Valve, is that you?

What does it matter though. The store was never a complete beacon of quality. All players care about is the games they know to exist and they mentally ignore the ones that they don't. Steam works off pure visibility so they still curate the games they feel deserve the front page and or banners. If something is escalated to the front you can be sure Valve thinks they can make money off it by it being worth a players time.

I find myself having to ignore far more stuff on the front page than I ever did before. It's not just "bad games" it's games that literally barely function or are just complete unity asset flips. I'm incredibly less inclined to even give the store a glance now thanks to how much inane bs I have to wade through, it's embarrassing.

You might as well allow barely working knock off phones from china at major electronic outlets, or bootleg recordings of music taken from the radio with some of the commercials still in sold on the itunes front page because that's basically the level of quality we're at here.

If you can't see an inherent issue with a store opening the floodgates to these absolute trash tier 0/10 games that wouldn't even be a passing interest to people on newgrounds I don't even know what else to say to you.
 
I have always thought that valve is more interested in the technologies and ideas being video games than the games themselves. Their current fascination seems to be multiplayer and VR, and it seems they tend to just follow the trends of the time. When Half-Life came out, story driven FPS games were the thing, Deus Ex, System Shock, Duke Nukem etc. Alongside, of course was the age of multiplayer FPS, and Counter Strike was Valve's foray into this trend.

Then came the co-op craze with Gears of War and CoD zombies,and sure enough it seemed Valve was there to one-up everybody else. Now, with MOBA's being the "thing", Valve has DOTA 2. The only Valve games I can think of as complete surprises and really different from the norm are the Portal games.
 
I do hope Valve doesn't completely abandon single player games for multiplayer.

It's so weird that Valve claims that their staff "works on games that they want to work on".

Does that mean that none of their staff has any interest in working on a single player game? Or perhaps none of the staff that wants to work on single player games can manage to cobble together something close enough to a finished product to show off?

Considering their history and pedigree, I doubt either scenario is true. What's likelier is that teams in Valve are encouraged to work on projects that generate revenue at the levels they're currently accustomed to. They give you flexibility, sure, but only so long as they get an impressive ROI.
 
Every time I think Valve is going to announce the end of TF2 support, they turn around and announce a year's worth of plans to improve the game further, that seem to lead into yet another year of more things to develop.

Like they have comp matchmaking coming next year, which they want to add partly to help balance weapons, which just shows they obviously have no plans to discontinue support.

That's impressive.

Honestly I can't imagine Valve dropping support for TF2, DOTA2 or CSGO while their economies are so strong. Dropping one of the games would probably pretty badly damage the economy of those games and probably cause some people to loose faith in the economies of the other games.

that's not even the best part, it's the follow up with how they're not involved with their games anymore.

Yeah, not like they didn't just recently

- Move Dota 2 over to Source2
- Release major CSGO update

They also released a major update for TF2 in July and just recently announced what they are going to be working on for the rest of the year for TF2.
 
Kind of lost interest in them after 2011. Portal 2 was great, then they just stopped making stuff that I cared about. I still play TF2 from time to time though. Specially during October.
 
OP your post is very poorly written. No references, no quotes, all opinionated bullshit because your wooden pc can't run Reborn. Speaking of Reborn I love the UI, and I find matches in less than 2 minutes.
 
Modern valve works for me. Dota 2 is amazing, I still have fun with TF2, and I'm dying to pay hundreds of dollars for a vive already.
 
Managing Steam and these games is a gigantic task, and they're obviously understaffed to do that. Especially when it comes to customer service.

One of my best friends on Steam had his account locked for security purposes when someone else tried to access it. He opened up a ticket with support, then Steam asked him for some information to verify who he is, so he provided it.

It's been over a month and still no reply from Steam.

Their level of support can be soul crushingly non-existent.
 
Here's what I don't like about current-day Valve...

So the Gun Mettle Campaign happened in TF2. In fact, it's just about to end. After paying $5.99 to join in, you're given special missions to fulfill (including Bonus criteria), in order to earn specially-skinned weapons. Some of these missions are clever teaching tools, others feel like robotic "Fill in Class Name Here" generated content, but ok. It's a way of bringing back that feeling of achievements long after you've unlocked most of them, and you can get some sweet gear!

