Team Fortress 2: Robotic Booglaoo is the first major Team Fortress 2 update crafted entirely by community members – and ladies and gentlemen, it is a doozy. Admire the trailer below; check out this amazing gallery of artwork; read both pages of back story; and marvel in the fact that it even comes with a comic. A full list of all the contributors is available if you’d like to send some mad props.

Busy on Easter Monday evening? You are now! The first of our new regularly scheduled Team Fortress 2 Community Games Nights is set for Monday April 1 at 8:30 PM AEDT.

Much like our previous nights, head along to these servers…

games.on.net #001 – Community Games Night! (203.26.94.58:27015)
games.on.net #002 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.36:27015)
games.on.net #003 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.70:27015)

..to get in on all the action. Regular TF2‘er and forum-goer Cupcake has also put up a schedule all the way up until December, so head on over to the forum and check it out.

Valve’s flagship war-themed hat simulator Team Fortress 2 has been revealed to be gearing up for Oculus Rift support, with a VR patch expected shortly.

“This is a mode that everybody who has a Rift dev kit and access to Team Fortress 2 will be able to play, just on public and in the same servers that everybody else is playing in,” revealed Valve programmer Joe Ludwig to Endgadget.

Mac and Linux players will miss out however, until the Oculus SDK for those platforms is supplied to the company. “We don’t have a Mac or Linux SDK from Oculus quite yet,” said Ludwig, “but once we get those, we’ll get it ported over to those other platforms.” A patch for PC players is expected “sometime in the next couple of weeks” that will bring Oculus support.

Meanwhile, Oculus Rift’s site has revealed that the goggles will not ship with a VR-enabled copy of DOOM 3 as promised due to it not being finished by id Software in time. More details here.

Source: Endgadget

Crytek are moving heavily into the free-to-play market, and, naturally, one of their biggest competitors in that space is Team Fortress 2, which itself recently made the switch to F2P. Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli has revealed that he has concerns about the game requiring the purchase of items to compete.

“I kind of think it’s a 70% free to play title,” he said to PCGamesN. “It’s on the way to be there, it’s a good model and it works for them, but there is still pay to win there and I don’t like that.”

“There’s some great experiment there, with user-generated content, but you buy items. You have to buy items.”

Yerli also explained how he believes a free-to-play game should be entirely free, not have any spaces locked off. “A free to play game doesn’t allow you to sell items,” he said. “This is the issue I have with that. We would allow communities to create items for virtual currency, but you can’t really go with commercial items because that’s pay to win. So that’s why I’m saying I’m disapproving of the concept of Team Fortress 2, because that is effectively not quite free to play.”

“The only thing that’s free-to-play there is they I can just go into the game and play it. But there’s a piece of game I can’t access without spending money.”

Source: PCGamesN

After the rousing success of our first Community Games Night, our regulars have got together and organised for another one! And we are of course only too happy to bring it to your attention.

So! Tonight, Monday the 18th, starting at 8:30 PM AEDT, you can enjoy hot, hot Team Fortress 2 action on the following servers:

games.on.net #001 – Community Games Night! (203.26.94.58:27015)
games.on.net #002 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.36:27015)
games.on.net #003 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.70:27015)

Remember, all-talk will be turned on and staff and admins will be popping in to share the fun. Come and join us for some guaranteed good times!

Our very first community games night is happening, tonight!

From 8:30 PM Sydney/Melbourne Time we’ll be all piling onto three dedicated 24-slot servers and shooting each other in the face with all sorts of outrageous Team Fortress 2 weaponry. The servers you need are:

games.on.net #001 – Community Games Night! (203.26.94.58:27015)
games.on.net #002 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.36:27015)
games.on.net #003 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.70:27015)

Remember, all-talk will be turned on and staff and admins will be popping in to share the fun. Come and join us for some guaranteed good times!

As we outlined in our roadmap, 2013 will see the kick-off of regular Community Game Nights — and our first one is coming up on Monday, February 4.

