ubercharged.net

Following on with the medic achievement fiasco topic that just keeps on giving, I spotted this one over at GU Comics.

I hadn’t heard of that site before, but Woody Hearn (the writer/artist) does some great stuff there.

It’s all becoming a case of life imitating art as foreseen by the destructoid crew a few months back
(although I counted at least 400 medics on the server I was on tonight).

spotpuff over at the new blog The Theory of Gaming has a nice talk about the new medic gears and the unlocking thereof that is close to my own heart.

Now normally this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but the achievements are not practical at all. Some of them are not achievements you would get if you were playing medic as a team player. For example, needle gunning 50 scouts to death, or bone sawing 50 medics to death. These are NOT things that happen in a regular team fortress game. 99% of the time if you are a medic and you don’t have your medigun out you are doing it wrong. The bone saw has a place in spy killing and last-ditch melee attacks, and the needle gun is useful, just not against scouts. If you needle gun a scout to death the scout either sucks or you got lucky or both, but realistically you should have been healing someone who kills the scout for you. So why did you have the needle gun out in the first place?

Come on Valve! NO MORE! 49 comments and counting from my last rant, none of them really a big fan of the achievement system. Most were against, some grudgingly went along with it just to get the toys.

I think one guy was in support, but he seemed like a bit of an unbalanced nutjob. Probably a career soldier player by the sound of it.

Perpetual double-medic ubersaw ubercharge!

Hopefully this gets nerfed soon. Probably just needs to be so that the ubersaw doesn’t charge your ubercharged while YOU are actually ubercharged.

Cheers to Janordy for the video

Part of the problem is that the other team is full of moron medics farming the new achievements that don’t have a clue how to play. Not sure if this would work as well against a better team.

So far I think I like the new Badlands Team Fortress 2 map. The routes are laid out to provide some interesting approaches and flanking opportunities, and the diverse terrain and vertical aspect is a lot of fun. From what I’ve seen, one of the biggest strengths is that no one class is able to dominate and you can play as almost anything and still useful in most areas. You just need to find the right tactics and think about how you are playing - it is a good thinking map, and good tactics and strats seem to make all the difference.

Which is why it’s so frustrating that I haven’t been able to have a decent game on it yet with all the idiots that have come out of the woodward with it’s release. It’s like all the kids played TF2 at the start, got bored, went back to Counter Strike, and now they’ve come back to TF2 again. GAH.

The worst thing seems to be the glaring underground-turret exploit. I think it took about 0.0246 seconds for the griefers to find that one after the map was released. I had really hoped Valve had learned their lesson with the problems in Gravelpit a while back and guarded against that kind of exploit a bit more.

This f**k here was s**ting me off royally last night:

Just in case anyone is running a server, and wants to lay down the ban stick (I’m looking at YOU Gamearena). His steam unique ID is STEAM_0:1:17433520, and his steam profile page is here

Another minor annoyance were the Team Roomba wannabes from WAPS stacking up one team, then all rolling engineer and being useless. Then being a dick about it on voice comms. Amazing how tough these kids act when they are safely anonymous on the interweb AND they have their buddies to back up their anti-social BS. At least Roomba had some style and made it funny.

I think I might just lay low till things go back to normal again. (Or maybe I’ll just be forced to anyway)

Valve has already sent the achievements your way

Murdoc has been totally kick ass, and has uncovered Valve’s dirty little secret - the medic achievements are already on your PC, hiding in plain sight. He emailed me earlier in the week, then I was slack, and didn’t post it, then he bugged me again, and it all works out

Just stumbled upon some amazing info!
I was poking around in the Valve Hammer Editor in the Source SDK (i was thinking of trying to make a level) and i found all the logos for the new medic achievements!

to find them, open the Hammer level editor (its under tools in steam), fo “File”, then “New”. on the right hand side is a box with a brick texture in it. click “Browse” the you will see a load of textures. type “achievement” in the “Filter” box at the bottom, you will see all the current logos, and some from one of the Half life games, along with all the new medic ones! click on the individual logos to see the file name at the bottom of the screen, this gives a clue to what will have to be done to get each achievement. Most are fairly self explanatory.

Please tell the world! I was so excited to find this!

Just did a quick print screen and crop on the medic achievement pictures.
they all have pretty much the same file name that valve gave them, so a little open to interpretation of the details.
i have not assumed anything.

If you want to access the image files directly, you can use GCFScape, and extract them manually if you want.

A lot of these seem pretty self explanatory from their name and icon. But there are some obscure ones in the mix as well (heal grind? wtf?).

