How Valve could Handle Economy Portability for TFx.

With rumors surfacing that Valve may be working on a new game in Team Fortress land, the old question comes back of what to do about economy portability. And I do mean old, I wrote “Source 2 and Valve’s History of Ports”, which looked at the question, back in 2015! Some of what I wrote then holds up to my current thinking, though I mostly punted at the end and said, ‘Valve smart. Valve do smart thing too big for my brain.’

One thing to note is that Valve has yet to show its hand on how it would handle economy porting. Counter-Strike 2 is mostly an engine upgrade to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and so they didn’t have to address item porting between an old economy and a new one.

But a new Team Fortress is likely not to be a port to a new engine. I think the spawn artists at Valve have learned too much to try to keep everything as it is for the franchise, with nothing but a new engine. If we see a new TF game, it will mean changes in characters, classes, weapons, and game modes.

New characters and weapons rules out straight portability from the get-go. The cosmetics are made to fit existing models, and most were community contributions. Automation could let them port the models, but unless they keep similar player character models, the ports won’t fit. And with weapons, unless they are keeping the same weapons, porting will gain them nothing.

In thinking about this, I thought about medals. There are more medal designs and models in the game than any other type of cosmetic, but you almost never see them worn. They don’t have great visibility. They are more about having an inventory item that says you played in such league for such season. So many wasted pixels! How could you fix the medal problem?

My best answer to the medal problem is back-patches. Create cosmetics where the back is a nice canvas to slap a piece of art (a decal). Unlike the TF2 Decal tool, these decals would be approved textures that would be selectable by the player. Better than a unique medal nobody wears, the art could actually see use, particularly since the art can be a lot more inviting than a medal model.

There are a few places back-patches won’t work. Several of the TF2 mercenaries wear backpack items (e.g., Pyro’s tank, Medic’s medibeam backpack), or have cosmetic items or functional items that cover the back up. For those that could fit it, they could be modified to allow for texture selection to show off these back decals, but not all could. That’s okay, though. If the player prefers a backpack to showing off a decal, that’s their choice, and it’s no worse than not equipping a medal.

How does that fit with porting the economy? you wonder. The answer is that for certain classes of items, rather than porting, the player could receive access to a cool texture to display on their back. Have an australium weapon? Get a cool texture. Have an unusual hat? Get a cool texture. Have a Hale’s Own strange? Cool texture.

There are a couple of ways it could work, but I think the best way is if the new TF game didn’t grant these textures as drops (though for other purposes it could). Instead, it would look at your existing TF2 inventory and make certain textures available based on having certain items in TF2. That way, if you played Mann versus Machine after the new game launched and got an australium weapon, you’d still get access, but if you traded it away, you’d lose it.

The cross-inventory system would help the original game retain some economic value, and it could open the door to similar cross-game inventory recognition. If you picked up the next Team Fortress game and have lots of inventory in another Valve game, it could let you have decals respecting that, as well.

I think I need to underline that these textures can be a lot cooler than simply having a little medal model, and their variety and badassery would really make them rock, while their cost is relatively low in terms of, well, it’s just an image (possibly with special shaders or even animation) after all. Having a variety of in-game cosmetics that all allow for the back-patch to be shown would only add to their flavor.

They could also be employed beyond decorating a player-character’s back. For example, they could be shown with the player’s name in the topscores at the end of a match, or if the maps accommodate it, on billboards or other decorations that would be dynamically changed based on who is playing and other features of gameplay.

I don’t think crafting TF2 items into TF-next items makes sense like I had considered in the old post. The rollout will have limited items available, for one, and the old economy likely retains some long-term merit worth keeping intact. So you need some other way to take a slice of the old value and let it be shown in the new game. Back-patches seem like the biggest canvas available (okay, you could give the new mercenaries some kind of totems or banners that float around, but that would be a whole stylistic choice).

In any case, we’ll have to see if Valve really is making a new Team Fortress, and if so what they decide to do with all of it.