Player Destruction
| “ | I'm drunk - you don't have an excuse!
Click to listen
— The Demoman on drunken UFO pilots
|
” |
Player Destruction is a community-made game mode added in the Invasion Update.
Contents
Gameplay
The goal of each team is to collect beer pickups dropped by dead players, and deposit them into a UFO at the center of the map to get it drunk and score points. When killed, a player drops 1 beer plus all of the beers they were carrying (shown over their head and on their HUD), which can then be picked up by players on either team. The non-Spy player on each team with the most beers also becomes the "team leader", making them dispense health and ammo to themselves and nearby teammates at the rate of a level 1 Dispenser, but also giving them an outline visible through walls that can be seen by both teams. The team leader's Dispenser has a modified range of 450 units (default range is ~32 units). Collected beers will be dropped on the ground if a player tries to carry them into a resupply area, and can also be dropped manually by pressing the drop-item button (Default key: L). Dropped beers that are not picked up will shortly despawn.
Scoring
To score, players must deposit their collected beers into a UFO at the center of the map, which arrives every 52 seconds and flies slowly across the area creating a tractor beam, before getting to the edge of the map and leaving after 34 seconds. While in the UFO beam, players can move around as if they were swimming in water, and their collected beers are gradually deposited into the UFO and added to their team's score. Players can also contest beer deposits by jumping into the beam and blocking the enemy team from scoring. The amount of beers a team needs to deposit is based on the number of players in the first 30 seconds of a round multiplied by 5. After 30 seconds the number is locked for the rest of the round. The deposit speed is also dynamic through the round depending on the number of currently connected players. The base deposit speed is 1 beer every 1.1 seconds, but the time decreases by 0.025 for every player in the round[1].
As more beers are deposited into the UFO, it will get drunk, visibly wobbling more and more the higher a team's score is. Once one team scores enough points to win (the number scales based on the amount of players at the start of the round), the UFO flies away and drunkenly crashes into the mothership in the distance, destroying it and winning the game for that team.
Maps
Player Destruction maps carry the pd_ prefix; community maps are identified with an italic font.
| Name | Picture | File name |
|---|---|---|
| Watergate | 
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pd_watergate
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Development
The current iteration of the Player Destruction game mode was heavily altered from earlier versions of the map.
Instead of dropping beers that had to be delivered to the UFO, dead players dropped team-specific cash pickups (reskinned from Robot Destruction cores) that instantly added to a team's score when picked up. As players killed more enemies, however, their bounty (shown on their HUD) would increase, causing them to drop more cash on death and making them a more valuable target for the enemy team.
As players didn't have to deliver their pickups to score, the UFO instead dropped a large "care package" of cash for both teams in the center of the map. The UFO's tractor beam was used to pull players towards a neutral control point at the highest point of the map, which slowly generated extra cash pickups for the team that owned it. Once one team scored $150, a barrel would launch from the control point building and land on the mothership in the skybox, destroying it.
This version of the game mode was eventually scrapped in favor of the current version, as players with high bounties would simply hide in spawn to avoid being killed, and without the UFO deposit or team leader mechanics, the game lacked a focused objective for players to fight over.
The control point.
The UFO and a care package.
References
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