Phobias
September 9th, 2009, 09:49 AM
I was (s)trolling through the Steam tf2 forums and found a rather good run down of the changes made to tf2 over it's lifetime, enjoy:
Caution: fucking long.
1999: First screenshots of TF2 are revealed, showing a gritty, realistic (well, for the time) design.
July 2006: Valve re-reveals TF2, this time with a cartoony art style, ruining the game forever.
September 17, 2007: Team Fortress 2 beta is released. Though playable, it is full of imbalances and lacks grenades, ruining the whole franchise forever.
September 28: First gameplay update is released
Valve claims to prevent players getting stuck in hydro, however, sudden death still exists. Players are confused.
Grenade bowling is removed, forever ruining the demoman and making him useless.
October 1: Meet the Heavy is released in Russian, ruining Meet the Heavy forever.
October 5: Valve *snicker* "fixes" *giggle* teleporter/spawn doorway exploit.
October 25: Major update released.
Valve claims to fix backstab code. Everyone laughs, including valve.
Valve improves autobalance calculation code when determining who to switch. It now correctly switches you (yeah that's right Steve) with approximately 80% accuracy, up from 50%. You deserved it though, jerk.
Valve fixes issues on Dustbowl and Hydro that could occur when a server emptied in the middle of a round. Owners of 24/7 hydro servers are relieved.
Rockets are now unable to deal splash damage through thin ceilings. Soldiers now extremely underpowered.
October 26: Soldiers extremely overpowered, apparently.
October 31: Valve adds anti-bunny hopping code, removing what skill remained in TF2 and ruining it forever.
November 7: Valve fixes a melee exploit where one could essentially "store" a hit. Melee is now completely useless and ruined forevevr.
November 15: Valve fixes an exploit on Hydro where players could jump out of the map. Unfortunately, valve cannot prevent players from jumping out of the server.
December 20: Sudden death is changed to a server option that defaults to OFF. Average hydro round now half as long.
January 7, 2008: Valve fixes an exploit on the final cap of Well where engineers can build in the ceiling. Engineers must now find a new way to be completely useless.
January 25: Valve add new map: ctf_well, a revolutionary CTF map where players must walk for more than 5 seconds to reach combat. It flops.
NINJA UPDATE SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS TIME: Snipers are given a .2 second delay between when they scope and when they can score a headshot. No one notices.
Feburary 14: Update!
Aforementioned delay shows up in the patch notes. Snipers commence complaining about something they didn't really notice in the first place.
Badlands is released: A great new 5cp map with several ways to attack each individual CP. The TF2 community declares it too confusing and goes back to playing dustbowl.
Feburary 19: Valve fixes "a case where a spy stabbing from the front of a player would score a backstab". Sadly, several million other cases of exactly the same thing remain.
Feburary 28: Update.
Soldier and demoman reserve ammo is reduced. Both classes now occasionally need to look at their ammo counter, once again ruining soldier forever and plummeting the demoman even further into the dark, gaping chasm known as "uselessness"
Valve adds protection against voice command spamming. I sink into a deep depression.
Valve adds "custom tab" to the server browser, where all servers that modify game rules are placed. This proves problematic for instaspawn servers as the vast majority of their playerbase is apparently too thick to find the servers in their new location
March 13: Some linux thing, I dunno.
April 1: A penalty is added for multi ubering. Medics immediately begin complaining about how their skill of rapidly clicking on as many people as possible has been made useless.
April 29: huuuuuuge update man, woaah.
Having learned their lesson from badlands, valve releases a new map: Goldrush, which is essentially a giant straight line packed with chokepoints that are incredibly easy to spam and block with sentries.
It's an instant hit!
3 medic items are released. As promised, all the weapons provide a meaningful choice to the player, such as the question posed by the blutsauger: "do you want to be good?"
Servers are now filled with medics. Remarkably, it's still impossible to get a heal.
Some 2fort changes make it roughly 1% easier to attack.
April 30: A hilarious command that could be used to unlock all the achievements is removed, as are the weapons of those who used the command and, strangely, the weapons of many of those who didn't.
June 19: Pyro recieves his major class pack, ruining him forever
The soldier no longer recieves less self-damage from his own rockets. He can no longer be used effectively by walking forwards and pressing the left mouse button.