Well...

Actually, there's about 6 different levels of rarity in the weapons, and you can only get levels 1-4 via drops. (That is further complicated by 5 levels of "Condition", ranging from "Factory New" to "Scratched up as fuck" "Battle Scarred".) Despite the fact that there are "Advanced" conditions that earn you 30 bonus points for each Contract, this does not guarantee you will get a better rarity or condition of gun, and I'm not sure it changes the odds at all. It apparently only makes it easier to level up your medal, something they did not clarify at first. (Your medal level also doesn't seem to influence what gun you get.)

Also, instead of a gun, you can receive a "Weapon Case", which can have weapons from rarities 3-6. These weapons can also have "Strange" modifiers, which count things like kills, and "Unusual" effects, but as any TF2 player can tell you, the odds of getting an Unusual are really, really shitty. ("But then they wouldn't be unusual!" says the person who wants to be smacked in the face.) But crates require $2.49 Keys to open. And not just the normal Keys you may already have. These require campaign-exclusive keys that you have to buy now, because there's already so many normal Keys floating around for cheaper in the TF2 economy.

So, to recap, you've already paid $5.99 to be a part of the campaign. You work hard at a Contract. You may receive a special box that you have to pay an additional $2.49 to open, which has a decent chance of being exactly the same type of gun that gets dropped for free. And you don't get this and a gun, you only get this for this Contract.

Now, some people were smart and sold off their better guns on the marketplace early on, paying for their contracts and maybe some keys. But quickly everyone jumped on this, and in the race-to-the-bottom marketplace, you could be spending $2.49 to uncrate a weapon worth less than $0.10. There are so many garbage low-tier guns out there now, that Valve patched in a "trade-up" program where you submit 10 weapons of similar quality (meaning you can't use everything you've gotten so far, they have to be in the same groups), destroying all of them for a single weapon one step up. Woo.

Midway into this campaign, they also introduced Gun Mettle Cosmetic Cases, which have unique costume items for this campaign. That sounds pretty good, right? These take the place of one of your weekly drops. And cost $2.49 to open. And require completely different keys from the Gun Cases.


This is TF2 now.


Well that, and constantly-screaming Demomen charging everywhere, tanking groups of enemies with the Half-Zatoichi.
 
Here's what I don't like about current-day Valve...

So the Gun Mettle Campaign happened in TF2. In fact, it's just about to end. After paying $5.99 to join in, you're given special missions to fulfill (including Bonus criteria), in order to earn specially-skinned weapons. Some of these missions are clever teaching tools, others feel like robotic "Fill in Class Name Here" generated content, but ok. It's a way of bringing back that feeling of achievements long after you've unlocked most of them, and you can get some sweet gear!

Well...

Actually, there's about 6 different levels of rarity in the weapons, and you can only get levels 1-4 via drops. (That is further complicated by 5 levels of "Condition", ranging from "Factory New" to "Scratched up as fuck" "Battle Scarred".) Despite the fact that there are "Advanced" conditions that earn you 30 bonus points for each Contract, this does not guarantee you will get a better rarity or condition of gun, and I'm not sure it changes the odds at all. It apparently only makes it easier to level up your medal, something they did not clarify at first. (Your medal level also doesn't seem to influence what gun you get.)

Also, instead of a gun, you can receive a "Weapon Case", which can have weapons from rarities 3-6. These weapons can also have "Strange" modifiers, which count things like kills, and "Unusual" effects, but as any TF2 player can tell you, the odds of getting an Unusual are really, really shitty. ("But then they wouldn't be unusual!" says the person who wants to be smacked in the face.) But crates require $2.49 Keys to open. And not just the normal Keys you may already have. These require campaign-exclusive keys that you have to buy now, because there's already so many normal Keys floating around for cheaper in the TF2 economy.

So, to recap, you've already paid $5.99 to be a part of the campaign. You work hard at a Contract. You may receive a special box that you have to pay an additional $2.49 to open, which has a decent chance of being exactly the same type of gun that gets dropped for free. And you don't get this and a gun, you only get this for this Contract.

