Presumably meant to tackle the dupes problem with the random drops, but what we understand of the current system is totally bizarre. You can ‘craft’ items by combining lots you have to produce one you might not. What does the mighty Camera Beard tell you about a Spy? Nothing, he just got lucky.
Some people play for hours a night, rarely get a weapon, find only dupes, and have never seen a hat in hundreds of hours of play.
On the plus side, that sometimes gives you a weapon for a class you don’t normally play, encouraging you to try it out. You can ‘find’ weapons and hats randomly. And we’re often bribed to play it in counter-productive ways to fulfill achievement criteria, some of which are just fun little jokes. We’re bribed to play that class at the very time when TF2’s primary problem is inevitably going to be too many people playing that class. That means everyone plays the same class when its new weapons are released, even before they’ve earned any of them. You can unlock weapons for a class by earning its achievements. If you’re all too familiar with why the current system needs changing, you can just skip to how I suggest changing it. But their experiments have been weird, and so far the resulting system doesn’t really do its job. They’ve been experimenting with ways to leverage this free content to add an element of persistent progress and character customisation to TF2. I cooed a little about the amount of free stuff Valve have added to TF2 since release, but it’s not purely to fix or improve the classes.
What’s Wrong With Team Fortress 2’s Unlocks