YokaI wrote:The hats aren't my problem, my problem is the lack of competitive atmosphere. IF the game had a stronger competitive community, it would be much more enjoyable to play. I actually think hats are a nice way to reward a player for playing but not give them any competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, many of the classes lack tactics (That's why I play Spy, Sniper, and Engy sometimes) and the game isn't as much about skill anymore as it is about logging hours and getting lucky with weapon drops. Some may say WoW is the same, but while there's still a time sink you have to put into the game, there's a huge competitive community revolved around that game. Also, more importantly, you know exactly what you need to do to get whatever piece of gear, and you are rewarded efficiently for playing well and for playing with a community.
THe problem with TF2 is that there's too many weapon unlocks and there are some that just AREN'T good. Even worse, some of the old secondary / melee weapons weren't used in a way that makes the classes unique. I also feel like you should be able to switch to any weapon on the fly, because loadouts make you blindly make a selection before a round starts. It would be nice as a sniper to be able to use both the Jarate and sub machine gun. Many weapons that used to be the default weapons were not buffed and were ignored.
Valve, instead of making weapon unlocks, should have been changing the game through primary weapons. Why not make the old medic needle gun the bluntsauger by default?
read yokai>
Tf2 Blog wrote:We're still thinking about how to allow you to influence your drops. When we see discussions on the forums, people often ask why we don't tie it to some in-game performance (like your scoreboard position, or number of kills, etc). Many players understand that if we did this, idle servers would simply change into servers running plugins that generate those in-game events frequently (as we saw in the Soldier & Demoman WAR!).
There's another side of it that we care about just as much, which is the message it would send to all the players who don't want to idle. Any in-game performance metric we chose would result in there being specific maps, classes, tactics, and so on that resulted in more drops. We really don't want that to happen. When it's simply playtime, you're free to play the game however you like. If you love Payload, you can play Payload maps without worrying about whether you're earning less drops than the guys playing Arena maps. Community mapmakers don't have to worry about whether their maps earn item drops fast enough. Similarly, server operators can configure their servers however they like, without worrying about reducing the rate at which their players are earning drops. In short, while it's far from perfect, not tying to in-game performance is a lot less poisonous to your minute-to-minute game experience
