Team Fortress 2 Idlers Get Another Slap in The Face

Idling in Team Fortress 2 has been a bit of a thorn in the side of Valve for quite some time. For anyone who hasn’t played TF2, there is a drop system in the game that grants you hats or weapons. The amount of drops you receive is based on your play time, and while the exact formula is convoluted in every sense of the word, you can generally assume that the longer you play, the more drops you acquire.

This has lead to “Idle servers” cropping up everywhere, where you can leave the game running for hours without having to worry about being kicked out for AFKing. When the crafting system was added, allowing extra items to be converted into metal that can be reforged into new items, the idling issue went from bad to worse.

Valve originally tried to remedy this problem by simply removing items from those who had exhibited suspicious behavior i.e. idling, and giving a special hat to those who had been playing clean so far. But that did next to nothing to stem the problem, and the special hat was pretty ugly. So Valve has once again tweaked the drop system, making Idling pointless.

Drops are now given on an (approximately) regular basis, and you can only receive drops up to a certain amount of gameplay per week. Valve didn’t specify what the cutoff time is, but I’m assuming it’s gracious enough so that even the most dedicated basement dweller who still plays fair can get plenty of drops.

I’m glad Valve has tweaked the drop system to be a bit more regular in respect to your game time. I get an urge to put my fist through my monitor when I haven’t gotten a drop for a week while someone else gets three or four drops within a period of 5 minutes. At least now players will have more sense of progression rather than feel like they are rolling the dice every time they try to get a drop.