet clear on the precise conditions that cause it to occur, but the system whereby a third of the players must sit out every round is bizarre and disastrous. I’m just not interested in spending my free time that way; impotently watching two teams of strangers blunder awkwardly into one another.

I don’t see why there can’t be two full teams. What is the presumably monumental problem that’s worth paying the exorbitant cost of boring a third of your players to solve?

If you want lower player counts, lower the player counts. If you want to scramble the teams, scramble them whenever one side wins three times in a row. Use the rescrambling to separate the highest scorers, and prefer to keep friends together unless they’re dominating.

With that system, Arena would be worthwhile to me because its format undermines the feasibility of Sentry nests, the biggest drain on my fun with TF2. Without it, I’m just not playing.

Heavy Unlocks
Funny, don’t want ’em.

I am, of course, reserving judgement on all of them until I actually try them out. The Sandvich is a lovely idea, but the prospect doesn’t entice me particularly. I don’t die because I enter a fight with partial health, I die because I take more than 300 damage before I can retreat.

Likewise, the other unlocks don’t attempt to solve any of the reasons I avoid the Heavy, and don’t add possibilities that excite me on paper. The reason I avoid him is that his slowness and similar weapons make him tactically inflexible: he can only deal with one kind of situation, and he doesn’t have the tools to engineer it. If he encounters something unexpected and undesirable, he has no options. Boxing gloves, a slow-gun and a snack don’t sound like they give me more options, and I thrive on options.

I’ll update this if that impression is mistaken, but I think unlockables need to entice as much as perform, and this is the first time they haven’t done that for me. For others, too – I’ve only seen one Natascha and no boxing gloves, and there are rarely more than four Heavies per team. It’s nothing like the mono-class unlock fever that gripped Pyro and Medic week.

“The goal was to establish a clear difference between the two sides of the map. One side climbs up toward a large mountain peak, and the other dips down into a vast valley.”

Reading that, I pictured a glorious mountain-climb of a map, something Tim is always saying would add some much-needed drama to TF2’s struggles. The reality is a truly lovely place that I long to spend time in, but it looks to me an awful lot like a perfectly symmetrical square of entirely flat land around big square building. I guess he’s talking about the background.

Regardless, like a lot of people I’m in love with this new style and I can’t wait for them to make a map in it that I actually want to play.

Relic Announce That Tom Francis Is Right

It takes a lot to make me completely forget about TF2 at time like this, but this’ll do it:

The Tyranids are in, they’re beautiful and they’re huge:

As I said back when no-one believed me, the last trailer completely gave it away: the explanations for that descending cloud of spores the pessimists came up with were just hilarious. It’s a cloud of orks. It’s a warp storm, only lower, and brown, and made of spores. Gamers seem to have a limitless capacity to believe the worst.

The reason Tyranids are a big deal, at least the reason they were always my favourite Warhammer 40,000 race, is what they’re made of. They’re not glistening pus like other aliens, or tissue paper insects. They’re clean pale bone, hard and sharp as diamond, acting as one conscious many-bladed machine.

In other news, Valve Announce That Tom Francis Was Right To Say That The SomethingAwful Secrecy-Impaired Testers Were Right About The Sandvich, And That Tim Edwards Was Right About The New Video.

Team Fortress 2 Goes To The Rockies

So the new game mode is a sudden-death single-control point mini-match, suited to fewer players. More like suited to no players! Because of how it might suck! Lol!

Seriously, though, I’m guessing the presence of a single control point negates what does suck about Sudden Death: the tendency for both teams to hole up at their base and wait until stalemate is announced. If you turtle up at the point, you can cap it and win rather than waiting for the enemy to come to you. If you turtle up before the point, the enemy can cap it and win rather than coming to you. I’m optimistic.

A delicious new environment for the chaps and Pyro! It’s quite, quite lovely – in some ways, even more stylised than the canyon motif we’ve been stuck with until now. The backdrop in this shot is just a few colours:

I’m a big fan of game environments that can feel cold without just blanketing the whole place in unconvincing snow. This definitely qualifies – can’t you just smell how brisk and bracing that mountain air is?

That set of tips from the SomethingAwful testers has now been proven so right that it’s had to be deleted from the Steam forums. In Arena’s case, knowing the broad picture wasn’t very helpful: the details that there’s a single control point, and it can have any number of players, completely change the prospect to a rather exciting one.

