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).
madlep on May 7th 2008 in Uncategorized, community, medic, patch, team fortress 2
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.
madlep on May 6th 2008 in community, medic, patch, team fortress 2
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.
It’s great that Valve puts so much into the TF2 community. Let me get that out of the way straight up. The stuff they’re doing with the new medic weapons, and new maps are great. I finally played the new update today, and… WOW. Gold Rush is a stroke of genius. Gotta be about the best TF2 map I’ve played. I mean, there’s something in there for everyone. Whatever class you want to play, there’s room for it in there.
It’s particularly well suited to pyro antics. I had my first game on it, and I totally rocked out. Top scored and all. Its the way the pyro is meant to be played - lots of back alleys to allow attacks from unexpected angles and quick sweep-and-retreat style play.
And the feel and intensity of the game is just great. Valve has really hit on a winning formula with this game mode. The balance in the games I played tonight constantly shifted back and forth as the cart moved through different sections of the map. There is so much variety in there that it forces you to constantly adapt the tactics to the ever changing game state.
Highlight of the evening’s play was where I was defending as a heavy. During warm up, me and a medic hid round a corner out of sight of the attackers. The medic charged up a critzcrieg and opened it up on me just as the count down timer finished and the gates opened. The attackers rushed out straight into a hail of crit chain gun bullets. Carnage everywhere. It was magnificent.
10 out of 10.
But about these new unlockable medic achievements…
I just really can’t get excited about locking the new medic gear behind the achievement gimmick that is so in vogue at the moment. I mean it’s great if you’re into that sort of thing. Kind of an e-bragging right for the people who actually care (I don’t). If you want to spent 3 hours laying down 1000 sticky bombs so you can get the “draw a picture of Doug Lombardi with scorch marks” achievement so you can boast to all the other cool kids at school, then all power to you - just don’t do that useless crap on any server that I’m on.
Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation currently has more internet authority (and traffic) than Jesus. He had some insightful words to say on the subject in last weeks Super Smash Bros. Brawl review, so I’ll e-quote it here:
It’s a long watch (but well worth it), so I’ll paraphrase liberally (i.e. make crap up):
Game developers don’t have sex, or hang out with cool people, or go out to parties, or even talk to human beings. So they pump out self-indulgent, pointless, and time consuming achievements cause they think everyone else likes to spend hours of their life endlessly playing through every edge case orifice of their game, because they are just that s**t hot.
Blizzard and their golden goose of orcs and elves has lobotomized the prefrontal cortex of the game industry. Compared to the golden age of yesteryear (which never actually existed, but everyone thinks occurred about the time they were in college playing the game-du-jour for 10 hours a day), today’s game development efforts have turned into a stimulus/response reflex race to the bottom to transform every game into World of Warcraft.
Game developers look at Blizzard, see their pile of cash, and try to figure out how to replicate it. The answer that the triumvirate of evil (NinteMicroSony) came up with was to include an online system of shoe horning achievements into single player games that would otherwise have nothing what so ever to do with achievements. You got some androgynous anime-inspired waif to swing a super size sword and kill a boss? HAVE AN ACHIEVEMENT! You spent one man month hitting golf balls into hoops? ACHIEVEMENT! You crashed into every traffic light while it was orange while driving the wrong way around the track in your favorite arcade racer? YOU BETCHA! ACHIEVEMENTS GALORE! All of which is annoying and stupid, but ultimately harmless.
It’s like they tried to headhunt the high-priced consultants that came up with PHAT EPIC L00T from the early days of MMORPGs, but instead they actually got the guys that came up with the idea of those kitset model magazines where they dripfeed you one piece of the Bismarck or some crap every week to try and keep your interest in their product. Except that you get so bored of waiting for the grind for each new piece that you lost interest in whatever the original product itself was. In the end you give up by the time you’ve barely even assembled the port lifeboats and the officers’ private latrine.
(Yes, I may have been one of those people that bought something just for the kitset model - but it was of the New Zealand Antarctic base, and it was Weet-Bix cereal, and I was 8 years old)
Now that’s fine. Let them think that and code in these achievements (it’s a waste of resources that could go into game polishing, but thats their business I guess if they want to make an inferior product). The problem is when they force you onto the achievement grind treadmill just to get core game play elements.
It makes it too easy for developers to get lazy and skimp on game content. Say that you market your game as having 40 hours of playable content? What is cheaper: developing a game that really has 40 hours of content, or just developing 2 hours worth, and including 20 “achievements” that you have to grind through unlock in order to reach all of that 2 hours of content?
Do you think that I find it fun to waste my time jumping through hoops for you? As I’ve already established, I don’t have time for that crap. I bought your game and I demand to be entertained. I play it because I find something intrinsically fun about it. I have all week at work to grind through repetitive mind numbing tasks (actually no, my job isn’t that bad, but you get the gist of it).
