Players who use ”external idling applications” to get those items from Team Fortress 2 are in for a nasty surprise as Valve reveals their ”zero tolerance policy” in a blog.
Only items ‘earned’ through ”cheating the system” are being removed for now, but future offenders will have ”all of their items” wiped. This will only affect 4.5 percent of players.
”Over the next few days we’ll be removing all TF2 items that were earned using external idling applications. We’re going to adopt a zero tolerance policy for external applications used to manipulate the persistent item system,” blogged Valve on the TF2 site.
”Due to us not having a policy in place prior to today, this time we’re only removing the items earned through cheating the system. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we’ll remove all of their items. If you’re interested, only about 4.5% of the players in TF2’s community will be affected by this cleansing process.”
Valve has now ”significantly increased” the chance of getting hats, and promise players will find a new hat amongst their gear for those who ”took the moral high road”.
”We realize there is a high level of demand for items, and we’re still working on systems to allow you to find them in new ways (via Trading, and crafting duplicates into desired items). However, we need to draw the line at running external applications.”
You have been warned; external idling shall not be tolerated by this Valve administration.
Source: Shacknews
