One of the things we've been thinking about for a while now is how to improve the player experience around finding a server to play on. It's a tricky problem because our master servers need to ask a game server for its details, and that server can lie to us if it wants to. We decided we needed to find a way of scoring servers, with a goal of finding and delisting ones we considered "bad". The scoring system had to penalize lying without penalizing custom game rules, because some players like custom game rules. Best case, the system needed to work entirely from data that didn't come from the servers themselves, so they couldn't lie to us in any way to affect it.
Nerrhrr... After spending all yesterday in my ExtraFlex Hyper-Butterfly PhotographyChair, using my 256 NerrPixl Series Digital Camera, I only managed to capture one measly ImageGraph of my precious butterflies. My beautiful butterflies, they move too quickly nerr... I need to show the other nerrs at digibutter.nerr lolwut my precious ImageGraphs, but my l33t photography skillz failed a little... I must ask you uh, l33ter nerrs, to help recreate my photo, using your own artistic talent, that I unfortunately lack nerrhrr. Rules and such: -Please only fill in one section of the grid at a time. The starting grid can be located here. -You may use the image posted above (with the blurred Tippi) as a reference, but please do not include it in your part of the collab. I want it all done by your fair hands :) -Please copy/paste the image from the previous poster and add your own new section to it. -Blank squares in the reference should remain blank.
On Tuesday we shipped an update that added a bunch of features / bugfixes / balancing tweaks that came out of the community's feedback. In particular, it made some changes to the underlying TF damage system, and as part of that, it modified the way critical hits are determined. We thought it might be interesting to dig a little into the change, and hopefully give you some insight into our thinking.
The Scout was one of the first TF2 classes we worked on when we decided to try out a more stylized approach to the game. As a result, his concept art is further afield, and in the eyes of our artists, much more embarrassing. This might be exacerbated by their desire to not have people looking at a piece of their artwork and not liking it, from an artistic point of view. Concept art has a different purpose than that, and so the effort to make it look great is usually unnecessary. In short, there's a special place in hell that all our artists hope we'll go to for showing you their concept art.
We're just about done with the Scout pack, and our design and coding has already moved on to the next pack. The weapons and achievements are all nailed down, and we just have to finish up the final artwork on them. We like to do the final art as late as possible to ensure that we don't waste any work, which turned out to be a good decision this time around due to the large number of unlockables we tried out as alternatives to the Scattergun. Balancing his replacement weapon has been very tricky due to large threat difference of the Scout between skilled and non-skilled hands. More on that soon.
This is one hi-technicaaaaaaaaaaal butterfly. It can get long-distance messages, and it tells them to you! You can tell it to get any topic of a message and it looks all around the world for that topic. If you ask for topic "dinner" at night, it would search, then it would say something like "what should we get for dinner tonight?" in a hi-technicaaaaaaaal voice. [img]http://www.club559.com/images/Butterflymessenger300.bmp[/img]
We've been pretty quiet lately, but thankfully, that's about to end. In the next few days we'll have an update out that has a couple of new features for the Engineer and Spy, and a variety of other smaller fixes.
It looks moderately huggable to me :3 And it's green, a color widely associated with the word "digital". And... I think those are squares on it. Seriously, what? Randomness or not, it's what you get.
It has yet to be opened, but there it is: a smiley face in the pie crust. Whatever person was involved with the pie-top must had been bored. Or high. Or something.
