Posted: 22-05-09 In: Team Fortress 2 By: Hectic Glenn | (45) comments | Add your comments

We all want to play with the new toys, but how can we get our hands on them? Achievement grinding wasn't much fun, lets be honest...so what is the new system based on? Its simple, its time. How much time do you play TF2? The more you do, the more items you are going to find.

That new system watches the amount of time that players are playing TF2, and gives them a chance to find items at regular intervals. They aren't guaranteed to get the item at those points, but they have a pretty good chance. We based the system on granting items on the amount of time played because we don't want players to have to do weird things like join achievement grinding servers to get new content. 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.

Using average times players play TF2, Valve are still tuning the period between getting new items. The work isn't finished yet however, new things are to come.

• Item trading. This is why you're finding duplicates.
• Giving players a method to influence the system so they can work directly toward getting specific items.
• Adding more rare items like the hats.

Hoodoo, a popular community made payload map has also been added to the update, as well as a quick preview of some of the hats we will be seeing on the Bonus Day update page. Valve are also already working on the next class pack!