Valve has announced that weapon unlocks for Team Fortress 2 no longer work through Achievements.
The Sniper vs Spy update released last week has changed how the classes unlocks new weapons and items, and Valve’s Erik Johnson has made an attempt to explain how the new item drop system works on the TF2 blog.
The new system, according to Johnson, “watches the amount of time that players are playing TF2, and gives them a chance to find items at regular intervals.”
Valve based the system on rewarding the amount of time played because they didn’t want “players to have to do weird things like join achievement grinding servers to get new content.” He also wrote that “basing it off time also has the benefit of ensuring that if you play a lot of TF2, you’re going to get more items than players who don’t.”
The reason for this change is because the developer was “disappointed in the number of people that got to play with the new weapons” through the achievements system, “and feedback from the community was generally not favorable with this approach.”
Johnson also mentioned planned ideas for future updates with item trading, which is “why you’re finding duplicates.” Players will also be given “a method to influence the system so they can work directly toward getting specific items,” and “adding more rare items like the hats.”
Read more on the patch details and patch notes here. In brief, the update gives the Sniper a Huntsman longbow, a Razorback backstab protector, and the ability to lob his own wee at enemies; the Spy gets two new stealth watches and an Ambassador revolver; and there are also achievements, bugfixes, new maps and a new gametype.
