So, valve has deleted all items obtained via idling.


There should have been some indication that this was wrong, but really what we got was the exact opposite. First with achievement servers, valve said nothing. apparently it was ok to obtain these achievements via other means. Then with idle servers, for 4 months, valve said nothing. Seemed to me that this was ok too.


It's not really the halos for people who were simple unaware of steamstats that annoys me, or the fact that I lost my 1 hat, it's the fact that most of us deleted lower level items in favor of higher ones. I personally have a grand total of 3 fucking items in my inventory now. All of the regular items I obtained legitimately by achievements, but they are all gone now.

There should be a button on each milestone, if you've unlocked the milestone you can click the button to spawn the item in your inventory at the base level.


Anyway.

This whole thing is moronic really. The system is broken, it takes so long to get a hat even while idling, the time it takes without is multiplied many times over.

I have been idling since a week after the initial hat patch, 4 months ago, every day every night. I just leave my old dell on 24/7 when not playing. When I want to play I exit the program and play on my main pc, then when I was done I would just launch it again on the dell.

Thousands and thousands of hours spent, only 1 hat obtained
A system based completely on chance doesn't work. It is mathematically possible to play until the end of time and never obtain a single item. Even Blizzard realized this was a bad idea with World of Warcraft.
I was originally going to post a scaled version of my steamstats log to show you how many hours were spent rolling the dice and coming up short to beter prove my point, but really, it's just too long.

They should instead just put in some insanely hard achievement for each hat. Like burn 9,000,000 players for the pyro fireman's hat. Or lite up 500,000 spies within 10 seconds of sapping a sentry for the pyro's engineer glove hat. etc..

These are long term goals that are achieved through basic play. PLAY which is what valve apparently wants. They also don't encourage playing like a moron, like ubering spies, as other achievements do..