But if you still doubt that the last Heavy unlock will be a health-restoring munchable named the Sandvich that replaces the Shotgun, you are now officially delusional.

Steel Yourself

The grand Team Fortress 2 update goes live tomorrow night, and there’ll be more details on what it contains tonight and tomorrow. I doubt the new community map, cp_steel, will be top of your trying-out priority list, but I hope you’ll get to it eventually. It’s an intriguing, ever-changing map, in a player-driven way rather than a random way like Hydro. It’s no less puzzling than Hydro though (I’m hoping some extra signposts are added in the ‘official’ version), so this clear, simple diagram by Ankich should make everything apparent right away.

In theory:

In practise:

Wait, wait, that diagram is actually helpful. Obviously you need to see it full size. An awesome Valve-style video explains the basics when you first play the map, but what you really need to know is how to play it well. How many of the map-changing points should you try for until you make a dash for the final, game-winning one?

I’ve been playing it whenever I can, and I’m really enjoying it so far. At the moment it feels weighted towards the attackers: we had a perfect round on Blu this lunchtime, where it went into overtime as we were capping C, we got shot off C, all our progress towards capturing C was undone, and just as it hit zero a cheeky Scout lept on E: the only cap that matters. We couldn’t even hold that consistently, but I kept as many of them as I could busy at C and eventually our forces at E won out, and we won with zero seconds on the clock.

Then the teams switched and we got destroyed. So I think we were actually sucking on offense, it’s just an offense-friendly map. But blasting Scouts off that final cap in the middle of a chasm feels like what the Soldier was born to do, so defense is still fun.

Vote Tom Francis In The Games Media Awards

Holy shit, apparently I’m a finalist in the Games Media Award for Best Specialist Games Writer – Print. The winner’s decided solely by votes, and “Voting is open to all MCV readers”, so just by reading that sentence I quoted from MCV, you qualify. If you want to be extra-qualified, go and read www.mcvuk.com for a sec, then vote (gma@intentmedia.com).

You can also vote for PC Gamer for Best Games Magazine, and a bunch of PC Gamer contributors who apparently call themselves Rock Paper Shotgun these days, for Best Games Website. In fact, you could vote for the whole of Team Awesome, as we’re called when we fight crime together on the streets of Bath at night.

If you actually want to read something I wrote for PC Gamer, I reported on those virtual assassins, kept a war diary, failed monumentally at Football Manager, and investigated the effectiveness of awkward flirting in MMORPGs. The SWAT 4 movie script I wrote here was also used in the mag.

The other finalists in my category are Rick Porter, who has long hair and one of those not-quite-a-moustache moustaches, Joel Snape who must work right next to me but I can’t remember which one he is, Jon Blyth, who once killed a seventy-two year-old man right in front of me for no reason, Ben Talbot who I don’t know at all, and Alex Wiltshire, who is lovely but works anonymously for the Edge collective, so it’s impossible to actually know what he wrote. Except when you’re both reviewing the same game and he WILDLY OVER-RATES IT and you don’t.

Also, they all just e-mailed me to say they think you’re a jive sucker. They told me not to tell you they said that, but I thought you should know.

Heavy Update: Sandwiches And Fresh Green Grass

The ongoing story here is that Valve pronounced their expected batch of unlockable weapons for the Heavy would also include an unexpected fan-made map, cp_steel, a brand new Payload map, Badwater Basin, a whole new game mode, still unnamed, and five new maps ‘arenas’ for that mode.

They’re revealing these elements day by day until the whole thing goes live on Tuesday (probably around 8pm BST, I’d guess). The latest is that the replacement minigun, Natascha, slows enemies ‘for an instant’ when they’re hit. But the real news is the image of the thing: not the gun itself, but that the blurred scenery the Heavy is standing in is green grass and grey rocks: a type of terrain so far unseen in any TF2 map.

Mess of original post and updates follows:

Sandwiches: While the names might be enigmatic and the descriptions missing, if you download the icon set for the Heavy achievements Valve have just revealed, the filenames are more explicit about what they’re for. The interesting ones, name then filename:

Konspicuous Konsumption – Eat Sandwiches
To regain health, one assumes. Something Awful hint was “Think PopEye”.

