Drunken F00l Steam Stats Edition for Team Fortress 2
Gamer and developer, Drunken F00l (owner of SourceOP, a Source add-on for Half Life 2, TF2) shook up the Team Fortress 2 community recently with the creation of a program that allows you to idle the servers for item drops without having the open game on your computer. Basically it simulates a server idle so it doesn’t actually open the game and join manually.
You must have Steam running with the Steam Community connected for the program to work. Then, simply open the program and allow it to run, connecting to one of several “idle” servers created specifically for the program.
The latest version of the program will show you when you get new items. It will also show timestamps so you know when you received them if you come back to check later. This is a great way for users to calculate how many items they get in a session and the percentages of these item drops.
In addition, a configuration file is included. Currently, you can enable three things from the configuration file:
1. Record on file
2. Elimination of duplicates (except duplicate hats)
3. A summary of what others earn
The settings.txt file controls all the settings. Change the contents of the file to configure the settings you want using values of 0 or 1, save the file, and then start the program. The latest version of the program will now show you how many users there are in the detailed item summary if you have it enabled.
If you have the latest version of the program, you can specify a port to use by putting -port and the port number on the command line (for example: SteamStats.exe -port 1234). This should help people who are having trouble connecting on multiple machines from behind certain NATs.
As a member of the community, I had early access to the program. Drunken F00l’s Steam statistics program took off when he posted on his community forums asking for testers. Not only did the SourceOP community go crazy over the idea, but the word quickly spread and even linked multiple times on the Steam forums, sending a lot of traffic to DF and SourceOP.
The forum thread now has over 180,000 views and continues to grow, and while many players were delighted with the program, others were less than satisfied. There are still players who consider any kind of “inactivity” to obtain drops to be a way to cheat the system and they despise anyone who chooses to obtain items this way.
Regardless of your personal feelings regarding the inactivity of items in TF2, one must acknowledge the ingenuity of said program and cannot help but admire the attention it received in the TF2 community.
Drunken F00l was inspired to create the program when Valve implemented a system of obtaining items (such as unlockable weapons and newly introduced hats) completely randomly from the time spent in the game. Players were frustrated by playing for hours and not getting the items they wanted.
Thousands of “idle” servers started popping up across the TF2 community, created for the sole purpose of joining idle and getting items. But there were a lot of glitches with these servers and they required you to open Team Fortress 2. The DF program solved these problems.
Now Valve has modified their system once again, allowing players to obtain unlockable weapons both through achievements and through the “random” drop system, however the new hats are just random drops. This means that the show is still very popular with players trying to get their hats.
Drunken F00l reports over 6000 unique SteamIDs using the program since it started tracking individual stats. It also keeps statistics on how many items fall and which items fall the most. Full drop percentages for each item can be found on their website / forums (with detailed charts and graphs).