In our conquest to help Newbs members put away those Ghastly Gibuses, we’ve been taking from the rich and giving to the Irish all month. If you missed it, don’t worry we’re just getting started.

Our 1st Annual “Its a holiday about pumpkins” story contest was a success with prizes going to the top 3 spots. Koans dug into his bottomless pockets to make sure you got yourself a pre-order of Super Meat Boy or a copy of Poker Night at the Inventory for you and that special someone.

• First place is Red Badger for $25 Steam bucks.
• Second place is Major Dewar for $15 Steam bucks.
• Third place is King for $10 Steam bucks.

We also wrapped up our 3rd Annual Team Fortress Newbs TF2 Themed Pumpkin Carving Contest. With the top 2 entries receiving more of Koans money in steam games!

• First Place: NFreak $25 steam bucks
• Second Place: Sharpevil $15 steam bucks

We’ve had less participation this year than in previous years on these competitions, but that doesn’t mean the prizes stop flowing. A great example of this is our Newbs Team Fortess 2 Christmas and other Winter Celebrations Contest in which contestants had to submit something holiday related. Although the competition was stiff, I still managed to win $20 steam bucks for my entry. How in the world did I win money with an entry like this? Well Octo felt since it took him a few months longer than it should have to judge it, that every contestant was a winner! He also gave out a reserved slot on ALL SERVERS for every entry.

Not only did I win $20 for this, but your mother has a laminated copy of this hanging on her refrigerator. Happy Hanukkah Mrs. Feuchtwanger!

Which brings us to our most recent contest: The Newbs Stimulus Plan. If you haven’t heard about this one.. Shame on you. Haha, no really.. shame on you. It’s our latest and greatest, and it’s designed to bring the hat poor’s backpacks on par with the likes of Octo and Crap (full vintage sets – oh yeah). All entries in the previous contests I have mentioned received 25 bonus points towards the Newbs Stimulus raffle. We compiled 3647 entries this month and plan to top that in December. Octo wrote the code for the lottery, so plan on this being a monthly tradition. Without further ado, this months winners:

• 1st Place: Stax1 Voodoo Juju or Spine Chilliing Skull
• 2nd Place: The Shark (Stout Shako)

Stax1 came in with 84 entries, and The Shark came in with 26. The Sharks entries were composed mainly of his bonus entries from another contest. What does this mean? It Pays to Participate. Literally, we here at Newbs rack our brains trying to conjure up new and exciting ways to give back to our great community, so take advantage.

Current Contests:

Newbs Stimulus December is under way and the same rules apply:

• Each post = 1 entry
• Great Threads / Posts (I like the cut of your Jib) = 50 entries
• Winning or Submitting info for other contests = Bonus Entries
• Signing up for the forums = 20 entries

We will now be awarding 30 entries for referrals to the forums. If you refer someone, have them post a topic in our [N] section with your name in their post. This only counts for new sign ups as of December 1st.

Prizes:

1st Place: Choice of Voodoo JuJu or a Spine-Chilling Skull!

2nd Place: Chieftain Challenge!

Drawing will be held January 1st, so get busy!

Newbsmas has Began!

Its that time of year again – Newbsmas.  As you all should know by now, Newbsmas is an elusive holiday, it begins and ends on different days each year.  This year it will be ending January 15th (2011).  The celebration is the same as last year.  Create a TF2 Themed wintery craft, story, item, short design, comic, whatever give it to the contest, and sit back and wait for prizes of great joy.    More details to come.  Prizes are great as always and will be announced shortly.

A more formal blog post detailing Newbsmas is on the way. Keep an eye on the updates in this thread.

Other Notables:

Think you can jump? A chance at 30 bonus entries for Newbs Stimulus! (Ends 12/3/10)

Want to win an unusual? Sharpevil of [N] is giving his away! If you’re a current [N] member it might not be too late!

Newbs Hat Lottery: 1 scrap gets you in the running for a crafted hat!

Whether steam bucks or sexy hats are your thing, remember it pays to participate this holiday season.

-JiB

Just a quick heads up, the new Crab Spy Calendar is up and available just in time for most peoples New Years celebrations. A big thanks goes out to NFreak and all the people that gave him a hand in helping capture great images of Crab Spies in various environments. These folks contributions are detailed in the Credits in the actual calendar release and will be added soon to the official download page.

Go ahead and check it out – http://www.tf2newbs.com/build/crab_spy_calendar_2010/

Since the calendar was incredibly popular last year, be sure to spread the word so that no one misses out on it.

Also a quick update on Newbsmas, due to me not being able to dedicate the proper time to the contest I’ve extended the deadline until Midnight Feb 14th (Pacific). Be sure to get your holiday themed entries in with this extra time I should be able to get some ‘unique’ prizes in to hand out =)

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).