Now, some people were smart and sold off their better guns on the marketplace early on, paying for their contracts and maybe some keys. But quickly everyone jumped on this, and in the race-to-the-bottom marketplace, you could be spending $2.49 to uncrate a weapon worth less than $0.10. There are so many garbage low-tier guns out there now, that Valve patched in a "trade-up" program where you submit 10 weapons of similar quality (meaning you can't use everything you've gotten so far, they have to be in the same groups), destroying all of them for a single weapon one step up. Woo.

Midway into this campaign, they also introduced Gun Mettle Cosmetic Cases, which have unique costume items for this campaign. That sounds pretty good, right? These take the place of one of your weekly drops. And cost $2.49 to open. And require completely different keys from the Gun Cases.


This is TF2 now.


Well that, and constantly-screaming Demomen charging everywhere, tanking groups of enemies with the Half-Zatoichi.

What's interesting to me is the psychology of people who can't separate the game from the ancillary microtransaction shit they tacked onto TF2, Dota 2 and CS:GO. The game is essentially the same as its ever been, it's just buried under a bunch of BS.

This is only TF2 if you were never in it for the core gameplay in the first place, or are easily conned into spending money on cosmetics.
 
What's interesting to me is the psychology of people who can't separate the game from the ancillary microtransaction shit they tacked onto TF2, Dota 2 and CS:GO. The game is essentially the same as its ever been, it's just buried under a bunch of BS.

This is only TF2 if you were never in it for the core gameplay in the first place, or are easily conned into spending money on cosmetics.

I knew this shit was coming. It's always "No, you're the idiot for playing along." This is the damn update. Beat these contracts, get unique guns. That's the selling point. That's what they've been waving in your faces as the cool thing about this update (along with the new community maps). The game has become obsessed with the "ancillary microtransaction bullshit", and it gets in the way of the game itself now. I like doing the contract challenges! But I hate that the reward is, "Hooray, you get to spend more money! And there's a very good chance you'll get garbage worth less than the key you paid for!"

The game is in this weird, obsessed cyclical loop when it comes to cosmetics, and I'm disappointed by it. Saying "Just ignore everything they keep updating with, lol!" doesn't make it better.
 
They gave me Dota 2 which is not only one of my favorite games of all time but has also given me a couple hundred dollars. For that I am always in Valve's debt.
 
At least finish Half-Life for crying out loud, and give a sense of closure to fans who have bought and purchased Half Life games + the episodes.

They don't *really* owe anyone anything, I just think it's really irresponsible for them to leave the fans hanging out seeking a sense of closure from HL games, especially considering the way they deliberately designed it as "wait for the next game for how the story closes out!" kind of way.

But I guess money talks huh.
 
Valve has traded their fantastic reputation for the chance to make as much money as possible *right now.*

I don't even think of them as a game developer anymore - they're just "the company that manages Steam."

Seriously. I think they're possibly the most disappointing "fall from grace" in the last decade of video gaming.
 
I knew this shit was coming. It's always "No, you're the idiot for playing along." This is the damn update. Beat these contracts, get unique guns. That's the selling point. That's what they've been waving in your faces as the cool thing about this update (along with the new community maps). The game has become obsessed with the "ancillary microtransaction bullshit", and it gets in the way of the game itself now. I like doing the contract challenges! But I hate that the reward is, "Hooray, you get to spend more money! And there's a very good chance you'll get garbage worth less than the key you paid for!"

The game is in this weird, obsessed cyclical loop when it comes to cosmetics, and I'm disappointed by it. Saying "Just ignore everything they keep updating with, lol!" doesn't make it better.

For me anyway the big selling point of the update wasn't the new weapon skins, but the community maps (and new valve map) along with the huge number of class and weapon rebalances.

Since TF2 is F2P all the major updates are going to have some way for Valve to make money off the game. Valve was very upfront about the fact you get either a weapon drop or a case from completing the contracts. Plus the great thing about the campaign was that a portion of the money from the campaign is going to support the community map makers who had maps included in the update, they are probably going to make a ton of money off the campaign which is great.

I just ignore 99% of new cosmetics, if there is something I really want I just buy it when you get it for cheap on TFwh.
 
