I say is that a hatless idling Irishman?
So a few days ago I booted up Team Fortress 2 after a mate asked me to check if my items were gone. Apparently because Valve had started to remove items gained by using Drunken F00l’s Idler Program which basically emulated you being connected to a Team Fortress 2 server.
Indeed I was greeted with the following:
Your account has been flagged for circumventing the item distribution system. We have removed the items that were illegally obtained. Future violations will result in the loss of all your items.
Valve had removed all the items I had gained using the idler which as two hats: The Heavy’s football helmet and the Glorious Officer’s Ushenka.
I am rather jarated off that Valve has all of a sudden pimp slapped a large percentage of its active Team Fortress 2 player base without stating its position on this matter months before this fiasco. The creator had emailed Valve about this months before asking for Valve’s opinion and also offered to voluntarily shut down operations if Valve requested, making it unforgivable for Valve to not have made an official post on their Team Fortress 2 blog warning idlers that its use was disapproved.
Instead of posting up a warning to all idler users Valve takes a different approach; it proceeds to take all items that idlers have gotten using the idler program, labelled them “Cheaters” and a final slap in the face, given all other users who did not use the idler program hats more specifically a “Halo” hat.
Now the community is in uproar about how Valve has handled this matter people who idled are not helping those with halos and those with halos refuse to help people who have idled. It has divided the community and many people have refused to play Team Fortress 2 ever again.
Although Valve has stated that only 3.5% of Team Fortress 2 owners were affected it seems that the number has been skewed as instead of being the number of active Team Fortress 2 players it is the number of people who own the game which it was bundled with The Orange Box. At its peak the idler server numbered roughly 10,000+ idlers at any given time, according to some users the number sits somewhere around the realm of 25-33.3% of the active player base has been affected by this fiasco.
Although I am unhappy my hats got taken away from me, I can still take solace in the fact that I can now see spies easily and snipers wearing the halo make easier headshot targets.
Edit: Fixed some expression mistakes and missing words.
