Ah, Christmas time is starting to gear up.
People are getting edgier by the minute; in stores you can see in people’s faces the dawning realization that they haven’t picked Christmas presents yet and time is already starting to run out.
And you can almost smell the pre-holiday panic. It will be bad this year. Here in Germany both the 25th and 26th are holidays, and with the 27th being a Sunday this means most stores will be closed for three days (OMG!). Not sure about the rest of the world, but we Germans can’t deal with such a terrible prospect, and consequently people act like they would have to buy supplies to survive World War 3. As a people we can be quite pathetic. Master race, my ass 
Speaking of wars:
According to recent stats our Scottish Cyclops isn’t doing too well. Which is not too surprising; I assume most of us have been expecting these results. However, I wonder if it’s fair to simply count kills without taking into consideration how many participants each side has.
Quite rightly it has been pointed out that the learning curve of the demo is much steeper than the one of the soldier, which means it’s easier to become a good soldier than a good demo. Consequently I would expect that you have fewer demos than soldiers on the servers and that the average skill level might be a bit lower on the demo’s side (especially since this war surely has prompted people to play demo who have not much competence in that class).
That should not belittle the efforts of the soldiers, but if you -hypothetically, since I lack any real stats - have an army of 10000 fight an army of 8000 it’s probably not be such an incredibly show of skill that you rack up a higher kill score.
But I admit, I am biased. The last few months I have played demo a lot, and though I’m crap at the class I still like playing it (hmm, this might be showing masochistic traits). Also I feel quite well on the losing side. Feeds my image of self-righteousness. But I have to admit that me participating on the war as demo is actually rather helping the soldier’s side, since I’m providing them with cheap kills. A lot of cheap kills, I reluctantly have to add. Perhaps I should switch to soldier to help demos to rack up more kills. Reverse logic ftw.
But perhaps there’s an alternative of war.
The recent update on the TF2 blog conjures SCIENCE as a possible way out. With an engineer on the picture. Have we been duped? Has the war been just a clever distraction and in reality this is the engineer update?!? Or - GASP - should this perhaps be a TRIPLE UPDATE?!?!?!?
(Which, BTW, would suit me. From my days of TFC I have a deep - manly - love for the engineer and I like playing it even more than playing demo. Though almost just as badly )
But the blog did also graciously provide us with the first REAL new feature this update will be giving us. Apparently the idea of a trade system for items has been dropped (pardon the pun). Or Valve has failed to figure out a less than ridiculous way to make it work.
Instead we get CRAFTING!
This idea has a lot of potential, but I’ll reserve further judgment until I can see it in action. But at least we can do something with all the (so far) useless crap we have been collecting in our (so far) equally useless inventory.
Yes, this aspect might push TF2 from a straight forward action FPS towards different areas. But then again, if you want a straight forward action FPS go and play CS . I’m sure some parts of the community will dismiss the concept, but IMHO this could be very interesting and I will keep an open mind.
Finally, it can’t be overstated that this update so far has been an incredible ride, and the presentation (I mentioned it before) is really wonderful. This is not an update, this is an event! Biggest kudos to Valve. Of course the icing on the cake would be another "Meet the"-video 
With that I leave you to spend this third advent Sunday. But remember in all this pre-holiday bliss, there’s still a war going on. So take a few hours to fulfill your duty and kill some soldiers.
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