Valve who? I thought they shut down nearly a decade ago. [/s]

Businesses are supposed to be about making money. The gaming service provider that happens to be called Valve does this well. More power to them.

The developer that also happened to be called Valve which made Half Life is long gone. The current Valve doesn't have the capability to make something that doesn't have "massively online" (translation - "infinitely monetizeable") as a prefix. I'm not going to pretend that I'm ok with how they left Half Life hanging on a massive cliffhanger but I'd rather leave things this way then see them try and continue the story in some social gaming abomination.
 
There was something charming about how long they used to take to make their video games. At least at the end of the day they put out a fantastic experience and we could justify how long they took with that.

Now that they're running many things as a service "Valve Time" has becoming something serious instead of something to make fun of. Problems don't get fixed in a timely manner, if ever. How Steam could have such shit customer support for so long is unbelievable.
 
I love Valve as much as anyone, playing all of their games through to completion, yet can't help feeling that they should (as many others have said) offer closure on Half Life.
For everyone who played Half Life 1 from release have now most likely moved on, what with work/family/life in general taking priority, a new Half life release is perhaps not so exciting anymore. If by the off chance your average Joe has free time I should imagine that they are more likely invested in other series/franchises who treat their fan base a bit more (for want of a word) respectfully!
Please don't get me wrong I know Valve is heavily invested in Steam, DOTA etc... but please thrown your fans a friggin bone! Is that too much to ask?
 
I know a lot of people miss the game making Valve. However if L4D3 is a lot of fun and receives great reviews they will fall back to being praised.
 
Most Valve threads serve as a showcase of how narrow-minded some gamers are about anything that doesn't specifically cater to their own wishes and wants. As a person who basically only plays single-player games I am not happy at all with Valve's change of focus. I would love, love more single player content from the studio that produced truly legendary games. However, personal preferences aside, Valve is the single most influential games studio in the world. Between their hugely popular multiplayer games, the juggernaut that is Steam and all their R&D projects, the Valve people are leaders in gaming and incrrdibly prolific qhen we consider that it's just a 300-person team.
 
Valve has traded their fantastic reputation for the chance to make as much money as possible *right now.*

I don't even think of them as a game developer anymore - they're just "the company that manages Steam."

Seriously. I think they're possibly the most disappointing "fall from grace" in the last decade of video gaming.

If Valve wanted easy money they would've released an Half Lifer every year with DLCs on top of it. Milk the shit out of your franchises, how hard is this? You'll kill them, but you get fast money. Activision style.
 
I knew this shit was coming. It's always "No, you're the idiot for playing along." This is the damn update. Beat these contracts, get unique guns. That's the selling point. That's what they've been waving in your faces as the cool thing about this update (along with the new community maps). The game has become obsessed with the "ancillary microtransaction bullshit", and it gets in the way of the game itself now. I like doing the contract challenges! But I hate that the reward is, "Hooray, you get to spend more money! And there's a very good chance you'll get garbage worth less than the key you paid for!"

The game is in this weird, obsessed cyclical loop when it comes to cosmetics, and I'm disappointed by it. Saying "Just ignore everything they keep updating with, lol!" doesn't make it better.

Who forced you to buy that contract? Or the key that gave you 'garbage worth less than what you paid for'?

Has any of this affected your ability to actually play the game? Has any meaningful content been locked behind a paywall? Do you have the self awareness to realize that you are complaining about entirely optional cosmetics?
 
I HATE CS:GO and TF2 microtransactions bullshit, but I don't understand the people who go online to rant about them. You don't have to use the cosmetic shit. Even if it annoys you that people will pay for it, just exploit the idiots. IIf you get a drop of this or that, just sell it on the marketplace, and watch it return to you as free games in the next Steam Sale. There's a sucker born every minute.
 
Valve has traded their fantastic reputation for the chance to make as much money as possible *right now.*

mjlol.png
 
I don't like DOTA, but I used to play CS:GO and TF2. Now, I haven't even signed into Steam for two months.

Valve can do what they like, but I won't be following their current course. They've done nothing for me since Portal 2.
 
It's so weird that Valve claims that their staff "works on games that they want to work on".

