To be honest, that’s the thing that bothers me most about the whole drop system: it’s unusually cynical for Valve. The achievements at least seemed to be rewarding you for exploring odd nooks and crannies of the game mechanics — the drops are a straight-up slot machine simulator. Every refinement they introduce seems to shore up the “incentive to play” angle rather than addressing players’ criticisms of the system.

I was being pretty vague when I said your system smacked of “management” — sorry about that. What I meant is that when I pictured that system implemented in-game, I saw an RPG-style advancement screen involving a mess of progress bars and drop-downs. Nothing any more complicated than, say, the inventory and crafting screens they’ve already implemented, but does TF2 really need another fiddly menu screen?

Frankly, it already baffles me that developers who gave the spy little paper masks to avoid cluttering up the interface with disguise icons are now shifting a bunch of game time out of the engine entirely and into the menus. I might be letting my personal opinion of what’s fun get the better of me, but I think that’s a trend we should strive to minimize. (The quick-switch system for guns you’re carrying is a great step in this direction, for instance.)

Chris’s system would just replace the single oversized image on the drop screen with x smaller ones, requiring no additional game time or new menus. It may seem like a minor thing, but it’s enough to make that concept my favorite.

Random drops aren’t a form of Variable Interval or Variable Ratio Reinforcement, the way they are in WoW, because they’re not a reward for a particular action. They just happen occasionally, regardless of performance. The choice here is between a system where rewards are tied to your actions, or one where they’re not. Reinforcement provides an excellent account of how much more compelling the former is.

Regarding 2, random drops under Chris’s system aren’t forever. That’s why I like it. The element of choice means you can almost entirely avoid dupes, and crafting means you can turn those you do get into what you didn’t.

My system takes at least 640 hours of play to unlock everything, and I suspect the others proposed here would work out at something similar. Even if Valve want us to play more than that in our lifetimes, they don’t need us to do so before they put out any more content. There’s no mileage in getting us to grind eight hours a day, just in making sure we don’t unlock content faster than they can make it. If that’s achieved, and I think all four systems we’re talking about manage it, all that matters is how compelling that reward structure is. Post-experiment interviews with rats confirm that pressing that bar is a lot more fun when it gets you closer to a pellet.

And I gotta say, I personally don’t feel very reinforced or incentivized by randomness.

Tom, yours is certainly workable, but I think it’s too complicated for something that really should be a sideshow to the action of TF2. It smacks of something you’ll have to “manage,” and I cringe every time I hear an action game purport to involve “managing” something. In fairness, the same criticism can (and should!) be leveled at the existing crafting system.

Horace’s suggestion that duplicates should be eliminated is so obvious as to be mind-numbing. Unfortunately, he’s mistaking Valve’s intentions. They aren’t looking for a fixed reward schedule, like leveling skills in an RPG; they want a variable reward schedule, like slot machines or random loot drops in an RPG. There are two reasons for this:

1. Variable reward schedules make for more durable conditioning than constant reward schedules — the habit is harder to break, making the game more addictive. The basics of this are summarized on wikipedia.

2. Leveling lasts for a while, but random drops are forever. Valve doesn’t want a system that has a clear endpoint; they want you to never run out of things to unlock.

So any system you create has to use a variable schedule so as to maximize those conditions.

Thanks for the response, keep up the good blogin’.

The first few unlocks for the pyro, medic and heavy were far more conservative and didn’t upset things too much, but the later ones have totally changed how some classes play, and the knock-on effect is a disruption in the once near-perfect balance of the game.

It’s still a lot of fun, but tbh it’s all just a bit too hectic and frustrating these days. To be fair, if no updates had come out for TF2 I probably would have stopped playing a year ago, but the choices Valve have made for the character updates seem to be slowly transforming it into a different game thatI don’t enjoy half as much.

My main qualm with the achievement system as they are now is that they can only be earned once. Once you get something for a particular accomplishment, you are never congratulated on it again. Once you get all the achievements… well you can still play the class, but sudden confetti showers and a crown icon over your head become a distant memory. That’s why I’ve always wanted repeatable achievements that tell me, “You exploded that soldier with his own delicious crocket! Now do it again!”

Incidentally, is anyone here familiar with the Battlefield games, specifically Battlefield 2142? It’s unlock system is rather similar to what Francis is describing, in that it has medals/achievements that can be earned (some of them repeatedly) which gives a player points that they can use to buy the weapons that they want. There are restrictions (you have to buy the low-level weapons of one class to get to its high-level weapons) and there is still room for abuse (achievement servers), but it’d still be a step forward, wouldn’t it?

