Steam has announced a wide series of changes in the recent update to the TF2 gameplay. TF2 has found a nice community in the online competitive sector so it will definately be interesting to see how this affects the upcoming gaming season. TF2 is already one of the top contenders to be picked up be the LAN competitions this summer, though as of late it has found lots of fps players going to CoD4 hurting its premier game chances. At the same time there is good ol' Counter-Strike 1.6 and Source, always popular team fps competition choices. Not only does the recent update deal a lot with class balancing (primarily reserve ammo), but as well fixes some of the more exploited glitches in gameplay.



List of Updates

Added "Custom" tab to the server browser

Servers can now specify metatags describing the custom rules they've adopted

Players can use tag filtering to find servers running the custom rules they want to play

Added options for servers who want to become custom games: Disable critical hits (tf_weapon_criticals), eliminate respawn times (mp_disable_respawn_times), and raise maxplayers above 24



Initial release of Tournament mode (mp_tournament)

UI for handling team naming, ready mode, and win results

Disables team player limits, autobalancing, and intermission



Class balancing

Reduced Soldier's maximum rocket reserve ammo from 36 to 16

Reduced Demoman's maximum sticky bomb reserve ammo from 30 to 16

Reduced Demoman's maximum grenade launcher reserve ammo from 40 to 24



General

Added protection against voice command spamming. Dramatic reduction in teleporters needed

Fixed mp_timelimit ending the map during the middle of a round on maps like Dustbowl and GravelPit

Fixed "lastdisguise" command not remembering if you were disguised as your own team

Added "Toggle Disguise Team" binding in Options->Keyboard to toggle the disguise team for the Spy's PDA

Changed PDA menus to accept keys bound to "slot1", "slot2", etc., and "slot10" cancels

Fixed Spectator targetID not using team colors

Changed team autobalance code to not balance the teams when the active round timer shows less than 60 seconds

Fixed "-maxplayers" on the command line not correctly setting the maxplayers value for the server

Fixed Badlands never having Sudden Death triggered

Fixed Engineer being able to detonate buildings that are being sapped

Changed Engineer buildings to detonate when a player disconnects instead of blinking out

Fixed potential client crash for players being healed by a Medic or dispenser

Made several improvements to server-side stat reporting (not related to individual player stats)






Source: steampowered.com