VanillaTF2

In case you don’t visit TeamFortress.com and have chosen to ignore the conveniently placed RSS link at the right, hold onto your privates as Valve have planned a minor downtime for Team Fortress 2. On November 9th, 2010, beginning 1pm PST (10pm CET) — Backpack, Loadouts, Crafting, Mann-co Store and Trading will be unavailable. The downtime will wrap up by 2:30pm PST (11:30pm CET)

The game itself will continue to work. All players will have their default appearance and weapons.

This downtime will be one of many in the upcoming days as Valve has created an official downtime thread for Team Fortress 2. You can access it here, subscribe to it to receive updates regarding planned maintenance.

- Abhorrence

Following the exclusive, competitive players only BETA that occurred a long time back, Valve is rolling out a public Team Fortress 2 BETA a la Counter Strike: Source. This tidbit was mentioned on the Kritzkast podcast, and you can hear at the relevant banter about the beta at 23:50. There’s also a page about it on the official Team Fortress 2 Wiki.

The TF2 Open Beta is a beta version of the game open to all TF2 owners, expected to be announced in the near future, likely during the week commencing September 6th. The Open Beta would be used to test various changes to the game and observe their effects on gameplay, before integrating certain changes into the game.

Robin Walker has mentioned that the main goal of the beta would be to test how systems in the game affect each other and are affected, and that experiments would be “wide scale”.

- Abhorrence