To start off this fine new tradition we’ll be running with an old favourite: Team Fortress 2. Special servers will be set aside for the occasion, with the festivities taking off from 8:30 PM EST that night. Pencil it in your diaries! Then, grab a pen, and write over the pencil because you will be there.

We’ll have all-talk turned on and admins and staff members of all kinds jumping in, so put some time aside and watch this space for more details on what server to join. And get TF2 up to date, if you haven’t already! You monster.

Valve has announced that nine Team Fortress 2 hats are to be withdrawn from sale, crate drops and crafting. According to Mann Co, a freak incident involving mayonnaise and raccoons means that current stocks of the Batter’s Helmet, Soldier’s Stash, Pyro’s Beanie, Demoman’s ‘Fro, Football Helmet, Mining Light, Prussian Pickelhaube, Trophy Belt and Fancy Fedora are gone … they’re gone forever. You have just two weeks to get hold of these historical items by any means.

What makes all this particularly interesting is that Team Fortress 2 is kind of a flagship for experimental free-to-play economies; Valve has its own on-staff economist to study the weird and wonderful things the shooter produces. What happens when a virtual item becomes rare? Should be fun to watch.

Source: TF2 Blog via PCGamesN

Or should I say, come Smissmas: the official, Mann. Co-approved TF2-Christmas. But nevertheless, it’s coming, and it’s been unveiled today: The Mecha-Update will bring a new robotic Engineer to Mann vs. Machine mode.

“These Grinch-like Smissmas cakewalk destroyers can skip huge areas of the path with their teleporting ability,” writes the update site, “and also teleport other robots forward instantly with their ‘telling other robots about the teleporter’ ability.” So that’s something to worry about, especially since there’s going to be a new, bigger MvM map by the name of ‘Big Rock’ to worry about fighting them on.

Three new weapons are also being deployed: a new shotgun for the Engineer called ‘The Rescue Ranger’, a new grenade launcher for the Demoman called ‘The Loose Cannon’ and a new medigun for the Medic called ‘The Vaccinator’. Naughty and Nice Crates will also return, but only until January 3rd.

In the meantime, why not read this delightful new comic?

“As part of our ongoing efforts to gradually phase out all Earth money in favor of Team Fortress hats, we’re kicking off the TF2-only beta of our new Steam Community Market,” reads the official Team Fortress 2 blog.

Check out the FAQ over here for more info.

Source: Team Fortress 2

As you may (or may not) know, Valve’s free-to-play shooter Team Fortress 2 has a thriving economy behind all those piles of hats, fuelled solely by the sale of items from the in-game Mann Co. store. It’s actually quite complex, and surprisingly vast — millions of dollars worth of items exist in player backpacks, and the most wealthy players can have tens of thousands of dollars sitting in their backpacks in hat form.

Warning: This article has a lot of jargon in it, though I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible for those who aren’t familiar with TF2’s trading scene. Just keep in mind that keys are worth ~$1.25, and Earbuds (or buds, as they’re colloquially known) are worth $32. These items are often traded on TF2 Outpost, a popular Steam item trading site.

This economy also (conveniently) allows Russian criminals to launder money, much like you’d see in a low-budget ‘60s noir flick — except a lot less exciting.

The Researcher

Of course, there’s a hero in the story too: Reddit user base1024 (also known as base64) runs a site called TF2Finance which tracks the values of ingame commodities by automatically scanning high-value trades. In a post on the SteamRep forums last Monday, he explained that he’d discovered evidence of huge amounts of Mann Co. Crate Keys being injected into the economy — over 5000, in fact.

The Tip-Off

These keys, purchased by Russian accounts using (presumably) stolen credit cards, were then quickly used to trade for large amounts of Earbuds at high prices (30 keys, as opposed to the normal 26-key market price). Here’s where base64 noticed that something was amiss: his website logged an abnormal amount of Earbud trades – four times as many as usual. After a little more investigative work, he found that a ring of traders had been buying Earbuds at the aforementioned extreme prices and then immediately selling them for 700 rubles each ($22 USD, $10 below the normal selling price for buds).

