I'm Disappointed, Valve

For years it’s been a well-known fact that Valve is the best gaming company out there: it buys mods the community creates, it hires the mods’ developers, and it adds community items into its games. Everyone knows that while Valve never listens to the community, it always ends up being right. So what’s the problem? Well, it seems Valve is trying to prove all of these statements false lately.

To start, let’s see what Valve has done recently: continuously updating Counter-Strike 2, fixing the botting issue in Team Fortress 2, and working on its new game — Deadlock — which I can’t talk more about seeing as I’m a beta tester, regardless of how much I want to. So the employees at Valve HQ are definitely busy, and yet it seems nothing at Valve has been up to the usual standards.

In Counter-Strike 2, for example, there has been no actual new content. The last few updates added new animations when players get MVP, a small rework to how the Molotov works, and probably the biggest addition — new community-made maps in the game. While all of these updates are great, there’s still nothing truly new to experience, at least nothing that Valve created. The biggest addition, the maps, are as simple as just adding a few files to the game and creating new UI elements in the main menu. A lot of old game modes that were present back in Global Offensive, such as Danger Zone, are still not back, too.

There’s also the cheating issue in CS2, which, as I’ve pointed out in a previous article, is not actually larger than the one in GO, but compare it with Call of Duty, or any other FPS really, and there are clearly more cheaters than is standard in the industry. While the developers have done some things to help, and there were some banwaves this year — cheaters are still rampant, and most of them aren’t even trying to hide it. For some odd reason, the Overwatch system isn’t really back yet, although according to an update, Valve released a while ago, it returned for “trusted partners”, whatever it means…

The way Valve has been treating its community lately is just as much of an issue: remember the Fix TF2 campaign a few months ago? Well, it definitely had an impact; the game has been almost entirely bot-free for almost a month now! But the timing is a bit… weird. For those of you who don’t know, Team Fortress 2 has seasonal updates in which community items get added to the game. Now, guess when bots started disappearing? Just in time for the Summer Update, which adds a lot more purchasable items to TF2. Also, there was a project to remake this game in the Source 2 engine using a tool called S&Box, but it shut down due to a DMCA notice from Valve. Yep, the same company that bought DOTA and Counter-Strike from modders issued a DMCA for a community remake of an old game it barely touches anymore.

So yeah, I am very disappointed and sad to see what Valve has been doing lately. The way the community, and the old games, are being treated is really not okay. I hope that there’s some kind of plan we don’t know about that will explain why it’s doing all of this — maybe Valve is planning to make their own Source 2 version of Team Fortress 2 (probably not). But I guess we’ll just wait and see, these games are still fun, so it’s not like I’m going to stop playing them.