“Rise and shine, map makers, rise and shine… Not that I wish to imply you have been sleeping on the job. No one is more deserving of a rest. And all the effort in the Team Fortress 2 Classified communities would have gone to waste until…well, let’s just say your hour has come again. The right mapper in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. So wake up Map Makers, wake up and prepare Hammer++…” – Jaw-Man

After a one-year break, the Competitive TF2C and TF2C Mapping Communities are teaming up once again to bring you the HAMMER MONTH II ! The goal is to find viable custom maps for the competitive community, and to give map makers a chance to shine in the spotlight (well, may not be the brightest light source, but who knows?). The mappers will find the opportunity to see their maps in action while competitive players test how well they work in a competitive setting.

All the maps we chose for this event are recent community favorites– as fresh as hot bread from your local bakery (or as fresh as human meat, if you’re still feeling the Halloween spirit!). Like the last time, it will last three weeks, with two custom maps for each week. But unlike last time, in Week 3 we are going to have… well, I am not sure if I can disclose it already, but let’s say it’s something special…

The event will take place in CompTF2C pickup games (PuGs). Recently, since the revival, we have been having them once in every two weeks, but for this event, games will be hosted every Friday at 20:30 CET (19:30 UTC) on the European server and a few hours later at 19:00 EST (00:00 UTC) on the North American server, starting from November 6^th, Friday, ending on November 20^th, Friday.

Regardless of your skill level or region, you are invited to join the TF2C Competitive Discord server and take part. Everyone is welcome here!

HAMMER MONTH II maps showcase, a video by starm0nster. Intro footage, music: EMINOMA, Valve.

Since part II of the series in August, CompTF2C has found a new administration under its most recent technician and reviver, Xinayder, and one of its earliest members and a PuG runner since last year, kotowski. Check out the initial announcement by Güven on Discord, and then admin kotowski’s Community log #1 for more insight on the transition.

Now CompTF2C again offers a pickup game schedule. It hosts a North American server once again, and just as the EU one, it is 24/7 online, acting as an MGE server outside of pickup hours. This full-time availability makes spontaneous pickup games a possibility for the future of the scene. The previous financial and technical collaboration with AltTab servers is over– saluting Jaws for his long-time service. Our new technician/host Xinayder has been providing a seamless experience so far. In addition, wider community support is enabled, with Ko-fi tips. You can tip Competitive TF2C once to get the Derby Booster role on Discord for a limited amount of time, or set monthly tips to become a member of Jenkins Coal Co. ☕

Logs

Let’s not hold back the biggest tech news anymore: TF2 Classified has proper logs. In the previous article we reported that some match stats looked promising upon uploading the server logs manually to logs.tf. That was after a test game with bots and had its own drawbacks. Now after a proper PuG, we can proudly show what the first-ever parsed logs of a TF2C game looks like (koth_bagel_rc12, September 12^th, 2026). Xinayder went further and installed F2’s Supplemental Stats v2 and Medic Stats to the servers, which both worked, and gave us the first extended stats of TF2C in the next PuG session.

Source engine games never stop surprising us players in revealing ever more depth to a class, weapon or mechanic we thought we fully knew about. Firstly, there are the gimmicky depths. Many would have memories of watching B||oodsire’s Meet the PROro 2 and witnessing a reflect jump for the first time, or seeing a friend sentry sprint in-game and being left completely puzzled. These techniques certainly require effort and mastery, but the more striking fact about them is how the mechanic has always been a part of the engine, but somehow never appeared to you as a possibility. Much like bunnyhopping remaining hidden for years in Quake engine, Source’s ancestor. Then there is the other kind of depth, which is reached by repeatedly digging into familiar ground. Consider an era when players walked to mid fights, and the good old sticky jumping giving rise to the first roll-out schemes in the hands of Demomen like ryb^{1, 2a, 2b} and Byte who went the extra mile of finding and perfecting faster and more difficult options through choky layouts like Badlands’. Or top Medics like TheFragile* insisting on using Crusader’s Crossbow despite the drawbacks of its initial design, and proving to everyone that it is viable.