Sypalectical Materialism – Uncover Spies
Combined with the Something Awful hint “Think Ghostbusters” I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a Medigun that did nothing except turn red when used on a Spy. Also, I once said to Robin Walker and Erik Johnson, “You guys should make a Medigun that lights up when it’s used on a Spy” and they said “That’s a good idea”. Then I saw them take notes, then scurry off to their PCs, and make that, and put it in the Heavy update.

More probably, as several commenters say, it’s just an achievement for hitting Spies while they’re cloaked, and nothing to do with seeing through disguises.

And not for nothing, but that Spy has a giant freaking silencer.

0wn The Means Of Production – Clear Stickybombs
The interesting thing here is the icon – that’s not a Sticky being pushed back slightly, it’s breaking. Not also the zero in ‘own’, to emphasise how totally pwnsome the means by which you do this is.

Five Second Plan – Teleport Fast Kill
This is probably just for killing people shortly after you come out of a teleporter, but there could be more to it.

Update! Craig points out that this compilation of the SomethingAwful hints is now two-for-two. The third unlock, according to this, is a minigun that slows people down. If true, a) I will be surprised, b) there will be riots, and c) ha! In your face people who said the Hobbler could never be done because slowing people down is always a bad idea! I may entirely agree with your claim and not even really like my own idea, but if Valve do it it’s automatically right.

Day Two! Click the image for details, and the names of all the achievements. Some of them strongly hint at what the other unlocks might be. Others – Pushkin the Cart, Stalin the Cart and Permanent Revolution – are just genius.

TF2 blog has the official word, the Heavy update site is detailing the changes day by day, and it all goes live one week from today. Holy, holy shit.

Five of the new maps are for the new game mode, all of which is currently mysterious. The sixth new map is a new Payload one focusing on wide-open spaces, and the smart money is on this being the oft-mentioned one where the cart is a platform you can build Sentries on. The seventh is an officialised version of cp_steel, that incredibly awesome-sounding changing map Chris blogged about ages ago and for which I’ve never been able to find a good server running.

Worth mentioning: some goons at Something Awful claimed to have playtested the update and offered enigmatic hints as to its content a while back. One of the three said, against all odds, that the Heavy update would come with a new game mode.

Another says “think Popeye”, but also claims the update will cost money, which is patently false.

The third says “think ghostbusters… it’s really that weird.”

Edit: Seven! Seven new maps! Maths degree, right here!

Chris Livingston Stops Considering A TF2 Comic

Our fiendish plan to get our hopes up so much that he couldn’t bear to let us down has failed. Chris, author of the enormous and excellent Half-Life 2 comic Concerned, has decided against doing one in TF2 for various annoyingly valid reasons. He doesn’t mention this one, but Jesus Christ have you ever tried posing something exactly the way you want it in Garry’s Mod? It’s like balancing a kitchen knife on an oiled marble.

I find that I am not disappointed at all. I’ve no doubt it would have been great, but a twice-weekly giggle doesn’t seem like such a big deal compared to the fantastic source of entertainment 1Blog has become. Without this procrastinating placeholder for the vapourware TF2 comic, Living In Oblivion, one of my favourite pieces of games writing in years, might have stayed a still-born non-blog.

1Fort has also provided me with news of the man who is only invisible while performing a forward roll, the real Team Fortress 2 stats system, the best screenshot ever, and an actual Team Fortress 2 comic: Red Spy.

Plus, I’ve always kind of wanted a place where “Tom Francis Ruins Team Fortress 2” is a real headline. Somewhere other than the Tom Francis Sucks newsletter, anyway.

Here’s to a long future of non-adventure, experimental side-projects and TF2 commentary.

Seriously, Buy Braid

Braid is a Mario clone with a time-rewinding gimmick that lets you go back as far as you like to rectify any mistakes. Actually, scratch that.

Braid is an homage to Mario that uses the reversal of time as a central game mechanic to remove the frustrations of platform gaming. Well, no.

Braid is puzzle game that starts from the basic concepts of Mario – most prominently jumping on enemies’ heads – but uses this merely as the basic medium for puzzles that require you to manipulate the flow of time.

And although in its 1st chapter this only amounts to reversing time to correct mistakes, from the 2nd chapter onwards you encounter enemies and objects that don’t go back to how they were when you rewind everything else. On the one hand, these elements are harder to deal with because they keep on going while you’re backtracking.

Braid is a platform puzzler in which you have the power to reverse time, but each of its six chapters interferes with, subverts or adds to this ability to completely reinvent the way you play.