Does that mean that none of their staff has any interest in working on a single player game? Or perhaps none of the staff that wants to work on single player games can manage to cobble together something close enough to a finished product to show off?

Considering their history and pedigree, I doubt either scenario is true. What's likelier is that teams in Valve are encouraged to work on projects that generate revenue at the levels they're currently accustomed to. They give you flexibility, sure, but only so long as they get an impressive ROI.

Employees at Valve can work on whatever project they wish, or can start their own. They need to be able to justify their work to recruit other employees to their team and during their salary review.
Unfortunately, at this point justifying a single player development would be difficult.
 
I don't see the issue with the campaign passes in TF2 and CSGO. If you are smart you can easily make your money back in a day or two (cases start out really high value) and then the rest of the time is just icing on the cake..

For the TF2 Gun Mettle campaign I would hope to get a case drop because I could easily sell them... 2.49 to open a case? you're doing it wrong. I didn't even grab the gun mettle pass until a week or so after the event started and I was able to make double what I spent on it through the steam market..

that plus trading card revenue means I am able to buy games on Steam using money earned from the market, instead of from my bank account, so it's a self-sustaining ecosystem..

being able to buy the BoI expansion from money made on the market is fantastic
 
Here's what I don't like about current-day Valve...

So the Gun Mettle Campaign happened in TF2. In fact, it's just about to end. After paying $5.99 to join in, you're given special missions to fulfill (including Bonus criteria), in order to earn specially-skinned weapons. Some of these missions are clever teaching tools, others feel like robotic "Fill in Class Name Here" generated content, but ok. It's a way of bringing back that feeling of achievements long after you've unlocked most of them, and you can get some sweet gear!

Well...

Actually, there's about 6 different levels of rarity in the weapons, and you can only get levels 1-4 via drops. (That is further complicated by 5 levels of "Condition", ranging from "Factory New" to "Scratched up as fuck" "Battle Scarred".) Despite the fact that there are "Advanced" conditions that earn you 30 bonus points for each Contract, this does not guarantee you will get a better rarity or condition of gun, and I'm not sure it changes the odds at all. It apparently only makes it easier to level up your medal, something they did not clarify at first. (Your medal level also doesn't seem to influence what gun you get.)

Also, instead of a gun, you can receive a "Weapon Case", which can have weapons from rarities 3-6. These weapons can also have "Strange" modifiers, which count things like kills, and "Unusual" effects, but as any TF2 player can tell you, the odds of getting an Unusual are really, really shitty. ("But then they wouldn't be unusual!" says the person who wants to be smacked in the face.) But crates require $2.49 Keys to open. And not just the normal Keys you may already have. These require campaign-exclusive keys that you have to buy now, because there's already so many normal Keys floating around for cheaper in the TF2 economy.

So, to recap, you've already paid $5.99 to be a part of the campaign. You work hard at a Contract. You may receive a special box that you have to pay an additional $2.49 to open, which has a decent chance of being exactly the same type of gun that gets dropped for free. And you don't get this and a gun, you only get this for this Contract.

Now, some people were smart and sold off their better guns on the marketplace early on, paying for their contracts and maybe some keys. But quickly everyone jumped on this, and in the race-to-the-bottom marketplace, you could be spending $2.49 to uncrate a weapon worth less than $0.10. There are so many garbage low-tier guns out there now, that Valve patched in a "trade-up" program where you submit 10 weapons of similar quality (meaning you can't use everything you've gotten so far, they have to be in the same groups), destroying all of them for a single weapon one step up. Woo.

Midway into this campaign, they also introduced Gun Mettle Cosmetic Cases, which have unique costume items for this campaign. That sounds pretty good, right? These take the place of one of your weekly drops. And cost $2.49 to open. And require completely different keys from the Gun Cases.


This is TF2 now.


Well that, and constantly-screaming Demomen charging everywhere, tanking groups of enemies with the Half-Zatoichi.

I read through this stuff and I'm thinking "how the hell can anyone keep up with these things?"

I can't be the only one who's been feeling this. Every seasonal sale they introduce a new mini-game thing, trading cards, gems, where you unlock cards by buying $10 worth of stuff, and if you gemify these cards you get gems which you can use to buy card packs that all these systems that feed into eachother. They update their games, usually TF2, with new modes that you have to buy tickets in, that reward you with cards or weapons, but sometimes they don't, and there are "special versions" that you need to buy a ticket plus craft something or whatever the hell you have to do to get one of six different versions of a skin of a weapon.

