Item donations are now open for Tip of the Hats, an annual charity livestream event hosted by the Team Fortress 2 community. Cash donations will begin on Saturday, September 12th. The event streams at twitch.tv this September 19th at 12:00 PM EST. Last year's event boasted over 500,000 unique viewers and raised over $100,000 towards One Step Camp, a program that gives camp experiences and other programs throughout the year that allow children with cancer to just be kids. It's a worthy cause, and this year's event promises to be the most ambitious yet! Be sure to tune in, and don't forget to donate!
Issue #5 is live! Man, it feels like just yesterday since Issue #4 came out. How long's it been since we released that, anyway? Let's see... one month, two... hm. three... four... wow, five...
Actually, let's not focus on how long it's been. The important thing is Issue #5's out! The last two should be coming out a little quicker.
If you haven't already bought a pass to the Gun Mettle campaign, it's not too late! But it will be in a week, because we're going to stop selling them. So this is your last chance to get a Gun Mettle Campaign Pass. If you're thinking, "The Campaign's almost over, why buy one now?", the answer is that you'll still get access to all past contracts up until now, in addition to all of the contracts for the remainder of the campaign. There's still five weeks until Gun Mettle's over, soo that's a heck of a lot of chances to snag yourself some one-of-a-kind campaign-exclusive weapons.
Speaking of those: If you've got ten campaign-exclusive items just sitting around, we've got good news for you. Now you can trade them in for a higher-tier item! Simply click on any Gun Mettle item in your inventory and choose "Mann Co. Trade-Up" from the drop-down menu to give it a shot!
We're also shipping the Gun Mettle Cosmetic Case, an exclusive community cosmetic item collection now available as a weekly random drop for folks who own a Gun Mettle Campaign Coin. Just like the weapons, all of these 16 cosmetics have a chance to contain Strange capability, and the nine hats in the collection have a chance at being Unusual.
Let's see, what else? We've made it so you can now preview Gun Mettle cosmetic items in your inventory the same way you can preview Gun Mettle weapons. We've also added map stamps and strange filters for all of the community-created Gun Mettle Campaign maps. (Don't forget to submit your maps to the Maps Workshop Beta, mapmakers!)
The Multiplay Insomnia Gaming Festival is one of the biggest annual tournaments, not to mention one of the highest profile TF2 competitions in the world. The Team Fortress 2 Cup goes down live this weekend at Insomnia55 at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, England. The top two American teams, Ascent and froyotech, will be in attendance thanks to successful crowdfunding campaigns.
The full event is being streamed on twitch.tv, so if you can't make it to Coventry in person, be sure to tune in and catch the fun!
It's our favorite time of year again! It's time to announce this year's Saxxy Awards, and lay out the rules and deadlines for submissions. We're especially excited to find out how the mix of universes for entries this year is affected by both the release of the SFM within the Dota 2 Reborn Beta and the Dota 2 Short Film Contest.
We're mixing up the categories again this year, to encourage more of you to submit entries. (and encourage the overachievers among you to submit more entries!) The Action, Comedy and Drama categories are all changing to have a 3 minute limit, and there will be a new Extended category that has the 5 minute limit from prior years. We believe that there are a great many stories to be told in the new 3 minute format, and we hope to see more of them by adding categories in the gap that existed between 1 and 5 minutes.
On a more technical note, we're also changing the way that submissions are uploaded, so you upload your entries directly to YouTube, and add them to your Steam profile, instead of uploading through the SFM. The submission deadline is November 11th, but once again, we'd like to remind you that you can upload non-final versions up to a week in advance of the final deadline, to guard against last-minute computer failures, internet outages, YouTube login problems, etc. Check the guidelines for details on the rules and deadlines, and get your entries ready!