Team Fortress 2 Update Kills Idle Servers

[Lovely Mixture]

Cool valve, now that you've done this, can you remove the drop cap please?

Please this. If idleing's no longer a problem, remove the drop cap so the lifeless loser's like me can play for days straight and still get items.

It would also get rid of one major argument by those who continuously try to compare Valve to EA.

Not that I have any love of the TF2 economy, but it works.

 

[Alcom1]

I'll miss seeing some friend in TF2, join their game without paying attention to the map prefix, getting disappointed that they are idle, then see their soulless standing form ride down a conveyor belt so I can headshot them a dozen times before I leave for a more legitimate map.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

Early as always Valve, now that everyone already has every items or isn't playing any more.

That's what I thought too, but apparently it turns out that idling using hacks has become a much bigger problem since the Linux port came out [http://forums.tf2maps.net/showpost.php?p=289149&postcount=6]:

Since TF2 for Linux was released there has been a growing underclass of intelligent idlers who were beginning to do it at a seriously massive scale. It's possible to run TF2 so it only uses around 150MB of RAM, which can be reduced even further by forcing the RAM to page out to virtual memory.

On a fairly standard £30 p/m server with 8GB RAM you would be able to run around 60 instances of TF2 and still have some fairly comfortable headroom in terms of server resources. It is also possible to automate the trading of items between accounts using the Steam Web Trading platform. Once one account hit the drop limit, they'd switch it out with another automatically.

This move affects those people. These people had 400+ accounts hitting the drop limit on a weekly basis, now they simply can't do that without triggering VAC, and turning off drops while in textmode induces the need for dedicated video hardware, and so on.

Valve has likely had this on the cards for a long while, but never implemented it because idlers were never a huge issue until it could be done on such a massive scale.

EDIT:
This guy had nearly 7000 accounts:
http://forums.sourceop.com/threads/145300-PSA-Idling-now-a-bannable-offense

 

[Strazdas]

anything that destroys those idling servers is a good thing. though those servers are good for achievement whoring too. need the "hot him 10 times with piss bottle while hes capping" achievement. jsut ask one of the guys in there to stand on the cap and do it repeatedly. well, that is, it was so before all the people there just went AFK. remember back in 2009 when idle server meant that everyone ran around all over and simply had a no-shoot policy?

Early as always Valve, now that everyone already has every items or isn't playing any more.

So Team Fortress 2 being the second most played game in the entirety of the steam library translates to no-one is playing it anymore?

Source [http://store.steampowered.com/stats/]

no, he said that those who paly it already got it and those who dont have the hats are probably already out of the game. he was implying the game had no new players for a lnog while, not that it is unpopular.