I don't know if I'm just stupid (about a 70% chance likelihood), but every time I see VALVe pump out these new "contracts" or "crafting" or whatever the hell micro-game they put in to boost their economy, I need practically two pages of explanation (which they handly give in a bloated FAQ every year). It's all to boost their economy (of which VALVe gets a small percentage, meaning they get a profit for literally next to no work aside from coding, doubly so if they're just putting in a community made item) where they introduce 6 different types of the same weapon with 4 different paint jobs of the same 6 types, where you always have money to spend.

These systems are designed to be confusing, bloated, tangled into one another, hide cost under cost, and gouge money from the user in subtle ways. It's as insidious as the worst of mobile gaming and VALVe have been introducing these systems all over their games.
 
I will say that it seems like Valve are treating their games-as-services customers well again by providing actual service in the form of regular content updates. The Source 2 launch in Dota 2 was a hot mess but they've shipped an update pretty much every day (including last Saturday and Sunday) to try and get things up to snuff, and they've been releasing more CS: GO and TF2 updates, which is nice, even if most of the TF2 stuff is half-assed community garbage or beta modes and maps.

I'm still unsure about L4D3 being an actual thing at this point, unless they're totally retooling the concept and attempting to figure out a monetization structure. Seems like we would have heard something concrete by now.
 
What difference does it make if it is? Does it make it a worse game?

When most of their resources seem to go catering towards cosmetic and superfluous content, then yes, it may well make it a worse game.

It is easy to say "just ignore it", but that doesn't work entirely. You'll get bothered by seeing it everywhere and it still influences your game. It bloats the game and makes it more difficult to interact with it.

As an example, let's take my playthrough of Assassins Creed Unity, keep in mind that I basically haven't played the series since Assassins Creed 2.

So, I get into the game. There is a companion app, there are coop missions, there is some content that I need to access by going to a website. I have endless amounts of upgrades and equipment that makes little difference and some are only useful for the online part where I have no interest in.

It takes a long time to figure out how everything works even though in a lot of it I have no interest. I can't just ignore it.

Any user interface designer should tell you the same thing, you can't just plaster all options everywhere and expect users to just ignore what they have no interest in, you are the one that needs to focus their attention to the parts that matter. All fluff added to it is just detriment to the experience.
 
Most Valve threads serve as a showcase of how narrow-minded some gamers are about anything that doesn't specifically cater to their own wishes and wants. As a person who basically only plays single-player games I am not happy at all with Valve's change of focus. I would love, love more single player content from the studio that produced truly legendary games. However, personal preferences aside, Valve is the single most influential games studio in the world. Between their hugely popular multiplayer games, the juggernaut that is Steam and all their R&D projects, the Valve people are leaders in gaming and incrrdibly prolific qhen we consider that it's just a 300-person team.

This is how I feel. I don't play DOTA 2, TF2, and CS:GO at all but I still can't help but appreciate the work Valve is doing with those games and how popular they've become.
 
I was going to drop this, but someone else decided to go after me, might as well try once more. (Have a feeling I have a giant target painted on me, though.)

For me anyway the big selling point of the update wasn't the new weapon skins, but the community maps (and new valve map) along with the huge number of class and weapon rebalances.

Which is great (for the most part, Snowplow feels like a very half-baked map to me, and Suijin had some immediate fixes required). Borneo is great, and Powerhouse feels almost like a classic map.

The thing is, I don't think you need to even pay for the contract to get all that. And again, while I'm sure they do a lot of work on the elements submitted, these are at heart community creations, with the exception of Powerhouse.

Since TF2 is F2P all the major updates are going to have some way for Valve to make money off the game.

They already make ludicrous amounts of money off this game, they've said. One of the common ways to do it is to directly sell new items (no chance involved). For example, a new taunt for the Spy that lets him run around in a box costs $7.99.

Recently it's been discovered hats have stopped dropping for a while now. You have to craft them (randomly), unbox them (semi-randomly), trade for them, or buy them.

