Monster Hunter World has constant update support and ironed out a lot of issues, they really deserve to be there.
I'm mostly wondering about two things:
Will they fix up artifart
where are my tf2 promos
All Promos go to DotA2 now, didn't you know?
I'm fuming about artifact
I was really stood telling all my mates when it got announced, with them all telling me I was stupid, that this was going to be a massive gamechanger. I literally thought that artifact was about to end the card game market and I couldn't understand why none of my friends agreed.
I thought what they'd do was do exactly what they did in dota / csgo and push the daylights out of cosmetic changes and have the game be essentially free (I mean csgo actually was free in the last sale so there you go)
All they needed to do was make stupidly rare gold border stuff and even rarer holographic foil or particle effects on attack or animated cards or some weird 3d hologram thing for heroes or literally anything for the enthusiasts to gobble up and trade on the steam store for 100 usd a pop so u make 25 quid every time - then make it so u can earn cards so that getting a good deck doesn't cost u hundreds of gameplay hours or loads of money. leave making big bucks to the enthusiasts cause casuals like me don't want to spend bare
did they not trust the game was good enough that anyone would actually be enthusiastic about it?
no other card game has the access to such easy monetisation & a giant advertisement the game to the biggest pc store, I really think if they took proper advantage of their tried and tested monetisation routes it would have popped
I'm not saying ive spent a load of money on microtransactions, because I honestly haven't, but when csgos gambling was about (the good one in csgolounge not stupid slot machine crap) I must have spent a couple of hundred pounds in store fees liquidating all the shit I won. I know I did, because I maxed out my steam account money like 3 times. That's just an example of how a cheapskate like me can still end up contributing to a games success, so you may say it's entitlement but it's not like I'm not contributing more than most people anyway to the margins
NOW all my friends are ripping me cause I was so unbelievably incorrect and that's pretty UPSETTING
I don't know what you expected man. CCG's and TCG's are, hands-down, the single most manipulative and exploitative industries in gaming. They are entirely constructed on a model that is pretty much legalized gambling, and that is even worse when you realized how heavily card games are marketed towards children. Everything going on with Artifact is par for the course, and honestly what anyone who has played a CCG/TCG should have expected this. Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon have been doing this same exact shit for nearly 20 years now, and no one batted an eye then.
yeah, I mean now that it's happened of course I'm like what was I thinking this is what PC gaming is like atm so of course they'll get away with it, and yeah I do play HS and I did have yugioh as a kid, though I wasn't that into it, I still sort of recognise that it is indeed pretty much par for the course. Though, irl card games don't require you to pay tickets and you can trade them unregulated, so that is at least something.
I just expected valve to do better, just like they could be charging way more for each game. always seemed like player number was king with valve because they don't realistically need the money what with steam just sponging it all up. felt more like they want blockbuster titles to make sure people stay on their platform, so to me I felt like it was a case of bringing in the audience to steam and keeping em here
I mean yeah, valves support is not as good as it could be, and I know we do like to complain but you have to admit, valve games are extremely good value for money historically, especially when you look at the times where companies were charging for map packs and the like, valve were looking to get it in for free
I just figured they'd continue to deliver that and continue to do better. I didn't expect it to go entirely how I would have done it, but not in my nightmares would I have expected it to be essentially equivalent to hearthstone, AND have an entry cost
I noticed something today. Of the many things unfinished and missing from Jungle Inferno was the glaring lack of any new achievements. The TF2 team have not added any new achievements to the game since the two related to Pass Time in the summer of 2016. Prior to that, Powerhouse had a bunch of map-specific ones a year earlier.
I mention this now because I was looking at the Artifact store page on Steam and saw that it doesn't have any achievements at all. I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised by this because Dota2 also lacks Steam achievements as well.
Are in-game achievements another feature left to the die on the vine? I see how achievement items like the Ubersaw were ultimately a bad idea, and how they have been replaced with contracts (which are a mixed bag at best, but I digress...) I can also imagine that the TF2 engine code is such a mess that adding new achievements might be a massive headache.
I'm still surprised that Valve have seemingly abandoned one of the major features of their own gaming platform.
Maybe contracts are sort of a replacement for them perhaps?
I mean, they are kind of similar in a sense...
imo the best achievements were all added years and years and years ago, and even then were few and far between amongst all the "deal a million damage as pyro" garbage. If we're complaining about a lack of achievements that are at all interesting, that's not really a critique of Jungle Inferno specifically, and more a critique of the past half decade of updates. I can't say I'm super miffed about no more "kill 200 parchuting demomen" or "win 495 rounds on foundry" achieves.
Achievements never really had a purpose on Steam anyways. At least with Xbox's achievements there's tangible reasons to go after them. Gamerscore doesn't mean much but people still like getting them. For Steam, they're just...there?
And yeah, the achievements in TF2 specifically were always a few good ones inbetween dozens of bad ones at best. The only original achievement that I feel actually fits into the ideal of "achievement" is "trick an enemy medic into healing you as a Spy". Achievements are way more fun when they're things that are difficult to obtain, or obscure. A lot of the achievements in most games, including TF2, literally amounts to "Play class X a lot!", "Play Map Y a lot!", "Kill Z a lot!", or just "Play a lot!".
