I have a lot of criticisms with TF2, but this is one that is difficult to ignore this time of the year. Community servers cannot fairly compete with free items, simple as that.
I wonder if it takes away from the content itself, are people enjoying the new maps less because they're forced to be there? Do fun gimmicks get seen as annoying distractions? Is it fair to the people who want to make content for this game to not control the context it is played?
With contracts, you have to complete tasks against other players, you can't really control who you play with on a Valve server. If you do, it's most likely organized kicking of players outside of your friend group. It turns the whole thing into a competition.
Rowedahelicon
@cruxes.space
@cruxes.space
Valve eventually claimed it was an unfair system, and admittedly, I don't have data to suggest otherwise other than at least on my server, everyone had a fair chance to get a number of items.
October 13th, 2024 @ 11:58 PM EDT
Halloween used to be a huge thing for SCG, it's when we had reliable around the clock traffic, we had organized events where people happily waited in line to be the next person to get an item, it was even better when everyone had an individual item timer, we let people fly around
But what does affect me personally, it creates an incentive to play on a Valve server that a community one cannot offer without breaking Valve's rules. We can't give away free items, at least not the "new" items reliably or permanently. It's simply an unfair thing to compete with
There are other reasons I dislike the idea of contracts, they use fomo to entice people to focus on particular objectives with the overall game being an aside and they create conflict for people to fight each other over if someone simply playing is interfering with their task.
I have a grudge against contracts because simply put, they are quests that can only be achieved on Valve ran servers, they cannot be completed on a community server. I run a community, so I definitely have a bias! But at the heart of it, I just find the concept unfair.
It's that time of year where I complain about Halloween contracts in Team Fortress 2. A lot of people I am friends with work hard to put out great content each year for TF2, this is not a complaint against them, they're awesome, as are a lot of TF2 content creators!