Today’s TF2 blog update is pretty funny, for all the wrong reasons.

The first was whether or not you understand what killed you. If you don\’t know what killed you, that death is failing in providing you the feedback it\’s supposed to, and you won\’t be able to figure out what you could have done differently. Unsurprisingly, we saw that these deaths were highly aggravating to players, and in sufficient number caused new players to stop playing entirely. Trying to reduce the number of these deaths in TF2 was done through a variety of changes. It was one of the reasons why we chose to remove the hand-held grenades that each class had in TFC, which were one of the primary causes of these deaths. It was one of several goals that led to the creation of the freezecam.

…but they added critical hits.

The second was whether you felt you were actually engaged with the person who killed you. Dying to someone you weren\’t engaged with, especially when you were already engaged with someone else, was aggravating. Even worse was dying to someone who you couldn\’t have engaged with, even if you chose to. In that case, you\’re very unlikely to believe you could have done anything differently to survive.

…but they added the Sandman.

Ah well.

Why another post about TF2 oddities? Well, my total playtime as Soldier finally overtook my playtime as Pyro, making the Soldier my most-played class. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been playing Soldier a lot more since he had a higher skill ceiling, and I’m more or less at the point where I can play the Soldier decently in public games and score reasonably high on the scoreboard. Unfortunately this has also meant that deaths due to crits have become about 100x more annoying as a result. It’s so goddamn annoying to have a decent streak as Soldier ended by some dumbass Engineer’s crit wrench because his sentry managed to kill some dipshit Spy a few minutes earlier. Or to have a Soldier that I successfully juggled one-shot me with a crit shotgun blast that wouldn’t have killed me otherwise.

And don’t get me started on Soldier and Demoman crits, even though I get my fair share of those. Ugh.

Why are there so few nocrit servers out there 🙁

2 thoughts on “Oh Valve, you silly people”
  1. Engineers get criticals from racking up sentry kills? Was this always the case or was it an update? I ask because in the updateless PS3 version engies seem to get critical wrench hits all the freakin time..

  2. I’m not 100% sure, but I think this has always been the case. Any kills you make in a single life will increase your chance of your next attack being a critical, and sentry kills count towards this increase.

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