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This has been a thing since 2016.

What changed? The editor has been living under a rock for the past decade and just now realized what games have been doing. i.e. Beginners play Warframe, Vets play FashionFrame, etc.

People will pay Real Money for cosmetic items! News at 11.

Valve's TF2 popularized micro-transactions for cosmetics almost a decade ago when Team Fortress 2 hats became available on May 21, 2009.

In Team Fortress 2, "free users" are limited in trading, crafting, and backpack slots. Anyone who bought the game before it went free-to-play, or that make any purchase in the Mann Co. store (even as little as 99c).

For those that are "free" users and just absolutely have no money, there is one more alternative: Upgrade to Premium Gift can be given to them by another player, and will grant them a premium account. (I can't find the exact price at the moment, but I recall it being inexpensive.) I imagine that if there are enough of these edge cases, Valve will introduce a similar item for Steam in general.

As in a real-world Capture the Flag or in a game like Team Fortress CTF?

Why aren't you a gamer now?
http://www.teamfortress.com/li...

among others

Flame throwers are legal for civilian ownership in the US due to things like hornets and locusts. They're considered a tool, not a weapon. Unless you're the hornet, but that won't last long once it becomes an issue for the hornet.

Also, they're used in fighting forest fires, to clear low brush and create fire breaks.

Anyway, I'm gonna just leave this here.

Then they're idiots. I'd prefer to hire someone who had demonstrated a set of skills relevant to the 21st century than someone who didn't have the personal integrity to walk away from an overtly homophobic group.

If the BSA really cared about this, how's about they try suing girl scouts, cavalry scouts or just the scout ?

First thing i thought of was that it looked like the Team fortress 2 fonts.

Seeing that TFC came out a little after the original Half-Life, I wonder whether there will be a Source port of TFC. Like Fortress Forever but without the bugs and the developers changing the gameplay every week and mistakenly make some classes MUCH stronger than others.

Why wouldn't they just port TF1 rather than TFC if they're going to redo everything anyway?

Then again, both a TF1 or TFC remake would have to compete against the juggernaut that is TF2.

Incidentally, TF2 has one of the problems that you complain about... constantly changing the gameplay. Yet that's what's kept it interesting over the last 5 years: TF2 currently has 10 game modes across 57 official maps (and all sorts of custom maps) and a wide variety of alternate play styles based on being able to swap out your weapons in the respawn room. The stock weapons are generally the most powerful with 4 major exceptions I can think of: Pyro's Flamethrower is inferior to the Rainblower or Degreaser; Pyro's Fire Ax is inferior to the Axtinguisher; Medic's Bonesaw is inferior to the Ubersaw, Amputator, or Solemn Vow; Soldier's Shovel is inferior to the Escape Plan, Equalizer, or Discliplinary Action.

Granted, the last major TF2 update basically added a Killing Floor mode to the game... but it needs special servers to run it since it's restricted to 6 players instead of the usual 24-32.

(Psst, TF2 is free btw if you haven't tried it... you just need a Steam account)

We have that. It's called TF2, and it's even free!

Valve games already do weapon switching via the mouse wheel.
Having played FPS for ~ 20+ years, using the mouse wheel to select weapons is incredibly slow compared to keyboard since you need to cycle through them to get to the right weapon. It is significantly faster to just press a single key to select the correct weapon.

I've been playing multiplayer FPS games on and off since the original Doom in 1993 (10Base2 coax LAN ftw). However, I took a break from them from sometime in 2003 (I know because Unreal Tournament 2003 was out, but 2004 wasn't) to 2008 when I picked up Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately, when I came back to them is when I picked up the habit of using the mouse wheel.

I've played TF2 for the past 4.25 or so years. Unlike most games, TF2 has you start out with all the equipment for your class (Loadouts aren't important for this discussion).

7 of the 9 classes only have 3 weapon slots. Meaning that any other weapon is just one scroll of the mouse wheel away; two if you go the wrong way.

Having said that, I play Spy the most. Spy has 4 weapon slots and a right-click item. I tend to manually trigger slot 4 (the Spy's disguise kit) because I'll be using it almost every time I'm invisible (the right-click item) and after every kill.

The problem is that I tend to use the mouse wheel while switching between the other 3. The Knife (slot 3) has an instant-kill backstab, but is otherwise the weakest weapon in the game. The Sapper (slot 2) only works on Engineer buildings (and robots in the new mode). That leaves the Revolver (slot 1).