In itself this was suspicious behaviour, but base64 took the investigation one step further by tracing the keys to their original purchaser. Upon looking inside the inventories of the purchaser and the users on his friends list, base64 found a large amount of both keys and Mann Co. Store Packages, free items which are granted by Valve for every $20 spent in the store. The existence of these items was evidence enough of large-scale key buying, but the rabbit hole went even deeper…

The Russians

With further investigation came more revelations: each of the users was a member of a Steam group called “DIE Friend”, with a start date of September 18th, 2011. I’ve spoken to many knowledgeable folk in the trading community, who claim that this sort of trading has been occurring for a while now, and the start date of this group only serves as more evidence to support this timeframe – all in all, at least ten accounts in the group have been definitively proven to be engaging in suspicious buying behaviour. base64 summarized his findings from the group on the forum:

1. We all know that a Mann Co Package is granted for every USD$20 of purchase from Store. They had 14-17 Packages, so they “spent” USD$280-$340 on Keys using each account.
2. All the involved accounts in this group were created at least months ago.
3. The accounts were Free-to-Play (Per my replication of Valve’s database in May 23, 2012)
4. No weapons/hats stayed in these backpacks.
5. They sometimes open the Mann Co Packages, or just give them away to Buds sellers.
6. Usually no Keys/Buds were left behind.
7. The proven accounts NEVER signed in at TF2 Outpost. However, they do look for Buds sellers there.
8. They refer each other to the largest Buds sellers on Outpost

It’s pretty damning stuff. The implications of this sort of activity are fairly dire too: with a huge amount of keys being injected into the economy, item values are slowly dropping, and some traders are beginning to speculate that a market crash is looming. The uncertainty isn’t just conjecture, either — according to a previous article on his site, base64 believes that the value of keys (in USD) is slowly depreciating, and it’s very possible that the injection of “stolen” keys into the economy is helping this along.

So why would anyone do this? It’s estimated that the credit card thieves are making around a 33% return on the money they put into the system: for the thief, every $300 worth of keys they buy will net them about $100 of near-untraceable real-world cash. As a money-laundering scheme it’s surprisingly simple, and as an inside observer, it’s absolutely fascinating to watch how the macro-economy of TF2 reacts to these events. I’ll be paying very close attention to how the situation develops, especially in regards to Valve’s reaction to this sort of activity.

The TL;DR

base64 sums it up best:

A group of Russians bought over 5000 keys from the Steam Store today using illegitimate credit cards, and bought a few hundred Buds from TF2 Outpost at a ridiculous price of 28-30 Keys (The average yesterday was 25.5 Keys). They have been doing this for quite a long time and their activity today is alarming.

I’d like to thank base64 for the time he spent discussing this with me — he really knows his stuff!

Valve has not responded to my request for a statement regarding the matter.

Yesterday’s teased Halloween event for Team Fortress 2 has, in a staggering twist, come totally true.

Revealed in the all-new Scream Fortress Blizzbobarrabas Event page are features like control points that spin a magical roulette wheel when captured, as well as potions you can pour on items in your inventory to shift paint colours, give you flaming footsteps, and more. A new wave has been introduced to the the Mann vs. Machine mode, comprising of “a single, apocalyptic wave of zombies” – over eight hundred of them, in fact, despite the wave being named “Wave 666″.

All this and more will be yours from October 26 through to November 8. Enjoy!

Halloween is upon us, and what better way to celebrate than with a variety of Halloween-themed game events. Team Fortress 2 is no exception to this, bringing us such classics as Mann Manor and the Horseless Headless Horsemann, and of course last year’s Eyeaduct map starring Monoculus, the Demoman’s haunted left eye.

