TF2 Newbs (Team Fortress 2) Blog

Today it was announced that all items/drops that were earned by players while using an idler will soon be removed, and that all players that didn’t ever idle will soon be rewarded with a new hat. Since most the people I knew idled, I thought I’d go ahead and post some shots of what the halo looks like:

Be sure to check out the TF2 Newbs servers, all server starters (first six players on any server) are rewarded with the ability to wear any in game hat (including the halo!)

Update: The halo’s proper name is ‘Aura of Incorruptibility’

TF2Newbs is proud to announce something badass and wonderful that makes the world a better place.

Newbs Daily – The TF2 Comic of win.

What we need -

Artists – Duh
Inkers – convert the hand drawn picture scans into vector images
Image Colorers – take the ‘inked’ image and add the coloring and shadows
Writers – Someone has to come up with the ideas and the jokes.  This can all be observations of trends, things that were said in game (that wouldn’t be inside jokes)

The Newbs Daily strip will be released at a frequency of.. Hmm, we are still working on that detail, it will depend on responses and how fast the scripting goes.  We would like to have several recurring artists that are interested in having their comic run at a regular interval.  We plan to also include guest artists in the rotation if outside people become interested.  The goal here is to have a fun time and have a funny / light hearted strip that can help bring some joy to the world.  The current plan is to rotate through the artists to keep things fresh and poppin’ and to remove any unnneeded pressure on participants :)   Artists will be able to do short series of strips on consecutive release days if they’d like to.

We are hoping for a healthy mix of styles and methods.  We don’t want to put limits on peoples creativity so if you have the skill to do hand drawn, computer drawn, machinima (think screenshots with word bubbles) creative work than we want you on board.

If you have any interest in being a featured artist or helping out with any of our other jobs please drop me an email: [email protected]  Be sure to put ‘Newbs Daily’ in the subject line so it isn’t considered spam, or hit us up on the TF2 Newbs Forums – TF2 Newbs Forums – Comic Helper Thread.

Stay Tuned – I’ll be posting additional information soon!

First off, a big thank you to everybody who sent in rocket cakes (or cakes made of rockets, or rockets made of cakes, or cakes getting shot by rockets, and so on and so forth). The reaction this contest got brought a smile to my face and a spring to my step. Seriously. I bounced.

Secondly, an apology if you submitted a picture and I didn’t receive it. I had some people express interest but then I never received an entry from them. It might have gotten lost, or it might have been sent to steam when I was away. I checked my spam folder and didn’t see any rocket cakes in there, so I’m hoping it didn’t happen. However, if this happened, then I have no recourse but to make the saddest of sad faces and hope you don’t hate me.

If you submitted a picture and don’t see it here, that is the reason. I’m not ignoring you. I just didn’t receive it.

Third, this was a hard contest to judge. But judge I did!

I’m posting these in the order they appear in my pics folder. I’m posting all the entries, then announcing the winner at the bottom of the post. That way you have to read the whole thing. Literacy is finally getting used for evil. Or for good. I’m not sure anymore. What do you mean I’m rambling?

First off, Andy sent in a picture where the rocket is a cake, shaped like a rocket. So it’s a rocket cake rocket. Doubling up on the theme. nice.

Bonus: Metal Slug.

Next, Ggglygy. I don’t need to say anything else about it.

Bonus: the sun is wearing awesome sunglasses. Plus Space Heavy. Plus French for a touch of class. Je suis Scott, j’aime la gateau. Bein oui.

Third in this cavalcade of cake is NFreak, with a cake strapped to a rocket. Also the cake appears to be made of lies. I hate lie cake, but I like rocket cake. Is a rocket lie cake any good? We’ll see.

Bonus: First entry, submitted so fast I have friction burns. And rocket lie cake is pretty tasty.

Next up is octo, who proves once again that cake and rockets are best enjoyed with boobies.

Bonus: I love the tagline. I don’t know if you can read it in the squished blog frame. Maybe I should go back and edit these so they’re all links to the full sized images.

Fifth entry on the old blog rollout is Orsa, with some midair Soviet-powered control point destruction. Fro, bitches!

Bonus: Apparently that is Ggglygy on the control point. I came to get some but all there was left was cake. Babies.

Next up… Look at that, it’s Confehdehrehtheh, showing us all what happens when you replace typical explosives with delicious cake.

Bonus: Rocket-powered cake enema. That poor spy.

Nearing the end, SDHitmen proves once and for all that the cake is a spy. So you better blow it up.

Bonus: This spy cake got the Dead Ringer before I did. I also want a cake icon in my kill bars. (Hey octo, can we get a plugin for that? Please?)

Our final entry (that I know of, see point 2 above) comes from Shipster (or StrongBad36x for you old skool Newbs). This one adds a glorious new dimension to the proceedings, with animation!

Bonus: Those are awesome testimonials. Everybody should buy a rocket cake from this guy.

Those were the entries. You can see how I had trouble coming up with a winner, since I honestly liked them all. However, I can’t declare myself the winner (or can I…), so one of you has to be it.

In the end, the thing that just kept coming back to me, making me smile at inappropriate times and making me grimace at other inappropriate times, was the rocket-powered cake enema.

Congrats to Confehdehrehtheh on a cake well rocketed!

And now for a surprise!

I can’t just give one prize. There was too much awesomeness. So I’m opening up another branch of the contest to the community. The picture best-loved by you crazy Newbs also wins a grand prize! I’ll be creating a forum poll that will run for one week, so get your votes in asap!

An interesting thing popped up on the forum earlier.
In this thread.

Quote from: Slooms on August 21, 2009, 08:07:01 PM
Psst, Andy. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you punch yourself in the balls.

The fund is proposed.

Quote from NFreak on August 21, 2009, 12:22:23 AM
I’ll throw in a penny.

The fund is now in effect.

Currently $20.01 for Andy to rack his own nuts. Lets open our hearts and wallets for this noble cause!

Also, the art contest is closed and I’m in the process of determining the winner.

[Editors Note: The fund has grown since Scott wrote this, I'm not sure if the funds will be held in escrow to ensure that they are infact real, or what, I'm just relaying 'news']

The August 13th Update brought joy, hate, and new hats to the land of Team Fortress 2. The goods news is that Valve fixed a hand full of problems, added a handful of features and gave all the classes 2 (and in some cases 3 if you count ‘no hat’) new hats. The excitement surrounding the release wasn’t nearly as wild as a typical class update, but I did see a bump in user counts and saw less bitching about the FaN.

Now onto the meh – Each afternoon I look at my friends list and think “oh wow, TF2 is poppin’ today” until I realize that its just a bunch of people idling for hats. So I began to think how I could save myself from this daily disappointment. After many hours, and countless reams of paper with scrawled notes and calculations I finally had achieved my goal. I had formulated a plan to make the world a better place for everyone. Well at least Newbs.

The plan is simple. Reward people who play on the servers with hats. Yup, you got it – TF2 Newbs is giving away the New Team Fortress 2 hats for free to players. But wait, theres a catch :( I know I know, you’re expecting me to say that you need to sign over power of attorney before you get the hats right? No? Oh.. Hmm. Anyways… So, the catch is that the hats ONLY work on the tf2newbs.com servers. Thats right, you can come in, hang out, borrow a hat, but when you leave you have to leave it with the coat room clerk.

I know what you’re thinking, how can I afford to give away hats to everyone? The answer is simple, I can’t. So I’m going to have to do this as a limited offer. How is this going to work you ask? After much consideration I decided that the lifeblood of the community are the players that are determined to play on a Newbs server, regardless of who is on, and even more importantly even if there aren’t other players on. Yup – I’m rewarding the true heroes of each day, the server starters!

From now until I say otherwise, the players that are on a server when the player count (on teams) reaches 6 will be rewarded with access to our new hats command ‘ !hatme ‘. So if you want hats, join an empty server, get 5 of your friends on, and BAM hats. The hats will be available to you by menu until you leave the server, or the map changes.

There are probably a few players out there that have played on other servers that do have ‘hats’ as a feature, some of them might even be available to everyone that joins, but they probably don’t have a feature that we have (Unless you’re on the nNn clan server). Our hats work on all classes. Yup, you heard that right – you can be an scout with an engineer hat, and you can be a demo with a ushka. Any combination works, and they mostly all look good :)

What you don’t believe me? Well heres some previews..

I’ll update in a couple days with some more pictures, maybe some without me taunting. Oh yeah, this offer is good on servers 3-8 + Arena currently, servers #1,2,2.5 and #10 will be added when possible.

Servers:
#3 24/7 Badwater 113.212.76.6:27015
#4 24/7 2fort (Octo-land) 69.12.98.121:27015
#5 24/7 2fort (Koans Kingdom) 69.12.37.15:27015
#6 Custom Rotation (Koans Kingdom) 69.12.37.16:27015
#7 24/7 Payload Rotation 69.12.37.14:27015
#8 Stock Rotation (Octo) 69.12.37.3:27015
Arena [Chicago] 69.12.91.12:27015

Forum Discussion: http://www.tf2newbs.com/forum/index.php/topic,3745.0.html