TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2) Blog

As promised I’m posting the results of the 2nd Annual TF2 Newbs Pumpkin Carving Contest – This year we had 7 entries which is down from last year, but the entries were VERY good. I spent a long time evaluating the Pumpkins trying to decide who should win. I decided that in order to reward those who put the time and the dedication into making a pumpkin and submitting them that I would expand the prizes! So instead of one copy of l4d2 I gave away 3 copies! I had Jib send one to each of the three ‘winning’ pumpkins. The final odds of winning a grand prize in this contest ended up being a 3/7 which means that 42% of the entries won a copy of l4d2! You just can’t beat TF2Newbs odds.

A big thank you goes out to Control Point for featuring our little contest on their podcast, I think its really kicked things up a notch – Thanks again!

All people who participated won 1 years worth of reserve on the Newbs servers, a forum honorz (will be added tomorrow hopefully), and 1 year of !hatme access (enables you to wear any classes hat). If you participated and want the Newbs server rewards contact me on steam, most of the participants I couldn’t find in the stats db under their entry name so I don’t know their steamid :) I can be reached @ http://steamcommunity.com/id/octodhd

I would like to take this chance to announce the next Newbs Contest… (drum roll) The next contest is the – Newbs Team Fortess 2 Christmas and other Winter Celebrations Contest. All entries will be TF2 and winter solstice themed. Entries can be winter decorations, confections, other food stuffs, songs, snow sculptures, or any other creative work. I will be announcing further details very shortly. If you want to keep track of the latest Christmas contest news please join http://steamcommunity.com/groups/TF2Xmas/. I’m not certain on the prizes yet (looking for some sponsors) but I promise that it will be worth your time :)

Back to the Pumpkins…..

The participants (in alphabetical order) -

Winners:

• Gearpunk
• kitty_tiky
• LlamaMaster

Runner ups:

• binjin
• nfreak
• nil.kemorya
• odinspeed

These were the winning Pumpkins, I’ll be posting all entries in our hall of fame soon (which means by Christmas).

I rarely go on the steamforums, but today I was sent a link which sounded interesting enough for me to brave the cold, harsh steamforums. The link was for a rogue server blacklist, specifically for TF2. I was actually quite happy with what I read and instead of reading a bunch of bellyaching whiner posts I read happy ‘its about time’ posts (thats a shocker). If you too hate servers that have fakeclients, bad tags, mods that unbalance the game than you should check out the TF2 Server Blacklist Post. The configurability of the lists seems like a nice powerful feature, so you can remove only what you want to remove. Immortal-D of tf2maps.net is helping Pebr to verify that the reported servers really are bad servers – which I think is great. So if you know some bad servers that lie, please report them. TF2 Server Blacklist Live reporting / list page

Lets hope valve takes this idea and incorperates it into the client.

[Edit - The live generation of custom lists seems broken (it shows unverified servers in the list), I recommend using the lists that can be found @ http://tf2app.com/blacklist/lists.php until this is fixed]

Andy Is Great Contest – Due to low volumes of entries this contest has been extended to Midnight November 15th. The basic premise of the contest is simple – write a < 200 word short essay about why Andy is great. If you believe that you can do the vast topic justice in a couple of sentences have at it - but if you want to get real detailed you have up to an entire page to cover the topic. The prize is a TF2Newbs.com T-shirt (Scout). Remember that we are all about having fun with these contests, so even if you don't think you can win you should still enter, its a small amount of time for a great amount of fun =)

Annual TF2Newbs Pumpkin Carving Contest - This contest is set to end on November 2nd - First place is L4D2. As always with the Pumpkin contest all people who enter will receive a prize (Reserve Slot on a Newbs server of your choice for a year) so its definitely worth the effort. So far we have 4 Entries and hopefully many more to come today - but if we don't then the odds of winning are VERY good :) Last Years TF2 Pumpkin Entries. Entering is very simple, just go to this link and Enter Your Pumpkin (tf2 themed) here for prizes

As the title says, we will be having a short essay contest (roughly 250 or less words). The subject will be ‘Why Andy is great’. This contest is open to all people who know or are at least familiar with Andy. Andy has never won any tf2newbs prizes, but he has won an honorz for mic spam though. First prize will be a TF2Newbs T-shirt (available in Large and XL).

Contest ends November 1st – Midnight. Email entries to [email protected]

Private Steam Community Page
His Stats This Period

Hello and welcome, its time for a update on the posts from ~10 days ago, which I’ll pretend was only a week ago.

First off the TF2Newbs 2009 TF2 Pumpkin Carving Contest is underway, I havn’t checked if we have any submissions so far, but I’m pretty confident that we’ll have a better turn out than last year (See last years TF2 pumpkin entries). We have decided via poll to allow craft pumpkins, which is good news for those of you who hate pumpkin guts, or wish to save their pumpkin to display next year. For the rest of the Rules for 2009 TF2 Pumpkin Contest check out the link just before these words. The tl;dr basic idea is that you (using a tf2 theme) cut a pumpkin or other pumpkin like thing, take a picture, enter into contest, and get a chance to win L4D2.

As far as L4D2 boycotters go it looks like the boycott movement is sliding even more. Previously when we reported on this, the numbers were at a 2% hypocrite level. This has swelled to 3.8%! As always, be sure to check out the official L4D2 Boycott Lulz Webpage that psychonic has blessed the world with. I’d also like to remind everyone to mark down tomorrow (Oct 18th) on your calendar as Master Server Day. There will be much rejoicing and booze.