In case it wasn't obvious, that means you want to switch between weapons 3 and 1 quickly as the situations dictates, but I still tend to use the mouse-wheel for it.

So, yes, I need to get back into the habit of using 1-3 to switch between my main weapons.

I guess that makes sense in games where one weapon makes you move faster.

I'm used to playing TF2. Melee weapons don't make you move faster in TF2*. There are really only a handful of weapons in the entire game where you'd want to have a weapon selected but not switched to, out of something like 200 unique weapons in the game.

* There are two exceptions:
1. The Gloves of Running Urgently make the Heavy (one of the two slowest class in the game) move at nearly the speed of the standard classes, but the Heavy takes double damage while they're equipped and 3 seconds after you change weapons.
2. The Disciplinary Action allows the Soldier (the other slow class) to hit a teammate with it to make both the Soldier and the person he whipped move faster for about 5 seconds. This makes more sense when you realize TF2 has Friendly Fire off by default (very important since one of the classes can disguise as any class on either team).

I guess that makes sense in games where one weapon makes you move faster.

I'm used to playing TF2. Melee weapons don't make you move faster in TF2*. There are really only a handful of weapons in the entire game where you'd want to have a weapon selected but not switched to, out of something like 200 unique weapons in the game.

* There are two exceptions:
1. The Gloves of Running Urgently make the Heavy (one of the two slowest class in the game) move at nearly the speed of the standard classes, but the Heavy takes double damage while they're equipped and 3 seconds after you change weapons.
2. The Disciplinary Action allows the Soldier (the other slow class) to hit a teammate with it to make both the Soldier and the person he whipped move faster for about 5 seconds. This makes more sense when you realize TF2 has Friendly Fire off by default (very important since one of the classes can disguise as any class on either team).

Hat-Life 2 is still going strong. Releasing Hat-Life 3 would likely piss people off who have put time and/or money into 2.

Pyro Vision.

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Meet_the_Pyro

Problem solved.

I'm reminded of this recent video.

Also, pray tell, which FPS developer makes the innovative breaths of fresh air that you occupy your time with, eh?

Valve.

Then again, I've been playing the same online FPS for 5 years, but it's still getting new updates including one scheduled for later this week with the Pyromaniac update and the associated Meet the Pyro video.

Also, pray tell, which FPS developer makes the innovative breaths of fresh air that you occupy your time with, eh?

Valve.

Then again, I've been playing the same online FPS for 5 years, but it's still getting new updates including one scheduled for later this week with the Pyromaniac update and the associated Meet the Pyro video.

I'm only wearing 4 pieces of Flair!

In Team Fortress 2, that is.

Lot of comments here saying that the SpaceX rockets are pretty much the same old technology as the 1950s, and why aren't we focusing on carbon fiber scramjet single-stage spaceplanes or flying saucers powered by dark energy?

Because two-stage kerosene-and-oxygen rockets *work*. It's proven technology, you *know* it's going to work, and you don't have to spend billions on aerodynamics research to figure out if it's going to outfly its own skin. From there, you can add in high-tech electronics, advanced manufacturing, etc., as SpaceX has done.

This sort of practical solution to real-world problems using tried-and-true technology is something every engineer should appreciate. Including an engineer you all know and love..

TF2 gives you random weapons for the first 6-7 hours you play after the item server's week resets at midnight Thursday. If you don't play for a week, these 6-7 hours will carry over into the next week (so... 14-16 that week).

If you're not an f2p player, those 6-7 (14-16) hours also accrue towards the timer on the rarer cosmetic items, which take 1 or more months per drop.

However, the items you get are completely random. You could get the best weapon in the game as a drop (which is subjective), or the worst weapon ever (Sun-on-a-Stick). It can even be one you already have.

The same goes for the rarer cosmetic items. You could get a really nice item (like the Nine-Pipe Problem (Sherlock Holmes pipe for Medic added to the game yesterday)) or one of the worst hats ever (ex: Texas Slim's Dome Shine for Engineer).

In other words, how well you play has no bearing on what you get... you get them just for playing.