On the other, it allows you manipulate how they synch up with the rest of the world, which actually gives you greater control over them. If there’s a rewind-immune door, for example, you can use up a key unlocking it, then rewind time to before you did so. The door will stay open, but you won’t have used up the key.

 

The 3rd chapter links the flow of time to your position in space, so you have to keep moving to the right for time to progress. If you move to the left, time goes backwards. While you’re standing still, the whole world is frozen. This is madness, because it means that if a patrolling monster is in your way as you climb up a ladder, you can’t wait for him to move out of the way. He will always be at that point in time when you’re at that point in space.

 

The 4th chapter allows you to use your rewind ability to co-operate with another copy of yourself. Yeah, the copy is created when you stop rewinding: he runs off and does what you did the first time, while you’re free to do something different simultaneously. Exactly. So if a switch needs to be held to keep a door open, go and hold it, then rewind time and walk over to the door… …and Mr Unoriginal will run off obediently and pull the switch just like you did.

One time I had to put this guy into position to pull a switch that wouldn’t be there until he came to replay my actions. So when I was standing where the switch would be, I just hammered the Use button to make sure my copy would get it. Then when I rewound and stood on the platform it was supposed to raise, the thing just gibbered spastically up and down – that idiot was hammering his Use button, and each press was reversing the lift’s direction. Dick.

The 5th chapter lets you drop a ring that slows time intensely for things near to it, and slightly for those further away.

With it, you can re-synchronise every clockwork element of Braid’s complex levels.

It’s the most

Flexible

Your toolset gets.

There’s one puzzle where three or four of us discovered we’d all approached it in different ways.

Mine involved killing myself over and over again by repeatedly headbutting monsters in the ass to keep them locked up in a cubby hole until I was ready to kill them.

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Braid Is Out On Filthy Consoles

As Mike Gapper on Xbox World puts it: get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, GET IT!

Disclaimer: I haven’t got it, but I’ve played the PC version – which is coming later this year – at various stages of development. I’ll update this post once I’ve had a moment to try the finished thing on filthy Xbox.

James regular Jason L deserves profound thanks for putting me onto this, long, long before it was cool, and I hope he and anyone else who plays it will take a sec to weigh in on the end product here.

It’s a platform game in which you can rewind time as far as you like, and each chapter layers another mechanic on top of that. The best creates a shadow-you each time you stop rewinding, and the shadow-you runs off and does what you did the first time while you try to co-operate with him. You. Scle.

It’s been getting maximum scores (it got 9/10 in Edge, but Edge only give 10s when they’re wrong, so 9 is the maximum possible correct score), and will likely continue to do so. Those places will use words like “ingenious”, “astonishing”, “staggering”, “masterpiece”, so I don’t have to. Some will mention art, triggering a thousand irritated sighs. One of them insists it is just like The Watchmen, though in what sense is still unclear after a paragraph of strenuous explanation.

My thing is, this is unlike anything we’ve played before, it’s a constant delight, and the second best puzzle game I’ve ever played. It’s $15 or £10, and if you think this is too much you are a small and boring man or maness.

Update: I should say, though, that it has a some problematic bits. The full thing, now that I’ve played it, is effectively identical to the early PC version I’d had a go with, but this time through I’m not moving on from each world until I’ve got all the puzzle-pieces. Which means I’m solving a lot of puzzles I just skipped over last time – you don’t need to get any of them to actually progress, until the very end.

There’s one puzzle in World 2 that can’t be solved when you first reach the level it’s on. And it uses a counter-intuitive mechanic that’s never used before or since without explaining it.

There’s another in World 3 where a problem at the start of the level can’t be solved until you ignore it, leave the area, and then encounter another one-off unexplained mechanic that renders it irrelevant.

These two bits are problems because there are lots of seemingly impossible puzzles in Braid with brilliantly clever solutions. So having a couple that actually are impossible with the current apparatus betrays the player’s confidence that there is a solution to the harder puzzles, that he won’t be wasting his time if he sits there and really thinks about it. Because of these two, sometimes, he is.

World 4 is the only one where the new mechanic isn’t a bonus ability, but a restriction. At times it’s very clever, and it’s probably the most unusual of them all, but just as often the solution comes down to a very fiddly matter of whether you were facing left or right at the time you did something.

