Hat Describing Contest

The lazy guys of the TF2 team have started a Hat Describing "Contest" which basically involves coming up with a short 50-75 word or less description for a hat from Team Fortress 2. The quotation marks are there since it's not really a contest in the sense of winning a prize, but I do suppose getting your description chosen to be included in-game is itself a pretty big honor.

Anyways, any of you writers out there can have some fun with this. I probably won't throw in my own entry as I'm currently busy trying to patch up an error in the Timeline someone was kind enough to point out, though I was kind of tempted to try to come up with a Bill's Hat description mentioning the Timeline's reference to how it relates to Half-Life.

References
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=4245&p=1

Promises of New Updates

Both Team Fortress 2 and the Left 4 Dead series have received a few promises of future update in the past few days.


Team Fortress 2

Yesterday, PC Gamer revealed that Robin Walker and the rest of the TF2 team hopes to release an update next month that will finally bring the promised item trading, a new gamemode, and a bunch of new items, probably from the Polycount contest a few weeks ago. Perhaps most interesting of all, Robin Walker basically admits that he and the rest of the team didn't put that much time into designing the previous community-made item such as the Crit-a-Cola, using attributes they hoped would work and have only a small gameplay effect, while also trying to err on the side of being underpowered. I suppose this would explain why most of the previous community-made items have been hats and melee weapons.


Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead 2 is having another feature similar to Mutations, by hosting well-made community campaigns on official Valve servers on a bi-weekly schedule. Much like the Tank changes, this is also a pretty old idea. I guess the usual saying is "better late than never."

Chet Faliszek of Valve also claims that information on the promised content pack for L4D will finally be released on August 20th. I suppose the usual saying is "better late than never," but given the current state of the L4D community, I'm not so sure.

References
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/11/next-tf2-update-adds-trading-new-game-mode/
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=4173&p=1
http://l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=4194

TF2 Retrospective Part 2: The Pyro Update

TF2 Retrospective Part 1: The Gold Rush Update

The TF2 retrospective series is meant to recount the major updates to Team Fortress 2 in order to help newer players understand how much has changed over the years. They will provide some background context and explanations about the environment in which the updates were released and estimations on what the general response was to each update. Think of it as a very loose and informal "history."