"Kill a Heavy and take his Sandvich" as Scout is a fun, difficult achievement. "Flick your cigarette onto a dead player's body by taunting" as Spy is fun, hard to do, and interesting, as well as kind of roundabout (you could literally just get it by chance, but if you're new to the game you might not ever figure out how to get it without looking up a guide or something).
I think achievement items are dogshit but contract-only items are even more dogshit, even if you can do contracts year-round all the time it just leads to people flooding classes doing irrelevant, pointless busywork. My real question is why weapons have to be tied to any kind of
unlock or progression system whatsoever, if they're meant to be sidegrades then Valve should have the brass balls to give everyone every tool and allow them to do as they see fit. But then again they can't laughably overprice the weapons in the Mann Co. store that way, can they?
One of my favorites was the Specialist achievement as medic. Really fucking hard (should have been scaled back a little bit imo) but trying to survive that long as med gets really tense.
I also have a love hate relationship with the Prime Cuts achievement. It's a really cool idea to kill each class in a round, but the classic is such a bad choice for that achievement that you might as well not bother. That achievement actually killed my desire to play sniper for months, because every time I would play I'd use the classic, get every frustrated, and then associate the sniper class with sucking ass and having no fun. When I switched back to stock I remembered that sniper can actually be fun.
The trickle system is not in itself flawed. It's so prevalent because it's a great way to slowly ease players into the hundreds of different choices or features a game has. The base 9 classes are easy to understand, hard to master. all their melees work mostly the same, except for the Scout's, Engineer's, and Spy's. Only two classes have more than 3 weapon slots, and they serve an extra purpose in helping that class accomplish their goal in a team.
If you assaulted a new player with over 200 new weapons as soon as they booted the game up, it's going to be information overload. It's the same thought process behind a map like CP Steel or Hydro being so mind-boggling to new players - so many different choices right from the get-go is counter-intuitive. You want to ease new players into it. DOTA 2 giving you every character from the start is awesome because you don't have to spend money on them, but at the same time, a new player is subjected to over 100 different characters that all play completely differently.
It also extends the game's play cycle for players. There's a goal to achieve beyond just normal gameplay. Normal gameplay is fun, but the gameplay cycle can get boring and repetitive for games like TF2 where there's a set goal and only one way to accomplish it. Given, the problem isn't nearly as big for Tf2, since 9 classes and all, but that extra bit of incentive is why the playercount surges during contract-based events or releases - because returning players have a reason to play and accomplish something. Same applies for new players.
"Oh cool, Scout has a weapon that is soda. I really wanna try it, but I don't know Scout well? Well, I have to play as Scout to unlock it, so I'll jump into a server and play as him for a few hours."
John Schoenick and Eric Smith are in the credits for Artifact. Hah.
I'm pretty sure all current Valve employees are listed in the credits of a Valve game no matter how much work they did on the game.
Hmm, that does seem to be the case.
Not sure I really buy the idea that valve thinks about their man-hours as "resources" that can be funneled anywhere to begin with. They're structured specifically so that people work on whatever they want. If valve wanted to tell people what to work on, they'd buy some new desks without wheels, if you catch my meaning.
That's the quixotic version of Valve--the publicized company manual version of Valve--not the reality of Valve.
so artifact was a tf2 killer afterall
Just not in the way we expected.
Do you think it would be worth it that in casual, preferably under alternative game modes they collect a small selection of maps dedicated to pitting specific classes against one another only? Both QWTF and TFC had some dedicated maps that specifically pitted one particular class against one another. Probably one of the more common one were sniper war maps, which had identical bases with a death pit inbetween that allowed snipers to face off against other snipers. Same could probably be done with other classes too like soldier, scout, ect.
They don't even have to be complicated maps either. With simple rules set for ( some allowing entire teams to play at once, some doing 1 vs 1, 2 vs 2, ect. at a time, some can be like arena were everyone plays with one life till one team wipes, ect. ).
Adding onto what Racist Gamer Man (lol) said, there's no reason the contracts can't be focused on objectives and teamplay; I could foresee a contract requiring you to use the previously unlocked weapon to help your team as the objectives, then you unlock a new toy that you get to learn. It could theoretically fit well with the game, just adding some neat progression on top of the existing game.
I would be fine with that. It annoys me that I see Pyros suicidally running into the enemy lines with the Ass Blaster because they got told to fart on 30 enemies to unlock the slap.
Also there's nearly 1000 achievements, that's way too many already
Think it be more accurate to say Valve is the TF2 killer.
Valve Killed the TF2 Star
Finally got the "Kill 3 enemies as Scout while under the effects of an über". It took me years.
i think its no surprise that the tf team works on artifact. Again, i dont think tf2 is close to being left behind, but we gotta understand big pushes for games like artifact are gonna need the whole valve gang to get that big push.
i very much like artifact, yet i have not played it, i still am happy valve is trying new and neat things;
on the positive note for you guys, the tf team definately had to take a back seat to go work on the last push for artifact, meaning now they are coming back to tf2 now that the games out most likely. i expected and still expect this year to be a slow one for tf2 with such a big release being there as artifact, so its only understandable to me. hopefully its time for them to come back and resume work on that comp push they've been at, which i still feel is a big focus, and next year's goal with our beloved game
https://i.imgur.com/qFR8Opp.png
I hope you don't do your own taxes.
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TF2 General Chat and Speculation Station V13 - Heavy times