The other thing is, there are 27 unlockable weapons gotten via achievements. These weapons can't be used in crafting, but they're good for building up your initial weaponry. Five classes have lower requirements for achievement unlocks: Sniper, Spy, Soldier, Demoman, and Engineer because Valve lowered the required number of achievements for their unlocks. Medic, Heavy, Scout, and Pyro have higher requirements for unlocks... we're hoping that Valve will eventually fix this discrepancy like they did for the Medic unlocks once already..

Note: The unlocks do have some of the better weapons in the game... for instance, the Soldier's Equalizer, the Pyro's Axtinguisher, the Heavy's Sandvich, the Engineer's Frontier Justice and Gunslinger, the Medic's Kirtzkrieg and Ubersaw, the Sniper's Jarate, and the Spy's Dead Ringer.

There are also a good number of unlockable hats, but most of those are restricted to the Halloween holiday. The ones that aren't are the Ghastly Gibus (dominate someone who is wearing a Ghastly, Ghastlier, or Ghastlierest Gibus), Full Head of Steam (complete 7 cp_foundry achievements, the Alien Parasite (In Alien Swarm (free on Steam), play 3 levels online), and the Spiral Sallet (In Spiral Knights (free on Steam), venture into the Clockworks and reach the first rest stop).

"The Original - Identical to Rocket Launcher, but fires from the center instead of from the right."

You forgot the best part, although it is only a cosmetic feature: The Original looks like and sounds like the rocket launcher from Quake :-)

I had enough of FPS games back in the Unreal Tournament/Quake 3 era, so I couldn't care less about missing out on Halo or any of the WW2 simulations du jour.

On a side note, you should give Team Fortress 2 for PC a try, It's free on Steam. At its core, it's a class-based, team-based first person shooter. However, it's essentially a somewhat-cartoony first person shooter set in a 1960s evil genius motif (think James Bond villain).

Although its free, free accounts do have limits. The most glaring is the 50 item inventory. At this moment, there are over 100 unique weapons/items in Team Fortress 2. You generally get 6-8 random weapons a week.

Buying any item from the in-game store ($0.49 is the cheapest at last check) will up the inventory size to 300, as well as enabling the rarer cosmetic drops. The catch is that Steam Wallet has a $5 minimum, but you can spend the remaining $4.51 for anything on Steam (including other games... like Skyrim if you're in to that sort of thing). Oh, and Steam accepts Paypal, too.

I had enough of FPS games back in the Unreal Tournament/Quake 3 era, so I couldn't care less about missing out on Halo or any of the WW2 simulations du jour.

On a side note, you should give Team Fortress 2 for PC a try, It's free on Steam. At its core, it's a class-based, team-based first person shooter. However, it's essentially a somewhat-cartoony first person shooter set in a 1960s evil genius motif (think James Bond villain).

Although its free, free accounts do have limits. The most glaring is the 50 item inventory. At this moment, there are over 100 unique weapons/items in Team Fortress 2. You generally get 6-8 random weapons a week.

Buying any item from the in-game store ($0.49 is the cheapest at last check) will up the inventory size to 300, as well as enabling the rarer cosmetic drops. The catch is that Steam Wallet has a $5 minimum, but you can spend the remaining $4.51 for anything on Steam (including other games... like Skyrim if you're in to that sort of thing). Oh, and Steam accepts Paypal, too.

I had enough of FPS games back in the Unreal Tournament/Quake 3 era, so I couldn't care less about missing out on Halo or any of the WW2 simulations du jour.

On a side note, you should give Team Fortress 2 for PC a try, It's free on Steam. At its core, it's a class-based, team-based first person shooter. However, it's essentially a somewhat-cartoony first person shooter set in a 1960s evil genius motif (think James Bond villain).

Although its free, free accounts do have limits. The most glaring is the 50 item inventory. At this moment, there are over 100 unique weapons/items in Team Fortress 2. You generally get 6-8 random weapons a week.

Buying any item from the in-game store ($0.49 is the cheapest at last check) will up the inventory size to 300, as well as enabling the rarer cosmetic drops. The catch is that Steam Wallet has a $5 minimum, but you can spend the remaining $4.51 for anything on Steam (including other games... like Skyrim if you're in to that sort of thing). Oh, and Steam accepts Paypal, too.

I found Kotaku and RockPaperShotgun and they serve me gaming news just fine. As for TF2, Reddit does great job.

I don't understand. TF2 news? You need gaming news for a specific online FPS? One that has it's own humorous blog with tons of information on every small detail about the game? One that sends you messages when you log on and that you must be online to really play?

