Counter-Strike Opens Weapons Market

kalpatin writes "The ever so popular game, Counter Strike:Source developed by Valve, has a new feature added to the game: A virtual marketplace for the weapons and equipment. According to Valve, every item's price will be updated on a weekly basis depending on the global market demand. Some users have posted their anger toward the new change on the Valve forums and have even started a petition to stop the change. Is Valve turning into Microsoft by introducing features that are not needed or wanted by the community, or are they merely spicing the game up?"

Re:Hmm...

[Skye16]

If you want to add realism, make it so that 8 shots from an mp5 to drops someone. Whether they're dead or not is completely fucking moot. They aren't going to be fighting any longer.

The game hasn't been about realism... well, ever. If you want realism, play SWAT or Rainbow Shield.

Well, back to 1.6 then...

[UnderDark]

I guess to get the old CS back, I'll just have to play 1.6...

Get out of your cocoon

[fistfullast33l]

throws entire match strategy right out the window.

Oh no, god forbid you have to change your strategy in a 10 year old game. People, get a grip. I love that some people are crying out for the Wii because it uses a new controller that according to them will revolutionize the way games are played, and yet they still bitch and complain about a change like this. Most times when I play CounterStrike, you usually end up with $16000 really quickly and dominate the match wit hteh best weapons, or you constantly lose and have the SMGs that can't compete as well with the rifles.

I applaud Valve for bringing a change like this. It's time for games to start taking more advantage of the global internet and stop creating a world that is server and instance based. So many people play MMO's nowadays that really, I don't see games like CounterStrike keeping up with them. You're constantly starting from zero and whatever stats are saved are server based only so if you want any progression you need to constantly use the same server. I only hope the "newly announced" TF2 encorporates more of this stuff.

Re:Why HL2 is the last valve game I buy

[SanityInAnarchy]

I think that, for the most part, the responsible thing to do is make all updates tweakable, unless they fix an obvious bug. So, for instance, if they suddenly decided to change the gravity, they should make sure those of us running our own servers can tweak sv_gravity.

This, I think, is far superior to what you're describing with LOTR. In that case, if you don't like the patch, you can't usually uninstall it, you'll have to reinstall the game from scratch. Oh, and good luck finding the 1.1 patch if there's a 1.5 out already.

This is also one thing I liked about the smaller MMOs, the ones which you download for free, and which you only pay a subscription fee. The bigger ones, you have to buy a $50 game so that you get the install cd/dvd. Smaller ones, just download. Try it for a week, with limitations. Then try it for a month for $10. If you don't like it, cancel your account.

But that's only even necessary for MMOs because the strength of an MMO is having tons of people playing on the same server, so of course everyone has to be running the exact same version of the game. Even if they're not, server patches affect everyone, lie it or not.

For my money, I don't know about you, but I buy a game because I like it now, not because I want to enshrine it forever. It's always nice to be able to go back and play the original Half-Life or Doom, but really, if I was able to play through a game a few times, I'm happy. If Valve kills Half-Life 2 tomorrow, I'll be pissed, but I wouldn't feel I got a bad deal.

Re:Why HL2 is the last valve game I buy

[Thansal]

Well, first up, you don't have to patch it. (tel lsteam to not update it)
you can thus still paly on LANs, and servers that have not updated.

next up is the fact that some one will disable this rather quickly.

This is going to work in 1 of 2 ways:
1) hard code the numbers into a patch released each day/week/hour/whatever.
2) Stream the data from a central server.

If it is option 1 then you just use any of the Admin Mod/what ever the other server mod utils are plugins that lets you set prices. (Wow that was hard)

Option 2? I am willing to bet that some one will come up with a way to block the connection, or to simply over ride the prices with a new server side plug in. (how about pointing the attempts to get the "new" prices to another server that ismply feeds it back the old prices?)

Remember, the HL Community is one of the most mod hapy communities out there.

Smart idea

[jmichaelg]

Tweaking game play is one of the hardest aspects of developing a video game. You're balancing personal preferences against what works well for the most people. I wrote the original Star Wars arcade port for the C64 for Parker Brothers. The project manager couldn't make up his mind on how the cursor should feel and so I ended up coding a roll-your-own cursor feedback tool for him so he could tweak the acceleration parameters himself. It was far more productive to write the tweak code and let him fart around than it was for me to burn a prom give it to him, have him say something like - "it should be more responsive" or "it's too responsive."

By making this patch, Valve has in essence, coded their own version of letting the players roll their own parameters. Instead of a small group's opinion on what the prices should be, it's the combined player's opinion that matters.

For the younger players, it's an introduction to price/demand responses. Of course, it's artificial in that the comodities have no production cost so from the producer's perspective, the weapons could be free. Nonetheless, it conveys the message to younger players that tho more people do or don't want something, that will affect the price of the something.

I think its fantastic

[1.000.000]

It will definetly mean that a wider range of weapons will be used over time, instead of just the M4A1, CV47 and Magnum. This also means new tactics will be developed to suit the new challenges. Thats very positive for a game and its positive for all players who like to face new challenges.

You can always argue wether its a good or bad thing that the provider controls the content and not the customer. One thing that speaks for the provider is the ressources needed to run the servers and scoresystem and so on, which are essential in any competitive game. If you had to support 10 different versions it would require more ressources, so its quite understandable that the provider chooses to only have 1 version running.

Im excited to see how it plays out ingame and i personally think it will give the game a fresh new twist.