Today we're shipping some significant changes to the item drop system.

• Previously, we rolled randomly at intervals to see if you got an item drop. Now we roll to determine when your next item drop will occur. So you're guaranteed to find items at fairly regular intervals. The bulk of drop complaints we've received in the past have been from players having unlucky streaks, where they didn't find any items for weeks. That won't be possible now.
  
• We've significantly increased the rate at which item drops occur, compared to the previous average interval.
  
• There's now a maximum amount of playtime per week in which you get item drops. Playing beyond that amount won't find any more items. The amount varies, but if you play an hour or so a day you're good. Some of your unused time will rollover to the following week, so if you're an intermittent player you'll also be fine.
  

What are the net effects of these changes? Here's the quick summary:

• If you're an idler, you're going to find fewer items than you were prior to this change. Sorry. On the bright side, there's less reason to idle, because it won't earn more than players who are playing regularly.
  
• Everyone else will find items more frequently, and with greater regularity.
  

We're still thinking about how to allow you to influence your drops. When we see discussions on the forums, people often ask why we don't tie it to some in-game performance (like your scoreboard position, or number of kills, etc). Many players understand that if we did this, idle servers would simply change into servers running plugins that generate those in-game events frequently (as we saw in the Soldier & Demoman WAR!).

There's another side of it that we care about just as much, which is the message it would send to all the players who don't want to idle. Any in-game performance metric we chose would result in there being specific maps, classes, tactics, and so on that resulted in more drops. We really don't want that to happen. When it's simply playtime, you're free to play the game however you like. If you love Payload, you can play Payload maps without worrying about whether you're earning less drops than the guys playing Arena maps. Community mapmakers don't have to worry about whether their maps earn item drops fast enough. Similarly, server operators can configure their servers however they like, without worrying about reducing the rate at which their players are earning drops. In short, while it's far from perfect, not tying to in-game performance is a lot less poisonous to your minute-to-minute game experience.

<a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/901399/"><img src="http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/max_ears.jpg" width="420" height="255" border="0"></a>

At Valve, we like to play games made by other people, mainly because a) we don't have to make them, and b) they're generally more fun than ours anyway. In particular, games made by other people don't have Pyros named Eric Smith, who makes our collective lives miserable on a daily basis in playtests. (If you ever wonder why features like "Pyro now gets assists for airblasting enemies into environmental hazards" keep getting added to the game, thank Eric. Not content with killing us by just holding down W+M1, he persists in finding bold new ways to get points by any means necessary.)

It turns out that not only do we play other games--other game developers play ours. Last year <a href="http://www.telltalegames.com/" class="standardLink">Telltale Games</a>' TF2 Team went head to head with us in the TF2 Studio Rumble tournament, in the process dominating our own Adrian Finol so hard that he made up an excuse about "picking up my kids somewhere" and went and sat in his car for an hour. After the match, we all agreed that one of these days we should do something cool together, because they're big fans of TF2, and we're big fans of getting advance copies of Sam & Max episodes.

Fast forward to now, and doodly-doodly-doot: We're doing something cool together. To celebrate the release of The Penal Zone, the first episode in Sam & Max's new adventure, <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/901399/" class="standardLink">The Devil's Playhouse</a>, the Telltale team has provided us with some awesome TF2 items. We're going to give them out to everyone who buys The Penal Zone in the next week.

That's right: one week only. It's like the Soldier medal all over again, except this time you have no excuse about being too asleep in bed to download it in time. The items:

<strong>Max's Severed Head</strong>
<ul><li>It's not often you're given the gift of a beloved character's decapitated head by the very studio responsible for that character. Still, we're not complaining. It's soft, it wicks away moisture in the heat of battle, it highlights our eyes. It's got us thinking about all the other game characters we could be wearing around as clothes.</li></ul>

<strong>Max's Pistol</strong>
<ul><li>Who wouldn't want to squeeze off a couple rounds with the murder weapon of choice of a sociopathic cartoon rabbit? Probably quite a lot of people, when you get right down to it. Luckily, those people are all well-adjusted contributors to society with no police records, spotless credit ratings and few unresolvable moral failings. They also probably have no interest in playing TF2, so that means more murder-rabbit gun shooting for the rest of us.</li></ul>

<strong>Sam's Revolver</strong>
<ul><li>This might look like an ordinary revolver, until you realize that it helps a talking dog solve crimes. How many crimes has YOUR dog solved lately? And let's face it, his revolver kind of sucks too. Man, we want to talk about this gun more, but we can't get over how much your dog sucks.</li></ul>

So there's the loot, folks. Get over to <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/901399/" class="standardLink">Steam</a> and take a look at The Penal Zone. (And to answer your question, no. We asked. It doesn't mean what we thought it meant.)

At Valve, we like to play games made by other people, mainly because a) we don't have to make them, and b) they're generally more fun than ours anyway. In particular, games made by other people don't have Pyros named Eric Smith, who makes our collective lives miserable on a daily basis in playtests. (If you ever wonder why features like "Pyro now gets assists for airblasting enemies into environmental hazards" keep getting added to the game, thank Eric. Not content with killing us by just holding down W+M1, he persists in finding bold new ways to get points by any means necessary.)

