Author Topic: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.  (Read 18536 times)

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Offline sigtau

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Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
http://kotaku.com/5815052/team-fortress-2-is-now-free-free-forever

That's right.  TF2 is now officially free to download and play to everyone, forever.

Valve says you can still use your real-world money to spend on hats, new weapons, etc. but the game itself is free.

Discuss.
Who uses forum signatures anymore?

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
And the pubbies came on and on and I cried MEDIC but there were no medics and there were no dispensers and all around me there were pubbies, shouting, trading, and Gabe Newell's fingers above it all, green and gorged and dripping

 

Offline Sushi

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
Means there are now players worse than me. Score!

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
Now there's no excuse for any of you poor schlubs not playing.

 

Offline Scotty

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
Means I can now pick it up.

Yay.

 

Offline BloodEagle

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
Ugh.

  

Offline Kolgena

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
Means there are now players worse than me. Score!

Same! I might revisit the game and get rid of my infinite noobness.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
By the way this game is not very good any more and has completely abandoned its core design principles ~

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
By the way this game is not very good any more and has completely abandoned its core design principles ~
yeahno

 

Offline sigtau

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Who uses forum signatures anymore?

 
Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
I expect "Free to play" to become "Free to play, but every server not run by Valve automatically boots you." very rapidly.  There will likely be server mods that boot anyone with less then 500 backpack slots before the week is out.

Beyond that, meh.  All these new items, and not one thing to screw over sticky spammers.

 

Offline Klaustrophobia

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
i feel another "free to play, pay to win" coming on.  can't blame them really.  these systems make assloads of cash because morons or kids with access to mommy's credit card will shell out hundreds for better weapons in a video game.


...unless all the bought stuff is purely cosmetic, in which case i'll start chewing on my work boots.
I like to stare at the sun.

 

Offline Axem

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
That's ok. Whiners don't need to play. :) Everyone else can have fun.

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
I expect "Free to play" to become "Free to play, but every server not run by Valve automatically boots you." very rapidly.  There will likely be server mods that boot anyone with less then 500 backpack slots before the week is out.

Beyond that, meh.  All these new items, and not one thing to screw over sticky spammers.
Valve doesn't run any servers, so that would be impossible.  And any backpack slot thing would be set to 300, since that's the starting value for the "paid" people (you have to purchase expanders to increase it 100 at a time, up to a max of 1000).

As for stickies, cry some moar. :p

i feel another "free to play, pay to win" coming on.  can't blame them really.  these systems make assloads of cash because morons or kids with access to mommy's credit card will shell out hundreds for better weapons in a video game.


...unless all the bought stuff is purely cosmetic, in which case i'll start chewing on my work boots.
With a few exceptions, you can buy pretty much any droppable item in the Mann Co. Store, along with a few store-exclusive items.  However, anything store-exclusive is purely cosmetic.  More importantly, the current system of a certain number of random item drops per week, coupled with rare hat drops, won't be changing.  From the time the Mann Co. Store was launched, Valve was adamant that any items affecting actual gameplay would be freely-obtainable, and they've restated that today.  There really isn't any point to buying weapons from the store anyway, since drops are plentiful and it's easy to craft and/or trade duplicates.

Besides, from the snippets of sales figures I've seen from the store, Valve has probably been making way more money from selling items than from selling the actual game for a long time now, more than enough to support continued development just from that source.  This really won't change the status quo in that regard.

 
Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
As of today, Valve runs a LOT of servers.  Go look in the server browser.


 

Offline sigtau

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
This probably won't sway most of you, but Valve certainly isn't that stupid--they wouldn't force free players to play just on Valve servers.  It would probably curb the interest in this significantly if they did, and I'm sure they don't want to limit market exposure.
Who uses forum signatures anymore?

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
As of today, Valve runs a LOT of servers.  Go look in the server browser.


Ah, I see what they're doing there.  They must have implemented some sort of auto-generation based on that new quick play matchmaking feature.  No, that shouldn't affect anything, since normal servers can apparently qualify for that too if they have certain settings turned on, and I can't see any reason why they'd create a dichotomy there.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
By the way this game is not very good any more and has completely abandoned its core design principles ~
yeahno

Didn't you start playing in, like, the past six months?

TF2 is still a good game, I guess, but it moved away from its original design tenets, and those tenets were very good. That's disappointing to me.

Also Meet the Medic was not great eeeither

 

Offline Sushi

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
TF2 is still a good game, I guess, but it moved away from its original design tenets, and those tenets were very good. That's disappointing to me.

Also Meet the Medic was not great eeeither

I agree that I appreciated the simple balance the game started with, and that the extra weapons have added more noise than value. Still a great game, though. And Meet the Medic had its moments.

"Kill me"
"Later"


 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Team Fortress 2: Now free, forever.
I think my big complaint is really about, like you said, how noisy the game has become. Depriving the player of the information they need to make moment-to-moment decisions and reactions, or burying this information under layers of complexity, reduces player agency and leads to frustration. I was really happy when I ditched TF2 for more cleanly designed games.

I'm at a loss as to why Valve went down this path, too, until I think about money and then I understand. Which is disappointing.

It's also funny to watch them try to work around the issue of some of their classes being overoptimized - there's no way for them to give new equipment to the demoman or engineer that both follows the original design scheme and doesn't throw the class balance out of whack. They can't touch the engineer's core functions because he's so vital and he shapes the level more than any other class. They can't touch the demoman because he's by far the most powerful pure combat class. So they either don't do anything, in the case of the engineer, or make up an entirely new class in the form of the demoknight.