TOM FRANCIS
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Team Fortress 2 Badlands Exploit Patched

“Fixed Badlands exploits.” Ha! There go all your kills, exploit-o-jerks! “Fixed a case where a spy stabbing from the front of a player would score a backstab.” Aw. There go all my kills.

Badlands

Playing Team Fortress 2 at the moment is starting to feel like being part of something. We play it in the office at lunch. Chris Livingston’s making a comic in it. We settle our grudges against the US edition of PC Gamer with it. Yahtzee’s making bad Garry’s Mod machinima in it. The other day a level designer at Ubisoft Montreal mailed me an incredible map of a film set he’d made for it. And when the update adding Badlands, the first proper new map, was due to go live, everyone hung out at the Steam forums making tenuous “X sappin’ mah Y” jokes until it was released.

Badlands is good. I can’t help thinking it would have made more sense to go with this instead of Granary for the initial release, given how similar Granary and Well are. Granary’s become problematic on public servers because so few people are willing to play defense, and the straightforward layout makes it incredibly easy to win quickly once the middle capture point is yours. Badlands staves off rush-wins like this by making the second-to-last cap a) time-consuming to get to and b) easy to defend.

Which is good. So far it’s lead to a lot more back-and-forth than either Granary or Well had, and those are my favourite matches. Even if we win, I hate a trouncing. But like all symmetrical control-point maps, the final point is so wide-open and absurdly fast to capture that it might as well not exist.

I assume that if you make the final point tactically biased towards defenders, you get a lot of stalemates. But I don’t see why you can’t make it slow to capture shortly after the second-to-last point falls, then become gradually less resistant to capture the longer the pushing team manage to hold the defenders back to their last point. Stalemates would be just as unlikely, but rush-wins would become much trickier.

I think the reason this type of map gets a lot of flak on the forums, while Dustbowl and Gravelpit seem generally well-liked, is that defeat has long felt inevitable by the time it comes. On Dustbowl, you always feel like you can hold it for that much longer. You always feel like you can cap it in the time you have left. Victory is as close to your grasp as defeat.

On symmetrical capture-point maps, I’m always in a “Oh fuck it, we’ve lost this” mindset long before we actually do. Comebacks aren’t impossible, but they’re both daunting and improbable. When defeat is close, victory is way, way over there. If we’ve sucked this hard so far, what chance to we have of making it now?

The good news is that Goldrush, the map that’ll introduce the new Payload game mode soon, falls firmly in the former category. In fact, it makes that knife-edge between a win and a loss all the more tangible, because you can see how close that damn cart is to the objective. That’s one less level of abstraction than looking at a coloured icon or countdown clock.

And more importantly, the gradual roll-out of unlockable items for every class is going to make the game even more like being part of something. The simultaneous worldwide release of exciting stuff is one of the great pleasures of Steam, a shared moment that fuses the community together. And here’s a way for them to be doing that regularly, for years.

I apologise, but only a little, for talking about Team Fortress 2 so much. If you’re a gamer, I can only say that it’s like when Deus Ex had just come out. If you’re not, it’s like being a film buff at the time of The Godfather. But it’s not really like either, and that’s kind of the point.

Team Fortress 2 Update Reactions

This just went live, and makes me happy in several ways.

• Added an option in the Options->Multiplayer dialog to filter custom game files being downloaded from servers

Ahhhh.

• Fixed cases where ragdolls were falling through the world

Ahhhh!

• Graphics optimizations for mid and low end hardware

Ooh.

• Fixed players blocking doors in Well

Heh.

• Fixed engineer building in exploit areas on final caps in Well

Oh?

• Increased starting round timer to 10 minutes in Well

Hmm.

But my favourite Steam Update News – and I apologise if you’d hoped I might do something like a ‘Films of the Year’ post instead of this – was actually a little while ago.