If you put the goodies up on a high shelf where I can’t reach, the game ceases to be fun within the time parameters I’ve got to play it. If madlep doesn’t have fun, madlep doesn’t buy your game. You don’t make money, and you go out of business, and you end up destitute living on a street corner holding a cardboard sign reading “will code achievements for food”
But there are particularly bad problems when we’re talking about unlockables and mutliplayer games:
It’s merely annoying to lock up single player content, but it’s down right broken to grant better stuff (or even different stuff) to some players in multi player games that just happen to have done more of your moronic little time wasters. Blizzard (despite their later sins), was the original master of finely balanced multi-player gaming with Star-craft. The whole game was open to begin with, and it was incredibly well balanced. Imagine if you had to grind through weeks of play just to be on a level playing field? Would Star-craft be the national phenomenon it is in South Korea today if new players had to go through that crap just to be able to get their butt kicked fair and square by that hyper active 8 year old genius?
You know how I mentioned that I top scored as pyro at the beginning of the post? IT WAS BECAUSE THE ENTIRE SERVER WAS FULL OF MEDICS TRYING TO UBER DEMOMEN JUMPING OFF CLIFFS, MEDICS TRYING TO UBER SCOUTS, OR MEDICS TRYING TO UBER FIST HEAVIES (or the scouts or heavies or whatever from their clan helping them out)
Ridiculous stuff. What the hell did valve think would happen when they put such moronic criteria for the achievements in there?
(Co-incidentally, I was too damn lazy to take my own in game screen shot, so I googled for one, then I went to look at who to credit it with, and it turns out it’s by Shakey Lo, from my old Tribes 2 clan - |8| Hi Shakey! Shakey rocks as a Tribes 2 Heavy Offence player. Those were the days… )
Gold rush rocks, but I’m going to be sorely tempted not to even bother playing for the next few weeks till this crap dies down a bit.
It actually took me sometime to find a public server with a real gold rush game - or a real game with any map for that reason. Partly because there is still a lot of popularity, and the servers genuinely are busy. But mostly because I had to go through about 5 different servers before I found one where players weren’t there with their clanmates/friends/whatever solely for the purpose of grinding achievements to get the unlocks so they could go and play normally afterwards.
What the hell is the point Valve?
If these achievements are supposed to be bringing so much fun to the game, why are people doing this?
It’s all very MMORPGish. Why do you spent two nights slaying fearsome murlocs? It’s so you can get the quest reward of a bigger sword. And you need a bigger sword to do what? That’s right! So you can go and slay mighty murlocs, so you can get an even bigger sword, so you can go and slay Elite murlocs and over and over.
My brain hasn’t implemented tail-recursion optimization so I get a call stack overflow a few weeks into a grind like this (that means “I get bored and quit” in english. Sorry for the computer science geekery, but it’s late and I should be asleep).
Well, the guys from Control Point had some fun, but they’re a fun bunch of people, and they’d even be able to amuse themselves at an antique bed-pan dealers convention:
This hasn’t happened yet to my knowledge, but the entrepreneurs that brought the world gold-farming and power-levelling must be rubbing their hands together that Valve has opened up a new market for them. Why spend weeks levelling up a TF2 account to get all the unlocks when you can buy a ready made account from some shady guy dealing out of a Beijing area code?
Again: What the hell is the point Valve?
madlep sucks at this kind of stuff. I’m just not patient enough, and at this rate I will never get to know the joy of ubersawing to build up my critzcrieg. Have pity on a poor crap player like me Valve!
So I don’t know what to make of all this. I’m obviously not a big fan of the whole unlockable concept. Hopefully the next few weeks are such a mess that Valve seriously rethinks the whole unlockables roadmap. Ideally they’ll just release new items for the other classes ready to play by all as soon as they come out - and do the same for the medic items.
Bring on the new weapons and abilities. Even keep the achievements if you really have want (I won’t be getting them).
But leave the unlockables out please!
madlep on May 1st 2008 in funny, medic, rants, team fortress 2, valve
theBond from Gib$Ru$ wrote in mentioning the promo video they’ve done for their Dustbowl server. (24/7, instaspawn, instateleports - messy. I like it!)
They’re invoking memories of 80s sitcoms, Cheers in particular. My parents used to love that show when I was a kid, we watched it every Tuesday night. I got pissed off cause Knight Rider was on the other channel and I wasn’t allowed to watch it. Yeah, back when Woody Harrelson had hair, Kirsty Alley wasn’t doing reality TV about dieting, Ted Danson was actually well known (although he was pretty good in Damages), and Kelsey Grammer wasn’t Frasier… No wait, he was Frasier in that as well.
It’s all warm and fuzzy like, where every one knows your name. You can almost hear Norm and Cliff hollering for another beer.
Gib$Ru$ 24/7 Dustbowl Server
67.213.67.91:27015This video was shot on the Gib$Ru$ server.Join us on the Gib$Ru$ 24/7 Dustbowl server, where its Dustbowl all the time. Unique mods such as instant respawn, and instant teleporters seperate the server from the rest, along with friendly [Gib$Ru$] guild members.