This year’s Halloween returns us to the world of Merasmus the Magician and his roommate the Soldier, with an altercation that ends with the Mighty Ghost Wizard trying to kill everybody and everything forever. Presumably this means Merasmus will be the new boss on this year’s Halloween map, which should be a fun shootin’ time for everybody.

For more clues, check out this mysterious classified ad section from a scary newspaper that appeared on the site, too.

Source: TF2 Blog

If you’re one of those strange people who enjoys playing with total strangers (you probably like “sunlight” and “fresh air” as well, you weirdo) then you might have been miffed at the amount of people straight-up bailing on your Mann vs. Machine Team Fortress 2 matches when things go south, they get bored, or just alt-tab out to watch cat gifs.

This is soon to be a thing of the past however, as Valve are introducing new penalties for players who abandon their comrades in the heat of battle. A new letter from the desk of Saxton Hale highlights the problem and points to the updated FAQ on ‘Abandoning’. The criteria for being labelled an ‘abandoner’ is as follows:

• You leave a game while playing a Mann Up game on an official server; and
• You have not played through a single wave to completion or failure; and
• There are 5 or more players currently connected to the server (including you).

Players who repeatedly abandon games will be punished with longer wait times by being placed in a low-priority cheaters pool, and presumably made to wear embarassing water wings.

Source: TF2 Blog

Mann VS. Machine Mode for Team Fortress 2 is set to get a big update, with Valve preparing a patch designed to bring more tours, loot, and improved matchmaking.

Responding to player complaints that the original Tour of Duty (Operation Steel Trap) was too hard, Valve will be deploying two more: Operation Oil Spill (“less hard”) and Operation Gear Grinder (“very hard”).

The new operations will also include their own loot, such as “rusty, blood-covered ‘bot heads” for Operation Oil Spill, and “24-carat diamond ‘bot heads” for Operation Gear Grinder, presumably to enable more effective boasting.

Finally, the matchmaking system — one of the biggest gripes we had with the original — has been updated to allow you to select multiple missions you’d like to play, to increase your chance of, you know, actually playing. Additionally, your group is no longer automatically disbanded once you’ve beaten a mission. Which is nice.

Source: TF2 Blog

If somebody had asked me to estimate just how much money some Team Fortress 2 item creators were making, I would probably have stopped a few figures short of six. Valve’s Chet Faliszek, however, says differently.

While admitting that many may laugh at the concept of making money through hats, wigs, gloves and other weird cosmetic items, Faliszek revealed that some item creators were in fact making six figure incomes from the practice.

How can you make a living doing this? “Just give yourself one,” said Faliszek. “You want to create something, you want to release it, you want to get feedback on it and make it better.”

So there you go.

Source: PCGamesN

I was reading the other night about how George Lucas really didn’t like how the first Star Wars failed to take shape the way he’d first envisioned, and that he was freaking out about it being a massive flop at the box office. His good mate Steven Spielberg was just across town making Close Encounters of the Third Kind around the same time, and George was always over there on the set marvelling at how kickass Steven’s film was while bemoaning how awful his was going to be.

He made a bet with Steve: If my trashy Star Wars film grosses more than your alien thingy, you can have 2.5% of my movie’s profits for life. Reportedly, Steve still gets quite sizeable and annoyed cheques in the mail from George. Point is, George’s vision was changed for the much better.

Very little is said, however, of games that change their stripes mid-development. Oh sure, they receive tweaks all over the place all the time, but complete overhauls? Shooters, as it turns out, are some of the most tampered with productions in video game entertainment today. Let’s look at some of the biggest stripe-changers.

Borderlands

Topical. You may remember way back in the day when Gearbox first started showing this baby off to the masses that it looked nothing like it ended up looking — that’s a picture of it up top there. Its art style was your stock “kinda real” shooter art style, with nary a hint of the huge, cartoonish about-turn their design team would pull quite late in its production cycle. Everyone wigged out at the time: “Whaaat it’s a comic nao zomgor,” etc. Everyone subsequently declared much win when it was released, and Borderlands’ eventual aesthetics arguably had a big hand in establishing what was, at the time, an IP no one cared about.

