Voting is now LIVE for the Second Annual Saxxy Awards, from now until midnight GMT, November 27th! Your votes will help our panel of judges make the final call on which entries are the most gut-bustingly hilarious, the most eye-wettingly dramatic, the most pants-crappingly action-packed, and the most heart-tuggingly romantic. We don't want to oversell things here, but this is quite literally the most important thing you will ever cast a vote for. All that Presidential election hooha? Consider that nonsense practice for your voting finger, like the training montage in Rocky IV, except instead of your finger lifting a telephone pole up a mountain on its back, it'll be clicking a mouse button.

How to Vote

Every video entered in the 2012 Saxxy Awards can be viewed and voted on at the Saxxy Awards voting page. Head over now to vote! We've randomized all the entries to keep things fair; however, you can filter by category if you're more interested in some genres than others. After you've watched an entry, simply upvote it or downvote it and move onto the next one. Vote as much as you like, but remember: you've only got one vote per entry.

Also, with such a huge number of entries, it's a challenge to keep on top of entries breaking the contest rules. So if you spot an entry that's longer than five minutes, or that's using copyrighted (i.e. not Valve, and not public domain) material, help us out and report it.

The winners of this year's Saxxy Awards will be revealed on November 30th, with the exception of the Best Overall category. Why? Because the winner of the Best Overall category will be announced LIVE on the GTTV Spike Video Game Awards pre-show on December 7th, AND their entry shown on the air. Stay tuned for details!

Mixup Number Five has been announced giving players an opportunity to both donate to a good cause and a chance to play with the developers and various other community notables. Three lucky donationists will be randomly chosen to fill out the rest of a 9v9 team! If you're curious how it went last time around check out the replays.

Just a friendly reminder to anybody planning on submitting an entry to the Second Annual Saxxy Awards that the deadline is November 15, 12:00 AM GMT. This means that we won't accept entries after this date. Those of you planning on waiting until there's a single adrenaline-gorged second on the countdown clock, remember: You're not Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker and there's absolutely no need to do this. If you want to ensure your entry gets submitted, do not wait until the last minute.

Also, once your entry has been submitted, don't forget to double-check it. (You can find it in the Videos tab of your Steam Community profile.) Note that if you’ve uploaded your video to YouTube before, you may encounter a duplication issue. Learn how to fix it here.

One last thing: We've received some questions about using music. Just to clarify: Using royalty-free music in your entry is absolutely okay, but you should submit a source link in your entry's description as proof of the music's royalty-free-ness when possible.

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 a bug that was causing intermittent lag spikes for Linux dedicated servers
• Fixed a crash while command-tabing on Mac in fullscreen
• Fixed not running on Mac OSX 10.5.8

Team Fortress 2

• MERASMUS! has leveled up at WizardCon!
  • "The Skull Island Topper" now tracks the highest level of Merasmus the owner has helped defeat
  • Increased Engineer, Scout, Pyro and Heavy damage against Merasmus
  • Increased Soldier and Demoman damage against Merasmus while he is in hiding
• Saxxy Awards submissions are now being accepted for the Replay category via the in-game YouTube™ uploader
• Fixed the Heavy not playing the correct audio when equipping all of the Grand Duchess items
• Fixed the Grand Duchess items not being groupped as an item set
• Fixed a bug that allowed spells to be applied to base items
• Added zombie character images and a new Halloween background for the main menu
• Beta version of new item import tool, available in game in the Steam Workshop submission process
• Fixed Mann vs. Machine robots not taunting when they level up while carrying the bomb
• Updated the health bar for Merasmus and Monoculus
• Added more credits to Caliginous Caper, Wave 666

As of 12:00AM GMT today and for the next two weeks, we are now accepting submissions for the Second Annual Saxxy Awards! Click here to find out how to submit!

(Note: Replay category submissions will be accepted starting tomorrow, via the in-game Replay Browser.)

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 a regression in the Mac's minimum system check

Team Fortress 2

• Added new audio lines for Merasmus to use when he attacks
• Fixed a Linux dedicated server crash related to Mann vs. Machine mode

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)

• Added mat_viewportupscale and mat_viewportscale to enable rendering the world at a reduced resolution. ("mat_viewportupscale 1" and "mat_viewportscale 0.5" will downscale world rendering by 50%.)
• Added a new convar mp_mapcycle_empty_timeout_seconds to trigger a changelevel when the server is empty
• Added positional audio support for Mumble clients
• Fixed a bug that prevented consecutive clicks on scrollbar buttons
• Performance and stability improvements

Team Fortress 2

• Scream Fortress Event 2012
• Fixed a bug where buildings would be invisible during their setup time
• Mann vs. Machine
  • Added the map Mvm_coaltown_event with a special Halloween mission
  • Fixed a bug where players money would not be set properly when restoring a checkpoint
  • Fixed server crash on vote to restart mission

In much the same way that most of the characters in the 1983 haunted elevator movie “The Lift” were warned – repeatedly - to take the stairs, we warned you that the frankly terrifying Scream Fortress Halloween event was coming. And now it’s here, and you’re scared, and you don’t have anyone to blame but yourself. This year, you’ll experience the tear-squirting terror of being trapped in a living nightmare with a vindictive ghost, just like everyone in M. Night Shyamalan’s epic of elevator haunting, “Devil”. Before we get to the horror proper, though, we’d like to thank everyone in the community who contributed such terrific items on short notice. Alright, enough talking. As female reporter Jennifer says just before the final elevator battle in “The Shaft”: It’s going DOWN!

Welcome to your DOOM... AARON A. AARONSON!

Yes, we're talking directly to YOU, Aaron A. Aaronson! This prophecy of your death is coming from INSIDE YOUR OWN COMPUTER! AWOOOOOO!

Hello, everyone else! What you just experienced was a brave new frontier in Halloween scaring technology: personalized terror! Rather than generically scaring all of you a little, from this Halloween forward, we’re going to scare one specific person... TO DEATH! Admittedly, much like the Human Genome Project, this is going to take some time. So everybody be patient - you'll all be scared eventually. Also, if any of you know Aaron B. Aaronson and don't want to deprive him of the thrill of dying of terror next year, don’t tell him about this blog post.

But just because we’re all now living in the amazing far future of scaring, being frightened in ways that until moments ago seemed impossible, that doesn’t mean we don’t have some more traditional Halloween horror planned for you. First of all, we’re happy and scared to announce the Fourth Annual Scream Fortress Halloween update, dedicated to the loving memory of Aaron A. Aaronson. It doesn’t ship until tomorrow, but you can read all the eerie details here.

Secondly, we’re pleased to present the first in our new series of Halloween-themed release notes. It’s a terrifying little tidbit of fearful fact reporting we call “John Carpenter’s Changes to the Functionality of Halloween Gifts”! Last year, gifts spawned publicly and could be claimed by whoever got there first. This year, players will receive private gift spawns that they can grab at their leisure without having to race everyone on the server for them. The end. Directed and programmed by John Carpenter.

Those of you who follow the private lives of TF2's mercenaries might be aware that Soldier's had an ongoing roommate problem. Specifically, his problem is that his roommate is a powerful magician. Things reach their logical, terrifying conclusion in a comic we call... "Doom-Mates!"