Valve dealt with those servers as well with the ranking system. Fake clients faking a game = more people leaving and joining = servers unlisted.

GG

Actually they didn't. People don't join and leave idle servers - they stay on them for whole days (in some cases ;-). That's the point of idling. The special idle maps even have hurt boxes to simulate player activity. If anything the idle servers will have a higher rank than most other types of servers.

There's also nothing fake about the idle servers, nor the clients that connect to them. They are regular TF2 servers with the idle map loaded, so that people may find them, and no idle kick options. People connect to them using TF2 and minimizing it.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I was talking about the fake clients or spectate idling in OUR servers, that you were moaning how we "trick" people to join a server, and how thats been sorted, at least to any non popular server. not the idle servers. tbh any server with the tag "idle" or "afk" will probably just be taking straight off the listings if valve are gonna play rough... but im geussing their main objective is for people to actually have the game open and running, therefore encouraging "play" but if ur still not gonna play then at least they can claim you were for number crunching.

Tbh, if people wanna idle and get weapons and stuff it doesnt affect my life. But I dont see why people dont get how using a 3rd party program to do it for you wasnt gonna be just a little bit naughty. Just because a system is broken doesnt mean its ok to use its broken parts.

When I get my stuff ill be playing, ill see it come up and i shall be happy.

See - I'm not arguing that using a 3rd party program to idle is illegal. I completely agree with you on this one.
I'm just saying that Valve is trying to put the people who used it in a bad light while they claim the moral high ground even though actually more or less the opposite is true. The "3rd party program" clause is clearly there to prevent people from using cheats, reverse engineering their game and whatnot - they can decide to roll it out or not whenever they please, otherwise even things like MetaMod, SourceMod or HLSW might have been outlawed in the past. It's JUST a legal clause not necessarily implying moral guilt. You know - kinda like a baker giving out free bread to the homeless but forgetting to put it on his expenses could be punished by the tax office (true story, happened in Poland ;-).
However, Valve seem to be saying that people have "sinned" for circumventing their "awesome drop system" and HENCE they are punished. I say, no, they shouldn't be punished because it was MORALLY wrong to idle - their drop system is shitty and they only should be punished for breaking the EULA - same results but a very different reason. People breaking the EULA to idle for items are CONFIRMING Valve's mistake and just happen to be doing something illegal at the same time but it's not the straw-man that Valve put forward, which to me sounds like "You broke the EULA hence our drop system is wonderful, since you are a morally bad person", if you reduce it to its components - it should be "You broke the EULA BUT we admit that the system is shitty and understand why you did it".

See, if SO MANY people have idled, then you should take it as customer feedback.
I guess my issues are mainly with the tone of Valve's response.

They should have said: it was brought to our attention that many of you have idled using a third party application. We regret that you don't like the system and will do everything in our power to improve it as quickly as possible. Sadly, we have to remove all the items acquired through the fake idling program, since it breaks the license agreement and would set a precedent for similar or worse applications of this kind in the future.

Instead Valve went like "Ha, ha! Look! We found a way to identify idlers! And we can punish them! Muhaha! We are right, you are wrong! To prove it, we even made halos for the people who didn't idle and licked our asses for the wonderful drop system we implemented to show how bad you are!"
THAT'S what pisses me off, not the fact that my items were removed or that the program was deemed illegal.

Be more humble, Valve, admit your mistakes. To a third party observer everything looks jolly funny since Valve always come up with witty responses and smart jokes about situations like that but recently I somehow got the impression that Valve are becoming more and more arrogant, perhaps because of the financial success they are enjoying and the immense amount of fanboys that meanwhile flock around them and who would even worship Gabe Newell's turd lying on the floor. I guess I'm still under the influence of the whole L4D 2 controversy and this somehow fits into this category in my mind.

Valve seems to become... Blizzard?

Notice how they pointed out how small the number of idlers supposedly is? The implied meaning here being - most of the people are awestruck by our system, while it could very well be that most of the non-idlers didn't even know about the program.
Notice how they imply that around 5% of players (I still think it was more than that - it could have been 5% of total TF2 accounts but a much larger percentage of ACTIVE TF2 accounts) doesn't mean anything to them anymore? We can safely piss off people who were ALREADY dissatisfied with our product even more by presenting them as morally decayed wrongdoers.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Yeh the drop system does suck more balls than a banana chomping monkey with an obsession to nuts.

Well said Lim-Dul! The 'morality' pissed me off as well.

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

The only person/persons that have sinned here are Valve themselves for introducing the drop system in the first place. I felt the game was much more exciting when you earned the achievements by playing the classes. In some respect this also encouraged people to play different classes challenging them to the milestones and being presented with the new weapons for their efforts.

This drop system is boring, it's taken some of the fun out of playing the classes and has led people to idle to gain the benefits which sucks just as much as the drop system.

I for one did not idle and in my opinion idling is a waste of time, but so is playing TF for hours and not getting a single hat.