Besides, in everything that Valve has done for TF2, there has always been the indication that this is but the groundwork for future grander plans. Perhaps the inventory system we are seeing now is but the beta for something more fully thought-out in the future.

You work at Valve. Everyone’s been busting their humps to get the new update ready. There’s been brainstorming and playtesting and rendering and tweaking and fixing and coding and more testing. There’s been late nights and long weekends of work. Everyone is fried, over-tired, and punchy. Among the long list of things that need to be ready for the update in a few short hours are names for the achievements. Hundreds of puns have been suggested and tossed aside.

Someone who has had very little sleep over the past weeks suggests “Slammy Slayvis Woundya” and it’s so damn bad that everyone else who has had very little sleep laugh their asses off. It’s so bad it’s perfect. Go with it. GO WITH IT.

Sure, the next morning it seems embarrassingly bad, but at the time there was surely no better option. That’s how puns work. That’s what puns do to us. This holiday season, I choose to forgive. Won’t you?

There should still be some incentive to getting all the achievements, but one that is purely cosmetic but still shows dedication. Perhaps a hat is the wrong idea, but some kind of miscellaneous reward, i.e. a soldier medal for all the soldier achievements, or a cooler looking radio headset for all the scout achievements.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I would not try for achievements unless there was some kind of reward other than completion involved.

And speaking of drops, my friends and I also thought that when you killed someone with a special item, you could go over, pick it up, and take it as your own. I still feel like that’s a good idea, and the Gibus kind of shows that. Hand out the new unlocks to about a fifth of the TF2 population, but ensuring nobody gets two for the same class, and when someone dominates them, the dominator gets the weapon. Of course, you could still get it through ‘feats’ or buying or the drop system or whatever happens, but having a bit more control over the gaining of the weapon adds a lot.

I especially like the idea of getting extra points for doing sensible things (defending points, getting on the point (maybe even ‘altruistic’ things, like repairing another engie’s building, stabbing away an annoying sniper’s Razorback, overhealing X number of players, blowing out fires, etc)).

I can only think of one improvement. When you get an achievement, you can press escape and immediately see which achievement you got, and what it means.

Invariably I get some achievement, it flashes for a tenth of a second, and I have to go through that classes achievement list hoping to see whatever it was that I did so well.

Team Fortress 2, however, was, and should be now, a game that you just pick up and play. You don’t need silly hats to bribe you into playing, you just do. Achievements and updates (with content instantly being handed to you) should be there if and when you get bored of it, not unlocking things.

For example, I really, I still don’t have the gunboats, even though I want to play with them. Why should I wait for some dumb luck, or idle so I can craft it? I just want to use it now while I’m still in the spirit of playing a lot because of the activity since the update. It’s stupid. Why is new content kept from me? What’s the point?

Sure, Medic’s achievements are all pretty impossible. But Scout is easy, I got his achievements for the third milestone in about a day or two of casual play with some silly stuff included. So if you could do both, I can’t see the problem. You wouldn’t be forced to do the silly stuff, but you could do it if you like.

Tom, I think that your concept isn’t bad, but it’s too complicated.

Then again, it’s the internet and multiplayer players are always angry.

furthermore: I’m replying here cos this post is NEWER, but you asked “do scouts use bonk?” on that other TF2 post t’other day. Personally, I do, but I get no scoreboard points for it. :'( Why? I use it in this fashion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEaaqBTZr7Y

It might not cause me to win, but my team will, and that’s all that matters :)

I’ve heard very many people complain/whine about this system, and I’ve yet to be convinced that their counter suggestions would actually be better (I don’t think the current system is great, it’s just that most suggestions are actually worse).

These all come from the standpoint of how it will improve the game play and why. Well done.

I had actually read Chris’ article, and my problem with his suggestion re:”item drops” was that picking which weapon you want on random drop would just slow the game down too much.

Your solution addresses the issue of getting the items you want, encourages smart game play, and acknowledges the zaniness that is TF2. I hope Valve takes this seriously.

There should also be the ability to change what unlock you’re working towards, without too much penalty. You could perhaps sell items you have for half points or something, much better than the crafting system.

Sometimes, you are just not GOOD at certain games, unfortunatly. For every triple kill in a sticky jump, there is someone that gets killed by a scout because you can’t turn well with the keyboard.

This week I’ve played TF 2 ~18 hours and only gotten 2 random drops (+6 milestone ones). If drops occur every 6 hours for me, that means that it takes nearly 3 days of constant grinding to craft a weapon, assuming every drop can be used, and over 20 days for me to get enough scrap metal for a random hat.