Well, as some of you may know (I guess it depends on who all is reading this), Valve reciently dropped it's most recient "Mega-Update" on the game Team Fortress 2. For those of you that don't know by now, Valve has been slowly adding new unlockable weapons and achievements to each of TF2's nine classes. The first update was for the Medic. This one was for my favorite class, the Pyro.
The Pyro update has done three types of things, which can be devided into catagories as follows:
- Things Valve intended - Valve's goal was to make the Pyro class more "user friendly" according to their experience, most players don't like the Pyro. This is mainly because the Pyro needs to get up close and personal to do their job, and most players get their asses handed to them from afar the first time they play the class. So, the temptation of new weapons to unlock and achievements to earn gets players who, in some cases, admit to hating the class to play it for hours on end. The most notible inprovement is a new "compressed air blast" added to the standard flamethrower. Basically, a Pyro casn now reflect things like missles and grenades away from them and back at whoever shot it.
- Glitches - This isn't really a suprise. Everytime Valve does a big update, something slips through the cracks and starts to cause problems. I've noticed that on the BZG server a few custom maps (notibly Horus and Rock_B2) don't seem to be compatable with the update. Mainly this involves weird glitches with flare guns being held in an off-hand of being stuck in someone's leg, but one of my admins, Bogart, claims that certain achievements just don't work on some custom maps.
- Pryos are f-ing everywhere - Every random jackass now wants a piece of the Pyro class, which is frustrating because I feel like I've been robbed of my elitism. After all, I've been playing Pyro consistantly for six months, which was long before it was "cool". The main problem is that all of the servers are now over-saturated with the flame-spewing maniacs. You don't realize how bad of a thing that is until your playing as a Pyro: most of the weapons you have are flame-based, and most of your enemies are fire retardent. I'll let that one seep in for a moment...
If past experiences with the Medic update tell us anything, all this will die down in about a week, give or take. After that, most of the really hardcore players will have their unlockables and will go back to business as usual. All that's left then is to breathe a sigh of relief, grab a fire extinguisher, and keep my server from burning to the ground...
~Van