http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s … p?t=815498Interesting stuff. May as well quote the whole lot.
Email to Robin Walker wrote:
Hi there, Mr. Walker. Lately I've been pondering a few things in regards to some of the things that some communities within the TF2 playerbase have been, to use a light term, discussing. Since most of these questions are linked, I'll just keep them sort of interconnected.
There has been a quote that has been floating around for the longest time that has been attributed to various TF2 developers, or just 'Valve' in general, and that quote is 'we will not take control away from the player.'
Was this statement ever really issued by a Valve developer, or Valve itself? Is it part of your overall philosophy regarding TF2, or was it ever part of it? If so, what made you (the team as a whole) change your stance on it?
That statement alone has been brought up and quoted for everything from grenades to the medic's infection to unlocks starting with the pyro to the recent scout unlocks.
Also, in light of the recent weapon unlock program and the punishment doled out by Valve (that occurs every time the unlocks are released,) I was curious as to what you and your team are considering doing in regards to people's apparently violently negative reaction to weapons tied to unlocks? The achievements themselves aren't too bad but it appears that people really do not like having the weapon unlocks tied to them, but can't think of a better suggestion than to just automatically give them out for free.
What is your opinion on this? What is your reaction to the implied response from the players using the unlocker programs despite warnings and punishments?
Thank you very much for your time and satiating the curiousity of one of your players.
-Scott
Robin Walker wrote:
Hi Scott.
We’ve seen that passed around a bunch in the TF2 forums, but haven’t been able to remember where we’ve said it. It’s entirely possible we said something about the movement lessons we’ve learned over the years. That said, we’ve also learned we should never say never when it comes to game design, because there’s always some reason why it might be worth doing something we’ve written off in the past. We have found it’s dangerous to over generalize lessons learned from design we’ve shipped. TFC seemed to teach us that slowing someone’s movement down for 20 seconds wasn’t much fun for the person being slowed, but does that mean we should never slow players down? Or does it mean we can’t do it for long periods of time? Or maybe the method of delivery was the issue? If anything, it taught us that we still have a lot to learn about the ways that players can interact with each other, and that we shouldn’t remove large sets of options from the table yet.
In regards to the item unlocks, we were tied to the achievements in the past due to our backend technology. The update we released just prior to the Scout update, where we moved TF2 over to using our new item backend server, is the one we’ve been waiting for. With that shipped, we have much more control over item delivery, and we’ll be re-evaluating the way we give out items. It’s highly likely we’ll be taking a different approach with the next pack.
Feel free to post this on the TF2 forums if you think it’ll help some of the discussions.
Robin.
Excellent. Sounds like they might be dropping the awful achievement -> unlock system