World of Team Fortress

I had pretty much stopped playing Team Fortress until the Medic achievements came out. A lot of them were kind of stupid and I ended up farming 5-10 on one of the achievement servers to get the Kritzkrieg, but they definitely got me playing again. A lot.

This weekend was the Pyro's turn, adding tons of cool weapons / achievements to get. Valve learned a lot from their first attempt at achievements, and the achievements this time are much more reasonable. On top of that, you need far less to actually get the new weapons. I definitely plan to stay away from the achievement servers and earn the achievements, since it's a lot of fun.

But one of the biggest complaints about the new achievements is that players want to have the achievements unlocked by default. While I can understand the argument, I actually enjoy earning the achievements (except the ridiculous Medic ones). I think the achievement system is very popular among those that enjoy MMORPG games -- games like World of Warcraft -- where grinding is just something you do. And compared to the WoW grind, the 'grind' (if you can call it that) in TF2 is so minor that it's hardly noticeable.

It still amazes me that Valve puts so much time and effort into a game that I believe costs like $20 (but I'm not complaining!)