For about 10 days I have been completely consumed with finding the green floating presents in Team Fortress event Scream Fortress. It's amazing that Valve continues to update and add to this 4 year old game, and yet this game can still be enjoyed completely for free.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there were a number of admins cheating the system and taking all the gifts for themselves. I was happy to hear that Valve reacted quickly to this problem and reported has banned a number of servers, even making a blog post about the situation. It's amazing to see that Valve not only sets up this event, which is completely free, but is responsive enough to address and deal with the problem quickly. So many other games have problems that either never get address, or only are done so after a delay.

I hear people complain about Valve some times, but Valve has given so much for so little money and kept on top of bugs with rapid responses. This is in direct contrast to the MMO games which charge a fortune for very mediocre games. I played Star Wars Galaxies for about a year, which cost over $200, but it was pretty poor in terms of game play and updates.

i saw one present on eyeaduct, but didn't realize they took a little while to materialize and was shot down before it was all the way there. i did end up scoring exactly one present though that happened to be fully-materialized and all alone in the mann manor hallway i was going down. it was very exciting to score the masked mann achievement even though the scout mask i got is of no use to me until i manage to collect all the other class masks.

The carrot-on-a-stick hype that this game generates is truly phenomenal 

Valve are terrific examples of how devs should communicate with their community. Gotta love 'em.

I can always go back to TF2. Still my favourite game. They keep it fresh because they keep actively working on it.

I disagree with the quantity of weapons they have introduced in to their ecosystem, but it doesn't wreck the game for me since the basics continue to work just as well.

Valve, I love you. But, fuck you, give us HL3 and CS2 (forget CS:GO).

Sorry gentlemen, just had to get that out.

@Shuborno said:

I can always go back to TF2. Still my favourite game. They keep it fresh because they keep actively working on it.

I disagree with the quantity of weapons they have introduced in to their ecosystem, but it doesn't wreck the game for me since the basics continue to work just as well.

I really don't mind the plethora of weapons; I really hate the hats.

Valve seems to have a full plate of exploits to fix. Aside from that TF2 one, the Steam forums were hacked and have been offline for more than a day, and there's a nasty DoS exploit in Left 4 Dead 2 that griefers are using to lag out and crash dedicated servers, including official Valve ones.

@Aus_azn said:

I really don't mind the plethora of weapons; I really hate the hats.

I'm of the opposite opinion. Cosmetic stuff has no gameplay impact so while I think paints are stupid, I'll live.

There was a time when weapons were introduced 1-3 at a time. You started noticing both how you would use a weapon and how it would be used against you and there would be specific strategies tied around these things. This part of the game is ruined and gone.

Now I'm more likely to stick with old favourites (default and achievement weapons) and ignore everything else. I'm not inclined to try a new weapon drop because I assume it will be mostly useless.