Pyro recieves a hilarious buff in which the damage from his flamethrower is, on average, doubled. Hit detection is also altered: Whereas previously it detected roughly as many hits as a blind man wearing earmuffs, it now has the eyesight of a hawk, the ears of a cat and the nose of a bloodhound. Also, that weird electric thingy that sharks have, whatever that is. The end result is that the pyro can now be used effectively by walking forward and pressing the left mouse button.
The flaregun is added: It's pretty useless really, but people tell themselves that it's good.
The backburner is added: It gives 100% crits from behind (and other directions too, depending on the weather) and, to aid ambushing, 50 health. Other unlocks valve looked to add included the hotfoot, which instantly killed people from below and gave the pyro double jump to encourage subterranean tactics.
The axtinguisher is added, which provides a meaningful choice in the same way the blutsauger did. For a while it's completely and utterly useless beause the flamethrower kills everything anyway, but it does eventually come into it's own.
Ctf well is updated to merge the easy-to-reach combat of 2fort with the balance of a non-pile-of-crap map. No one notices.
July 1: The flamethrower is nerfed to somewhere in between the useless pile of crap it was before the update and the spewer of unavoidable death that it was post-update, ruining it forever.
Some more voice spam protection is added. My depression worsens.
July 29: Cancer is cured. No, wait, sorry, just an update.
Annoying soldiers who kill themselves before burning to death now give kills to the pyro. Hah!
Stuff can no longer shoot through setup gates. 1 minute of every attack/defend map is now boring.
The health bonus is removed from the backburner, placing the pyro in his current state of pseudo balance where he dominates noobs and gets eaten by good players. Oh, right, sorry. Blah blah ruined blah.
August 19: Heavy is ruined.
Arena is added. People hate it except for lumberyard.
Sandvich is added. It sucks.
Natascha is added. It sucks.
The KGB are added. They don't suck, but are still almost completely useless, like the normal fists.
Badwater basin is added. It's a new payload map which tries out the incredible concept of blue team being able to win. Surprisingly, it's actually popular.
The kritzkrieg is made useful. Hooray.
CP_steel is added: It's a great a/d map where blue has a very good chance to win. Every point is pretty well balanced with sentries never really dominating and multiple routes to each point, allowing flanking and such. Every class has a place!
It is hated by all.
SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS TIME: Despite never getting buffed since his ruination at the hands of the nade-bowling removal, demoman is now apparently overpowered. Whee!
December 11: Engineers can now upgrade all their buildings. They still, however, refuse to upgrade anyone elses.
Spies can recharge their cloak by picking up ammo boxes. Cloak is made shorter to compensate.
Strangely, the only people who whine are the spies.
Soldiers now look AWESOME when rocketjumping, wooo!
January 28, 2009: An update occurs.
The medic can now see exactly how charged his uber is, letting him know whether this next hit will allow him to escape unharmed or leave him hilariously dead at 99%.
Natascha is made not useless, unfortunately revealing how incredibly boring she is to use.
Feburary 2: The chance of a soldier walking out of spawn and killing you instantly is now 1 in 50, down from 1 in 20.
The flaregun recieves a 10 damage boost. For reasons that I still haven't quite worked out, this makes the flaregun a halfway decent choice.
Feburary 24: The scout ruins tf2.
The Force a Nature is added. It sucks.
The Sandman is added. It is essentially a portable crit grenade which also renders ubercharges useless. A forum post pops up on the steam forums stating that it will be completely useless in comp play. It is later banned in comp play
haha, that guy sure got told.
Bonk! energy drink is added. It sucks.
CP_junction is added. It sucks.
First blood is added to arena. It sucks
A bug is fixed where players would sometimes gib from non-gib kills. That sucks.
CP_egypt is added. It's not too bad, but we'll run with the theme here and say it sucks. It sucks.
arena_watchtower is added. It's an arena map and so is automatically hated, in other words: It sucks.
Backstab is changed. It sucks.
Natascha is broken again somehow. It sucks.
Sandman somehows breaks the axtinguisher. Wut?
Feburary 25: Axtinguisher is de-broken.
March 5: Backstab no longer sucks and is in fact better than it was before.
