I wish I had fancy voice recognition software.

What I would take out is that whole juvenile apparatus of dominations and revenges. I couldn’t give a flying fffft who’s dominated me, or how many times I’ve died. Only one thing counts — did my team win? I thought that’s why they called it TEAM Fortress. Including anything that tends to stoke individual egos is counterproductive.

And can we have a simple word filter on the comments too, or some sort of alarm for servers? There isn’t much of it compared to some other games, but I don’t like it much when someone just offed by the Demoman starts typing “n*gger n*gger n*gger.” I think I see why Valve made the Demo a Scotsman as well as black — might as well dilute the stereotyping by parodying him at an angle to the way he looks (not that there aren’t black Scotsmen).

I would have gone with scout, myself. I fear the Soldier/Demo updates though. Crit explosives already are… interesting.

Also:

“Party Loyalty: Kill 50 enemies within 3 seconds of them attacking your Medic.”

I’m assuming that’s .. over time, right? I just did a double take while reading that, haha.

It was also one of the least played classes overall. It was about tied with scout for least played when I looked last week but it’s going up since people are anticipating the update.

I think they tend to do the updates for the lesser played classes so I expect the scout to be the next update.

Is it like a one-use per life thing? Because 100 is great, that’s what, one near-miss rocket? He’s still dependent on constant healing.

At least, sort of.

I still find it odd they’re doing the Heavy changes now. It’s my second least played class, but has my most kills, most points, and most.. something else. Defenses or something.

Except it doesn’t matter.

Valve did a brilliant job of making the new weapons desirable, useful, and rather well balanced (exception: the Backburner), but not a necessary part of gameplay. While my friends spent hours farming for the Ubersaw, I just kept playing, occasionally working on a lol-worthy achievement, like one of the freezecam ones.. I have earned only the Blutsauger and Kritzkreig, and they are nice, but my play experience hasn’t suffered because I don’t have weapons that my enemies have.

I get where the “all weapons should be available to everyone” comments are coming from, and I respect those, but some people are saying that “achievements should reward the hardcore, not punish the non-hardcore.” Reward/punishment seems like a matter of perspective and/or hurt feelings.

In short: I thought achievements & weapon upgrades would screw up the game. Experience has proven me wrong. Now excuse me while I go for a sandvich….

Just seen the achievements. As an occasional medic I am very concerned about “Photostroika: Provide an enemy with a freezecam shot of you taunting while invulnerable.”. Are all my ubered heavies going to be taunting when they should be killing?

What’s wrong with them doing it after you’ve just wiped out a wave and you have 2 seconds of charge left? It’s not like it has to be done after every kill…

I’m not against achievements/unlocks in principal, but I really think the nature of the achievements needs to be carefully considered.

Making the specialised gear available ‘at launch’ would probably ease the ruination of public servers at patch time, too — people would still be trying the updated class out in disproportionate numbers, but they won’t be clinging to that class for ages and ages while trying to milk outlandish achievements out of conventional gameplay.

I think that this is my view on the whole thing as well. New weapons are lovely, but the road to get them isn’t so much.

Agreed with Vanderdecken as well, especially when the same starter weapons are as bare and powerless as the ones in COD4 are.