
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 UpdatesAdded "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