Valve have f#cked* up here not anyone else, I think they should just give everyone a hat of their choice and ask for forgiveness...

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

Amen

*now they've made me swear

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

I know it's spam but... +1

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All roads may lead to Rome, but all Wikipedia pages eventually get you to the Third Reich. - m3n

Sense?

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SaintK: I'm completely lost

I agree that when it comes to the weapons, having a random drop system is a bit silly - as it could be argued that some weapons could give someone an unfair advantage in the game. It is not advantageous to possess a hat, therefore having a random drop system is perfectly acceptable.
Maybe a better system would be you would pay £5 for the hat you want, and all the money would go to charity?

And by the way - you know how one could make the drop system 1000x better?

a) Don't make it random. Give out e.g. hats with 100% probability after a certain amount of gameplay time. There are so many of them that it would still take a great enough time for anybody to collect them (if the interval would be sensible enough) and hence they would still allow everybody to feel unique.

b) In addition to giving out items at fixed intervals, code a SIMPLE routine that would prioritize items you don't have yet. So, every once in a while you'd get a random new item out of the pool of items YOU DON'T HAVE YET. After you have acquired all the items, the process would repeat for duplicates and so on. Or perhaps after you have all the items, then the hat-giving time interval would be shortened too?

I realize that Valve has announced how they plan to improve the system in the future but so far it's been a few months and the only thing they did was messing around with the percentages a bit. Changes as outlined above, so making the system non-random and eliminating the possibility of getting like 50 Bonks in a row would take like 15 minutes to implement. Even I could do it, if I had the source code! ;-)

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

i love the fact that valve gives all the squeeky clean people a halo that is riddled with bugs lolz

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

Taking a quote out of context is a bit silly, of course I didn't mean it like that. He tried to refute Lim-Duls arguement by just saying he didn't do it, which of course didn't work because he didn't idle either and he still had a problem with it.

Of course the idle program is a 3rd party program, but that wasn't his argument, he was comparing idling to bug exploiting. Which then Lim-Dul compared to idling on a server to trick players into joining it

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

That wasn't my argument at all -.-

It was effectively.

Dont be upset about idlefail because at the end of the day, if you do something that feels dodgy and looks dodgy. Guess what. Its dodgy... and if/when valve chose to punish said dodgy was the risk you took.

No morality in it, I think idlin to get items is bug exploiting, as the whole damn systems a bug. its not like it was intended gameplay to idle around for your weapons. I know its a hard thing to comprehend, the whole "while you play stuff drops and you feel somewhat satisfied about the randomness of it all" but its obvious it was meant for it to happen while you played the game. So i intended to get things the way it was intended, not by teh "dodgeyz" way.

I said I never idled as in Our server idling in spectate, as lim threw that in my face when i said about game exploitation. and then explained how server spectate to fill up servers has been damaged by the server ranking system.

Oh and I have a halo.

Yeh.

Anyway -.- stop misinterpretin my arguments...

P.S. this is all getting a bit hot under the collar isnt it, lets all chill out and take a load off

How is idling tricking the system, the system is, 'When your on a server you get items'. They make it so that you get items while you're in spectator, so why would you have to play to get them? It is not bug exploiting because you are using the mechanic that the game developers included and they don't class it as a bug.

How to 'exploit' this 'bug':

1) Join a server
2) ... Profit!

The 3rd party application isn't dodgy, but since it's against the EULA then it's fair enough for valve to punish people who used it, what isn't acceptable is the way they went about it. It took them 2-3 months to tell people that it was wrong, then they were retro active on the policy on the idling program.

The actual idling part is not dodgy at all and is fair game as long as it doesn't effect people who run the servers you are idling on (e.g it should be kept to idle servers or a server that you know won't be used while your on it, or someone has the ability to kick you if they want to use it).
It's not hard to comprehend that you don't actually need to play to get weapons, and they would have fixed that a long time ago if they actually classed it as a 'bug', or maybe they spent all their time and resources on pissing off the people who used the idler . Yes, many people are dissatisfied by the randomness of it, especially when valve won't admit that their system is crap and incomplete, as you have said.

Thats me done, I'm going to go back to idling.

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

Well, Minimoose - I think it still is "exploiting" the system, so I'm not really on your side here. ^^
The main point here being that you can get items while not actively playing the game, which is not Valve's intention. Yes THEY fucked up by making it possible but still...

What I am/was annoyed by is the whole "Saint vs Sinner" attitude Valve has adopted and them ham-fistedly plowing their trainwreck of a system forward despite more and more signs of how much of a failure it is. They even presented the increased hat drop rate as a gesture of benevolence to placate their fanboys instead of admitting that they increased the drop rates BECAUSE the system was bad and BECAUSE the whole idling thing confirmed it. That's what I basically wrote in my TL;DR post before. ^^

Also, I didn't want to imply that Greasy idled on servers himself but that he never had issues with other people in SpA doing so until THIS idling scheme came up. =)

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Well if this is how like 6,000 ( my numbers are probably wrong) idlers feel, then perhaps we should just create a new game, in which you have your PC on running, you do fuck all, and you get random stuff on rare occassions like shiny tin cans, while normally you get normal tin cans. Sounds good?

