Valve's Team Fortress 2 character updates bring out the worst in humanity

4:40 PM on 02.26.2009   |   Anthony Burch

79 comments

Yesterday's Scout update marks the fourth Team Fortress 2 character alteration since the game's 2007 release and, for the fourth time, the Steam community is reacting exactly as one would expect it to. As the Scout's new weapons and abilities cannot be unlocked without completing a certain percentage of new, Scout-specific Achievements, the entire Team Fortress 2 world seems to be currently obsessed with getting as many Achievements as they can, to get the new weapons as fast as they can, to have an objective edge over their rivals for as long as they can.

As ultimately entertaining as these character updates are, however, and as much replayability and staying power they've given to Team Fortress 2 as a whole, I have to take issue with how Valve chose to implement those updates. Rather than simply giving us a reason to start playing again (or, given the current 50% off sale, a reason to buy it in the first place), Valve has for the fourth time unintentionally managed to turn their game into a wasteland of human desperation, greed, selfishness, malevolence, and irritation.

Hit the jump to see what I mean.

There are two types of people when it comes to getting character updates: those who feel the Achievements should be earned through natural play, and those who wish to cut to the chase and farm their achievements with the help of others. 

The first group argues that the achievements aren't that hard to get through normal play, and that since they are badges of merit and skill, to "farm" them is unethical and cheap. 

The second group, to which I belong, argues that it's silly to make me waste my time doing a bunch of things that I have already done or would have done anyway through normal play, and the relative reward of doing something difficult is replaced with a sort of increasing irritation that of the eighty times I've stunned someone with the Scout's baseball attack, I've been just an inch or two too close to actually get the achievement for it.

Both groups will probably never reconcile their differences, but they are alike in one very important way: for a few weeks, they turn Team Fortress 2 into a wasteland of mediocrity and hate.

Let's say you're in the second group. You take issue with the entire achievement thing, but you really want to try out the new weapons because they're legitimately quite interesting. Rather than going into a regular server and just praying that you get lucky enough to find yourself in some of the ridiculously specific situations many achievements require, you decide to enter an achievement farm.

Note: the above will never, ever happen in an achievement farm.

Achievement farms are servers that run a class-specific map designed to make it as easy as possible for players to get the necessary achievements for each class. The people who set up these servers are, generally, idiots -- they don't allow votekicking, they often don't include instant respawn, and the admins are never around so if just one person decides to, say, camp the shared spawn point as a Heavy and kill every single person as they spawn, the people in that server have literally no way to get rid of him. They must either wait for the troll to get bored, or leave and hope that the other achievement servers are full of more civilized people. Which they aren't.

Entering an achievement server and listening to the cacophony of people trying to enlist help in completing their particular achievements makes me think of a farm auction. So many people need so many different things that the airwaves are forever ablaze with people trying to engage in one-on-one conversations in a server that often holds up to thirty people at a single time. Add to that the fact that there will always -- always -- be someone who thinks it's more fun to run around killing people indiscriminately than it is to actually try and follow the server's intended purpose, and then you get to hear half a dozen people screaming something along the lines of "dude stop fucking killing us what the fuck is wrong with you" interspersed with hails of cackling laughter from the asshole who's doing the mass-murdering.

Unless you bring someone in with you and sequester yourself from the idiotic masses, trying to actually get anything done in one of these servers is like trying to hammer a nail with Play-Doh. You will see every single type of repugnant human being on the planet: the arrogant asshole who tries to shout everyone into cooperating with him, despite the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing; the douchebag who, knowing what achievement farms are for and disagreeing with them on a personal level, takes it upon himself to kill and irritate everyone inside for as long as possible in some philosophically misguided attempt to make the achievement whores repent their evil ways and earn the new weapons the "real" way; the greedy assholes who will gladly allow you to help them with their achievements, but who will immediately leave the server once it's time for them to return the favor. There is no better place to meet the dregs of the Internet, and of human nature in general, than in an achievement farm.

These people are laughing at one douchebag because they're a clan, and they only have to deal with one douchebag while the rest of them are united in trying to get the same thing. Imagine that ratio of helpful-to-unhelpful completely inverted, and that's what you'll find in an achievement farm.

But let's say you're in the first group. You want to get the Scout achievements legitimately, and so you play exactly as you normally would by going into a server that's running a map you enjoy, except this time you play as a Scout.

This would not be a problem were it not for the fact that nearly every single other person in the server is probably doing the exact same thing. The price for being honorable about achievements is that you have to share the entire Internet with a bunch of people who are also honorable, and who all want the same things you want. The Scout is not a fantastically effective fighter against other Scouts, and thus when you've got two teams full of nothing but them, the game becomes tedious at best and mind-numbingly irritating at worst.

The nuanced interplay between the incredibly well-balanced classes all but disappears in the face of a hundred thousand honest gamers who want nothing more than to try out the new Scout abilities they've waited a few weeks for. Nobody wants to switch to a different class, partially because they don't want to miss out on getting the Scout achievements, but mainly because one member of any class (with the possible exception of the Pyro) against an entire army of Scouts will probably be annihilated by the spastic, double-jumping antics of the other team. Most TF2 servers are ruined for the first few weeks after any given update as the entire playing audience tries to get the new weapons and abilities, yet it is not the players' faults; it is Valve's, for implementing the  achievement system in the first place.

I have always personally been against the requirement that players should have to wade their way through a group of irrelevant achievements just to get at the new weapons. The weapons themselves are well-balanced enough that they are not empirically better than the default weapons, thankfully, but they also afford new strategies and playstyles that any reasonable person would immediately want to try out for themselves. The character-specific achievement sets may presumably be an effort to acclimate players to each class's playstyle before allowing them to have a weapon that will further complicate that playstyle, but, as is currently being proven on countless TF2 servers across the globe, it generally results in the exact opposite.

Only because I ran out of videos of people successfully getting achievements, and because I haven't heard an NEDM joke in years.

The imaginary world of TF2 servers where people simply play the game and get the achievements normally does not exist. Many of the people who are now trying to get the new Scout weapons have been playing for quite a long time, and thus some of the achievements  are downright insulting -- I've already killed more than 2004 people in the time I've spent playing TF2, why should I have to kill another 2004 just because this new achievement pack dictates that I have to? 

Rather than just gracefully awarding these new weapons and abilities to the Team Fortress players of the world, Valve's achievement system, like clockwork, inadvertently turns every player into either a mindless, repetitious, purpose-driven robot until they get their achievements the "real" way, or a selfish, idiotic, disgusting asshead when they try to skip the BS and get straight to the goods. After a month or so, the fervor for these new weapons tends to die down. Until that point, however, Team Fortress 2 becomes a home for every bad gamer tendency known to man.

Until, that is, you get lucky and find one or two decent human beings in an otherwise-empty regular map server who help you out once you help them in return.

But it usually takes, like, four hours to find people like that.