Valve's Team Fortress 2 Goes Free-To-Play 195
heptapod writes "Valve has announced that Team Fortress 2 is now free to play. 'We've been toying with the idea of making Team Fortress free-to-play ever since the Mann-conomy update [in September 2010],' said Valve's Robin Walker. 'Team Fortress 2 would only be monetized by microtransaction payments. No advertising model will be pursued, Walker said. No premium subscription model will be used. No cynical "pay-to-win" options will be implemented, he assured.'"
Free to play accounts are limited (Score:5, Informative)
They've also made it so new accounts have limits, such as:
No random cosmetic item drops.
Can receive items in trades but not send them.
Cannot gift items to other players
50-slot backpack (as opposed to 300-slot for normal accounts)
Limited crafting recipes.
Of course, the way to "fix" this is to buy anything from the Mann Co. Store. That'd be easy... if it weren't for Valve having a $5 minimum on funds put into your Steam wallet.
These restrictions make sense, though. They are in place to prevent people from creating a whole bunch of Steam accounts to farm item drops.
Re:Splitting hairs (Score:4, Informative)
The only things you can buy in-game is stuff that you can earn with enough gameplay.
Besides, all of those items have trade-offs versus standard kit. It's not like you can buy a gun for each class that clearly bests anything else.
Re:Splitting hairs (Score:4, Informative)
Most unlockables in TF2 are highly situational items and some more are very dependent on your play style. The aforementioned Natasha is a great tool to keep pesky scouts at bay but in pitched slug-it-out battles, especially against targets that receive healing, it's at best useless. It depends on your problem, and in some situations, having access to unlockables will give you an edge. But they're hardly a must-have to compete sensibly or be an asset for your team.
Re:Splitting hairs (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, that's true. The actual problem with the game since the Mann-conomy is another. Threats in TF2 used to be highly recognizable, both by sight (different silhouettes, different poses for holding guns, etc.) or by sound. Nowadays there are so many weapons and some of them look and sound so similar it is impossible to distinguish between them all in any useful way.
Look and sound similar? They are very few weapons in the game that actually look similar.
The ones I can think of are: The Minigun and Natascha look similar, but sound different. This is important, since they both have to spin-up before firing. Both their spin-up and firing sounds are different.
The Flame Thrower and Backburner look similar from a distance and sound identical. However, the Backburner has a different "mouth" to it (it looks like a snake head).
The Medic's Needle Gun and Blutsauger look quite similar. The main way to tell the difference is to see if the Medic has +3 health things appearing over his head when he shoots you.
Those are all the similar looking weapon I can think of in the game. The others all look quite different from each other, from the Shotgun and Frontier Justice (has a battery taped to it) to the Sniper Rifle and Sydney Sleeper (which has feathers attached to it).
Note: I haven't included any of the new weapons because I haven't seen how similar they look in-game.
I also intentionally ignored the Rocket Jumper and Sticky Jumper, which use the same models as the Rocket Launcher and Sticky Launcher respectively.
Re:Splitting hairs (Score:4, Informative)
The Dead Ringer and Your Eternal Reward are clearly better than the default spy weapons. Same with the Backburner and Axtinguisher for the Pyro.
Maybe for you. I find the default Pryo weapon better than the backburner (putting out allies can be very useful, as well as reflecting projectiles -- I've gotten tons of kills from stupid soldiers who just keep firing and getting hit by their own rockets) and for a smart spy, the default cloak is infinitely more useful for actual sneaking around than the Dead Ringer, if you know where ammo drops are.
If there's one thing Valve is good at, it's balance. I don't think any of the additional weapons are clearly better than the original ones.