August 31 update: Idlers BEWARE

[Purplecat]

Problem is that as hats works, it dosen't really care if you're playing the games. It still rewards you with hats even if you like, join a random server and join the spectator team instead of playing.

So if valve punishes idlers, just expect people to manually join real servers and idle on those instead. :/ Which happened for the first week after spy vs sniper update...

[Arcalane]

[Arcalane]

[Lost]

[Stormcaller3801]

...So, what? If they think we haven't been idling, we get a hat? Sounds rather arbitrary.

[Arcalane]

You'll have to use GCFScape to open up "team fortress 2 content.gcf". It'll be in the resource folder there.

Unlike L4D (which has an "unpacked" structure), TF2 is almost always packed, but defaults to "unpacked" files first (that is, those in /<accountname/team fortress 2/tf/) - which is nice, as you can just blanket delete mods and such without having to worry about replacing and renaming files.

Storm; see http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2787

[Wulfie]

[Sekh765]

All information on this "idlers getting banned" "idlers losing all their items" is pure speculation. And the speculation is pointing towards being wrong.

The information in this latest patch, as far as I have read, points towards Valve removing the items of/banning people who are DIRECTLY circumventing the item distribution system with programs. These programs allow you to take one item, and...Transmorgify it ala a "Horadric Cube" style of sorcery, into whatever you want. Allowing people to take their excess Sandviches, and turn them into hats. The suspected number of idlers is somewhere around the upper thousands of players. You can find this number yourself by doing a little research. Valve isn't going to just banhammer or dick around with that many peoples things. They would piss off such a massive number of their players by doing it. ESPECIALLY since they have never said anything on the topic before. If you look at Valve's older posts, they always give a warning to players doing "grey area" things that they have decided they don't like. There has been no such post on idling.

[Arcalane]

[Nocturnefoxx]

You know what bugs me the most about this? They mention once again an item trading system and "merging duplicates into a desired item".

I have to wonder how much idling would have happened if Valve hadn't released half-a-system with the random drop crap by having the trade system ready with it. Or alternatively if they had used their one non-update blog post a month on updating folks on how the trade/item system was going instead of wasting it on LOL fake Announcer posts.

People idled because hat drops were too rare and there was no alternative. A simple boost of the drop rate and putting an alternate system in place would have worked wonders, I bet.