Oh boy.
You'd think that the Summer update of Team Fortress 2 would be a big thing. And it normally is, last year Gun Mettle brought lots of good stuff. But this...
Let's go over the things that transpired with this update.
- Brought Competitive Mode
- More weapon/class balances
- Replaced Quickplay with Casual Mode
- New taunts/crates/starter packs
- Brought Heavy VS Pyro War
There's some ground to cover here, so let's do this.
- Competitive Mode
This is it, the thing the community's been longing for: Competitive Mode is out of Beta and is now official! And it's... Just the same as it was in the beggining of the Beta on Day 1. Lots of patches have been made since the beggining of the update, but there are still lots of bugs/glitches to patch.
For example, your game can crash when qeueing up for a game. You can lose your rank instead of leveling up. Just what.
And hackers galore, you're almost guaranteed to find an Aimbot/Spinbot on Competitive Mode. Also on Casual, but we'll get to that.
- Weapon/Class balances
Since Gun Mettle, we've been having major balances, such as the Dead Ringer/Loch N' Load nerf, and the infamous "Phlog" buff, but this update has a smaller number of balances. But the most important balances were this:
- The Spy's max speed has been increased from 100% to 107%. This means that at max speed he's just as fast as a Medic. Before he had the same speed as a Sniper, Engineer and Pyro, so naturally he had some difficulty to catch up with a Medic. This is obviously a buff for the Spy, and a very welcoming buff.
- All the Medic's Medi Guns now match the same speed as the healing target. So you're thinking "Wait, doesn't the Quic-Fix already do that?". Well, it maintains the effect, but now it's a shared effect with all Medi Guns. Meaning you can heal a Scout with the Stock Medi Gun, and have the same speed as him. This is very important in Competitive Mode, as it makes healing Scouts more viable.
- Replaced Quickplay with Casual Mode
This was the most outrageous change in the update for all the community. Before MYM, you could choose a server, and instantly join. Now you have to qeue up for any server (Except for community servers). And in the first 2 weeks of the update, it was almost impossible to join a server, as you'd wait around 10-20 minutes to get in a server, and most likely lose.
As of the moment of writting, qeueing up in Casual Mode alone is much faster (It takes around 1-3 minutes), but it still has some problems.
- You cannot change teams
- You cannot vote for a scramble
It was even worse before, as you couldn't vote kick a hacker.
- New Taunts/Crates/Starter Packs
This is obviously the most TF2 Economy related content, and it was actually kinda of a bad thing for the Economy.
The new taunts are decent (With the exception of the Scout taunt imo, no music?), and the Starter Packs are just there. But the crates are best/worse thing form this update.
Now we have 11 new crates, 1 of them is a normal crate with new Stranges (Such as the Iron Bomber and Quickiebomb Launcher), and the other 10 crates are "Unlocked" Crates in which you don't need a key to open them. Don't be fooled, as the crates cost the same as a key. So bleh.
The thing about these 10 crates is that each have cosmetics belonging to a class, and the last one has multi/all class cosmetics. Cosmetics can be Strange and hats can be Unusual and/or Strange.
What does this mean? It means that everyone's gonna buy the Multi Class crates, meaning that there will be an overflow of Multi/All Class Unusuals. Heck, I even unboxed 1 myself, and a Burning Flames Team Captain has already been unboxed. With that, All Class Unusuals will drop in price.
- Brought Heavy VS Pyro War
For those who don't know, a War is when 2 classes duke it out, and whoever wins gets new content. This time it was Heavy VS Pyro, and whoever won will get a class pack in a future update (Meaning new weapons and game balances). In August 15th, the War was decided, and Pyro won with a 12% advantage against the Heavy.
Although this War only decided who'd get a class pack first. This means that Heavy will get new weapons eventually (Something he desperately needs), and Pyro will get game balances soon (Something that Pyro really needs).
My thoughts about the Meet Your Match Update?
Valve said that this update was the "saving grace" of Team Fortress 2. Surprise surprise, it's not, and I agree with that.
There should have been a lot of fixing and working before launching the update, and doing damage control over the update is definitely a "no-no" in my book. There were some changes I liked, but overall this was a bad update.
What are you thoughts about the MYM Update?