Basically, we had Halloween, which introduced sd_doomsday_event set in a carnival. It has more Wheel of Doom-type effects, bumper carts, and 3 gameplay types for the bumper carts, Soccer, duck collecting, and platforms. In soccer, which gave us prop_soccer_ball, you bounce the ball into the enemy goal 3 times using your carts to win(pipeball ripoff, volve pls). In duck collecting, pickups, which are ducks, spawn around the map, and you need to drive over them to collect them. Hitting enemy players drops some of their ducks. First team to a set amount wins. In platforms, there are nine wooden tiles over a deathpit. After some time, one of the tiles glow, and all but that fall. If you fall down the deathpit, you become a ghost, and need to fly up and touch teammates to be reanimated. If everyone on one team is dead, the other team wins. There are also new spells specifically for the carts.
YM was the first to make a map incorporating the new carts,
Mann Mountain, which is a racing map. There are quite a bit
more, too.
Almost everyone was hyped about the
End of the Line update, which was rumored to have new weapons, certain to have Snowplow, and of course have an SFM video. Sadly, cp_snowplow was cut from the update in November. Instead of these things, we got hats, an all-class melee reskin, and the Duck Journal. During the EOTL event, players would drop duck pickups on death, and objectives spit them out. The Duck Journal could be purchased for $5, and counted how many of these ducks you collected and leveled up like a strange weapon, as well as giving duckstreaks, a count in the killfeed of how many ducks you've collected.
The
Smissmass update was pretty big, bigger than almost everyone expected. We got 3 new weapons, the Iron Bomber, the Quickiebomb Launcher, and the Panic Attack. The new wave of Festive wepaons included the Revolver, the Bonk! Atomic Punch, the Shotgun, the Bonesaw, and Backburner. On top of that, we got
Mannpower, a new beta gamemode which introduces many new mechanics and tweaks to CTF, including grappling hooks, a crit pickup at the center of the map(later accompanied by an uber pickup) and numerous powerups which could be collected by killing the previous owners, such as one that makes you reload and move faster, one that gives health for damaging people, one that removes damage falloff from your weapons, one that hurts enemies that damage you, and probably a few others. The tweaks include giving players 6 seconds of uber when leaving spawn, requiring 5 captures to win, and intel having a somewhat long grace period before being able to be picked up again. Two "new" maps were added for this gametype, ctf_foundry and ctf_gorge, which are just edits of their 5cp variants, with some clipping removed for maximum grappling hook effectiveness.
Aaaand that's about it. Minus the hats, and people increasingly bitching about how the game is dead and valve no longer cares and whatnot.