Valve was very upfront about the fact you get either a weapon drop or a case from completing the contracts.

Being up-front about it doesn't make it completely okay. That being said, I may be overlooking it, but the promotional website doesn't really clarify that cases are exactly like crates, and that you need to buy separate campaign-exclusive keys to open them until you dig halfway down into the linked FAQ.

I would also be very interested in seeing the drop statistics. I felt like, despite doing the bonus conditions (unless that was the cause of it), I received a high number of crates. Working hard toward objectives, some of which can suck up an hour or two by themselves, only to be rewarded with the "opportunity" to spend more money (and still have a good likelihood of an uninteresting item) feels icky to me. That's not a reward. I already paid my entry fee. Most of the guns I did receive were of the lowest quality levels, both condition and rarity. I did get a few decent ones early on, but it's been disappointing that I'm not even just getting weird crappy guns, I'm getting boxes with price tags on them.

Plus the great thing about the campaign was that a portion of the money from the campaign is going to support the community map makers who had maps included in the update, they are probably going to make a ton of money off the campaign which is great.

I just ignore 99% of new cosmetics, if there is something I really want I just buy it when you get it for cheap on TFwh.

Supporting creators is great. Valve still gets a hearty cut. So this double-dipping approach feels awkwardly included and unpleasant. Why not at least a gun and a crate?

Who forced you to buy that contract? Or the key that gave you 'garbage worth less than what you paid for'?

Has any of this affected your ability to actually play the game? Has any meaningful content been locked behind a paywall? Do you have the self awareness to realize that you are complaining about entirely optional cosmetics?

"Who forced you to videogame?"

I thought I would be getting more out of the Gun Mettle Pass than I did. More weird guns, of varying quality. Look at all the weird ones they show on the page! I didn't expect to keep receiving the same handful of scratched-up guns with the same handful of designs over and over. "Every weapon is given a uniquely placed paint job so that it will always look a little different from anyone else's." That sounds great, but slightly skewing a flat red pattern turns out not very different from the other flat red guns you've got.

Has this affected my ability to play the game? The point of the Pass is to complete Contracts to obtain rewards, so I've been focusing on them to hopefully receive something of interest. Also, it does affect weapon readability from a distance a bit. I saw a few people (and had the same issue) where the Soldier looked like they were sporting a Rocket Jumper, which used to be a popular thing to do. Sometimes it's easier to look for the paint job on a gun to ID it over the physical shape. When they start offering this for other guns for the same slot, it's going to get more confusing.

Has any meaningful content been locked behind a paywall? I guess not. It's a shame I wasn't aware of this before I bought the paywall. I do like the weird purple Sniper Rifle I lucked into, and I like fulfilling the contracts in an Achievement-y sort of way. But I don't like when the reward is them asking for more money, when I paid an entry fee.

And then it's implied that if something is "optional", it cannot be criticized. Nevermind that I was trying to demonstrate more of a general turn Valve has taken with TF2, that I dislike.

I read through this stuff and I'm thinking "how the hell can anyone keep up with these things?"

[...]

These systems are designed to be confusing, bloated, tangled into one another, hide cost under cost, and gouge money from the user in subtle ways. It's as insidious as the worst of mobile gaming and VALVe have been introducing these systems all over their games.

This person gets it.
 
I have been noticing more frequent server outages compared to before, I suppose their server farms aren't growing as fast as the Steam userbase and its bandwidth requirements.
 
You are vastly oversimplifying this and how it has been presented.
I guess I was lucky in that I played TF2 for a long time and felt like random worthwhile drops hardly ever happened.

So, when I got items and cases right after the TF2 contract release, I immediately sold most of them to pay back the campaign price. I don't think I've ever bought a key in my life for TF2 or CSGO, always assuming (which seems mostly true from what I see my friends open) the vast majority of unboxings will be junk.

So from my perspective, I figure if you get a TF2 or CSGO campaign right after release, you can pay it back by selling the stuff, and if you get lucky with any drops after that then it's a bonus. I could imagine some people might get the impression crates are worth opening or have a lot of disposable income, however.
 
If you actually read my post instead of <snip>ping it, I described exactly that.