• Added effects to players when they earn an achievement, visible to other players nearby

Cool. But isn’t there an achievement for tricking an enemy Medic into healing you while you’re disguised? Would this not give the game away somewhat?

A few days later:

• Fixed cloaked/disguised/disguising spy reporting his achievements to everyone else

Reason Valve should hire me #26: totally saw that one coming.

Analysing Team Fortress 2

One of my only criticisms of Team Fortress 2 was that the Medic isn’t as fun to play as the other classes – a particular shame when he’s so critical to success. Some people objected to this, because they really enjoy the Medic, so I’d just like to make sure these people don’t miss the Team Fortress 2 stats: cold, hard evidence that I am right and they are wrong. The Medic, for anyone not motivated to click the link, is the least-played class by a head.

Obviously the THIRTY-SIX achievements they’re adding just for Medics is an attempt to redress that imbalance, but I wonder if that’s the way to fix this.

You never had to bribe people to play Medic in Battlefield 2, partly because they were effective combatants, but I think mostly because the medicking part of their job was extraordinary fun. When I’m holding my healing ray on a Heavy while he mows people down in TF2, I feel like I’m serving him. When I sprint through thwacking gunfire and dive defibrillators-first onto the unconscious body of my squad leader in BF2, I feel like I’m saving him.

What’s surprising about those stats- well, okay, there are lots of surprising things about those stats.

1. The first surprising thing is the very first fact: the Scout is the most-played class? He’s the only class which, for the majority of any given round, is almost entirely useless. The second the enemy have a single sentry up in any sensible location, he has no way of getting to their objective and is too weak to effectively defend his own. It must just be that, like me, a lot of people always play him for their first life on 2fort, well and granary. But when I do, can I persuade the rest of my team to get a decent Scout rush going? Can I testicles.

2. Speaking of those three maps – the three perfectly symmetrical ones – here’s the most remarkable stat of the lot: the Blue team is almost twice as likely to win on any of these. Even 2fort. These are maps in which each team’s base is a mirror of their enemy’s, and the game’s teams have no inherent differences. If you played in black and white, you wouldn’t even be able to tell which team you were playing on.

I can think of only two explanations for this, and the first one is stupid. Perhaps the Red team are just slightly easier to see? This would be a perfectly reasonable theory in a game with large maps or camouflaged players, but Team Fortress 2 is depicted with unprecedented clarity. It’s the one game in which you can always spot enemies and even tell which class they are, at any range. Perhaps Snipers, through the smallest and darkest of windows, sometimes go unnoticed for a moment, but you’d think Blue Snipers would stand out more strikingly against the warm wood buildings of well, and that’s the map with the the strongest pro-Blue bias of all.

The other possibility is that for whatever reason, better players pick Blue. It’s not often you get to choose your team, since one usually outnumbers the other when you join, but the times when you do could account for this difference. It would have to be an overwhelming trend, to show through the auto-balance and playercount restrictions, but it’s possible. I pick Blue when I can – maybe I’m just that good.

The real answer is probably the counterpart to this: it seems possible that new or inexperienced players might automatically pick Red, since it’s first on the team-choice menu.

3. My other criticism of TF2 was that hydro didn’t quite work. It’s the map that changes shape every round, in complicated ways, in order to keep it fresh for years. As far as I’d played when I reviewed it, this just seemed to keep it confusing for years, but I said I was prepared to bear with Valve’s experiment to see how it played out.

Three months later, I have a more conclusive answer: sucks! hydro is awful. But looking at the stats, Valve must be delighted: apparently hydro sees the longest rounds of any map, and never results in a stalemate. That’s funny, because around fifty percent of all stalemates I’ve ever had and my ten shortest rounds have all been on that very map.

