![]() In summary, it comes down to the way Steam authenticates. To explain how Baker's plugin works would get unnecessarily technical, but when asked whether Valve would have an easy way to get rid of it, Baker launched into a lengthy breakdown of how the plugin detects free-to-play users. "I would doubt Valve are okay with method," he said. Baker expects it's not, though less because of what the plugin does, more that it's possible. I've contacted Valve about whether the company's okay with Baker's mod, but haven't heard back. To get a sense of how the community is hashing this out, read this rather contentious thread. ![]() He can't be sure, since the ability to query servers running on Linux for their rulesets is broken at the moment, and from what he can tell, the majority of Team Fortress 2 servers are hosted on Linux machines. " It allows people like Baker to create things that are not necessarily kosher.Īccording to Source Mod (and Baker), there are 16 servers running his mod. Open Steamworks, as Baker puts it, is "a series of scrounged, leaked and reverse engineered headers that allow the usage of the client-side portions of Valve's Steamworks API. "Basically it just boils down to there being a demand for it," explained Baker over email recently, "yet there being very few developers who had the necessary background knowledge to do it without 'hacks.' I was in a unique position due to my work on Open Steamworks." Team Fortress 2 quickly overtook Counter-Strike as the most popular game on Steam. personally i put it in the same category as banning high ping people which i hate but valve has created a problem a community needs a barrier to entry and it needs a way to heal itself if there is a misbehaving member if there is no barrier to entry - and no recourse against those people - it could be bad but its too early to tell there are also a large number of tf2 servers aimed specifically at trading, the non-premium players can't start trades and therefore just end up in these servers taking up a slot and begging for items (it's a trade server owner that originally asked me for the plugin) and yeah, I also dislike high ping kickers, that silly cross-game vac ban detector, and even this one but I figured it was better to do it myself properly before someone released something that did something silly like parse their backpack page to see how many slots they had etc.īetween some public requests for a plugin and other private conversations, Baker relented. To provide a better sense of the mindset, Baker provided me with a transcript of an IRC dialogue between himself and "dvander," the founder of Alliedmodders, where Baker's plugin is hosted. Baker was first asked by a friend in the Team Fortress 2 trading community. As this happened, then followed by the official announcement, there was chatter about a plugin to kick free-to-play users. It's worth remembering this is happening exclusively on private servers, not on Valve's, and anyone who purchased Team Fortress 2 in the past automatically became a premium member when the switch was pulled.īaker and others in the community got the sense Team Fortress 2 was heading towards free-to-play before Valve ever announced it, as some backend changes rolled out. If you don't have one, you're kicked out. Getting bumped to premium after downloading the game for free is simple you only have to purchase an item from the in-game store. ![]() You don't play a game for this many years without forming expectations about the people you play with.Īs such, not everyone responded to the decision with open arms.Īsher Baker, known in the Steam community for his various Valve-related plugins and workarounds, created "Free2BeKicked (Anti-F2P)," a plugin that detects whether a player has a Team Fortress 2 premium account. The people who have been playing Team Fortress 2 since its launch in 2007, however, are a dedicated bunch. It's not like Team Fortress 2 hasn't been ridiculously cheap in the past-once, it was just a few dollars on Steam-but the difference between any amount of money and free is a big one. ![]() When Valve turned Team Fortress 2 into a free-to-play experience, it opened the floodgates. Moving Team Fortress 2 free-to-play follows Valve enabling other F2P games on Steam.
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