I think I have made it abundantly clear that Team Fortress 2 rocks the hell out of my world. For the first time, I feel a developer has implemented character classes in an inventive way that naturally encourages teamwork. For every single positive a character has there is another class that can exploit it in their favor, and Valve has been doing an admirable job of keeping a perfect balance. Their efforts haven’t required them to swing the “nerf-bat” in any specific direction until now, and they have finally begun to flail about.
 
The new patch, which adds numerous bug fixes and readies the game up for competitive play by adding “tournament mode,” also takes two of the most popular classes down a few pegs. Nothing huge, but it is still interesting to see Valve’s take on balance post-launch.

Both the Soldier and the Demo Man have had their ammo reserves cut roughly in half. This change should improve the balance in a significant way by putting the role of “spray bullets and pray something dies” back into the hands of the Heavy Weapons class and making people be more specific on where they choose to place their explosives.
 
The full list is below. As of yet there is no word on if this patch will find its way onto the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game, but as Orange Box sales continue to rise it would be crazy for Valve not to pay close attention.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:
 
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)
 
 

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