Whoa. Dejavu.

I thought I'd fire up the old TF2 last night, after 3 weeks of Red Bull and long nights of animation, coding and design. I find that in general people on servers tend to greet or comment on players they haven't seen in awhile alot more than the regulars. Albeit there probably is some massive sociological study somewhere which documents this sort of behavior in great detail but this post isn't one of them.

Rat would know, he was there with me, I got giddy after a few minutes of pyroing, airblast timing was all off, couldn't judge the distance I was going to push the enemy and I was getting killed by frontburning backburners - embarrassingly bad. Truman prescribed some good nights sleep to patch up the damage accumulated from the past few weeks.

What scares me though, is that I wasn't merely "out-of-touch" with the FPS, but more likely... bored.

Having brought most of you guys from the WoW guild over to TF2, don't you guys see a startling similarity with the way Valve is keeping its player base enticed?

Trum messaged me this morning to tell me that TF2 got ninja-updated, I was like, "Aiyah must be one of those patches that fixes some glitch in the inventory system" But, I was wrong. I had to pick my jaw up from the floor as I read the list of changes. This was becoming World of TF2 very quickly.

Here are some case studies:

Pistol now fires at a fixed rate, not based on the speed at which you press the firing button.

This is a typical example of a "normalisation" in WoW. You penalise players who are able to click quickly (regardless whether they bind fire to mwheel or run a script) and subject them to a hard cap. This effectively levels the playing field in the maximum amount of ammo you can empty at an enemy player and/or building to take them down in the shortest period.

It's known loosely as "casualising" the game. Keeping the game good for the hardcores, but limiting their ability to exceed their casual peers by leaps and bounds.

Here's another,

Engineers wrenching a teleporter will repair the other end as well, and remove Sappers from both if they exist.

Not only can the teleporter transport players and enemy spies, but now they form an intergalatic-time-space rift that sends wrench hits across too! Again, this is a huge boost as well as burden for public large-game server engineers and spies. It takes a piss on acute Spies who make full use of the psychological mindfuck in sapping the entrance first and waiting the the Engy to run back and rebuild it (and then killing him too), proceeding to destroy the exit and collateral structures.

Given, this is a win-win situation for both Engineers and Spies in general, the update favours the common populace of players. Perhaps this normalisation is a good thing, because it might remove the niches and elitism that existed in games previously, driving the player bases to a more active, light-hearted and community oriented one. It's probably a good thing as catering to the casual player population would generally send a clear message to the hardcores: "This isn't about you any more, so stop acting like you own it." Then everyone will just have to get along and play.

I like this.

It takes out all the e-drama in this game. The same kind of e-drama that could cause clans to unite and fall apart. E-drama has the potential to bind groups of individuals with common views. You see it happen in MMOs all the time, be it ninja-looting friends, or because of some IRL issue, the online game experience was significantly affected.

But as Hammifer once told me in one of my futile attempts to play a Q3 duel with him, "Drama keeps the community alive." This is so true in so many ways but again, it's so detrimental in itself.

I think for a game to survive in today's mass-producing video game market, it has to have staying power. Game companies wish to see their game having not only the strongest player base, but also the longest-staying and widest. Just look at the game store. so many fail games out there, games that I wouldn't touch even if you bought it for me for X'mas. Mass produced junk.

What I'm doing here is drawing a comparison between a game that has defied all the laws of video game marketing and one that is about to do the same, because for me it's truly dejavu.

No one in the industry believed WoW could charge SGD$22 per month for its game. But hey they did, and look how many of us were on board that ship. Look at how many of us went to queue up for the expansions on launch day? It became a global event man!

I believe that TF2 is now doing the same thing, if they make some skills which are achieved through experience and training of a motor muscle weaker, it "gives chance" to newer players. At the same time, the learning curve for newer players is decreased in steepness. Much like how WoW eventually made leveling up 10 times faster for players who are only entering the game now.

My guess is that this ensures more copies of the game get circulated and friends can invite other friends to the game without intimidating them too much.

So to be very honest in my opinion, where do players like Xeon the 600+ hours Soldier or myself 400+ hours Medic or Null 99999+ hours (lol) Demoman fit into all this?

No where.

It's both a pleasure and a pain to have played this game for this many hours and have it drastically changed every 2 months in a major patch. But I suppose, for me at least, it is what keeps it fresh. Adaptability and evolution, to change your gameplay again and again to come out tops in your class - always.

I think we all paid for something a little more when we sank our money into this game called TF2. It's not just a computer game, it's social analytics.

So even if I can no longer extract all my Pyro demos to make that new video, I'm pretty sure there'll be a huge amount of things to try in the upcoming days. Just like WoW all over again.