The problem is that they don’t count the fight over two control points – before the map reconfigulates – as a round. They count the entire, tedious push through each arbitrary mess of blocked-off routes towards the enemy’s final base – at least four separate games – as one round. This cleverly conceals the two main ways in which hydro sucks: if one team is even slightly better than they other, they utterly storm the enemy control point in a matter of seconds, and no-one has any hope of mounting a comeback or even having an influence on the battle. And if the teams are even in skill, every damn game ends with two nests of Sentry Guns sitting vigilantly at their own bases, waiting for the Sudden Death timer to run out.

4. As you can see from the ugly grey lumps in that graph, Stalemates are all too common on the maps where they can occur. Amazingly the solution to this is so simple the community have already implimented it in places: a fantastic server-side mod causes everyone to spawn as the same class when entering Sudden Death, and restricts them to melee. When I last played on such a server, this meant twenty-four Heavy Weapons guys punching each other to death, but pretty much any class is as funny.

It completely transforms the dark, paranoid, defensive atmosphere of Sudden Death into a glorious burst of humour and madness at the end of the round. Instead of saying “You’ve failed to complete a game of Team Fortress 2, now you must play Counter-Strike until everyone gets bored and leaves or the game tells everyone they suck”, it says “Eh, you guys are about as good as each other. Fist fight! Woo!” Then it spins around with its arms out until it falls over from the giddiness. In other words, it’s silly and friendly and hilarious in just the way TF2 is everywhere else. You actually come away from it feeling almost like friends, instead of hating the enemy team’s stupid camping guts and your own team’s stupid non-Medic faces.

But if I were Valve, I wouldn’t be working on any of these issues yet. In fact, I’d be doing absolutely nothing to the game until I’d come up with the perfect auto-balancing/team-reshuffling algorithm. I think they ended up maximising almost every other factor that positively contributes to the percentage of time you spend enjoying a multiplayer game, but left alone the biggest one: engineering a fair fight.

If it were up to me, no-one would get to pick a team. Everyone’s auto-assigned according to their skill level, keeping Friends together and players who prefer the same class apart, in that order of priority. After every round, the highest-scoring player from the winning team, along with the third best, fifth best, seventh, etc, are switched with the second best from the losing team, and the fourth, and sixth, respectively. In other words, maximum rejiggling with a slight bias towards the losing team, giving the best players a challenge and the worst players a break.

The reason you couldn’t do most of this stuff in older games, like the original Team Fortress, was that the game simply didn’t have access to that sort of information about players. Steam now has all this and more, and if they’re only using that for playtesting, they’re missing the real value of this kind of data. They’ve got everything they need here to rig a multiplayer game to be fun every time, and that could be a hell of a thing.

The Greatest Spy In Team Fortress 2

This is the closest I’ve come to actually feeling sorry for a Spy’s victim. But also the hardest I’ve ever laughed at one.

Until today I honestly thought I was the biggest asshole playing this class. I see now that I have been thoroughly out-assholed, and I doff my balaclava to, er, MrCuddles100. He’s kindly uploaded the spray here so you can try it yourself. Even if using it just gets you killed, it’s still comedy gold like no other game. This sort of stuff is exactly why I love TF2 and The Spy so much.

Not Being A Spy

Some people seem to really enjoy playing Team Fortress 2 as a Heavy, or a Medic. Me, I just like not being a Spy. Pretty much anyone but the Spy. It’s nothing personal, he’s just not for me. Not my kind of class, you know? I’m a straightforward type. A straightforward, red-blooded, red team type. Love that red team.

For example, I really like just sitting here, next to your turret. I’ve got it. You can go off and build teleporters or something. Oh, my name? Yeah, that’s just a coincidence. I guess you and I think alike – after all, we’re both straightforward types, on the red team, the best team of them all.

I also really like being healed. So that I can better kill all the blues. That’s why their bullets don’t look like they’re hurting me, by the way – because of your excellent healing. Thanks, red team medic. You and I are on the same side; the red team. Just regular joes, fighting the good fight against the blue team, who are the enemy of us both.

No, I’m not going to fire just yet. Why don’t you go ahead? Maybe you can lure them with your Syringe Gun. I’ll mop them up just as soon as you walk ahead of me. Go, red team!

