You have a bitter taste in your month because a company hasn’t come out with a new game? Isn’t that rather a sign that you like the company and the products they make? What is the deal with people thinking they are entitled to another Half-Life? Episodic or not, they aren’t. We may all want to know how the story ends, but we don’t get to make the timeline.
It's more the lack of information that the fans are getting uppity about. It's regarded as one of, if not the best fps in history and people really wish to see it contiuned. It seems like to the fans that valve has just gave up on the half-life series and decided to make Hat Simulator 2011.
I’ll admit the whole micro transaction thing is very very strange, but it did not butcher the community. There are still servers up every day with low pings and plenty of players. How exactly do you measure a “butchered” community?
The community of TF2 is just disturbing. Go onto the steam forums for a second and 90% of the front page will be about hats. Tha balance has gone out the window. The comptitive scene is a shadow of it's foremoreself. It's near impossible for a new player to compete on an equal level with other people due to the horrid item drop system. The over powered weapons with no downsides what so ever. The gimmic weapons which make team mates useless to you (it's team fortress for a reason). The lack of class balance, the pyro is still terrible and valve insists on giving it new shitty weapons instead of new abilities. The whoring out of team fortress to other developers so we can get shitty art direction breaking weapons and hats. Adding hats to the sets some of which are completely postive. The lack of a serverside toggle to remove hats. Trading; which gives you spammers that sit in spawn, team mates that stop in the middle of battle to trade with some other idiot. TF2 is done, it's dead. Anyone with half a brain jumped the ship ages ago. The truth is the game can never return to a state where the balance and gameplay were the top priority so now it will be milked to it's final drop.
Where to start on this one? You are upset and complaining that Valve released a free game and didn’t support it? Really? This is a big thing your entire post is missing out on. Supporting these games long after they’ve been released costs money and is not something the average development team does. Any additional content they released for TF2 or Half-Life or anything else could have easily been a paid download. TF2 has been out now for three and a half years! The fact that Valve even lets the servers run is pretty incredible, let alone developing new content for it.
I'm not complaing that they didn't support the game, it just seem like a wrong move. Alien Swarm being updated with just a few more maps, or even easier a way to download player made maps ingame could have gotten a lot more people into steam. Valve's complete indifference to getting people into steam makes me worried that they think they can just whore out their games to other developers when the money pile dies down a bit.
As for paying for dlc, well in the case of team fortress 2 it would have been welcomed. Let the kids buy their hats while the gamers play their game. TF2 is like buying a cake, enjoying the cake, then a couple days later the chef comes up and farts in your face. You attempt to complain but everyone states that it was free, so it must be good!
But, again, how can this leave a bitter taste in your mouth compared to the business practice of other major game companies? Map packs for 20 bucks? “Elite units of the (direction)” for 6 dollars? New train types for 2 dollars!?
Hats for 20 dollars (more than the game itself)? Some of which are needed for item sets? Some of which give a complete postive buff?
Whew, fuck! I'm glad they didn't do that at all. *Cough*
Seriously though, valve used to be a beacon of light in the computer gaming market. To me it seems like we're losing that perfection and moving on with milking little Jimmy's parents' bank account like all game developers end up going. That what really makes me sad.
This wasn't a personal attack either, just defending my statements.