The word is that the new achievements coming out initially for medic, and later for the other classes as well, will be used to unlock new game features. I’m still not sold on the idea. I like to be able to play the game out of the box as is, with only player skill determining who can do what, not how long they have been on the achievement treadmill for. 10 bonesaw hits? Save falling teammates? Syringe a scout? This stuff sounds a little silly. Sure, let the kids brag that they got the achievement by giving them a novelty hat or pet or something cosmetic like that which doesn’t affect gameplay. But having to do this stuff in order to unlock game features sounds like a pain.

It’s early days, though. So I guess we’ve got a long way to see how these things work when fully flexed out.

So here they are

The icons are already there. I wonder if the code is already written and deployed awaiting some flag in a patch to activate it?

Assist capturer

Assist demo man

Assist heavy

Assist heavy long

Assist medic

Assist pyro

Assist scout

Assist soildier

Assist vs nemesis

Bonesaw medic

Bonesaw no misses

Bonesaw spy callers

Charge blocker

Charge friends

Charge juggle

Counter charge

Extinguish team mate

Freezecam ragdoll

Heal achiever

Heal callers

Heal engineer

Heal grind

Heal huge

Heal large

Heal under fire

Invite join charge

Kill healed spy

Kill while charged

Rapid charge

Save falling team mate

Save team mate

Setup charge

Simul charge

Switch to medic

Syringe scouts

Top score board

Valve has pumped out another update.

Pretty lengthy set of changes. Looks like granary has had a major work over. And there are also unconfirmed rumours floating around on the forums that the pyro stealth nerf from a few patches back has been stealth unnerfed. Will have to check this out when I get home. I want my old pyro flame back, so if this works I’m gonna be a happy man playing this weekend.

Team Fortress 2/Source Engine Update Released

November 15, 2007, 5:30 pm - Jason Ruymen

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

• Fixed a bug in networking that would cause long stalls (up to 10 seconds) when a split packet would not be reassembled properly, which forced a full update to all clients
• General optimization to tracelines
• Fix for broken .dem file playback
• Added backward compatibility code to allow demos recorded with protocol 12 to continue to be playable under protocol version 13
• When showing “WARNING: Connection Problem”, now indicate the number of seconds remaining before an auto-disconnect will occur
• Fixed a bug that would cause NULLNAME to be shown as the player’s name in the scoreboard for a short time

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed exploit where spectators could spawn into the world without actually joining a team

Hydro map changes

• Fixed an exploit that would allow players to jump out of the map

Granary map changes

• Cover changes to the first capture points of both teams. Reduces some of the sight lines for defenders, and should make the area easier to capture
• Teams that are holding more points will receive a greater spawn time bonus (spawn timer reduced for the winning team). This should help attacking teams build momentum
• Minor visual tweaks to the BLU side between capture points 2 and 3
• Clipped off a super high (demo pipe jump) perch in the middle area
• Increased base round timer to 10 minutes
• Added windows overlooking the final cap from the capture point 2 building (via new room next to conveyor route)
• Minor changes to lighting in the middle area
• Moved the middle spawn points farther forward (saves 6-7 seconds off a Heavy’s run from this spawn to enemy capture point 2)
• Reduced spawn advantage/penalty to a total of -/+ 6 seconds when on the final cap (from 10 seconds)
• Fixed material alignment and model interpenetration issues in home spawn rocket rooms

SourceTV

• Increased default bandwidth rate from 5 to 8 KB/sec for spectator clients
• Increased SourceTV demo buffer size for table class descriptions from 64 to 96KB. Team Fortress 2 was running over this
• Performance improvement for copying unreliable data buffers to SourceTV clients
• Updated the list of events in TF2 tagged for the director to play

The Valve guys have pushed another update out. Nothing major by the look of it, just a few bug and exploit fixes. Who knows though, maybe they managed to unofficially un-nerf the pyro that they “didn’t” officially change a couple of patches back. I hate the bendy flame.

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

November 7, 2007, 5:52 pm - Alfred Reynolds

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

• Improved paged pool memory tracking
• Fixed crash on importing spray logo that claimed to be a valid jpeg file, but wasn’t
• Fixed Medic’s uber-charge stats tracking
• Fixed a bug in scoring Engineer building destruction
• Engineers no longer earn points for using their own teleporters
• Freezepanel hud improvements now trigger on usage of the “jpeg” command
• Fixed Spies exploit enabling them to attack while disguising, without losing disguise
• Fixed Spies being able to attach sappers through thin walls
• Fixed several melee weapon switching exploits
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to teleport with the intelligence
• Fixed a client crash related to MP3 playing
• Improved client handling of stats when a connection couldn’t be made to the stat servers. Fixes several cases of stat loss