Catching up

Vacation’s over; time to get back to work. As well in real life as here, on the Fort.
Not too much has happened, but a few things deserve some commenting.

A few weeks ago Valve brought their "Contribution"-site online. As I understand it it’s basically the opportunity for players to create and submit items and avatars for TF2. The website says: "Weapons, hats, avatars — designed by you,
used by the entire TF2 community" [1]. The motivation is simply for people to personalize their game. I guess most people like that, given the fact that skins and similar features are very propagated these days and many applications try to satisfy the desire of their users to make the surface/UI of an application an expression of their personality (yikes!).
In that regard this idea of Valve is quite consequent and will doubtlessly be eagerly accepted by parts of the community. As long as this is restricted to skins, items and the like I couldn’t care less. We will see ...

A new interview with Robin Walker was brought to my attention (thx CruelCow).
The interview offers some interesting info as well as some welcome insight into what’s going on at Valve.
Some of those interesting tidbits are:

- There are plans for more updates, and Valve plans on doing at least one more update before the engineer-update (which suggests a general update, which may or may not introduce new game elements)

- Item trading appears to be still on the table. This makes actually more sense considering the creation of unique custom content (skins) which would actually justify a trading system.

- Pretty early in the interview Robin mentions that Valve (in regards of the soldier/demo update) was under the impression that the community was expecting further double class extravaganza. Perhaps a portion of the community see it that way (perhaps even a majority), but personally I disagree. The recent updates with their elaborated intros and all the great stuff surrounding them really made these updates special and fun. If the presentation is good and the offered content itself is substantial (e.g. Maps, “Meet the”) then I don’t care if the update covers one class, two, or all nine. And in the end it’s the quality of the new items which counts. I will rather have one class with well-developed and -balanced new items than two classes with some half-arsed stuff which require multiple adjustments to be gotten right. Sigh.

And lastly: A new TF2 blog update, revealing that some people have cheated during the soldier/demo war to quite some extent.

This is as sad as it probably was inevitable. I don’t completely understand how it was done (it was pointed out that there were maps accommodating such rapid killings), but I congratulate those idiots for subsequently spoiling this fun event [2] and giving the outcome of the war a foul taste. On the bright side there’s no high horse to sit on because apparently both sides cheated at their heart’s content.

On one hand I would wish that Valve would in some way punish those cheaters [3]. On the other I realize that it is not feasible.
Sure, those people with extreme numbers can be identified quite reliably as cheaters, but you reach very quickly a level where you can no longer be sure if that was plain cheating or the actions of a skilled player.
In the end all we can do is let this be a lesson for future events. Valve will hopefully find ways to minimize such trickery (e.g. by restricting an event to official maps).
Very sad indeed ...