The Goal (Crafting)

With the additional and slow refining of the crafting system in Team Fortress 2, there’s been a lot of complaining about how hard it is to craft a hat. I thought we’d take a minute to look at this.

The recipe

3 weapons/items = 1 scrap metal
3 scrap metal = 1 reclaimed metal
3 reclaimed metal = 1 refined metal
3 refined metal = 1 random hat

So, with a little maths, we work out that:

1 reclaimed metal = 9 weapons/items
1 refined metal = 27 weapons/items
1 hat = 81 weapons/items

Now, 81 items may seem like a lot, but I’d like to take you back, back into the past, to before the War Update and the crafting system. Now back then, there was no way to force hats. How did people get them? Random drops. Now, random drops for hats were rare, and half the time you ended up with endless items. Some people now have heaps of hats from random drops (I have a couple myself), while others still don’t have any, after hundreds of hours of playing.

The idea behind the crafting system was so someone who just can’t seem to get a hat, can now put all those duplicate items he receives in drops to work towards finally getting one.

Of course, you inevitably find those people who complain because the crafting system has made it  too hard to make anything meaningful. But really, hats are meant to be rare; Valve can’t just give them away, can they?

The The Goal (Crafting) by ZombieSkittles, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

Tagged as: crafting, hats, team fortress 2