I was expecting a lone figure boxing a kangaroo (how Australia chooses their next rightful king).

Most game developers have realized that the tiny percentage of people interested in mods have no real impact on game sales for large AAA titles. Like most businesses game studios operate on a stonrg cost benefit model. You show them that a hundred thousand gamers will only buy their game if they are able to mod it and believe you me, we'll see every studio adding mod support.

Are you daft? Off of the top of my head: TF2 and the Man Co store also why they've switched over to a free model. In the past, Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Desert Combat. Look back to Quake and the massive community around that (not simply the core game) and why that was THE engine of it's day sporting gaming leagues and conventions. Modding has a much higher barrier to entry than in the past with 3dmodelling, Animation, High res textures requiring significant talent, software and most importantly skill. What they've got a hardon for now are people forking over dollars hand over fist for DLC. Pay for the game ($59 on console, what a deal! hey at least you can resell it, right?!) + 3 or 4 DLC at $9.99 a pop, with no multiplayer dedicated servers. It's great! It's almost like they're taking a page out of Microsoft/Apple's playbook by deliberately removing key features to be sold at a premium topped off with planned obsolescence.

If anything I'm tired of buying games that end up being crappy.

As someone who just purchased (with several discounts!) Space Marine I feel your pain.

Netflix for games would do wonders for the gaming industry.

Ugh we're headed there, where you own nothing and pay for everything. Meh.

While microtransactions aren't inherently evil...

[citation needed]

No problem.

Yes.

Though your free account will have some minor limitations: http://teamfortress.com/freetoplay/faq.php

They do differentiate free and premium accounts, free accounts cant trade items, which prevents people creating tons of accounts to idle for items. However, like many free to play games, the game is significantly hurt by people creating accounts simply for hacking and griefing.

There already exists a plugin for servers that prevents free accounts from joining, which I'm sure Valve will love to hear. What people dont realize is that even if you prevent free accounts from joining your server, there will still be a significant increase in hacking across the board with TF2 premium accounts and all source engine games. Hackers will try out there hacks in TF2 to see if they get caught.

you can't buy an account without these restrictions anymore; you can only get a "free" account.

While that is technically true, you can permanently upgrade to the normal account with your first purchase in their store. See their FAQ.

You have to add a minimum $5.00 to the Steam Wallet to buy stuff from the store, so practically you can look at this as the price of getting a normal account. If you feel like spending $1 on a cosmetic item is unfair to other players for whatever reason, there's a Map Stamp item which basically lets you vote on your favorite maps, and the creator gets a bit of that money.

And if it's the DLC system itself that you don't want to give money to, you can try looking around if there's still retail copies of the game around somewhere.

Team Fortress 2 (PC) has had this since at least last fall:
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Mann_Co._Store

Also, they have a similar store for Portal 2.

You can't have my Fancy Fedora. :|

Pft. Firewire can cook an entire pig - INSTANTLY

Not when said game got featured on the TF2 developer's blog a couple months ago. It's been spreading like wildfire since then. 60k sales isn't that surprising.

It got a pretty big boost recently (July 28, to be exact) when it was posted to the Team Fortress blog by a VALVe employee.

They kinda pull some weight in the gaming community, so when they hype your stuff, sales spikes happen.

Soon to be followed by iBlewUpTheMoon

There you have it folks. Conservative = amateur.

Why? Because Professionals have standards.

...there's no fixed ending, and it just becomes a grindfest that chews up money from your credit card. I'd sooner buy a solo game like Final Fantasy 12 (fixed ending) or DDR (fixed cost).

Not all multi-player games have recurring costs, other than the one you're already paying for your Internet connection. The game that the OP was referring to, Team Fortress 2, has no recurring cost. This is despite having had 11 major updates.

Do you also bitch at them for releasing an "unfinished" game just because they add content later on?

I'm going to address these two separately.

Valve has released DLC's and patched TF2 for the last 3-4 years, since it's release. They have added content and maps and tweaked the gameplay.

In this case, no. The game was complete as it was. Not only that, but the new updates are free. For those not in the know, the most recent patch was the Engineer Update, a week ago today. It added 3 new Valve-made maps, 1 community-made map, 3 new Valve-made weapons, 1 new community-made weapon, a new game mechanic (Engineer buildings can now be picked up and moved), and 38 new achievements. The Polycount update has already been announced, but without a date and containing an unknown number of community-made weapons.

