TF2 F2P: Why I'm Not Bitter

So, Team Fortress 2 is now free-to-play. Is this good? Bad? I say mostly good. If you're unfamiliar with Valve's model for the game, free-players only get basic item drops, can't instigate trades, and some other limits. If you're content with the default weapons or are uninterested in getting fancy hats, you might not notice what you're missing out on. By making any purchase through the in-game store, you get upgraded to a Premium account, which is the same as if you bought the game at retail. I feel slightly bad for anyone who recently paid full price (hi Maggie!), since all they get is a hat for their $20, but I'm not bitter about the game I paid for (three years ago?) becoming free.

So many of my friends are gamers, but when I consider how many of them:
...play on PC, and
.....use Steam, and
.......play TF2, it's not surprising that I've never played TF2 with any of my friends. Now that there is no financial barrier to entry, they have no excuse to not at least try it. And anyone who has gamed socially knows, games are exponentially more fun with friends. Being able to unite your R/L friends in one or two games will make their first experiences better as well, since they'll have each others' support and won't have to deal with as many jerks online, nor alone.

I will suck less. By comparison.
With the exceptions of the original Dead or Alive and Wipeout XL, I've never focused so much on one game that I become truly great at it. With a whole slew of new players who are worse than me, hopefully future matches won't be the trainwrecks of hyper-competitive players insulting their own teammates because not everyone is playing at an e-sports level of efficiency.

Be ready to do some coaching, 2Fort combat vets.
The downside to a whole slew of new players is that the absolutely larval newbies may still be learning basic strategies, like an Ubercharge on a Heavy is a bit more valuable than on a Sniper. Or even how to use Ubercharge. If the old-timers simply get frustrated and start filling the voice channels with feces, that impression is going to stay with the newbie and harms the community as a whole.

I find it fascinating to hear that already, some veteran players are using their Proof of Purchase hats to distinguish themselves from newcomers. We'll see if human nature drags down the gaming utopia that Valve appears to be working towards, but I for one welcome this grand experiment in PC gaming. I don't believe that full retail games will ever die out, but hopefully this will spur other large game developers to try out F2P financial models.

Steam F2P: Round One

Steam is now distributing a handful of microtransaction-based free-to-play games, and the first one I'm trying is Forsaken World. With some more playtime I'll write a review, but so far in the first hour or so I haven't found any deal-breakers. The graphics remind me of WoW but not as angular, so it runs quite well on my aging gaming rig. Overall it feels a tad generic, but there's still plenty of opportunities for unique gameplay to emerge.

MineCraft on Xbox 360?!

At E3 on Monday, Microsoft announced that MineCraft would be coming out on Xbox 360 sometime near the end of the year. Normally I wouldn't care, but a couple specifics caught my eye:

• cross-platform functionality between 360 and PC
• Kinect support

I can't help but wonder why bother including Kinect support, other than to add a bulletpoint. It doesn't seem like the kind of game that would be improved at all by marching in place, flailing your arms, and/or saying "inventory" aloud vs. using a controller. Whatever cross-platform features are implemented should be more interesting... and ACHIEVEMENTS!

Hackers Ruin CoD: Black Ops Matches Also

I was excited to see that Call of Duty: Black Ops is having a free (multiplayer) weekend on Steam. That is, until I encountered one or more game hackers in a match. If you've never played a recent CoD game, one of the handy features is a "kill cam" showing who killed you, from where. After getting killed immediately upon spawning (multiple times), I watched the kill cam for as long as it displayed. The camera of the player in question was moving in an unnaturally jerking manner, racking up kills through multiple layers of walls. It was quite obvious that this wasn't the behavior of a normal player, and 'his' 77-0 kill/death ratio seemed a bit odd as well. Teammates agreed that it just wasn't fun anymore, and we all left the match.

This is why I don't mind paying $50-60/year for Xbox Live. It may be a walled garden, but Microsoft at least tries to keep an even playing field by punishing cheaters. Only time will tell if CoD: World at War settles down from an online Wild West, but between that and Black Ops on PC, I won't be taking for granted a fair (fire)fight any time soon.

Playing with Imaginary Friends

In CoD: Black Ops, you can play "Combat Training" bot matches. It surprised me to find that the PC version names the bots after people on your Steam buddylist. It was nifty at first, until I thought about how few of them would actually play a FPS online, let alone B.O. *le sigh*

CoD: WaW Hackers

Looking through my pile of clearance games to play, I decided to try out the multiplayer in Call of Duty: World at War. (Don't know why, but I recently heard the siren-song of ranking up in CoD again.) The first thing I noticed while waiting for the match to start was all sorts of colorful player names, some cycling through multiple hues. No biggie, that might just be a bonus at some insanely high level. Once I got into the match, however, things went downhill. The entire upper-left quadrant of the screen quickly filled up with automated messages from a couple players hawking a YouTube channel apparently about game modding (a bannable offence on XBL). I reported them, but soldiered on through the match since leaving early shows up as a loss on your record. It didn't help that occasionally I would see a player levitate across the level in mid-air. I can't prove this, but I think some of my opponents may have been invulnerable as well, unless there's a perk that allows you to survive melee attacks to the back of your head.

Normally I wouldn't care about what others are doing for fun, but the spamming messages obscure my vision, and I'm paranoid about getting suspended/banned from XBL because the automated matchmaking throws me into games that may be hosted on modified consoles.

My question is this: why is there so much blatant game modding in World at War? I play MW 1 and 2 also, but have never noticed such a flagrant disregard to the TOS. Is it simply because the game is older and not policed as strictly as the 'big guns' of XBL, MW2/BlackOps? Or is there something about WaW that makes it easier to hack?