At ease, you wastes of skin. The Powers That Be have commanded me to write another short missive—I'm told it will be broadcast on some manner of punch-card tube machine and read by the thin, stupid youth of today, who evidently ignored my past instructions to stop wasting their lives and do more push-ups.

With work on Left 4 Dead 2 calming down for us a bit, we were able to finish up something we promised you a while back—gathering up all the source files for the character models and getting them online. This'll hopefully let you guys get a lot more creative out there with your fan-made content. (We can't wait to see it.)

Patent Pending: #1308 - "GUARD DOG"

As with the first Left 4 Dead game, most of the TF2 team has moved over to help out Left 4 Dead 2 get through its final shipping steps. This time around, though, we've improved our process a little to ensure we can keep some people on TF2, enabling us to continue doing TF2 updates. We've been a bit slow on updating here, and there's plenty of stuff to talk about, so we might as well jump right in.

Over the next few days we'll be removing all TF2 items that were earned using external idling applications. We're going to adopt a zero tolerance policy for external applications used to manipulate the persistent item system. Due to us not having a policy in place prior to today, this time we're only removing the items earned through cheating the system. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we'll remove all of their items. If you're interested, only about 4.5% of the players in TF2's community will be affected by this cleansing process. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we'll remove all of their items.

We thought you might be interested in seeing some of the "behind the scenes" work that goes on in Team Fortress 2. The process usually starts with a team discussion: This helps us determine the goals of the map we're going to build. In this case, we wanted a game mode that had an intense, centralized experience with quick player turnaround. We liked some of the facets of Arena mode, but it was clear that many players don't like to wait for the next round to play.

Go check it out, and keep your eyes peeled for goodies!

*Has probably already been done by someone in the TF2 community. Please don’t sue us.

I would like to thank you for emailing us to point out that Viaduct is not the first TF2 map to feature snow. More importantly, I would like to thank you for stopping.

Immediately.

The Classless Update continues to class up the joint with some previews, including a brand new game mode and some retooled classic maps. Check it out, then fire back on the forums.

After setting a new standard for Lack of Class in an FPS with the addition of Jarate (the jar-based Karate), we've raised the bar on lowering the tone even further with the first ever Classless Update!