: I don't know why I or someone else didn't think to ask, but what exactly do
: these changes do (presumably they make the things in question stronger but
: IDK)? Also, are these the only changes to in-game things made when a
: certain type of map is loaded?

Been busy with drug called Steam Summer Sale, so haven't been checking HBO lately. To answer your first post, the code is from the tool which actually builds the (monolithic) map files which the release build of the game uses. The tag_get and such function names were reverse engineered from multiple builds from multiple games (notably debug assertion strings). A 'tag' being a single file, eg pistol.weapon.

I currently don't really have the time right now to see which tag fields this code is touching. However, since it is only in the tool code, not the game code, someone could use the HEK to make a pistol2.weapon tag (doing the same with the other tags, plus duplicating the tags which reference them) which the tool code wouldn't touch when building a map to experiment with the differences if they REALLY desired.

These are the only 'last-minute' changes they, or Jones, coded in. I'm not aware of any other hardcoded values besides what they use for essentially defaulting new data created with the tools (which content creators can tweak afterwards)