After playing for a while, sign up for the guild at gibsrus.com/
We hope to see you around!
Team Fortress 2: Dustbowl to Cheers Theme Song from Sean Joudry on Vimeo.
madlep on May 1st 2008 in community, funny, machinima, team fortress 2, videos
The Escapist (home to the inimitable Zero Punctuation) has interviewed the Team Roomba lads.
There is talk of griefing videos (as we’ve seen a couple of times before), and the ethical implications thereof.
Arriving at the initial crest of enthusiasm toward Valve’s Team Fortress 2, Team Roomba’s video showing an array of petty, hilarious and oft imaginative cruelty was an immediate memetic sensation. Griefing is usually little more than plain sadism; but with the right soundtrack and frame-perfect editing, Team Roomba’s videos have turned it into - whisper it - a kind of comedy performance. Or, at least, something other than just being a douchebag.
No mention of an an apology for getting Celine Dion stuck in my brain (again).
madlep on April 30th 2008 in community, team fortress 2, videos
Everyone has been asking why I haven’t posted the meet the scout vid yet.
Well, I had a bit of a family thing at the last minute - my Grandad died. He was 80, and a great guy. He had lived a good life, was mentally and physically sound, but he was old and that wouldn’t have lasted much longer. It was just his time. He went out quickly and with his dignity with a sudden heart attack. Everyone thought that was much better than slowly decaying over the next decade or so and causing pain for him and the family. He was much loved and there must have been at least 400 people at the funeral.
So I had to book a last minute flight back home to see him off, and now I’m staying with relatives in non-broadband land. This is about the first time I’ve been online.
Apparently Valve has spies watching me, and knows that the only time they can get away with big news releases is when I’m not around to poke fun at them, cause as soon as I was under internet radio silence, they pumped out the Latest Meet The Team Vid:
So until I get somewhere that transfers faster than 3kb/s, I won’t be watching it for a while. But it’s Valve, so I’m sure it’s all good.
madlep on April 22nd 2008 in orange box, scout, team fortress 2, trailers, valve, videos
The evils that come from Team Roomba know no limits.
After a couple of griefing attempts and a Pyro music video, the latest shenanigans to come from their way involves a bunch of sweaty Team Fortress 2 geeks with little to no musical talent playing the “My Heart Will Go On: Karaoke Mod” on the 2for2furious.com server. I kid you not.
The big question is though: Can we put this on a server in my area?. I WANT IN!
TF2 Karaoke: My Heart Will Go On from FLOOR MASTER on Vimeo.
Spotted over at Brad Sucks
madlep on April 18th 2008 in community, funny, team fortress 2, videos
Quick note, cause I’m sure that anyone who cares has already read this in the million other regular gaming sites that cover “the news”, but Shacknews has the details on the new Medic changes (and a bit about Goldrush and such).
All sounds lovely. The achievement stuff is still in there, which I’m a bit dubious about (I wanna play TF2 - not organize rigged servers with buddies just to grind achievements - except I don’t have any buddies, so I’m screwed either way), but it all sounds quite interesting. The old permanent health plan buff is out, and this stuff is in:
The Blutsaugher
For players that earn one third of the 36 new medic achievements, they will be given a new syringe gun. Called “The Blutsaugher,” this new weapon no longer has the ability to score critical hits against an opponent. Instead it will draw health from enemies each time a syringe hits. Especially useful as a weapon to retreat away from the fight while staying alive.The Critzcrieg
Once a medic has earned two thirds of the achievements, they will be granted “The Critzcrieg.” This new medigun uses its ubercharge not for invulnerability, but to give its recipient 100% chance to fire critical ordinance. Medics and the player they are charging need to be careful though, because as much fun as it is to fire critical rockets as fast as you can, the other team will see what you’re up to and try to put a quick stop to your plan.The Ubersaw
For the determined medic that has earned all 36 of the new achievements, they will find themselves the proud owner of “The Ubersaw,” which will take damage done in melee attacks and convert it directly to ubercharge. Four hits with this new weapon will fully charge whatever medigun the medic has equpped.
Seriously, I don’t know where these names come from. They must have one guy at Valve working round the clock who’s job description is “Smoke Some Crack And Then Think Up Whacked Names For Game Concepts”.
More scope for medic shenanigans all round. I’m picking we’ll see double uber/critzcriegs as a standard tactic as predicted some time ago.
Oh, and now I’ll have to go and rebrand this whole site to critzcrieged.net (yes, I’ve already registered the domain name 
)
madlep on April 17th 2008 in maps, medic, news, team fortress 2, valve
Nerf NOW!! is a web comic by Josué Pereira. Some very cool work in there.
There’s a bit of a story line going on. So some dreaded continuity required. It’s best to go back and read it all from the first comic (yes, I know, this is tough for some of you with a 30 second attention span, but it’s worth it.)
Cheers to Pinko for the tip off 
madlep on April 13th 2008 in community, funny, team fortress 2
