PSA: Unorganized raffles are like radioactivity...

Stay far away!  There is a trend on trade servers for gamers to hold impromptu, unorganized raffles of random items.  Often the raffle holder will have a small buy-in with the chance to win a valuable item.  This item could be a hat or a bills.  The chance of getting something valuable for a little risk encourages many to take the plunge and give away their metal or worse.  Of course there is no guarantee that the raffle holder will pay out said item.  If he or she does it may be to a friend to give the appearance of being legit.  Then there is the buy-in, often described as "slots" remaining and so forth.  Here also, there is no guarantee that once said slots are filled with buy-ins that the raffle holder stops taking more.

Stick to official raffles, held by reputable groups with real presences such as actual servers, sites and admins who are more public.  Even here things can be sketchy.  Spy-crabbing is also another game of chance, make sure to use a middleman for any spy-crab for anything substantial.  The only true official raffle are crates of course.  Any way you do it, use your noodle.

That is all.  Be well.  Have a good drop night.

Your favorite Badge/Pin is....

Surprisingly the favorite badge or pin of TF2 traders is: The Genuine Companion Cube Pin.  Possibly the most widely available and signifying that someone bought Portal 2 pre-order for a good amount of cash, the Cube is the clear winner.  The License to Maim from Poker Night comes in second place, and the Soldier Medals and Bombinomicon tie at 3rd place.  Flair with an honorable mention in 4th place (I can see the Office Space rentals on Netflix getting queued up!)

Most unloved?  Dr. Grordbert's Copper Crest at a measly 7 votes.   It cost the same as the Silver Crest and was available for the same amount of time and the only real difference being the name and color.  But as we see so often in the TF2 economy, gamers value things with similar consistency to real life: silver being slightly more popular.  Although let's be honest the crests were a somewhat awkward store item and had seemingly little interest from the community.

That is all.  Carry on.

Companion Cube	502 (28%)
Resurrection Associate	33 (1%)
Spacechem	105 (6%)
Dr. Grordbert's Crest	14 (0%)
Dr. Grordbert's Copper Crest	7 (0%)
Dr. Grordbert's Silver Crest	16 (0%)
Mark of the Saint	153 (8%)
Flair	181 (10%)
Photo	40 (2%)
Soldier Medal	193 (11%)
Clan Pride	93 (5%)
License to Maim	221 (12%)
Bombinomicon	192 (10%)

Votes so far: 1750

New update, more promos and a new crate people!

Team Fortress 2

• Added The Conquistador
• Added The Map Maker's Medallion
• Added new promotional items^[1] for preordering Jagged Alliance - Back in Action
• Added information about item origins to the WebAPI
• Added "DamagedPlayer" animation event for the HUD, fired when the local player damages other players
• Fixed The Head Warmer not displaying unusual particle effects correctly
• Fixed paint applying incorrectly on Max's Severed Head
• Fixed a server crash caused by Holiday Punch critical attacks on physics objects
• Updated the Itsy Bitsy Spyer so it can also be equipped by the Sniper
• Updated cp_foundry:
  • Clip brush collision smoothing by the forward spawn alternate exit
  • Fixed Nobuild exploits
  • Fixed the teleporter player trap on the roof of the forward spawn alternate exit
  • Fixed Nodraw and texturing errors
  • Fixed clipping of barrels on final cap points
  • Fixed fade distance on props
  • Fixed lighting bugs in spytech vistas
  • Removed props hidden in geometry
  • Removed ability for players to cap the final point by standing on the catwalk behind it

Undocumented changes

• Removed Engineer-specific text from Itsy Bitsy Spyer's description.
• Added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series 38 - strange items

• Dead Ringer
  Submachine Gun
  Quick-Fix
  Killing Gloves of Boxing

   

TF2 Spreadsheet Steam Group

We just want to give a shout-out to our friends ZombieK and Beverage at the TF2 Spreadsheet Steam Group.  They maintain the group of over 800 gamers and are all around good people.  They also successfully worked around last summer's "ponies" and "trolls" take-over of the old steam group (when someone gave admin privileges to all gaming group members - a real mess, don't try it at home).  Drop them a comment or thanks over at the Steam group here.

Crate unboxing values

Every once in a while we see sites and tools in the TF2 community that we think are cool.  The Crate Unboxing spreadsheet is one of them.  It gives actual values (in scrap) of the average unboxed item and even factors in the cost of the key to unbox.  Very nice.

As of today (it gets updated once per week) the best crates to unbox look to be Salvaged Crate #30 (which is a no-brainer) and crates #13 and 14.  Also the current crate #37 is near the top of the realized value but that is more a function of it being new.  The coveted #19 crate is also up there.

Overall a smart little tool.  Link here.  FAQ is here.

PSA: steam phishing sites

We've known people to be burned by these sites.  No matter how obvious a scam entering your email username and password may seem like, there will be people who fall for it.  When a site looks like the one you trust it's sometimes easy to be fooled.  That said, always check the URL before putting in your steam information.  This goes for logging into Steam, signing into your bank accounts, email websites, whatever.

Here's the latest one making the front page on Reddit.

New update released...

Team Fortress 2

• Added the Alladin's Private Reserve for the Demo
• Fixed a bug where the Medic would lose his healing target's speed when deploying his ÜberCharge while using the Quick-Fix
• Fixed a bug that would cause some Team Spirit painted hats to show as black-painted in the Steam Community
• Localized the team goal strings for cp_steel and pl_frontier
• Added missing level_data strings to kill_eater_score_type elements in the GetSchema WebAPI response
• Updated pl_frontier with author-submitted fixes:
  • small prop adjustments
  • several unsewn/gappy displacements fixed up
  • func_push altered below final capture point
• Undocumented changes:^[1] Updated all localization files

TF2 on a laptop

It probably is a pipe-dream to get Team Fortress 2 on a smartphone (and a pain to play so its better left that way) but TF2 on a laptop is an everyday occurrence now.  The specs that came out for the Half-Life 2 engine are easy to beat with almost all current notebooks and laptops.  After all, the HL2 specs were written when the resource-hog Windows Vista was still Microsoft's pinnacle OS.  But now there's a mature Windows 7 and Direct X far beyond the version 9 that TF2 makes use of.  Hardware-wise any Intel i3-i7 processors have more than enough horsepower.  AMD processors we haven't tested but anything made within the last year or two is probably more than adequate.  Touchpads are unusable in our experience, as our Dell test laptop couldn't even take commands simultaneously from the keyboard and pad.  We recommend a mini wireless laptop mouse (Logitech and Microsoft make adequate ones).  Standard graphics on our Latitude were more than adequate as well, same with HP middle-of-the-road laptops.

PC World has a new article on desktop replacement laptops here.  Good read and recommendations.   Cnet is another favorite of ours, and they have their own guide here.