You know there's a flaw in the game design when...

[Tek7]

Of the 3 ToJ members "playing" Team Fortress 2 on Steam right now, none of them are actually playing Team Fortress 2.

I don't want to say that trading and item drops Ruined The Game Forever(TM), but I'm starting to think that Valve has stepped beyond the bounds of equilibrium, disregarded original game design guidelines, and added several features that make the game LESS fun instead of MORE fun.

I'm still waiting for the community to make a mini-mod that strips out the "cruft" that Valve stubbornly continues to add to the game and restores TF2 as a proper FPS instead of a FPSMMO lite.

Note that I'm not against trading; I traded for several items in the last few days. But when the TF2 community seems more interested in the meta-game than the game itself, that doesn't bode well for those who want to play a FPS without dropping coin on virtual items or idle to craft new weapons.

 

[The Mighty Gerbil]

Valve could fix some of those problems so easily too. A convar to allow trading only in spectator mode and one to disable hat bonuses (while still allowing one to wear the hat).

Valve has said they use TF2 as their experiment subject and it certainly seems to be true :/ .

 

[Tek7]

A convar to allow trading only in spectator mode and one to disable hat bonuses (while still allowing one to wear the hat).

+1

If Valve refuses to do it, the community may do it themselves. I'd keep an eye out for SourceMod plugins that disable trading unless in spectator mode (which may not be possible if trading is not server-specific).

There are SourceMod plugins that automatically move AFK players to spectate (the Christian Crew servers use it; I believe it's called AFK Manager) and disable select weapon (I looked at the plugin when it seemed that Valve was never going to balance Natascha).

When something was broken in Modern Warfare 2, it stayed broken unless the developers fixed it. At least in TF2, Valve provided the tools for the community to fix their games. It's happened before (remember when we ran the TF2True mod to disable random crits before Valve added the server cvar that should have been included at release?) and, given the backlash seen with this most recent update, it will very likely happen again.