Natascha is de-broken
March 13: Stunned players take 50% less damage, making the infamous unlock unfun to use as well as unfun to get hit by.
April 20: A delete function is added that can be used to remove your unlocks. For reasons still unknown to mankind, many people go ahead and remove their weapons.
May 21: Valve ruins 2 classes in one update.
The huntsman is added. no comment.
Jarate is added, bringing a new class of highbrow humour to TF2. Harhar, urine!
The Razorback is added. It's a revolutionary unlock that works against 1 weapon from 1 class from 1 direction. It also only works once.
The ambassador is added. It deals 25% less damage than the normal revolver, but if you score a headshot it does 35% more damage!
which sucks.
The dead ringer is added. It's pretty funny, hur hur hur.
The cloak and dagger is added, allowing spies to accomplish in 2 minutes what they used to accomplish in 30 seconds. On the other hand, it's funny, hur hur hur.
Disguises are made surprisingly not-useless.
Spies can now use teleporters, leading to hilarious telefrag incidents.
The demoman can detonate stickies while taunting, which is a great way to get revenge on those foolish enough to attack taunters.
The airblast can now extinguish fire. Usually, however, either the genius using the airblast isn't aware of it's new use OR the genius running away from the pyro isn't aware of it's new use.
Valve changes the unlock system. Alledgely, "You now find new and old items as you play". The actual outcome is usually someone else finds new items as they sit in spectator while you find sandviches as you win round after round.
Hats are added.
May 22: Spy can no longer taunt kill while cloaked. Brainless, camping engineers are relieved.
May 26: The ambassador now does full crits on headshots, changing it from a useless piddlepot into a machine of random headish spam death.
The dead ringer drains all your cloak when you deactivate it, turning it into a useless piddlepot.
May 29: Milestones are readded, allowing us to farm our unlocks in one hour instead of 6-100 hours.
SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS TIME: People work out the hat probabilities and begin complaining about not getting items which have no effect on gameplay and can't even be seen by the wearer.
June 23: Dead ringer is de-piddlepotted.
Spies no longer brightly glow their own team colour. A shame, really.
June 25: Some linux thing, I dunno.
Direct link to post: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=917806
Caution: fucking long.
1999: First screenshots of TF2 are revealed, showing a gritty, realistic (well, for the time) design.
July 2006: Valve re-reveals TF2, this time with a cartoony art style, ruining the game forever.
September 17, 2007: Team Fortress 2 beta is released. Though playable, it is full of imbalances and lacks grenades, ruining the whole franchise forever.
September 28: First gameplay update is released
Valve claims to prevent players getting stuck in hydro, however, sudden death still exists. Players are confused.
Grenade bowling is removed, forever ruining the demoman and making him useless.
October 1: Meet the Heavy is released in Russian, ruining Meet the Heavy forever.
October 5: Valve *snicker* "fixes" *giggle* teleporter/spawn doorway exploit.
October 25: Major update released.
Valve claims to fix backstab code. Everyone laughs, including valve.
Valve improves autobalance calculation code when determining who to switch. It now correctly switches you (yeah that's right Steve) with approximately 80% accuracy, up from 50%. You deserved it though, jerk.
Valve fixes issues on Dustbowl and Hydro that could occur when a server emptied in the middle of a round. Owners of 24/7 hydro servers are relieved.
Rockets are now unable to deal splash damage through thin ceilings. Soldiers now extremely underpowered.
October 26: Soldiers extremely overpowered, apparently.
October 31: Valve adds anti-bunny hopping code, removing what skill remained in TF2 and ruining it forever.
November 7: Valve fixes a melee exploit where one could essentially "store" a hit. Melee is now completely useless and ruined forevevr.
November 15: Valve fixes an exploit on Hydro where players could jump out of the map. Unfortunately, valve cannot prevent players from jumping out of the server.
December 20: Sudden death is changed to a server option that defaults to OFF. Average hydro round now half as long.
January 7, 2008: Valve fixes an exploit on the final cap of Well where engineers can build in the ceiling. Engineers must now find a new way to be completely useless.
January 25: Valve add new map: ctf_well, a revolutionary CTF map where players must walk for more than 5 seconds to reach combat. It flops.
