Now Valve have danced the Robotic Boogaloo with the TF2 community in the game’s first entirely user-created official update, there’s clear incentive for fans to follow up the hat pack with similar initiatives. First to pull together a prospective update and brace themselves for the hand of Valve are the folks behind the Mann Co. Map Supplement, which will contain “six essential minerals, vitamins, and/or multiplayer maps” – just as soon as they get the permission of the maps’ creators.
The map pack would come in two parts, and feature some of the game’s best, underappreciated map talent. The Mann Co. Map Supplement would include payload maps Beerbowl, Cashworks and Swiftwater, two control point maps in Croissant and Snakewater, and king of the hill favourite Ashville.
The accompanying Mann Co. Community Remix would be made up of popular reworked versions of Dustbowl, Coldfront, Turbine, Viaduct and BarnBlitz.
The map pack’s perpetrators are currently pondering three potential methods of release. The first and simplest would see the maps collected in a Windows installer and released to the community.
“Snazzy marketing materials can be shared far and wide to various TF2 communities,” explain the hopeful curators. “People download the maps, servers start running the maps, everybody wins.”
The second would be a collaboration with the chaps behind Humble Bundle – though, I hasten to add, they’re not yet involved at this stage. A pay-what-you-want Humble TF2 Map Bundle would see a portion of the proceeds fund dedicated servers for three or four months, by which point it’s hoped that community servers would already be picking up the slack.
The third is the pipe dream: an official Valve release. The curators suggest a ‘community map crate’, which would be added to the game’s drop system and require two regular Mann Co. keys to unlock (equivalent to ~$5). Profits would (they hope) be shared between Valve and the map makers. And after a given period, assuming all goes well, the maps would be slotted into the game as regular curated ‘community’ maps, alongside the likes of Turbine and Coldfront.
There’s the whiff of lots of ifs about this one. But what do you think? Does it sound like a plan?