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Valve's Team Fortress 2 Goes Free-To-Play
heptapod writes "Valve has announced that Team Fortress 2 is now free to play. 'We've been toying with the idea of making Team Fortress free-to-play ever since the Mann-conomy update [in September 2010],' said Valve's Robin Walker. 'Team Fortress 2 would only be monetized by microtransaction payments. No advertising model will be pursued, Walker said. No premium subscription model will be used. No cynical "pay-to-win" options will be implemented, he assured.'"
They've also made it so new accounts have limits, such as:
No random cosmetic item drops.
Can receive items in trades but not send them.
Cannot gift items to other players
50-slot backpack (as opposed to 300-slot for normal accounts)
Limited crafting recipes.
Of course, the way to "fix" this is to buy anything from the Mann Co. Store. That'd be easy... if it weren't for Valve having a $5 minimum on funds put into your Steam wallet.
These restrictions make sense, though. They are in place to prevent people from creating a whole bunch of Steam accounts to farm item drops.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The only things you can buy in-game is stuff that you can earn with enough gameplay.
Besides, all of those items have trade-offs versus standard kit. It's not like you can buy a gun for each class that clearly bests anything else.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Most unlockables in TF2 are highly situational items and some more are very dependent on your play style. The aforementioned Natasha is a great tool to keep pesky scouts at bay but in pitched slug-it-out battles, especially against targets that receive healing, it's at best useless. It depends on your problem, and in some situations, having access to unlockables will give you an edge. But they're hardly a must-have to compete sensibly or be an asset for your team.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Dead Ringer and Your Eternal Reward are clearly better than the default spy weapons. Same with the Backburner and Axtinguisher for the Pyro.
Maybe for you. I find the default Pryo weapon better than the backburner (putting out allies can be very useful, as well as reflecting projectiles -- I've gotten tons of kills from stupid soldiers who just keep firing and getting hit by their own rockets) and for a smart spy, the default cloak is infinitely more useful for actual sneaking around than the Dead Ringer, if you know where ammo drops are.
If there's one thing Valve is good at, it's balance. I don't think any of the additional weapons are clearly better than the original ones.