Noshire

Seeing that Valve - with a certain valve-time delay, of course, but still - generally listens to the needs of the community, I do also hope that they will change something in the way the whole crateconomy works right now. There's thousands of possibilities to still give people a reason to buy keys while, at the same time, also involving people who don't want to pay extra in the whole crate business. Mr. Green is a good example for a nice solution; with just 1 Euro (if it hasn't changed, checked it about 1 year ago), you can buy 1000 virtual coins, which you can spend on cool stuff. Still, if you don't want or just can't afford this, there's always the other way of just earning them slowly by playing. Despite this "way of getting them for free", people most probably still keep buying lots of coins. That's what I call a balanced system; neither side has a disadvantage, and everyone is happy with their decisions. I think something similar should be done to the crate-key system. Maybe make keys craftable - something in the prize class of 1.5 refined. You can get a crappy weapon, thus losing value, a misc item (the value of which depends on how useful it is to you), or a hat, which would get you even more value.

Hope this doesn't count as necro-posting, but I just wanted to show what happened to crates in the course of the last 3 or 4 months. At the very beginning of the crate period, I used to sell one crate for 1-2 reclaimed metal. Later on, just as the quoted posting states, they went away for 1-2 weapons or one scrap. Nowadays, people sell bundles of 15 crates for a total of 2 weapons, and no one wants to buy them. Same here - opened 2 of my 15 crates with some spare money left from my recent steam game purchases, but I just can't trade the rest away - people don't even want them as gifts in a normal trade anymore. It's like crates have got a negative value nowadays. What do you think will happen to crates in the future? Will Valve decide to add some sort of crafting recipe (like, 9 crates for 1 scrap, for example, or one of the 1000 suggestions on SPUF), or will they keep it the way it is now, because they don't want any potential money to be crafted into stuff people who bought the game can actually make use of without paying more? They might even hope that people whose inventory is full of crates would buy backpack expanders. All this doesn't mean I didn't like the Mann Co. store, to get back on topic. I agree that most prices are a bit too high - the nametags, paints and other one-use items could easily be sold for half the current amount. I did it twice, but I'm just not willing to spend 5 dollars to rename a weapon again. It's a nice concept and it's the best way for Valve to get some more money out of TF2, so they can continue supporting the game. Still, I wonder what will happen to the open crate market in the close future?

Thanks for the quick answer Gonna save up for the Disguise Jutsu then - I never really use the backburner, but this perk is just too much fun not to get.

Sorry if it has already been asked, wasn't able to find any information. How many hitpoints does the "Drunken Life" perk restore, and does it have a cooldown or any other cons? Not sure whether to buy Drunken Life or Disguise Jutsu, so I appreciate any details on that perk

Yeah, saw that quite clearly yesterday. Anyways, the cross-team chillouts in the hot tubes sure were a nice break from all the shooting and splattering As for new maps: I haven't got a chance to play on it yet, but the new construction-themed arena "Hardhat" looks nice. Here's the overview: http://construction.tf2maps.net/ I think just adding new maps, trying them out and then deciding whether to keep them or not is a great idea. Sure, it may cause one or two sudden server-deaths, but in the end, having an asset of new nice maps is more than worth it.