Aw, god damnit.

[Turtle]

There's now a maximum amount of playtime per week in which you get item drops. Playing beyond that amount won't find any more items. The amount varies, but if you play an hour or so a day you're good. Some of your unused time will rollover to the following week, so if you're an intermittent player you'll also be fine

Valve found a way to get rid of idling, check the blog.

TF2 now officially is useless

[backfire]

There's now a maximum amount of playtime per week in which you get item drops. Playing beyond that amount won't find any more items. The amount varies, but if you play an hour or so a day you're good. Some of your unused time will rollover to the following week, so if you're an intermittent player you'll also be fine

Valve found a way to get rid of idling, check the blog.

TF2 now officially is useless

http://www.brbuninstalling.com/forum/ind...#msg147917

Also, TF2 is a game about hats.

[Turtle]

[quote author=Turtle link=topic=4516.msg147920#msg147920 date=1271804804]
There's now a maximum amount of playtime per week in which you get item drops. Playing beyond that amount won't find any more items. The amount varies, but if you play an hour or so a day you're good. Some of your unused time will rollover to the following week, so if you're an intermittent player you'll also be fine

Valve found a way to get rid of idling, check the blog.

TF2 now officially is useless

http://www.brbuninstalling.com/forum/ind...#msg147917

Also, TF2 is a game about hats.

[/quote]
It's so important it needs a thread.

[Kenny Strife]

Who cares if idling is no longer lucrative?  It was only potentially lucrative, anyway; it was fully possible to idle 24 hours a day for a week and get nada.  Maybe not common, but possible.  Now, you're guaranteed to find stuff, and to do it faster.  If you still want to idle, you can, it just won't be any more lucrative than playing. 

I'm not sure I like the time cap, though, since that means people who play eight hours a day are likely to exhaust their weekly items very quickly.

Hats are about to become a lot less rare, now that metal will be so much easier to come by.

[copulatingduck]

Who cares if idling is no longer lucrative?  It was only potentially lucrative, anyway; it was fully possible to idle 24 hours a day for a week and get nada.  Maybe not common, but possible.  Now, you're guaranteed to find stuff, and to do it faster.  If you still want to idle, you can, it just won't be any more lucrative than playing. 

I'm not sure I like the time cap, though, since that means people who play eight hours a day are likely to exhaust their weekly items very quickly.

Hats are about to become a lot less rare, now that metal will be so much easier to come by.

it's actually [i]less  lucrative now, ie it's like taking away all those extra items idlers were getting and spreading them around to the crybabies who never played the game and wanted hats. VALVE R SOCIALISTS, DO NOT WANT!!

[Duck, Duck, Goose]

Wow, the fucking whiners win again.

But whenever I whine, everyone just hates me. Fuck you Valve. :'(

[beep beep diglett]

can they just drop items into everyones account every 6 hours? i dont have tf2 installed and i want hats kthx

[SAVAGE-0]

hey at least they didnt punish anyone who's been in game for 343896945 hours per week... i'm quite ok with this since I play pretty much every day anyways...

[Moosendoo]

I think this is probably the best solution they could have came up with.  I wonder if hat drop rate is still the same 1/28 every 4 hr 17 minute 10 second?  If the hat drop rate is still the same then idling still has some value.

[copulatingduck]

hey at least they didnt punish anyone who's been in game for 343896945 hours per week...

i wholeheartedly agree with you on that, I would have been pretty mad to lose all my hats I worked so hard to get in a game I don't play...

[Duck, Duck, Goose]

Good thing there's people in this thread who idle and play on a consistent basis. Cry some moar.

[Turtle]

I think this is probably the best solution they could have came up with.  I wonder if hat drop rate is still the same 1/28 every 4 hr 17 minute 10 second?  If the hat drop rate is still the same then idling still has some value.

No they should have told everyone that they have to idle

[beep beep diglett]

waaah more turtle, you still have like 10 hats

[copulatingduck]

If you're an idler, you're going to find fewer items than you were prior to this change. Sorry.

[Kenny Strife]

At any rate, this seems to have been geared as an improvement to help casual gamers get items more often.  The fact that it also sucker punched idling looks like icing on the cake for Valve, not a primary goal.  They only cared about people using third-party programs, anyway.

[Didzo]

I want Valve to have item drops IRL.

[copulatingduck]

At any rate, this seems to have been geared as an improvement to help casual gamers get items more often.  The fact that it also sucker punched idling looks like icing on the cake for Valve, not a primary goal.  They only cared about people using third-party programs, anyway.

prob is imo it's a sucker punch to most of their biggest fans in order to assuage the unrest of the larger, but less loyal group of casual gamers. then again, who isn't sucker punching their most loyal fans nowadays

[Wrath Of Sandvich]

Also, TF2 is a game about hats.

This and I wish they could just somehow give out items on a fair basis. Like skill possibly? They whined about people using idling servers to bug that out, but they could easily beat them with the Screw-You-Stick if those servers started to pop up. People would bitch that they don't get as much items if it was this way though, but that's what they get for sucking. Not saying I'M the best player either mind you, but at least it would be fair. People who do better, get rewarded. That's how I view it.

[Moosendoo]

That wouldn't be fair.  IMO the system now is perfectly fair to everybody.

[backfire]

i just dont get why theyre punishing the people who are most enthusiastic and care the most about getting the hats, simply because the people who hardly care complain a lot. catering to the wrong crowd imo, will pirate hl3 out of protest

This I don't get. You're acting as if you LIKE to idle outside of the game to get items. I mean, as long as you play the game on a semi-regular basis, you'll get as much items as if you were idleing. Are you just sad that you actually have to do SOMETHING for your items? "Oh noes I cant get hats wen im at scool or work!"

To counter another argument. If you don't play tf2 a lot anyways, then why do you care about items?

[quote author=backfire link=topic=4516.msg147921#msg147921 date=1271804841]

Also, TF2 is a game about hats.

This and I wish they could just somehow give out items on a fair basis. Like skill possibly? They whined about people using idling servers to bug that out, but they could easily beat them with the Screw-You-Stick if those servers started to pop up. People would bitch that they don't get as much items if it was this way though, but that's what they get for sucking. Not saying I'M the best player either mind you, but at least it would be fair. People who do better, get rewarded. That's how I view it.
[/quote]

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!).