Blizzard has done the same with WoW, as have almost every other game company on the planet in the form of patches.

In this case... still no. World of Warcraft was relatively complete, if a little buggy.

Blizzard has two kinds of updates. The first type is incremental updates. Those are funded by the subscription fees people pay (in addition to covering hardware/bandwidth costs). When WoW first launched, there was no Dire Maul. Or Zul Gurub. Or Naxxramas.

Now, you do end up paying for expansions, but each expansion added a new area to the game that is 25% of the size of the existing game world. They also added two new playable races (and their respective starting areas) in the first expansion, and a new playable class (and its starting area) in the second expansion.

The third expansion is going to feature a complete makeover of the old world, even for people who don't buy it, as well as new areas, and two new races (and their respective starting areas).

No, what people bitch about is things like, iirc, Fallout 3 (which I haven't played), where the end of the game itself is sold as DLC.

There are things like Prop Hunt (already mentioned), Zombie Fortress, etc... There are also frameworks for writing server mods for Source games, such as SourceMod (which in turn uses MetaMod: Source as a base). Zombie Fortress is built on top of Sourcemod.

Honestly, though, if you really want to get into modding with the Source engine, consider getting Garry's Mod. The catch is that Garry's Mod requires you to have another game on the list linked from its Steam Store page (which I can't access from work). I know Garry's Mod is also sold in several game bundles like Garry's Mod + Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike: Source + Garry's Mod. It is not part of the Valve Complete Pack, as Garry's Mod is not actually by Valve. If you are going the TF2 route, wait a few weeks as it tends to get its price slashed in half (or more) around major updates, of which one is coming soon... but that price cut is not always reflected in game bundles. Right now, half-price TF2 ($15) plus full price Garry's Mod ($10) is the same price as the bundle ($25).

In theory, if you have any valid Source game on the list I mentioned earlier, you can make a mod that just uses the base game engine. This is what Garry's Mod is, despite that it is essentially a framework for writing other mods.

The catch is that people wanting to play said mod also need to own the applicable game, or in the case of the Source engine, one game from the list.

Better yet, wait for Valve's next major TF2 update, which is coming soon (probably within a month) because TF2 tends to go on sale around major updates.

Or just get the Orange Box, which includes HL2 and its two episodes in addition to TF2 and Portal (although Portal is free through next Monday).

So, lemme get this straight: You have to design to be an Engineer?

I better go inform all those Doctorates in my department they're not Engineers...

Do they solve practical problems?

No, it's an issue of patch size. You are limited to somewhere around 4MB for a patch on the 360 (it can of course, decompress into something bigger)

I can't view teamfortress.com directly here at work (even Google's cache of it is blocked), so here's hoping Google gave me the right link.

TF2 Blog entry explaining why the Xbox 360 version hasn't been done. Note, this is from April 2, 2009.

The script mentions both OS X and Linux, and after a quick Google search I couldn't find anything about HLDS on OS X. So I'm going to assume that it's for the Steam client. Unless they're porting HLDS to OS X, which I haven't heard anything about.

Feel free to correct me though.

Valve announced on March 9, 2010 that they were porting all their Source-based games to Mac. Your Mac Questions Answered from the TF2 Blog has more details.

What will they use to hunt Heavies down? They could Spy on them... or hire a Sniper. An Engineer could come in handy, too.

You just have to watch our for those pesky Medics following them around. ...Wait, we're not talking about Team Fortress 2?

My personal experience (as in just me; I don't have kids) is that the Xbox 360 is the one of the two that gets all the play time. While the Wii has a few gems, they are few and far between.

Nintendo's rationing of new WiiWare titles doesn't help... the Xbox Live Arcade just has a wider variety... with ratings... so it's much easier for me to find cheap titles on it that are still good.

Still, my most used system for gaming is still my PC. (Team Fortress 2 for the win!)

I trust a demo more if it's the full retail game for a limited amount of time.

Like, for example, this weekend's Team Fortress 2 Free Weekend. The game can be pre-loaded now for it, but the game is only available from when the WAR Update comes out on Thursday evening, through Sunday. However, it's the full game.

Granted, TF2 is a multi-player online game, so it's hard to have a demo without having the entire game after the game itself came out.

This looks astonishingly like TF2.

Can someone who's played both give some feedback on differences/similarities?