NINJA UPDATE SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS TIME: Snipers are given a .2 second delay between when they scope and when they can score a headshot. No one notices.
Feburary 14: Update!
Aforementioned delay shows up in the patch notes. Snipers commence complaining about something they didn't really notice in the first place.
Badlands is released: A great new 5cp map with several ways to attack each individual CP. The TF2 community declares it too confusing and goes back to playing dustbowl.
Feburary 19: Valve fixes "a case where a spy stabbing from the front of a player would score a backstab". Sadly, several million other cases of exactly the same thing remain.
Feburary 28: Update.
Soldier and demoman reserve ammo is reduced. Both classes now occasionally need to look at their ammo counter, once again ruining soldier forever and plummeting the demoman even further into the dark, gaping chasm known as "uselessness"
Valve adds protection against voice command spamming. I sink into a deep depression.
Valve adds "custom tab" to the server browser, where all servers that modify game rules are placed. This proves problematic for instaspawn servers as the vast majority of their playerbase is apparently too thick to find the servers in their new location
March 13: Some linux thing, I dunno.
April 1: A penalty is added for multi ubering. Medics immediately begin complaining about how their skill of rapidly clicking on as many people as possible has been made useless.
April 29: huuuuuuge update man, woaah.
Having learned their lesson from badlands, valve releases a new map: Goldrush, which is essentially a giant straight line packed with chokepoints that are incredibly easy to spam and block with sentries.
It's an instant hit!
3 medic items are released. As promised, all the weapons provide a meaningful choice to the player, such as the question posed by the blutsauger: "do you want to be good?"
Servers are now filled with medics. Remarkably, it's still impossible to get a heal.
Some 2fort changes make it roughly 1% easier to attack.
April 30: A hilarious command that could be used to unlock all the achievements is removed, as are the weapons of those who used the command and, strangely, the weapons of many of those who didn't.
June 19: Pyro recieves his major class pack, ruining him forever
The soldier no longer recieves less self-damage from his own rockets. He can no longer be used effectively by walking forwards and pressing the left mouse button.
Pyro recieves a hilarious buff in which the damage from his flamethrower is, on average, doubled. Hit detection is also altered: Whereas previously it detected roughly as many hits as a blind man wearing earmuffs, it now has the eyesight of a hawk, the ears of a cat and the nose of a bloodhound. Also, that weird electric thingy that sharks have, whatever that is. The end result is that the pyro can now be used effectively by walking forward and pressing the left mouse button.
The flaregun is added: It's pretty useless really, but people tell themselves that it's good.
The backburner is added: It gives 100% crits from behind (and other directions too, depending on the weather) and, to aid ambushing, 50 health. Other unlocks valve looked to add included the hotfoot, which instantly killed people from below and gave the pyro double jump to encourage subterranean tactics.
The axtinguisher is added, which provides a meaningful choice in the same way the blutsauger did. For a while it's completely and utterly useless beause the flamethrower kills everything anyway, but it does eventually come into it's own.
Ctf well is updated to merge the easy-to-reach combat of 2fort with the balance of a non-pile-of-crap map. No one notices.
July 1: The flamethrower is nerfed to somewhere in between the useless pile of crap it was before the update and the spewer of unavoidable death that it was post-update, ruining it forever.
Some more voice spam protection is added. My depression worsens.
July 29: Cancer is cured. No, wait, sorry, just an update.
Annoying soldiers who kill themselves before burning to death now give kills to the pyro. Hah!
Stuff can no longer shoot through setup gates. 1 minute of every attack/defend map is now boring.
The health bonus is removed from the backburner, placing the pyro in his current state of pseudo balance where he dominates noobs and gets eaten by good players. Oh, right, sorry. Blah blah ruined blah.
August 19: Heavy is ruined.
Arena is added. People hate it except for lumberyard.
Sandvich is added. It sucks.
Natascha is added. It sucks.
The KGB are added. They don't suck, but are still almost completely useless, like the normal fists.
Badwater basin is added. It's a new payload map which tries out the incredible concept of blue team being able to win. Surprisingly, it's actually popular.
The kritzkrieg is made useful. Hooray.
