Oct 29, 2014
Team Fortress 2
Step right up, mortals, to Merasmus the wizard's Carnival of Carnage... now LIVE in Team Fortress 2!
Share: 
Step right up, mortals, to Merasmus the wizard's Carnival of Carnage... now LIVE in Team Fortress 2!
Very soon, fear-fans, the Halloween update other game companies aren't BRAVE enough to give you is coming! And those other companies are right to be hesitant! Last year's Scream Fortress update hit Valve with a tidal wave of wrongful death lawsuits! That's right: Everyone who played last year's update DIED mysteriously! The only clue was that everyone's hair had turned snow-white!
They died of FEAR, reader! Or possibly premature hair-graying! We're not doctors. No, OUR jobs are to be your ringmasters at this year's Scream Fortress Update! Check out the teaser Update Page to get a taste of what's coming!
There's a long list of reasons why we look forward to the Team Fortress Halloween update every year. It's a chance for us to try some fun new things within the framework of a time-limited holiday. We're all really excited to see what you think of this year's event.
It's also an opportunity every year to revisit decisions we made it in previous years and see what we've learned and what we want to do differently. As one specific example, we've spent a bunch of time internally talking about the Halloween gift drops. We have a bunch of amazing content we're about to ship and we wanted to evaluate the gifting system to figure out if it was a good method for distributing some of that content.
When gift drops were introduced way back in 2011's Scream Fortress update, they were intended to be a small value-add a simple bonus for all players participating in the update. As time went on and Halloween updates came and went, however, some players spent more and more time focusing on gifts, often to the detriment of the players they were playing with. The Halloween experience for many players now consists of sitting idle in a custom server while a plugin teleports them from gift spawn point to gift spawn point.
Ordinarily we don't mind if players do things that we don't personally enjoy as long as their fun doesn't harm the quality of experience for other players. In this particular case, however, because the overwhelming majority of gifts claimed went to a tiny handful of accounts, we feel comfortable characterizing the current system as blatantly and transparently unfair: While some farming accounts claimed more than five hundred gifts just last year, the median numbers of gifts claimed was only five.
As before, we're continuing to iterate on gifts for this year's event. In line with our original goals of giving all participating players some free Halloween content without affecting the core experience, this year we'll be giving every player one guaranteed gift bundle just for logging in during the event. This bundle will contain a random sample of some of this year's content, including some that would otherwise only have come from crates. To keep some of the fun of getting multiple gifts through the event, all players can earn a secondary bundle by completing some of the event achievements. Put together, these two bundles will grant more items per player than the median five gifts from last year.
Because historically the total number of gifts has been unbounded, and the distribution incredibly skewed, we have been greatly limited when it came to what sort of content we could distribute. As we're now more tightly controlling the distribution, we can grant a wider variety of more interesting content and we look forward to seeing you all get your hands on some of it in just a few days.
A very recognizable, very handsome face has made a surprise appearance in SpeedRunners! Check it out!
It's been a whole year since you guys played a Team Fortress Halloween map. If we threw you into the 900-mile-an-hour hellride we've got planned this year without warming you up first, you'd essentially be going from an idle state of terrorlessness to a shrieking nightmare of solid 100% terror almost instantly. It would be the equivalent of going from seeing zero skeletons to seeing a thousand skeletons at once. Are your eyes deceiving you? That's when you reach up to your eyes and realize... they are also skeletons! AWOOOOO!
A shock to the system like that wouldn't just kill you. It would make you crap your pants (not fatal), turn your hair white (still okay), and make your heart beat so fast it would blow up your ribcage (now you're dead).
Luckily, you can now play previous years' Halloween spectaculars to get your shock tolerance up in advance of the update. Simply boot up the game, hop into multiplayer and quickplay any of our past five Scream Fortress updates. If you've missed out on previous Team Fortress Halloweens, or are new to TF2 in general, this is a perfect time to catch up.
Also, remember to LOOK WHAT'S IN YOUR DRIVEWAY IT IS THE WOLFMAN'S CAR! See? That was so scary it almost put you in a coma. Get practicing.
This year's BETA LAN Party will be covered live on twitch.tv at 9:00 CET (4AM EST), October 25th!
Celebrating the foundation of the Lithuanian eSports Association, The BETA LAN Party gives Lithuanian and neighboring country TF2 gamers a chance to gather in one place, participate in various tournaments and meet new people. This year's TF2 event will be held at Kaunas University of Technology; all participants will receive in-game medals, and the top three winners will be awarded with ZOWIEGEAR gaming peripherals.