Comments on: Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned…

By: Laurence

Laurence — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:48:58 +0000

They should really make a more definitive announcement than a blog post 7 months ago. Especially since they were fully aware that a huge chunk of the TF2 community were under the impression that this app was ok to use, and they didn’t bother correcting them. Fair enough, we were probably wrong, but Valve should have addressed this. There was a hell of a lot of forum discussion about whether its allowed or not, and Valve just stood there, folded arms, not even bothering to clear things up until they decided to slam the ones who use it.

A more appropriate response would have been “Just to clear things up, as many of you seem to be under the wrong impression, the external idling application is not allowed and we will be punishing people who use it as of next week”.

Done, no animosity and both camps are happy.

By: T

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:41:32 +0000

Yeah, it’s totally alright, and even expected, for them to ban third part applications, BUT…

1) They waited an awful long time to enforce this one, and when they did they did so suddenly. Kinda weird, but whatever. It’s not like the rules were unclear.

2) Everyone is acting like they’re trying to ban idling, which is causing reactions ranging from “lol Valve failed to get rid of idling,” to, “lol those dirty idling cheaters got what they deserved.” And neither of these are very productive reactions.

By: Drug Crazed Dropkick

Drug Crazed Dropkick — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:51:55 +0000

Actually, they did mention about external things before:
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2293

Though the creator of the program emailed Valve and said “I’ve made an idle application. If there are any issues with it, let me know and I’ll take it down’.

By: Laurence

Laurence — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:45:41 +0000

To be completely honest, I’m being very nitpicky, and essentially criticising Valve for a lack of clarity. But Valve are one of the biggest, if not the biggest, developer in the world, particularly famed for its relations with its community. That makes a flaw as apparently minor as clarity a rather big deal.

By: T

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:09:01 +0000

The way I see it, there were a couple different issues all be conflated and making any discussion really difficult.

- – “Is cheating bad?”

The anti-idling side seemed to think the pro-idling side was somehow trying to justify cheating, and that really wasn’t the issue.

- – “Is idling cheating?”

Not until it’s against the rules, which it wasn’t, and technically *still* isn’t. Using an achievement server is still perfectly legal and will not get you a ban or any other sort of punishment.

“Is using the idle program cheating?”

It wasn’t cheating exactly but it was against the ToS, which has standing rules against any sort of third-party program. Valve was not very clear on this though, leading to the idea that they were banning idling (and hilariously failing).

“Are hats worth it?”

This is my favorite part of the discussion. Does the benefit of the random-drop system (it rewards people who play more) really outweigh the drawback (people don’t get the hat they want to wear easily)?

Is playing more something people should be rewarded for in the first place? Why not scoring more points, or completing achievements as before? The answer to both of those might be, “Because they can be farmed,” but clearly, so can playtime.

If hats were simply all unlocked automatically, allowing anyone to customize their character however they want (avatar customization is a big deal to a lot of people), would it break the game or player’s expectations somehow?