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Comment by palcu | Hacker News Reader

I guess they are talking about Team Fortress 2 here. In TF2 you are allowed to buy actual weapons and power packs in the marketplace, not just skins for them. You could also get them by playing, but it takes an awful amount of time.

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Another important aspect that I hope they adopt from TF2 is that even if you use default items (e.g. weapons) you will not be in disadvantage when playing with users that spent money on items.

I'm assuming that you won't be able to buy things in the marketplace and bring them into other people's games. With mods in the previous UTs it's been very much that every player in a game is on exactly the same footing except for player skill.

You start with the same gear, and anything else you can get is sitting around the level to be picked up by everybody.

Could be CSGO style weapon skins, where when it's on the group it's the base model, but picking it up changes it to whatever weird skin you bought.

I'm not sure how the community would feel about that. UT puts you in situations where your opponent is carrying around 10 different guns at once, and the split second "he just pulled out a sniper rifle" reaction can be pretty important.

If they do have weapon skins carry into the game, Epic will have to be gatekeeper on approving all of them. If not, you'd have people reskinning their rocket launcher to look like it's something else, with negative gameplay effects.

Perhaps we'll see two tiers of aesthetic mods? Ones that anybody can create and use in their local / self-hosted games, and others that have been approved for online play?

All the gameplay-affecting weapons cost mere pennies in TF2 though (and most of them are sidegrades or downgrades anyway). The money in TF2 is basically all in purely-cosmetic items and effects.

Most of the gameplay-affecting weapons are $2+ each (example [1]). It's true that they are sidegrades (it isn't just pay-to-win), but its kind of disingenuous to say they cost "mere pennies"

[1] http://store.teamfortress.com/itemdetails/62839546

Unintentionally a bit misleading, but not disingenuous. The market value for an ordinary TF2 weapon, on sites like http://scrap.tf/ but also in the TF2 aftermarket generally, is usually the equivalent of about $0.014 . One you have a basic acquaintance with TF2 trading, the idea of buying weapons at the official store is so outlandish that it had genuinely slipped my mind that it was even possible until you reminded me. (Even if you don't want to mess around with item crafting or trading with bots or humans, at Valve's other official item store you can buy a fancier, kill-counting version of that same weapon for 15% the price! http://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/440/Strange%20Clea... ) I suppose there must be a significant number of people still doing it though.

Ah, interesting. I haven't played TF2 since the player marketplace was introduced. It uses to be either buy from the official store or go through some pretty shady websites.

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