The last of these levels has some real inconsistencies in the way certain objects behave when you’re rewinding – the game has two concepts of what ‘six seconds ago’ means, and it shows one of them while rewinding, then switches to the other when you stop.

I still suggest avoiding walkthroughs – these are just three puzzles among seveal hundred – but if you’re really stuck on something, it’s worth moving on and coming back to it. Even if it’s not one of these, it’s funny how thinking in a completely new way for the next level will usefully reorient your brain to go back and tackle the last.

Update: And yes, my favourite puzzle game ever is Portal. Partly because it doesn’t make mistakes like this.

I will say, though, that Braid has two advantages over Portal: each of the five worlds (and I think there may be a sixth I haven’t found yet) is profoundly unlike all the others, each as inventive in itself as Portal’s one mechanic. Portal’s length isn’t a reason for me to rank it below bigger but messier games like Deus Ex, but its scope is.

And Braid is genuinely tough. Fast and intuitive puzzling is great for telling a story, as Portal does expertly, but I wanted more head-scratching from its Advanced maps. They weren’t actually any harder than the later levels of the main game, and there’s no good reason they shouldn’t be.

Update: Just finished it.

Whoa.

Film Catch-Up

Despite being an English word in front of a Belgian placename, the title manages to make this sound like ponderous French arthouse cinema. Really, they should have called it: In Fockin Bruges? Wit You? Continued

Tweak Fortress

Not for the first time, a post I was writing – a sort of ideal TF2 patch notes – appeared on 1Blog before I could finish it. In fact, this time Chris even wrote a sequel before I was done with mine.

I agree with all the ideas Chris and his commenters propose. There are lots of small, uncontroversial improvements you could make to TF2, and I know Valve agree with at least a couple of the ones mentioned on 1Blog. The reason they haven’t been done yet is not that they’re potentially problematic, it’s just a question of time and priorities.

But I say these perfectly reasonable ideas don’t go too far enough! I got thinking seriously about my ideal patch notes when Valve admitted the Demoman is “a little out of whack”, then I finally got Kritzed under ideal circumstances, and later started to come up against more teams that field four or five Engineers on Defense.

This is an attempt to fix all the main things that bother me in TF2 with five changes. The last one’s just a good idea I stole from the Steam forums.

• Backburner: +50 health bonus removed.

  Update! They just did this!

  – Two sub-classes that look almost identical but have crucially different health values violates the clarity and immediacy that is the soul of TF2.

  – The Airblast ability is fun. You shouldn’t bribe players not to use it.

  – Pyros with this unlock automatically beat Pyros without it, even in a straight fight. That’s bad Unlockology.

• Sticky Bombs: Cannot be detonated until shortly after they affix to a surface. Neutralised if they take damage before arming.

  – The Sticky Launcher shouldn’t be an effective direct-combat weapon – it’s already superb for traps, jumps and defense.

  – The Demoman’s role shouldn’t overlap with the Soldier’s.

  – Engies should be able to defend their stuff from Stickies if they’re only coming in once every couple of seconds.

  – I hate that there’s no visual or audio indication of when you’re allowed to detonate a Sticky you just fired. They should light up and go bling! whether this change is made or not.

• Sentry: Will not attack a target if another Sentry is closer.

  – Most frustrating rounds result from impenetrable nests of three or more Sentries.

  – Sentry counter-tactics aren’t effective when other Sentries are covering the first.

  – Sentry clustering makes Engineers more viable the more of them there are.

  – Currently a computer-controlled class does more of the killing than most of the player-controlled ones.

  – This is silly.

Best shot ever, by Joe of Massive Crits, via Chris.

• Kritzkrieg: When activated, charge does not drain over time, but is instead drained by each shot the target fires.

  – Time-based charge drain encourages a rush mentality, which isn’t effective when the charge offers no protection.

  – It also penalises reloading classes, leaving only the same two who also make the best Ubercharge targets.

  – Currently an Ubercharge is more effective in almost every possible situation, and the 10% faster charge rate is insignificant.

• Heavy: No longer knocked back by Sentry fire.

  – The Heavy is unpopular despite being both powerful and fun, because he’s useless against Sentries at most ranges.

  – Even when Ubered.

• Wrench: Swinging with right mouse button will repair a Sentry, but never upgrade it.

  – Father_G on the Steam forums had this idea.

  – I like it.