Just wondering what people's opinion's on the possibility of Team Fortress 2 becoming free to play for anyone who has at least one purchase on their Steam account (to stop hackers being able to just create a new account and continue cheating). The basic idea would be that they get all they play the same game on the same servers as people who own the game but they do not get achievements, stats tracking, steamcloud support, item drops, crafting or trading. Basically if you play for free the only way to get items is the store and your points/kills/headshots etc are not tracked or saved and you have no achievements. Would this be objectionable to anyone?
I think that the friends who own the game must get the item drops and they may not count as a drop for the person who owns the game Another approuch is that those FPF (Free Playing Friends) get all the hats and weapons from there friends as they play on the same server.
It's an awesome idea in that it would keep the community strong for longer by bringing in more people. I know it's strong at the moment but eventually it will fall and existing people get bored of it and new people don't want to spend money on an old game. I can't really think of a reason against it because a game like this is only good as long as lots of people play it so the more the better.
The servers are silly with rookie players. Not that I have a problem with them (I'm glad for the influx of new blood), but on regular occasions, they just go wander off in the wrong direction. We were playing what I believe is the last stage of Hoodoo, and they were basically trapped at spawn (you have to walk around the building through a narrow alley to get out). Spies face stabbing engineers with live sentries a few feet away, running right over sticky bombs clustered on the ground, sentries pointing in random directions, teleports that go back to spawn (and not in a constructive way), much higher numbers of snipers than I've seen prior to this promotion, no demomen on red for the opening map of Dustbowl (so pre-constructed sentries open up point blank on them), people stealing metal from the engineers, etc. They're things that I took for granted that everyone knew. If you need to rack up a lot of kills/saps/whatever for an achievement you're after, this is the time to do it.
I love the play now button. It's usually so hard to find a server with default rules that isn't one map 24/7 with a good ping that wasn't empty. Now people are actually playing in the Valve servers for once! That said it's mostly new players in them and I felt a bit guilty over just how much better I was. Playing dustbowl at the end of round one the red team had a single point between them. When I left the server I was on 51 points, the guy bellow me was 39 and the top score on the enemy team was 7. There's no real joy in that kind of victory. Playing Spy right now is also ridiculously easy. Hell it's easier to get kills on good players even because they're used to their teammates not leaving obvious Spies run around. I've also been giving away spare weapons to newbies who'll chat with me or manage to kill me a few times.