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Counter-Strike Opens Weapons Market
kalpatin writes "The ever so popular game, Counter Strike:Source developed by Valve, has a new feature added to the game: A virtual marketplace for the weapons and equipment. According to Valve, every item's price will be updated on a weekly basis depending on the global market demand. Some users have posted their anger toward the new change on the Valve forums and have even started a petition to stop the change. Is Valve turning into Microsoft by introducing features that are not needed or wanted by the community, or are they merely spicing the game up?"
http://www.truecombatelite.net/ - free team based realism mod for the free version of Wolfentein Enemy Territory.
Started playing it a year ago and haven't picked up CS since. It's awesome.
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
It's ok, if you don't like it just don't download the patch and just continue playing it your way with your mates on the local LAN...
Oh, wait, it's a Steam Game.
Guess you are screwed then. This is what happens when you buy locked down products - and if you want more examples, just look at what happened to SWG (did you get a refund when the game turned into something that you were not sold? could you carry on playing the game you *were* sold?) or World of Warcraft (goodbye, forty man raids, around which a lot of players have built their guilds).
What happens in the future when this kind of crap gets extended to other aspects of life via DRM? Lucas might 'upgrade' every release of star wars automatically when he finishes the new tri-gital remastered version, now with 3D Jar Jar Binks. Apple might cut down the number of times you can burn your purchased songs to CDs without giving you a chance to stick to the old terms and conditions.
Normally such a rant would end with some message of hope for the future. Well here it is: In my case I'm going to work very hard to make sure I'm on the end doing the exploiting, so I get to enjoy it all the way to the bank.
Beep beep.
My first reaction to reading the title was "oh, so they finally decided to sell real guns?"
Well,
Like a lot of people on here, I ran out and bought HL2 when it first came out. I had my reservations about steam but wanted to give them a fair shot. That's what I did, and that's why I'm never buying another one of their products again.
You see, this issue just brings into light the whole concept that is so bad about publisher over-the-net supplied games. Let's compare this to a regular CD/DVD/etc game. Lord of the Rings BFE2 just came out with a major patch that completely changes unit times/strengths, etc. It's almost like playing another game. Not getting into a debate of if it's good or bad, but if **I** decided I don't want to apply it then I can keep playing. As long as others out there don't like it too, I can even play on-line. In CS:S, we are screwed if we don't update. You can't play period. That not only gives steam control over when and where you play, but your game experience. Don't like what they've done now, too bad.
Who knows how long they will continue to support HL2. But without their auth/update servers, the game will not work. I won't be buying anything like this again for that very reason. Anyone else notice this is the new trend. Even MS is moving toward this model. Complete control, and I'm not going to give it. Voting with my wallet, suggest you do the same too.
The CS community always complains about any significant change prior to actually seeing how it affects the game. The recent radar change was a prime example. So many people were moaning about it when it was announced, and yet now it's been rather well accepted as a good update.
:)
This marketplace idea is the same sort of thing. It sounds interesting to me. I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes the game.
I do have a couple of small reservations though:
1. It could "unbalance" clan matchs. If Clan X plays Clan Y one week when the M4 is expensive then they'll have a very different game than when they play Clan Z when the M4 is cheaper. While each game is fair I think any comparison of games (we beat Clan Z, how come we lost to Clan Y?) will be skewed.
2. Weapons that are available to both sides will always have more spent on them than weapons unique to one team. For example, the M4 and the CK are only available to the one side, while the AWP and the P90 are available to both sides. That presumably will mean the AWP and P90 have more spent on them in any one week, pushing them into the top 50% half where prices increase. I hope Valve have thought about that, I'd hate all the shared weapons to increase while the unique weapons fall. Not just coz I'm a P90 spray'n'pray player of course..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
This game is not just used by casual gamers. Professional competition gamers play this CS:Source in tournaments both online and offline. I wonder if the weapon prices will affect the way tournaments are held. If a LAN doesn't update Steam in a while, could they possibly have old market prices? Will Valve allow servers to control whether or not their server abides by the market rules?
All I know is, the competitive community is absolutely opposed to this update. We just want a fun, team oriented game to play. Not an RPG.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
If you want to add realism, make it so that 8 shots from an mp5 to drops someone. Whether they're dead or not is completely fucking moot. They aren't going to be fighting any longer.
The game hasn't been about realism... well, ever. If you want realism, play SWAT or Rainbow Shield.
I guess to get the old CS back, I'll just have to play 1.6...
