I’d encourage you to traverse the rest of the site before passing a blanket-statement final judgment on Game Central. Chances are, there are plenty of other articles that will suit your personality and tastes. I hope you don’t condemn the entirety of the website’s narrative content off a singular Op/Ed piece…

Heavies can’t dodge…

Concerning the sandman, you wrote: “besides frustrating enemies, does little to promote the given role of the Scout class (bothering enemies).”

pffhahaha

The Sniper update added the #1 annoyance ever to grace the game – The Huntsman. It made the Sniper easily be able to beat the Heavy at close range. It made the Sniper easily able to beat the Pyro at close range. The thing is a joke.
And the Razorback. Being shot 2/3 times at point blank range instead of backstabbed makes a huge difference huh? Needs to go back to the drawing board.

The Spy update was terrible terrible terrible. The Ambassador promotes bad Spy gameplay by making him run around trying to headshot enemies instead of backstabbing them. Every time I see a teammate attempt to fight someone with the Ambassador he dies because it’s rubbish.
The Cloak and Dagger promotes doing nothing at all. Little is more infuriating than watching your team’s Spy while you’re dead and watching him do absolutely nothing for the whole 15-25 seconds because he’s sitting in a corner with his C&D activated. The Invis Watch made people carefully manage their cloak and then ATTACK.
The Dead Ringer is another huge annoyance to the average team member. You try and kill the Spy and he just comes back. And again. And again.

The Spy Update was terrible. Just terrible. Every single weapon promoted bad Spy gameplay and added nothing good to general gameplay.

The Chargin’ Targe and Eyelander combo is incredibly fun. It’s just fun. It’s very hard to use because nearly all classes have powerful counters to it, but it’s still a lot of fun to use. So what if his name doesn’t match his new weapons? Valve went the next step with their class updates and made an entirely new class with the Close Combat Kit. Kudos to them. The Demoman got a great update.

I do agree that the Heavy got the short end of the stick though. Worthless new primary weapon, and his other 2 unlocks do nothing to help him in the average firefight either.

Of course that paragraph set the course for your thoughts on the Demoman (I wrote this line BEFORE reading your Demoman rant, so predictable!).

The Chargin’ Targe is obviously related to the Demoman, in more than one way, first of all, it grants resistance to explosives (Wikipedia Demolitions), and fits the Demoman’s heritage, what with both the Shield and Sword being traditional Scottish weapons.
I’m surprised you don’t hate the Razorback, I mean it shouldn’t be in the game, what with being AUSTRALIAN AND ALL, not to mention the Huntsman.

“Each update has rendered the Heavy even more useless than before, and his now ancient updated equipment fails to help him serve the role he was designed for in the first place.” Really? The Chargin’ Targe and Equalizer are indirect BUFFS to the Heavy’s Natascha, he is the anti-demoknight and anti-equalizer class.

As it is, the only unbalanced weapon is… uh… Sandman, underpowered, all it needs is the old stun mechanism back. As for overpowered weapons? Lets see…
DH: Learn to dodge.
Demoknight: You’re being countered Soldier, I know that is new for you, it’ll be ok.
Equalizer: To be effective with it, you need to be at <30 HP, that is less than a mag's worth of the Engineer's pistol to kill you.
Natascha: Anti-Scout, Anti-Equalizer, Anti-Demoknight.

"Think Valve’s hats are goofy? Wait until the inclusion of community-made items." Yeah, because Valve is going to add joe-schmo's horse dildo hat to the game, I always wonder where people got the idea that Valve is going to put everything put infront of them into the game.

Besides, if you don't like it, MW2 is always sitting there, guarantee you won't get any of that big bad free DLC/community support there.

If this were true, TF2 would be a broken game.

The Blutsauger and needle gun fire at the same rate. Natascha and Sasha fire at the same rate. The Axtinguisher does half standard melee damage and can’t crit on non-burning enemies. The Razorback no longer reduces movement speed. The Targe’s “gargantuan damage upon contact with enemies” is 25hp. You criticise without actually knowing the game.

You say quality is declining… yet seem to love the Spy, Sniper and Soldier updates, three of the four most recent. You argue against class counters and changing playstyles, yet Sniper is the one which changed the nature of the class most of all, and is the only update with a specific anti-class bias. I must ask, do you even know what you are arguing for?

Your reaction to the Direct Hit is exactly the same as mine was before I’d actually used it or seen it in action, which is somewhat telling. Direct Hit damage falloff is dramatic, meaing the instakill to the light classes only happens at very short range, where a sniper/spy/scout/engineer is dead against a soldier anyway. In practice, with the damage falloff it’s very well balanced and only noticeably better against heavies. Reducing damage or rate of fire would make it significantly worse, and the midair minicrits make no real difference to gameplay either way outside of the most skilled soldiers.

For all of you crying that the heavy is underpowered: Look up the TF2 steam class stats. Heavy shares the highest points earned per minute in the game with Medic and has alone the most kills per minute. The sandvich makes him a fantastically survivable class in the hands of players who know when to leg it. If you’re not doing well with Heavy, the only thing I can advise you to do is learn to play.

There are many flaws with the updates, and this could have been a good opportunity to point them out; unfortunately, most of your complaints seem to be based on not actually knowing anything about the game.

Generally I agree with this article. Natascha was the only thing I disagree with. Aside from other heavies, this gun is very useful, also helps new players more imo. The gun helps make targets easier to hit and any classes running away.

I do not get why you do like Backburner more then the Natascha. (yeah the BB suits the pyro a bit more, but you also need to compare it to the other gun(s)) I guess people will have their opinions.

Good work on the article.

If we’re to trust the leaks, there are plans for more updated items for the classes, such as the Heavy’s Gloves of Running Urgently or the Spy’s fireproof suit. Obviously, they’re not set in stone (and personally, I’m not a big fan of either), but Valve’s not exactly done with unlockable items after the Engineer update… unless they make the Engie update also a miniclass update for all the other classes.

Also, I think there are server side settings that take away the unlockables. But I’m not sure on that. Join one of them if you want to be a purist.

Also I am the terrible soldier who can’t hit anything with the direct hit. I suck at this aiming thing.

Not bad though, you only got 5 of 24 weapons wrong in one way or another.

Not saying it makes razorback useful, they need to make it more like the Targe for that to happen, but still, go check out tf2wiki and fix the numerous mistakes you made about the weapons if you expect anyone to take it seriously.

Oh, incidentally: http://tinyurl.com/yl9sxz4

Only true if they’re positioning/moving badly, and even then without the splash you lose a lot of secondary uses with it e.g. kritz, spamming in crowds.

Also you can’t just splash anything next to you by hitting your foot due to the low splash radius, it works both ways.