Edit: This no longer works.I recently found this info online. I did NOT discover it, credits go out to facepunch.com and other sites who have published it first. But I figure I would post it here as it's a very interesting bug if you are familiar with Team Fortress 2.
Intro: TF2 recently introduced a drop/unlock system where players randomly obtain new items, and even rare hats while playing. When you obtain one of these items, it is announced to the server.
The Bug: The bug is that you can announce that you have earned one of these items... even though you didn't actually get it. You
do not get the item, you just announce it and fool everyone. And if you announce a rare hat, usually a bunch of people in the server will congratulate you since they are pretty rare. So this bug can be fun to mess with people :P. In addition, you can use this bug to announce that you have "found" anything listed in the tf_english.txt file regardless of whether or not it's an actual earnable item.
How To: 1) Goto:
http://gamepaste.com/item_found.php 2) Type the map you're playing on in the "map" field (example: ctf_2fort). Type your temp player ID in the "id" field. You can find this by typing "status" in console and looking next to the #. So for example, mine is 2 in the parenthesis: (
# 2 "SomaFM" STEAM_0:0:12345678 01:00)... Now choose you rare hat from the list to announce to the server. Now press "Submit"
3) You will get a string of text like so: "item_found TF_Spy_Hat_1 37935". Paste this into your console without quotes and press enter. Check the chat! It should announce a fake drop to the server:
Other announcements:As I mentioned earlier, you can announce anything found in tf_english.txt. The file is too big to be displayed here, but here is the latest copy as of this post:
http://pastebin.com/f535db877. You can also get it by extracting your current "team fortress 2 content.gcf" file and looking under the path "tf\resource\tf_english.txt". GCFScape is a good tool for extracting Steam GCF archives.
I want to announce that I have found the item "Spiders". This isn't an actual item, but since it's in tf_english.txt we can say we found it! Use the link that was generated in the "How To" section like so:
http://gamepaste.com/item_found.php?map ... O_Monster5. I paste the generated string into my console and voila:
Item_Found.php:So you probably want to know how the string you type into console is generated (instead of relying on this gamepaste.com website). It's quite simple:
Code:
<?php
$mapname = $_GET['map'];
$pid = $_GET['pid'];
$weapon = $_GET['weapon'];
$base = crc32($mapname) & 0xFFFF;
printf("item_found %s %d", $weapon, $base ^ $pid);
?>
Other notes: You can't pretend to be someone else (nothing will show up if you try, or if you use an invalid string). You can spam it as much as you want though. Be careful, don't get banned!
Enjoy it while it lasts! But I've seen that this info has been known for at least 2 months now without a fix, so I'm not sure what VALVe is doing.