It turns out that not only do we play other games--other game developers play ours. Last year Telltale Games' TF2 Team went head to head with us in the TF2 Studio Rumble tournament, in the process dominating our own Adrian Finol so hard that he made up an excuse about "picking up my kids somewhere" and went and sat in his car for an hour. After the match, we all agreed that one of these days we should do something cool together, because they're big fans of TF2, and we're big fans of getting advance copies of Sam & Max episodes.

Fast forward to now, and doodly-doodly-doot: We're doing something cool together. To celebrate the release of The Penal Zone, the first episode in Sam & Max's new adventure, The Devil's Playhouse, the Telltale team has provided us with some awesome TF2 items. We're going to give them out to everyone who buys The Penal Zone in the next week.

That's right: one week only. It's like the Soldier medal all over again, except this time you have no excuse about being too asleep in bed to download it in time. The items:

Max's Severed Head

• It's not often you're given the gift of a beloved character's decapitated head by the very studio responsible for that character. Still, we're not complaining. It's soft, it wicks away moisture in the heat of battle, it highlights our eyes. It's got us thinking about all the other game characters we could be wearing around as clothes.

Max's Pistol

• Who wouldn't want to squeeze off a couple rounds with the murder weapon of choice of a sociopathic cartoon rabbit? Probably quite a lot of people, when you get right down to it. Luckily, those people are all well-adjusted contributors to society with no police records, spotless credit ratings and few unresolvable moral failings. They also probably have no interest in playing TF2, so that means more murder-rabbit gun shooting for the rest of us.

Sam's Revolver

• This might look like an ordinary revolver, until you realize that it helps a talking dog solve crimes. How many crimes has YOUR dog solved lately? And let's face it, his revolver kind of sucks too. Man, we want to talk about this gun more, but we can't get over how much your dog sucks.

So there's the loot, folks. Get over to Steam and take a look at The Penal Zone. (And to answer your question, no. We asked. It doesn't mean what we thought it meant.)

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Added Sam & Max items
  
• Fixed the Demoman's Fro not cloaking properly when being used by a disguised Spy
  
• Reduced the damage bonus the Equalizer receives as the player loses health
  
  • The speed boost was not changed
    
• Community Request
  
  • Added a flag to info_particle_system to mark particle systems as "weather" effects
    

<img src="http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/law_abiding_engineer.jpg" width="420" height="184" border="0">

Just a quick update to point out some of the fantastic community activity out there that gets emailed to us every so often. Hopefully you're aware of some of it already. If not, you're in for a treat.

<a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=3683&p=1">Check it out at the TF2 blog</a>

Just a quick update to point out some of the fantastic community activity out there that gets emailed to us every so often. Hopefully you're aware of some of it already. If not, you're in for a treat.

Check it out at the TF2 blog

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Updated the new community-built hats so they can be crafted
  
• Updated the Camera Beard and Medic Mask so they can be crafted as hats
  

<img src="http://www.tf2.com/images/posts/heavy_theking.jpg" width="420" height="276" border="0">

In the past we've shipped features that came from community suggestions. Now we've taken it one step further: we're shipping game content that was directly built by the community.

Today's TF2 update includes a bunch of new items and weapons, all of which were made by members of the TF2 community and uploaded to the <a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/contribute/" class="standardLink">Contribute! site</a>. The overall quality of submissions we're receiving is fantastic, by the way, so there'll be plenty of new additions to follow. The submitters of these items will find nifty unique versions sitting in their backpacks, so they can show everyone their work.

This is really exciting for us here at Valve. Starting from our core belief that entertainment products should be services, we've tried to increase the set of ways our community can impact our games, and the ways in which we can reward you for it. From the implementation of features requested by players and mapmakers, to unique community items given to valuable community contributors, to the purchasing and shipping of popular maps, to the ARG-style product announcement of Portal 2, we've tried to include our players in the ongoing challenge of improving our games and their communities.

This update represents the next step in that process. The line between developers and players is getting very blurry, and we think that's a great thing.

In the past we've shipped features that came from community suggestions. Now we've taken it one step further: we're shipping game content that was directly built by the community.

Today's TF2 update includes a bunch of new items and weapons, all of which were made by members of the TF2 community and uploaded to the Contribute! site. The overall quality of submissions we're receiving is fantastic, by the way, so there'll be plenty of new additions to follow. The submitters of these items will find nifty unique versions sitting in their backpacks, so they can show everyone their work.

This is really exciting for us here at Valve. Starting from our core belief that entertainment products should be services, we've tried to increase the set of ways our community can impact our games, and the ways in which we can reward you for it. From the implementation of features requested by players and mapmakers, to unique community items given to valuable community contributors, to the purchasing and shipping of popular maps, to the ARG-style product announcement of Portal 2, we've tried to include our players in the ongoing challenge of improving our games and their communities.

This update represents the next step in that process. The line between developers and players is getting very blurry, and we think that's a great thing.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Added items submitted to the Contribute! site by members of the community
  
  • Submit your own creations! http://www.teamfortress.com/contribute/