Team Fortress 2 Beta Test For Pro Matches

Valve has started a new closed beta process for Team Fortress 2 in order to balance the game for competitive matches.

European and American clans are being recruited for the beta which will test upcoming update features ahead of their release for balancing purposes.

“To iterate effectively, we need to be able to measure the impact of our changes,” Valve’s Robin Walker told Shack News. 

“Up until now we’ve been successful at measuring that impact on the non-competitive TF2 community, because we have good internal proxies for it–the TF2 team itself, plus other internal and external playtesters. Our proxies for the high end competitive play aren’t as good, and that’s lead to us making some design decisions that have hurt it.”

However, Walker was keen to stress that the development team has not abandoned the casual TF2 community.

“This doesn’t reflect any change of our attitude towards non-competitive TF2 play, it’s just going to give us more data,” he said.

“We’ll continue to talk and listen to the non-competitive TF2 players, as we have done in the two years since we shipped. The more data we have, the more effective we’ll be as we continue striving for design choices that work for all TF2 players.”

Last month Walker revealed that Valve is working on “a couple of large updates” for the game which are not tied to a specific class, like the recent Sniper vs Spy update.