Team Fortress 2

Valve’s enduring precious also took a huge amount of time in development, which is nothing new for Gabe and co. – except ten years is a really long-ass time, even by their generous standards. It first showed up at 1999’s E3, and then totally disappeared while most of the dev team were assigned to other things. “Oh well,” peeps thought. “Seeya.” But it came back, Jimmy. The next time the world saw it was in 2006, and it was completely unrecognisable. Team Fortress co-creator Robin Walker later revealed that he and his people “ended up building probably three to four different games.”

BioShock

BioShock’s looks didn’t change much, but its story sure did. Originally there was no Andrew Ryan, no undersea Rapture city gone mad, and no funky superpowers. Instead, you were going to be a guy hired by a senator to rescue someone of great importance from a cult before “reprogramming” them so they might reintegrate with society again. Even stranger, at one stage it was all supposed to go down in a newly discovered Nazi laboratory in the 21st century. Aren’t you glad Ken Levine is handy with a narrative whacking stick?

Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil 2’s a pretty drastic example of a game completely turned on its mouldering head mid-dev, but Resident Evil 4 is a lot shootier – although it wasn’t always that way. Devil May Cry was originally supposed to be Resi Evil 4, but luckily Capcom began to realise that this was crazy, and didn’t at all fit in with the franchise, definitely. They weren’t finished trolling their dev team though, and Resi Evil 4 initially took a few cues from Stephen King and Eternal Darkness, with Leon battling a malevolent fog, suffering bizarre hallucinations, and punching on with ghosts. Here, check it out:

Team Fortress 2: war-themed hat simulator, subject of endless promotional item tie-ins, purveyour of comical delights to amuse and terrify.

And then, from nowhere: co-op mode. Horde mode. Mann vs. Machine. You against the robots, with nothing on the line but the potential for a digital hat to appear in your inventory – increased, naturally, by whether or not you’re willing to lay down some of your own money and purchase a Ticket. Or is that a Voucher? It’s so hard to keep track.

Hell is other people

My first experience with Mann vs. Machine was less then compelling. Myself and five friends sat in a lobby, watching an unashamedly incorrect ‘estimated wait’ timer tick down from 22 minutes to zero of the course of 43 actual minutes. It took so long I actually went and did my taxes.

Oh, and then there was the bit where the estimated time remaining was “???”, which was right before the game tried to throw us all into a server but then crashed and dumped us all back at the loading screen. I think I may have legitimately ragequit. It was like Error 37 all over again.

Depending on when you play, it’s still like this. There’s just not enough servers up to sustain demand, and since each server can only hold six humans at a time, they fill up fast.  Even if you do get in, there’s no way to be reliably sure you’ll get a server with a playable ping, which is something Australians have enough trouble with at the best of times. We’ve added a dozen servers of our own nearly 30 servers of our own, and it’s still not enough.

So by now, everybody on earth has figured out that the only reliable way to play Mann vs. Machine mode – at least for the moment – is to host your own server. You can find more information on that over at the TF2 Wiki, or get some help in our own TF2 forums.

Let’s do it live

Assuming you’ve got a friend who has the goods necessary to host a server for you, you’re set. And the cherry on the DIY cake is that Mann vs. Machine mode is a stupid amount of fun. It’s designed to perfection: whether you’re screaming as hundreds of robo-Scouts swarm through the level, passing the bomb between them faster than you can pick them off, or screaming as a Tank relentlessly grinds its way towards the bomb and you’re all smashing it with everything you’ve got but it’s not fast enough it’s not enough it’s not enough aaaaaa, the game pushes all the right buttons.

