Interesting China Fact: Did you know China has a mafia? Did you know that, not only do they exist, they'll loan you money? And not even a little -- as much as you want! We hadn't even heard of them until last week, and now we're treating them like a cash machine. Seriously, these guys are nice. They've even started calling us all the time now, probably to ask how we're getting along with all that free money they gave us.

Anyway, the Chinese Mafia made their own game, Sleeping Dogs, so we've added some all-new items to TF in honor of our new best friends. Also, if anyone's seen Robin Walker, tell him somebody mailed us his hand, because he's probably looking for it.

Introducing eight new items available in the Mann Co. Store, or FREE when you pre-purchase Sleeping Dogs on Steam before August 14th.

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:
Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Fixed dedicated servers not being able to set sv_region

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed Replay/SourceTV clients getting kicked when quickplay servers hibernate

The first of several replays have been made live from the Team Fortress 2 Mix-up #4. These are from the event where players raised an impressive $9,664 for children's hospitals around the world and a chance to play several matches against and with various community celebrities. Much fun was had and we're already looking forward to another.

Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Fixed Unicode characters getting stripped from player names

Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Added sv_namechange_cooldown_seconds, to throttle clients from changing their name too rapidly. (Defaults to 20 seconds)
• Added sv_netspike_on_reliable_snapshot_overflow to selectively enable the automatic dumping of netspike file if a client drops due to "reliable snapshot overflow" (defaults to 0, which disables the debugging)
• Added check to prevent player names from containing color codes
• setinfo console command will now reject attempts to set / change convars with any unusual characters

Team Fortress 2

• Fix a bug that caused gameservers to not properly receive client inventory updates. (Frequent cause of the "The server you are playing on has lost connection to the item server" error message.)
• Fixed not being able to equip all-class items properly
• Fixed the DX8 water effect
• Fixed the Beggar's Bazooka misfiring with 100% crits after firing a crit rocket
• Fixed the Strange Sandman not accepting the Posthumous Kills strange part

eXtelevision has been putting together a fundraiser to help send two North American teams to the European Team Fortress 2 tournament at Multiplay i46! VanillaTV has been covering the events and will be hosting a night of exhibition matches over the next two weekends between the top two winning teams in North America.

Classic Mixup took first place in the eXtv-hosted i46 qualifier and the ESEA LAN champions, Leviathan Gaming, were runners up. These two teams are hoping to both be destined to i46, but need additional funds to make the trip happen. Visit eXtv and Vanilla TF2 for more details.

Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Fixed a client crash on exit (after connecting to a server using sv_pure)

To celebrate the Steam Summer Sale, we’re having our own Mann Co. Store Sale on some of this year’s Workshop items, along with other goodies such as name tags, description tags, and various paints, weapons and hats. We’ve also added new summer bundles, featuring new items from the Pyromania update in various packaging flavors. The sale runs today through July 22.

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

• Added Pyromania cosmetic items to the Mann Co. store
• All ash-related items have been faded away to dust
• Fixed Strange Escape Plans not counting kills
• Fixed missing strings for the ESL medals