Seriously if thats how a game strikes you as how its meant to be played, i think your idea of fun and gameplay are slightly (slightly) misguided...



Lim gets it it was never intended gameplay, much like in football you could just huddle round the ball and walk it into the goal till 90 minutes are up. It aint against the rules.. but dont see em doing it -.-

Once again, people didn't idle INSTEAD of playing TF2.

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All roads may lead to Rome, but all Wikipedia pages eventually get you to the Third Reich. - m3n

Aye but you wouldnt have played if you didnt idle.. therefore and therein its not unfair to say bb to your items you got from it...


Its almost as tho nothing happened. Cept I got a halo.


Its shiny.

Exactly. You should be thankful to the bad and dirty idlers. Without us, you wouldnt have this oh so awesome shiny little present for all the people who "took the moral high road".

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All roads may lead to Rome, but all Wikipedia pages eventually get you to the Third Reich. - m3n

Its nice to be rewarded for not being an unclean one...!

Im thankful to valve for it ;D

I think that if valve make a broken system and can't fix it in 2-3 months then people can do it, especially since they haven't stated anywhere that people can't idle. They say the system is fair, but I'll say it again, a system which is completely random and if previous repetitions of the system do not effect the new ones then it will never be 'fair'. Personally I don't see it as a bug exploit if you don't have to do anything to exploit it, you do exactly what a normal person does, except once you join you don't have to do anything, it doesn't effect people who don't idle so who cares.

It should be a system like:

After X amount of hat rolls you recieve without getting a hat your chance increases by Y amount until you get a hat then the chance resets to 3% and starts again. It's not bloody rocket science and also they could make it so that the chance doesn't increase if you are spectating.

I don't know how they would solve achievement_idle servers, but then again if hats don't matter to the people who don't idle, then surely it's ok if people choose to go on an idle server to get them?

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

In the UK the queen can throw out parliament, the lords and claim back power without breaking any laws.

She hasn't but after 100 years and its not fixed maybe she should?

Just because its broken doesnt mean you should just do what isnt intended... cos eventually youll break it and then be hung for high treason.

That really makes no sense in this context, it's just an awful comparison. People idling is not going to break the drop system, where-as the Queen taking over again would be completely impractical and would never happen. There are loads of old laws which are stupid, most of them have been overwritten by newer laws which hold more power.

Idling just goes to show that people are unhappy with the system in place and valve should spend more time fixing it than trying to punish people they mark as 'sinners'.

Most arguments against idling are just 'valve didn't intend for it to happen, so it's wrong', well maybe if valve put more thought into these things before shoving it onto a game then people wouldn't feel the need to do things so drastic. For example making a program that emulates TF2 so you can run it 24/7 just to have a chance of getting 1 hat.

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

How is it?

Explain how that doesnt fit in this context?

A broken system shouldnt be exploited just because its broken and hasnt been fixed.


Old laws, its funny, that get replaced, funny thing is, no longer have power.. in fact its only if they dont get replaced or updated at all or even recognize they still remain active laws. Funny eh? kinda like a drop system, right, which your meant to get stuff by playing the game, yeh, and you end up doing it out of the game which wasnt intended, geddit, but its ok cos they never filled in the hole, so its actually correct to do it! Yeh. Wait. Oh. Queen taking over country again....

If you wanna complain about a system, you "lobby" or write a big bad letter of unhappiness, instead of just saying "FUCK YOUR WAY JIM!"

It's being "exploited" because it's broken, not that it should be "exploited" because it's broken, i think that's quite simple to understand. If they can't be bothered to either fix the "exploit" or fix the system (preferably this one), then they can't stop it from being "exploited". If it's so broken that people go to measures like the idle program then I think Valve should probably to take a hint (a rather large 12000+ player hint).

I find it funny that you think people didn't complain Rebellions start when governments ignore the people who voted for them (or bought a game in this case).

I never said that everyone should idle, or that it was 'correct', I just said it wasn't wrong. If you don't care about hats then why would you care so strongly about people who idle? They stay out of the way of you, now that there are idle servers they stay out of our servers, it has no effect on anyone playing the game what so ever.

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

maybe u guys shud take this outside... and by outside i mean, buy train tickets and fight!

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

Twat.

I agree by the way mummble isn't as bad as the Idler but it could be seen that way, as could scripts, altering textures it just seems that Valve decided to police this and reward people wo didnt use the idler. Well done to all of you... I have had NO penalty from using it at all.

Oh and the halo's make you much easier to see, especially as spies. Fail.

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agreed

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

I agree.
The system was designed to reward people who play the game - certainly one may argue that idling exploits this system. However, because idling does not give you an unfair advantage over other players, it really is not that big a deal.
Breaking the EULA is something completely different.