Valve's Team Fortress 2 has been one of the most popular first-person shooters in recent years. Brandishing an art style that doesn't take itself too seriously, the fun-loving game has struck a chord with gamers and become something of a phenomenon, especially in the PC world. Valve's continued post-launch support for the game is just one of the many reasons this title has seen such success, even in the face of competition like Call of Duty and Battlefield.
One example of this post-launch support can be seen in its holiday events. Halloween is just on our doorstep now, and Valve will be implementing a number of seasonal changes to the game. Detailing what they have in store through a blog post on their official website, Valve revealed what they have in store for us. Specifically, Valve wanted to talk about gift drops in Team Fortress 2,
addressing some of the issues they have faced in the past and how they plan to fix them.
"When gift drops were introduced way back in 2011's Scream Fortress update, they were intended to be a small value-add — a simple bonus for all players participating in the update. As time went on and Halloween updates came and went, however, some players spent more and more time focusing on gifts, often to the detriment of the players they were
That doesn't sound like much fun, if you ask me.
"Ordinarily we don't mind if players do things that we don't personally enjoy as long as their fun doesn't harm the quality of experience for other players. In this particular case, however, because the overwhelming majority of gifts claimed went to a tiny handful of accounts, we feel comfortable characterizing the current system as blatantly and transparently unfair: While some farming accounts claimed more than five hundred gifts just last year, the median
In an effort to mitigate these extremely lopsided numbers, Valve has some changes they are planning on implementing this year.
"As before, we're continuing to iterate on gifts for this year's event. In line with our original goals of giving all participating players some free Halloween content without affecting the core experience, this year we'll be giving every player one guaranteed gift bundle just for logging in during the event. This bundle will contain a random sample of some of this year's content, including some that would otherwise only have come from crates. To keep some of the fun of getting multiple gifts through the event, all players can earn a secondary bundle by