The traditional Counter-Strike weapon system was one of the biggest flaws of the game, in my opinion. Sure, it added a nice touch of realism and a bit of strategy, but the pricing structure made 90% of the guns effectively useless. It's very rare to join a server and see someone using a gun other than the Colt/AK or sniper, because they're so overwhelmingly powerful and still pretty cheap.
Basically, this means that the weaker guns will now have a purpose, since they'll be much more affordable. I'm sure the Colt and AK will still be heavily favored, but at least now it'll be harder to get them in the second round of a match.
And a note to the critics: If you don't care for these changes, CS 1.6 is still alive and well. CS:Source is a great opportunity for Valve to play around with the previously stagnant formula (by adding a new radar system, for example) without alienating older players. Let's not ruin that... we don't need two versions of the same game.
throws entire match strategy right out the window.
Oh no, god forbid you have to change your strategy in a 10 year old game. People, get a grip. I love that some people are crying out for the Wii because it uses a new controller that according to them will revolutionize the way games are played, and yet they still bitch and complain about a change like this. Most times when I play CounterStrike, you usually end up with $16000 really quickly and dominate the match wit hteh best weapons, or you constantly lose and have the SMGs that can't compete as well with the rifles.
I applaud Valve for bringing a change like this. It's time for games to start taking more advantage of the global internet and stop creating a world that is server and instance based. So many people play MMO's nowadays that really, I don't see games like CounterStrike keeping up with them. You're constantly starting from zero and whatever stats are saved are server based only so if you want any progression you need to constantly use the same server. I only hope the "newly announced" TF2 encorporates more of this stuff.
So if one gun is sold more why don't the manufacturers start producing more of that weapon? Then the cost of each individual gun would fall, and they could sell it for less.
Just right click on the game in your steam menu and tell it not to automatically update the game. There you go.
Were you dropped on your head as a child, or do you just ignore certain details to whine about "locked in" platforms?
Let's say I hate a particular weapon. The popular weapon to hate, last I was there, was the AWP, so let's use that as an example.
Set up a server with unlimited buy time and a few million dollars of starting money. Now, start the spammage. Buy, drop, buy, drop, buy, drop. Before you know it, the AWP is completely impossible to afford, no matter what server you're on.
Suppose only one purchase per round counts. Ok, fine, now add a custom map, and do it with a friend, dropping buy time and time between rounds as much as you can tweak them. Now you alternate. Buy, snipe, respawn, buy, snipe, respawn. You don't even have to drop it this time -- whoever got sniped will have dropped their AWP.
This can be done for any weapon. Before long, someone will have written a mod that does it automatically. Imagine -- someone doesn't like that weapon you're carrying? They punch one button and their server starts spamming Valve with new price information. If you manage to kill them, they'll never be able to afford that weapon again.
It's an interesting idea, but Valve is about to learn that it's much more difficult to balance an MMO market, where so many things are in the players' control, than to balance arbitrary weapon prices or abilities. They should've just quietly collected statistics, and then set the prices based on those statistics, probably still having to manually tweak them, and tell us when they're all done, thus giving no one the opportunity to exploit it. Here, they're just asking for trouble.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As every round takes an extra few seconds to sort out the price of the week.
Hey I've got an idea, figure it out once and then just don't forget it for a week.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
...can be seen here: http://www.steampowered.com/stats/csmarket/ Though I agree that forced mods stink, the change to the game will likely be insignificant.
No.
Tweaking game play is one of the hardest aspects of developing a video game. You're balancing personal preferences against what works well for the most people. I wrote the original Star Wars arcade port for the C64 for Parker Brothers. The project manager couldn't make up his mind on how the cursor should feel and so I ended up coding a roll-your-own cursor feedback tool for him so he could tweak the acceleration parameters himself. It was far more productive to write the tweak code and let him fart around than it was for me to burn a prom give it to him, have him say something like - "it should be more responsive" or "it's too responsive."
By making this patch, Valve has in essence, coded their own version of letting the players roll their own parameters. Instead of a small group's opinion on what the prices should be, it's the combined player's opinion that matters.
For the younger players, it's an introduction to price/demand responses. Of course, it's artificial in that the comodities have no production cost so from the producer's perspective, the weapons could be free. Nonetheless, it conveys the message to younger players that tho more people do or don't want something, that will affect the price of the something.
