Forgot to Make It Not Suck
Valve’s Team Fortress 2, a game which myself and a host of other CSHers are quite fond of playing, recently received a large update that not only included new unlockable equipment for all classes, but changed the method by which said equipment is awarded to players. This has resulted in a predictable amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the game’s notoriously unpleasable fanbase, but in this case some of their complaints may actually be warranted.
The main reason for changing the unlockable system is that the old one, to be honest, really sucked. Valve, being Valve, struck out into uncharted gameplay territory and required players to grab a certain number of achievements in order to unlock each new piece of equipment. This turned out to suck for two reasons: On the one hand, impatient players who just wanted their new weapons NOW could easily knock off all the achievements in an afternoon using servers and maps designed expressly for the purpose. And on the other hand, those who wanted to earn their unlocks legitimately had to “grind” through numerous arbitrary tasks, many of which could only be completed by expressly focusing on the task itself rather than just playing the game and having fun.
For this new update released just last week, Valve promised to change everything. Unlockables would no longer be tied to achievements; and what’s more, the new system could not possibly be “cheated”, no matter how many custom maps or server hacks anyone created. And in those respects, they succeeded. Whether or not the new system actually has fewer problems than the old one is another matter entirely.
The new system is time-based: At certain time intervals while playing the game, any given player has a random chance of being handed a random piece of equipment. No other factors enter into it; number of items gotten increases linearly with amount of time played. Not everyone is entirely sure this is a good thing, especially those impatient players who are now unable to quickly grind out their unlocks on achievement servers.
But what’s really getting on everyone’s nerves is the fact that the new system feels cheaper than the old one, primarily because you can randomly be awarded a duplicate of an item you already have. Really hoping you get the Spy’s fancy new invisibility watch? Too bad; even though you’ve spent the past week playing TF2 and little else, all you’ve got to show for it are six pairs of boxing gloves, five flare guns, three Ubersaws, and a partridge in a pear tree. The new system may reward you for large time commitments, but there’s no way to actually work toward something you want.
The details of the new system, and the rationale behind it, are explained by Valve in this blog post. Ironically, they say one of the features they plan on adding in a future update is the ability to trade items to other players. This completely ignores the fact that players are being awarded duplicate items right now, and don’t have any way to trade them; you’re at the mercy of a random number generator, and this makes the system feel incredibly cheap. Why Valve of all companies would stoop to this level of half-assery, I can only guess. They could have easily put off the whole thing until the next update (which would be a very Valve thing to do), and then they would have time to do all the features the system should have had right off the bat.
One can only hope that updates to the new item system will come earlier than the usual three-month waiting period between class packs. Otherwise, I can easily see new players being turned off by the arbitrary mechanics of item awarding. I’m personally not too perturbed over it, but only because I don’t take TF2 as seriously as most players do (the Steam forums will probably still be boiling with RAGE over this issue months from now).
Update: A few days after I posted this entry, Valve issued an update that added milestone achievements for the Sniper and Spy. This seems like an extremely slapdash solution, because it brings back all the disadvantages of the old system, and resolves few of the issues with the new system. Unfortunately, since this is probably considered a “good enough” fix, it’s likely that we won’t see any major changes to the system until the next class update, three months from now.