We have some a very hardcore Team Fortress 2 player on the RotPod staff, so I’m sure if we didn’t, Team Fortress 2 would not seem as popular to us as it does. It seems to have fallen out of favor among some of the less dedicated players. I have no idea why. Clearly Valve knows this, but they aren’t just going to shut down all support for the game. In fact they are doing the exact opposite: they are releasing an update! Here are the main points of the update

Added “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)

via[Steam]