Unless I'm wildly misreading this blog post, TF2 has now dipped to shady Korean MMO levels of "pay us an uncapped amount of money" tactics:

The Per Diem Perk

Mister Reddy has prepared three absolutely unique one-of-a-kind hats that will rotate through the mercenary community every day. Who will get them? The three mercs who give the most gifts, win the most duels, and purchase the most map stamps on a given day. Presumably wearing these one-of-a-kind hats will make the winners feel like they've achieved something. Or not, I could give a damn. So long as they make you all better killing machines.

As someone who gets back into TF2 once every few months, I've never been an active enough player to buy anything from the shop (I did pay $8 for that Japanese tsunami charity hat), but this tactic seems like a brand new low that really milks the few hundred players who have no self-control when it comes to their disposable income.

Goddammit. Now I need to cancel all my Kickstarters and get some more hats.

Link to TF2 blog here.

This isn't that different from what they've been doing.
 
And it isn't like they are actively milking people, it's rewarding people who give the most back to the community.
 
Maps Stamps specifically are the only way in which map makers actually see any money from the store, so that is actually really cool that they're adding this incentive to purchase stamps.

This sounds pretty great to me.

Sounds great for people who care about it!

I don't give a shit about hats though.

Having never played TF2 (but heard plenty of jokes about hats) I've always been passingly curious: what do the hats actually do?

Suckers will be suckers

@Addfwyn said:

Having never played TF2 (but heard plenty of jokes about hats) I've always been passingly curious: what do the hats actually do?

Almost all of the hats do nothing. There are alternate weapons as well, which have different amounts of damage, magazine size, etc. But the hats mostly have no gameplay effect. They do, however, turn this:

Into this:

Most of the hats sorta kill the consistency of the original characters designs.

Seems totally fine to me personally... but whatever

i need more money now.

I really like the hat system. Vain attention seekers with too much money buy cosmetic items to subsidise the game for everyone else.

Having never played TF2 (but heard plenty of jokes about hats) I've always been passingly curious: what do the hats actually do?