CP_steel is added: It's a great a/d map where blue has a very good chance to win. Every point is pretty well balanced with sentries never really dominating and multiple routes to each point, allowing flanking and such. Every class has a place!
It is hated by all.
SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS TIME: Despite never getting buffed since his ruination at the hands of the nade-bowling removal, demoman is now apparently overpowered. Whee!
December 11: Engineers can now upgrade all their buildings. They still, however, refuse to upgrade anyone elses.
Spies can recharge their cloak by picking up ammo boxes. Cloak is made shorter to compensate.
Strangely, the only people who whine are the spies.
Soldiers now look AWESOME when rocketjumping, wooo!
January 28, 2009: An update occurs.
The medic can now see exactly how charged his uber is, letting him know whether this next hit will allow him to escape unharmed or leave him hilariously dead at 99%.
Natascha is made not useless, unfortunately revealing how incredibly boring she is to use.
Feburary 2: The chance of a soldier walking out of spawn and killing you instantly is now 1 in 50, down from 1 in 20.
The flaregun recieves a 10 damage boost. For reasons that I still haven't quite worked out, this makes the flaregun a halfway decent choice.
Feburary 24: The scout ruins tf2.
The Force a Nature is added. It sucks.
The Sandman is added. It is essentially a portable crit grenade which also renders ubercharges useless. A forum post pops up on the steam forums stating that it will be completely useless in comp play. It is later banned in comp play
haha, that guy sure got told.
Bonk! energy drink is added. It sucks.
CP_junction is added. It sucks.
First blood is added to arena. It sucks
A bug is fixed where players would sometimes gib from non-gib kills. That sucks.
CP_egypt is added. It's not too bad, but we'll run with the theme here and say it sucks. It sucks.
arena_watchtower is added. It's an arena map and so is automatically hated, in other words: It sucks.
Backstab is changed. It sucks.
Natascha is broken again somehow. It sucks.
Sandman somehows breaks the axtinguisher. Wut?
Feburary 25: Axtinguisher is de-broken.
March 5: Backstab no longer sucks and is in fact better than it was before.
Natascha is de-broken
March 13: Stunned players take 50% less damage, making the infamous unlock unfun to use as well as unfun to get hit by.
April 20: A delete function is added that can be used to remove your unlocks. For reasons still unknown to mankind, many people go ahead and remove their weapons.
May 21: Valve ruins 2 classes in one update.
The huntsman is added. no comment.
Jarate is added, bringing a new class of highbrow humour to TF2. Harhar, urine!
The Razorback is added. It's a revolutionary unlock that works against 1 weapon from 1 class from 1 direction. It also only works once.
The ambassador is added. It deals 25% less damage than the normal revolver, but if you score a headshot it does 35% more damage!
which sucks.
The dead ringer is added. It's pretty funny, hur hur hur.
The cloak and dagger is added, allowing spies to accomplish in 2 minutes what they used to accomplish in 30 seconds. On the other hand, it's funny, hur hur hur.
Disguises are made surprisingly not-useless.
Spies can now use teleporters, leading to hilarious telefrag incidents.
The demoman can detonate stickies while taunting, which is a great way to get revenge on those foolish enough to attack taunters.
The airblast can now extinguish fire. Usually, however, either the genius using the airblast isn't aware of it's new use OR the genius running away from the pyro isn't aware of it's new use.
Valve changes the unlock system. Alledgely, "You now find new and old items as you play". The actual outcome is usually someone else finds new items as they sit in spectator while you find sandviches as you win round after round.
Hats are added.
May 22: Spy can no longer taunt kill while cloaked. Brainless, camping engineers are relieved.
May 26: The ambassador now does full crits on headshots, changing it from a useless piddlepot into a machine of random headish spam death.
The dead ringer drains all your cloak when you deactivate it, turning it into a useless piddlepot.
May 29: Milestones are readded, allowing us to farm our unlocks in one hour instead of 6-100 hours.
SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS TIME: People work out the hat probabilities and begin complaining about not getting items which have no effect on gameplay and can't even be seen by the wearer.
June 23: Dead ringer is de-piddlepotted.
Spies no longer brightly glow their own team colour. A shame, really.
June 25: Some linux thing, I dunno.
Direct link to post: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=917806