Team Fortress 2 - A New Direction

Recently, Valve announced some major changes coming to the world of Team Fortress 2, to address issues rising in the community around the controversial 'hats' system. The hats system was introduced in 2009, and was basically a novelty system so while playing your character could collect various cosmetic hats to wear. While a cool idea, and a very simple one to keep players interested, the manner in which the mechanics for the system were done caused massive issues. Players naturally wanted to collect every single hat in any way they could, whether it be legitimately or not, and so the exploiting began.

The hat allocation process began when after 15,430 seconds of playing the computer ‘rolled a dice’, where the player had a 3.5% chance of obtaining a hat. The odds were ridiculous and it’s from this the controversy spawned. Players began to use 3rd party programs to obtain these hats – these programs connected you to the TF2 servers when you weren't even physically playing the game. This made obtaining hats more frequent than the loyal, legit players as these players were constantly in the servers. This was then eradicated with another update from Valve.

Prior to this recent update, players known as 'idlers' would sit in player created servers, with their clients connected for a week or so, maximising the number of dice rolls and gaining as many hats as possible. Although a lot of the TF2 community frowned upon the playing style, it has never been officially classed as an ‘exploit’ to obtaining hats. With the new changes, these 'idlers' will now have just as much chance of obtaining a hat as everyone else.

From the 20th of April:

• Instead of the game 'rolling a dice' to determine if you gain a collectable, the computer will roll to determine when the player's next drop will occur – Guaranteeing the chance of obtaining a collectable (like a hat) at some point in the future of you playing.
• There is now an increased drop rate for finding items (not including hats). 

And, most fundamentally: 

• There is now a maximum amount of playtime every week for when you get item drops (this cap seems to be around 11 hours a week). When you play past the allotted amount of time, you will not receive any more random items. If you don't play up to the allotted time, then some of that extra will roll over to the next week.

One thing that loyal players of the game are saying is that this new system from Valve is making it too hard to find these items! In some people’s minds, the game is penalising players that legitimately play 30 or so hours a week. If say someone plays for around 5 hours a day then they are only going to be as lucky, or unlucky at finding both hats and other items as someone who idles for 1.5 hours a day because of this new collection cap. Technically, the legit play may never find a hat. How frustrating would that be if you clocked up weeks of legitimate gametime hours and still not receive a single hat, where someone who has idled for just 11 or so hours a week gets 5!

This new system that Valve have implemented has pretty much made it pointless to idle but has had adverse effects on the moral players of the community. The previous ‘idlers’ may be distressed by the new change, but the questions that I ask them are: Why would you want to collect something that you haven't even earned? Where is the reward in that? Valve, in my opinion, have put in this system to address that and make drops once again special. The drops are something to be proud of, it would be a lot better to show off to your mates claiming: “Check out this hat I finally got. I swear I played for 8 hours today!” rather than: “Check out this hat I got from keeping my computer on for a week and a half”. Which do you think would get a better response? Although idlers can still keep wasting electricity and collect just as many items as the rest - a much needed cap has now been placed on the madness.