Team Fortress 2 Classified still offers a vast area when it comes to such exploration. And the latest YouTube video of Vooglet shows us the ultimate example of the sweaty, hard-to-reach type of depth. Vooglet plays and studies arcing R.P.G. Soldier, and he has been since six months before the game’s Steam release. The first image that comes to mind upon hearing the term is the blind, random rocket spam you stumble upon on public servers. In Vooglet’s hands, however, it becomes the Artillery subclass, or Arcsman as he calls it. He goes and figures out, for various positions in each map, where to place his crosshair in order to deliver rockets onto critical locations– like Counter-Strike players do for grenade throws. He records these findings on cheat sheets to use later in games, some of which he shares with CompTF2C.com readers through this article.

In the last article in March, we laid down the road map for changes that need to be implemented to TF2 Classified for a viable competitive gameplay, while documenting the temporary solutions made by CompTF2C in the pre-Steam era. Now in August, CompTF2C and a few of its stubborn members stand as a community actively involved in testing, bug fixing, and pinpointing them for the developers. The following is the progress report of that.

It all started with Xinayder entering the Discord server in May. Him and PuG runner starm0nster started testing different game modes in July to see where the tournament mode Ready Up function and the stopwatch functionality fails. Xinayder didn’t stop there, and went to the public TF2 SDK to understand how it works in live TF2, and from there, estimate how it could have gone wrong in TF2C. This led to a conversation between Güven and the creator of the TF2 Competitive Fixes plugin, twiikuu, who guessed that it could be about the fact that there are four teams defined in TF2C, whereas only two teams are able to ready up via the tournament HUD in a 2team map. That brought to mind what f stated about the initial post-Steam PuGs. A quick search in the Discord DMs reminded us that f indeed reported Ready Up to be functional in 4team maps. This further clue led to twiikuu finding the exact code that goes wrong, which, Xinayder documented properly. On 31 July, the developer team fixed the issue with the release of TF2 Classified update 3.0.12! Another bug reported by Xinayder, concerning Arena and the tournament mode (although may not be vital for the scene) is also fixed with update 3.0.12.
He went further and found bugs possibly hindering tournament HUD for 4team, and again, found where it could go wrong in the TF2 SDK as well.

The developer team behind Team Fortress 2 Classified, EMINOMA, has partnered with the independent TF2C Mapping Community (TF2CMC) -supported and led by the very same host of AltTAB servers- to organize the first official TF2 Classified mapping contest. Following the footsteps of the 2010 art pass competition of TF2, the participants are tasked with taking a de-artpassed version of a map originally created by Waugh101, now renamed arena_competition_template, and using it as a blank canvas to create their own art passed version, under an original name. The winner will have their version hosted on AltTAB Standard and VaultF4 Custom Maps servers for the forseeable future, in addition to receiving supporter perks on both servers.

The contest was announced on TF2CMC Discord server three days ago on July 6, with submission due six weeks later, on August 24. There are already around a dozen submissions on the #artpass-contest-submissions channel of the Discord server, where mapmakers are sharing their work in progress. Themes range from Yukon-like Canadian environment to industrial harbor. The map is relatively compact, so there is still plenty of time for mappers to join the contest and present their own vision of what the level could become. Even if you are not a mapper, the TF2CMC Discord is a great place to admire these new creations and join the weekly playtests with a community of creative individuals.

Note that, just two days before the contest was announced, TF2 Classified released its Modding Tools–a small but thoughtful gift to mappers and modders alike.

Thanks to the release of these tools on Steam, it’s now easier than ever to get started using Hammer for TF2C. Eminoma’s provided guides and example VMFs are perfect for learning TF2C’s style, and this contest is a great opportunity to have a go yourself. – Jaws, TF2CMC Lead and AltTAB Owner