Boy, it’s good being a Sniper too. Just us two Snipers, up here on the battlements. It’s a great view. I particularly like how we shoot at things, like blue guys, who we hate, because of the way in which we’re on the red team. I shoot at things all the time. Not right now, but usually.

I also turned off my laser sight. I didn’t like it. You know what I find helps? If you stand just a little way away from the wall, your aim improves loads. The wall really cramps your style sometimes. I don’t know if it’s an elbow thing or what, but just taking a few steps forwards does the trick. And staying scoped. Always stay scoped.

Sometimes things go wrong. Like this one time, all my turrets and dispensers fell apart one after the other for no reason. There were no enemies around, except this one dead guy who looked like a good ol’ red Engineer, but he had my name so I guess he must have been a Spy. Spies, eurgh. Who’d have them?

It’s the same when I dress up as and really am the Medic, on the red team, as always. For some reason my medigun never really works properly, and pretty soon my Heavy falls over. I’m kind of new at this, but I enjoy it all the same. It’s kind of fun, despite the tragic loss to the red team; the best team, and the one that I’m genuinely on.

Whatever class I play, the maps have some spots I love to hang out. Under bridges and stuff. There’s a few backrooms in Well that are just cool to stand around in, then wander back out into the fight like nothing happened, which it of course didn’t. Yay red!

The only thing I’m not wild about in Team Fortress 2 is when my own team – the reds, my favourite team – shoot me. It doesn’t hurt, because I’m on their team, the red team, and there’s no friendly fire. But it hurts inside. Just the idea that my friends think I’m a Spy. A Spy! I hate those jerks.

In fact, here come the Blue team right now. I might just show them what I think of them by going over there. I think I can break into their Resupply room and get some health, which I don’t need. I found a powerup that lets me do that. BRB.

Grrraaahahahahaa!

That is all.

Team Fortress 2, Episode Two And Portal

The team must have been working on this for a long time, they’ve kept it very secret, and they must have been nervous as hell about whether people would go for a cartoon look to a class-based tactical shooter. They must now be beaming, because virtually everyone seems to love it. The only whispers of dissent I’ve heard are people who love it saying “I don’t know why anyone has a problem with it, TF1 was never realistic.” I was a sceptic before they released this shot, but I see now that it is wonderful. I love their slim chunkiness, their sharp curves, even shading, their characterful but not charicatured expressions. And how cool the Spy:

I still don’t quite understand why they’re giving it to us free with Episode Two, along with Portal – a fantastic-sounding Source-engine successor to indie gem Narbacular Drop (the best game name since Grim Fandango). My best theory so far is that it’s just to generate good will toward episodic gaming and Steam, and partially to ensure a large user-base for TF2. Maybe they were hedging their bets against the cartoon look putting people off, and ensuring that people would end up owning it whether they liked it or not. Of course, they did a similar thing with Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source. We’ll never know exactly how well that did, because they won’t release Steam sales figures, but I have to assume it exceeded what they would have expected for Half-Life 2 alone. Otherwise they wouldn’t be repeating the formula with TF2 and Episode 2.

Forgetting analysis, the ripe bunch of gaming fruit that your slim twenty-dollar bill is going to bag you now looks utterly irresistable. A hefty and exotic chunk of the most finely crafted single-player game ever created; a bold reimagining of one of the all-time greatest multiplayer games using a graphical style never seen in a game before; and a completely fresh and mind-fryingly inventive experimental game, put through the mighty Valve polishing machine. Maybe that’s the point – just to put together something wonderful and profoundly worth the money to everyone. Sometimes if I feel I’ve done something well, I spend an extra half an hour to make it extraordinary, just to see how someone reacts. To hear CEO Gabe Newell talk, the faceless collective grin of an impressed gaming public – expressed through poorly spelt forum posts – is what he lives and breathes for.