Everyone and their brother has commented (no links, too boring) on the new TF2 randomized loot system, so I’ll save a lot of venom. It’s not that it is broken, it just turns a game of skill+luck into a game of pure luck, like a slot machine.

When one is rewarded, they look to a condition that caused that reward to repeat. It’s Skinner. When there is no cause to the effect, there is no behavior to reinforce. Since games are “a series of interesting choices”, choices being behaviors, it ceases to provide the player with any means to achieve – there is no interesting choice for him to face. The game is less fun as a result.

But let me defend Valve – they aren’t stupid. Reading between the lines, they clearly ran out of time. They were working on two class updates, six new items, sixty new achievements, five new maps and a list of bug fixes. They had a system that was functional, but not enough time to drop the -ctional. Instead of delaying the entire update, they allowed a half-assed system to go out the door which was probably the right decision. From the backtracking on their blog, it looks like they know what they’ve done and will patch it to something useful in a minor update. In the meantime, slot machines aren’t so bad. Sixty thousand grandmothers at the Seminole Hard Rock can’t be wrong.

It’s my first day of school today, oh boy. Let me gather up my pencils and little nubby eraser bits that go on the end and protractors and lunch tickets and trapper keepers… Actually, I’m not all that excited. I’m taking Accounting for six long weeks. No disrespect to accountants out there; it’s just not my game.

Speaking of games, I’m going to do another iPhone game roundup very shortly since I’ve amassed a few interesting titles since my last update: Chocolatier (!), Dream Chronicles, The Quest (Lite), Phase 10, Trivial Pursuit, Lemonade Stand, Phrase Party, Cooking Quest (Lite). Wow, that’s actually a lot more than I thought.

Also: Have you seen Team Fortress 2′s “Meet The Spy” video? They took it to a new level: Even if you don’t play TF2, I think you will enjoy this.

Oh, what the hell – these are great too if you haven’t seen them, but may only be funny to TF2 players. Since the Scout looks like Vince Offer, someone put this together:

But Heavy Weapons Guy wanted a piece of that action, so he sells household cleaners when he isn’t merc-ing:

I started playing Team Fortress 2 again yesterday and I actually have a lot to say about their brutal achievement system, but I will save that for a later day because I’m far too distracted by finding pictures on the Internet and trying to resist the urge of putting captions to them. It’s really the Typhoid of the Internet, this captioning thing.

Also, are there any TF2 servers that are exclusive that someone could key me into? While PC doesn’t have the mouth-breathing homophobia of Xbox Live, two-thirds of the servers I joined yesterday were full of people who were either being whiny passive-aggressives: “Oh, that’s cool, don’t bother getting those Sentries or anything. We don’t want to win.” or bitchy power users:”OMG, n00b! Blah blah blah”. If there’s a server out there that enforces my three commandments of “Thou Shalt Be Nice”, “Thou Shalt Help New People” and “Thou Shalt Abstain From Being A Whiny Bitch”, it would have my patronage every time I booted it up.

If it doesn’t exist, anyone want to start one?