Valve, this is an intervention.
Valve, first off I love your work. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2 (at launch,) all amazing games which I have spent more time then I want to think about playing, but every moment was great and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Which is what brings me here today, having this intervention for you, you need to realize Valve that you are hurting Team Fortress 2. I know you guys love it as much as I do, and you think you are doing the right thing, that’s it’s, “for its own good,” and that you “are just making it better.” But you guys need to take a step back an really think about what you are doing.
I’m speaking specifically about the new weapon procurement system you’ve added to the game, and I can understand why you would want to put in such a system. It prevents everyone on the night of new updates from playing that single class for the next few days, knocking the balance of the game off for those days. And perhaps more importantly it makes it easier for more casual TF2 players, and new players to pick up the game and get rewarded with these weapons just for spending time playing.
Which is all well and good for them, but what about people who have already played the game for over 100 hours, it doesn’t feel like a reward for us when we are playing and randomly pick up a weapon that we already got during one of the previous class updates. I know you’ve said that you are working on an infrastructure to allow players to trade these extra weapons, but here is the thing. People don’t want to trade weapons in a first person shooter.
What it really is is that with the old system, even though we complained about it a lot, it wasn’t a bad system. At least it felt like when you got a new unlock that it was some sort of an accomplishment, it was a reward for playing. But with this new system you are turning the game into an MMORPG, with loot drops. Random loot drops at that, that will more often then not provide duplicates which players really can’t do anything with. So getting these these random drops doesn’t feel like a reward for playing, if anything it makes it bothersome to play.
A loot system doesn’t work if there isn’t some sort of accomplishment tied into the looting. It works in MMORPGs because for the high end stuff at the end of the game it takes a lot of time, and effort to defeat the big things that drop the good loot. Even in the lower levels of an MMORPG grinding for loot still requires some effort by the player in the game, where they feel that they are actually active participants in getting the loot. Here its only a matter of time, it doesn’t matter how good or bad you are at playing the game, you are going to randomly be handed things just for playing.
TF2 needs to have a reward system, where players are rewarded for playing a class, learning a class, and becoming more skilled in it. That’s why the Medic update was really a success, even though the unlocks were really hard to get, it got people to play Medic (which no one really was at the time,) and it showed them that it could actually be a really fun class to play.
You need to reward players for their time playing, but you need to reward them for trying new classes, or becoming more skillful at the game. The best solution for this seems to be to do something like Call of Duty’s leveling system, where players receive experience for kills, completing map objectives, and whatnot. That experience then goes towards unlocking levels, and by leveling players are able to access new weapons, and abilities.
For TF2 this could be done on a class by class basis, with levels and experience being tied to each class independent of the others. The achievements then could be used as personal objectives for teh player that give them more experience then just killing other players, and capturing things. This then gives skilled players a chance to quickly level by completing the achievements, while also giving more casual/unskilled players a chance to level just by getting experience from playing, even if they aren’t able to unlock any of the achievements. Then as they level they are able to unlock the new weapons.
So please Valve, you don’t have to take my idea (I honestly don’t expect you to,) but you at least need to realize that what you are trying to make the game into isn’t what it is. Square peg does not fit into the round hole. Please just take a step back, take a breath, and realize that sometime you guys can be wrong.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go play some Left 4 Dead instead.