There’s only three levels for now, but presumably map makers will be rushing their own out soon. Each riffs off a colour palette and theme from the main game, with Decoy, Coal Town and Mannworks all offering interesting and fiendish avenues in which to banish robots.

Engineers will have a hard time in particular figuring out exactly where to place their gear: with the amount of robot killing you’ll all have to do, you can’t keep your dispenser to itself, so you might be tempted to set up your kit on the front lines. But then you’ll find yourself the victim of a Sentry Buster, and the blast radius will take out any unfortunate members of your team hanging around. And that’s not counting the Tanks that will just roll straight over your gear if you’ve built it in one of the lanes.

Upgrades, downgrades and buy-ins

Perhaps the most fiendish mechanic on offer in Mann vs. Machine is the buy-in: if you die, you can spend some of your hard-earned cash to bypass the spawn timer and get back into the action straight away. However, the cost for doing so increases each time, to the point where you’ll have to toss up between waiting 10 seconds and hoping your friends can take care of the gigantic Demoman firing grenades the size of watermelons just so you can afford the next upgrade — or taking one for the team and buying back in.

The upgrade system is intuitive and compelling, enabling you to pull off rates of fire and damage that would make you an unstoppable monster in the regular TF2 game. Fortunately you can respec at any time, and since you can see what will be in any given wave before it arrives, this can often be a good idea.

A breath of robotic fresh air

Co-op horde games are having somewhat of a renaissance at the moment, with Orcs Must Die!, Sanctum, and even Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer mode all proving that teaming up together against an unending wave of enemies is great fun no matter how you slice it. To their credit, Valve have kept Mann vs. Machine mode completely free to play and, although the system by which one can shut up and give them money is somewhat unclear, you don’t need to drop a dime to have a blast.

If you’ve got a friend who can host up a server for you, put some time aside and try it tonight – or just wait a little bit longer until the frothing mania dies down.

The new Team Fortress 2: Mann vs Machine update is now live! To celebrate, and to account for what we know will be a huge influx of players, games.on.net will be opening up twelve new TF2 servers. In addition, over at TeamFortress.com there is heaps of new info about what exactly is happening with this new game-type-thing.

There’s a bunch of new achievements listed over here, and an FAQ telling us how the Tour of Duty monetary-system will work over here. It is a little bit canny! But whether or not you choose to go for the paid system, we will see you all in game! Saddle up, we got some robots to murder!

Source: teamfortress.com

All the rumours were true! Universally-revered Valve game Team Fortress 2 is adding a new mode of gameplay, wherein you fight ROBOTS! It is, at its bare bones, more like Left 4 Dead or Monday Night Combat than traditional Team Fortress, with six players in co-op mode fighting an innumerable horde of robo-bots.

Today is Day One of the big reveal, so at the moment all we know about are the robots. Seems as though there will be hordes of regular robots with standard-issue weapons, and a handful of special robots that have more specialised functions, such as the ‘Minor League Scout’ who will stun you with his lightning fast baseballs, or the ‘Quick Fix Medic’, who will heal your enemies up quickly, but is unable to uber. There will also be giant robots to rough you up, and sentry killer bots that are essentially walking bombs. The aim will be to stop the robots from planting bombs in Mann Co.’s facilities, naturally.

Check out over here for more details, and keep an eye on it tomorrow for the next stage of the reveal.

Source: Teamfortress.com

Eagle-eyed super-sleuths carefully watching the Valve website and picking through every line of code in the Source Filmmaker have uncovered references to what appears to be an elaborate ARG, confirmed overnight by Valve on the official Team Fortress 2 blog. The clues revealed a birth certificate and a link to a new comic, “Blood Brothers”, which reveals the existence of a third ‘grey’ faction and paints him as a robotics expert.

Enterprising YouTube user 69Starmix96 has put together this YouTube video which should help you connect the dots, and shows very strong hints that we’ll all either be playing as – or fighting against – robots, in the very near future. Delicious.