Having not played CS, I can't comment, but I'd like to echo the fact that most of the people you come across on TCE are funny and friendly. For people thinking of downloading it, be aware that the new version, 0.49, is coming out on 29th, so you might want to wait. The maps and gameplay are, apparently going to change not insignficantly. Many of the changes are directly down to comments on the TCE forums on realism flaws. Looking forward to trying out the new gametypes and the new official maps (which look awesome from the screenshots) having said that, demolition and (to a much lesser extent) bodycount have kept me occupied. Give me a shout! -- gonzo|FishFace.
im in ur
Steam is about the most "friendly" content delivery platform I've ever seen at this point, barring some rather stupid technical problems that plagued the earlier releases (way to fail to learn from beta testing Valve).
I don't get why people are so hostile about it. I highly doubt that if one day Valve shuts down they'll just say, "lol, tough luck guys" and leave us with gigs of encrypted games we can't touch. That's about the biggest legitimate thing one can worry about, and judging from the size of Valve's money hats and the interest Steam is drawing from other publishers I don't think we have to worry about them running out of cash anytime soon.
Everything else is a non-issue or people don't get it. You DON'T have to update any of your titles unless you want to, it's just on by default. You DON'T have to be online to use Steam (yet another option people mysteriously overlook). You CAN burn backup copies of your games (there's an option to spit out backups in CDR and DVD friendly chunks, I just reinstalled from a backup a few months ago when I got my new rig built). There's no restriction on how many PCs you can install your games on. Shit, I can go to any internet-enabled PC, install Steam, and have access to my games whenever I want (well, after downloading 2+Gigs of stuff, buh!). That's fucking awesome IMO.
It will definetly mean that a wider range of weapons will be used over time, instead of just the M4A1, CV47 and Magnum. This also means new tactics will be developed to suit the new challenges. Thats very positive for a game and its positive for all players who like to face new challenges.
You can always argue wether its a good or bad thing that the provider controls the content and not the customer. One thing that speaks for the provider is the ressources needed to run the servers and scoresystem and so on, which are essential in any competitive game. If you had to support 10 different versions it would require more ressources, so its quite understandable that the provider chooses to only have 1 version running.
Im excited to see how it plays out ingame and i personally think it will give the game a fresh new twist.
This is a viral signature. You are now infected!
I have binds for binding and buy items quickly because I KNOW THE PRICE OF THE ITMES. Now you go and buy a rifle and guess what? The 10% price increase means you won't be able to afford ammo. Good luck!
Since when was Enemy Territory GPL'ed?
LOAD ".SIG"
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
If you're going to be pedantic you should at least bother to look the damn word up.
`moot':
"has three Standard meanings: "discussable, debatable"; "under discussion, being disputed"; and "without practical significance, academic." Thus a moot question may be open to discussion, in the process of being discussed, or not worth discussing at all, depending on the sense dictated by context."
Columbia Guide to Standard American English (http://www.bartleby.com/68/42/3942.html).
You also could have used "define:moot" at google and seen that the word has many accepted and acceptable meanings. Which, of course, makes your point moot.
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
I have no problem with them having a centralized server network; I just object to them requiring it. I should have the option of running my own server and letting people directly connect to it without getting Valve involved.
Are you kidding? Half-Life 1 could do that with no problem! And so can (hyperbolically speaking) every other computer game in the history of computer games! It's. Not. That. Hard.
But not zero. In fact, on a long enough timescale, the odds approach 100%.
Besides, it's the principle of the thing: if I buy something (as Valve claims I'm doing when I obtain a game from Steam), I expect to have rights to it in perpetuity. That guarantee simply isn't there, so I can't in good concience use the service. Maybe if Valve would just admit the truth that they're not "selling" anything via Steam at all, I'd reconsider. But then again, maybe not.
Because they claim to be selling stuff! You can't sell something and yet reserve the "right" to take it away again!
By the way, are you aware of their policies regarding accounts? Did you know that if they decide (unilaterally) that an account got "hacked" or was used for cheating, that they can disable it? And did you know that disabling an account removes all ability to use it, including single-player?
Let me tell you a story: I own a copy of Half-Life, and although I bought it pre-Steam, it's been registered on Steam so that I could continue to play TFC. Anyway, had I stopped playing for about a year, but then decided to start again. But when I tried to log in, I was informed that my account was disabled (even though I hadn't even touched it)! So, I had to e-mail Valve and beg for it to be reinstated (guilty until proven innocent, you know), and then wait for several days for them to get back to me. I did eventually get my access back, but it tought me an important lesson:
Nobody who OWNS a program should have to go through that BULLSHIT just to USE the PROPERTY they OWN!
Valve is run by a bunch of assholes who apparently want to destroy the property rights of everybody but themselves. They need to be stopped, and Steam needs to die.
And that's the bottom line.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz