I woke up today, and the first thing I did apart from check my twitter account was to check the number of wrenches found. This has become a daily routine for me this week, and a particularly thrilling one at that, which shows just how dull my life can be.
However, apart from the fact that when I woke up 74 (!) wrenches had been found, something else had happened. Apparently there was a reason that the TF2-famous Drunken F00l managed to get the 58th wrench; it wasn’t chance. Apparently the wrenches weren’t random as Valve had led us to believe, but were instead dropped at predetermined times, and whoever crafted first after the drop got it. Several people got when the drops were going to be, and crafted at exactly the right time. That, along with some crafting scripts, resulted in people, including F00l being VAC-banned and their Golden Wrench removed and recycled back into the system.
Today no official weapons were released, but a new map was revealed; a second official Payload Race called Hightower. This is interesting because the screenshot supplied seems to indicate that the cart actually goes on an elevator. This is an interesting aspect if it’s actually what it looks like; do you need to stay on the cart for the elevator to work, and if there is no-one on it the elevator goes back down? Interesting gameplay mechanic there. Hopefully this proves popular and makes Payload Race a more played game mode.
It was also hinted that along with the official melee weapon (which judging by the achievements page is most likely his acoustic guitar), we’re also getting a community made melee item for the Engineer too. That gives the Engineer three alternative melee weapons to choose from (if you count the Golden Wrench).
I can’t wait to see what the choices in melee are and what their abilities are, as they are the ones that normally result in an overpowered “upgrade” instead of an alternative.
As a final note, what does this look like to you? It looks like movable sentries to me.
