Nope. sounds like he's one of those faggots who uses 3rd party tools to find people with rare items on a server and scam them out of them.
I never understood the preoccupation with cosmetic items. It's not like you can even see your own character anyways, so that's sort of a moot point.
It's probably about self-image. If you think your character looks cool, then when you play you'll feel cool. You know, kinda like when you style your hair as a kid and think you're badass, but when you grow up you can't bear to look at it. I said kid, but I guess for some I mean now. Here's to a bright future!
I like setting up my character to look cool if I can. I run gibus and camera beard as spy so I can become hobo-lincoln.
I was about to post how this thread going into a full on tf2 faggotry ramble was a nice sum of how well emp is doing these days. Then I was about to post how Angry never played that pos that Superman was. And finally I smaked myself in my forehead for being a dumbass and not reading the whole paragraph. I had no idea someone other than me had a really bad opinion of d3. Lmao. edit: jesus fuck, shameful spelling there Aaaaand only after a whole minute I took my time to check my suspision towards this being not long after 1.04. I'm just going to stand in the shame corner for a while.
No, Empty's right. Every trade that I ever made was completely legit, but almost all of them were incredibly exploitative. But I suppose I'm no more of a crook than the guy that traded a paper clip for a corvette on Craig's list.
So, as Empty said, you "use 3rd party software to find people with rare items and scam it out of them". Like, really? That's fairly shameful.
I used tf2items, sure. One thing that you learn is that if people are coming to you for a trade, you are in an incredible position of power. I've been burnt before. I used to have three buds, two bills and a max head. I've definitely made my share of stupid trades. Most of my trades are on small things. When I'm playing on my regular server and someone asks for a small trade (a weapon for some scrap or w/e), it's usually a shitty trade for them. I take advantage of those opportunities as often as possible. So while empty makes it sound like you could scan people out of rare items, that's not entirely true. Sure, in the very beginning, you could do that (I got my max head for like a crate), but those opportunities died up very quickly. Long term opportunities are the small ones. After you make a few dozen small trades to slowly build up your wealth, you can afford to trade for a very nice hat or something. That's why my backpack is full of like two of every kind of vintage weapon. If someone asks for a weapon, I will almost always have it. If I don't, I'll have a vintage copy that I can try to charge more for. So sure, I only make trades that benefit me. I know the markets. If that makes me a scammer, then I'll happily take that title.
I don't know, that sounds like an inordinate amount of effort used for such a small gain. If cosmetics gave stat gains or something similar, I would understand the sentiment, but I honestly don't see the point of going through all this pointless effort to acquire pointless items. I can understand the sentiment a bit more in games like Dota, because you can actually see your character, but nonetheless, I still really don't care for cosmetics in that game, bar the courier and wards (because I like to play support all the time), so I just end up giving away all my useless cosmetics in that game to other people who would actually appreciate them.
When you get down to it, everything in every video game is meaningless achievement. I suppose an exception might be multiplayer games where you can beat an opponent, but then it only becomes as meaningless as any other sport or competition. I genuinely don't believe that this is an inappropriate slippery slope argument. Video games are just one more outlet for achievement. It's just that some are more or less structured than others. But I can respect your stance. You felt the same way about BioShock, so you're consistent. You found no achievement from experimenting with quirky ways to overcome the game's enemies. So I can't expect you to care about tf2 hats, which are less structured. And I really don't want to seem like a condescending prick. Like any other form of entertainment, video games are only entertaining if you enjoy them. That's why a tremendous variety of entertainment products can still be supported by the entertainment market.
I saw this and got a little confused. I thought it was for entertainment. And some of that is for story purposes, a very small part is informational and possibly some logical practice comes in on certain game types, as well as logistical and organisational on others (more often sim type). To be fair, we play games for fun, and if you gain niche reflex skills through playing it isn't really an achievement, but it doesn't always have to be meaningless. A lot of single player games are interesting in how they deal with characters and a storyline. The slightly broken ones are usually better at making you think, since most people put a handle on what makes them annoyed over time, and many are able to do character and story assassinations after a while. Mods like this one also come about from people looking at the design of other games, breaking that into parts in their heads and then seeing what they would like to create instead. If you think about it, almost all of us here are beta testers, and we give feedback based on the conclusions we draw from the flow of the game and the experience we've had of it. To effectively do that actually requires a lot of understanding and experience of not only games, but the technology behind them. In most cases it also helps to have an understanding of the minds and time that are available to go into the game. Of course I've digressed, but since you opened your post with an emphatic line like that, I would expect you to feel it was at least partially true and wanted to point out that largely, it's not meaningless. Like you more or less said to Hexi, it's what you put in that determines what you get out.