But I think you were more interested in the snipe than the snip.

You didn't describe how contracts are different from the other six hojillion TF2 Gambling Events. You didn't bring them up at all, actually. Hell, paying for the chance to pay more money is essentially how premium works.
 
doesnt seem to be a problem for PSN, XBL, GAF, ever email hoster or most other services...
Those other services allow storing items worth a lot of $$ in the inventory?
I'm not saying this economy driven scammer luring environment is a good thing though.
 
We've had complete radio silence on new games for over three years now. That's really the only thing that bothers me with them as a developer.
 
You didn't describe how contracts are different from the other six hojillion TF2 Gambling Events. You didn't bring them up at all, actually.

I didn't directly reference other events (I think this is the most egregious/disappointing one so far), but here's your precious TL;DR:

1. $6.99 Entry Fee, 2. Cases take the place of Contract item rewards, instead of supplementing them, 3. Cases are not clearly advertised as requiring keys on the Gun Mettle page, 4. Cases require unique keys costing $2.49, instead of allowing use of normal keys, 5. More unique-looking items, like the ones advertised on the top of the Gun Mettle page, are restricted only to the Cases, 6. Cases, in my experience, seem to have dropped at an extremely high rate compared to actual guns, 7. Despite costing additional money, Cases have a fairly large change of containing something that drops as a standard Contract reward, 8. Although minor, Campaign Cosmetic Cases take up weekly drop slots, and require unique keys even from the Gun Cases.

I also find it concerning how easily you write off "TF2 Gambling Events." Like that's something that should be openly accepted.

If you need me to literally write out how the above is different from Mann Up and standard crates (and don't think I'm defending crates here), then I direct you to do some reading on your own, because it should be obvious if you have.

You edited your post some time after I quoted it, but I'm not going back to revise. I can't even count on you reading this, anyway.
 
Nowadays Valve is just a Research and Development company. They only make games as test beds for new technology. Lets see what will happen when they "finish" Source 2 and release Vive (SteamVR).

This.

That their showdog for Source 2 is not Half-Life 3, but DOTA 2, a MOBA, should tell you everything.

I get the sense they lost their humility a few years ago. They really believe their own hype.

Um.... that's because, for ten years, they WERE the King Shit.

In many ways, they still are.

Five million users on Steam? Why the fuck SHOULDN'T they believe their own hype? Hell, fuck, they OWN STEAM.

Usually the "shitty route" = the money route.

Which isn't a bad thing.

The day I knew the game was up was when they announced Left for Dead 2 instead of the next Half-Life.

That is when I knew they lost the plot.

Same.
 
Just wanted to butt in and say that Reborn is not bad at all - in many ways it's better than source 1. The community outcries against it have died down as more bugs have been fixed. As far as I know there are only a few major bugs left to iron out. I myself haven't had a single problem and I started playing Reborn both in the beta and when it was released.
 
What difference does it make if it is? Does it make it a worse game?
Yes.

It's very distracting in CS to see people running around with bling guns. It's meant to be a serious terrorists vs counter terrorists game.

It would be even worse in L4D where it's meant to have a serious horror atmosphere. A bit of silly is okay (carnival level etc) but hats would be too far.

I appreciate that cosmetic stuff keeps the games balanced but it still negatively impacts their games and I wish I could turn it off.
 
I didn't directly reference other events (I think this is the most egregious/disappointing one so far), but here's your precious TL;DR:

1. $6.99 Entry Fee, 2. Cases take the place of Contract item rewards, instead of supplementing them, 3. Cases are not clearly advertised as requiring keys on the Gun Mettle page, 4. Cases require unique keys costing $2.49, instead of allowing use of normal keys, 5. More unique-looking items, like the ones advertised on the top of the Gun Mettle page, are restricted only to the Cases, 6. Cases, in my experience, seem to have dropped at an extremely high rate compared to actual guns, 7. Despite costing additional money, Cases have a fairly large change of containing something that drops as a standard Contract reward, 8. Although minor, Campaign Cosmetic Cases take up weekly drop slots, and require unique keys even from the Gun Cases.

so sell the cases, who cares. You don't have to open it. Just play the game.
 
Top Bottom