![]() ![]() That’s a lot of effort to go to for a hat. ![]() This was what first piqued my interest: that despite not putting all that much time into TF2, and despite having a rather threadbare inventory, I could still possess an item valuable enough to make somebody pelt the owners of it with random friend requests in the hopes of persuading them to part with it. And the answer he got back was fairly surprising: he was a TF2 trader, and he wanted Bill’s hat. Being a bit more outgoing than I am (also he may have been drunk at the time) he decided to engage the guy in conversation to find out why on earth he was pestering multiple people like this. That is, until an actual real friend of mine also got a friend request from the same user a few minutes later. Steam isn’t like other social media there’s no e-cred for having a zillion friends on there, and I hadn’t put enough time into TF2 to think anyone would be interested in the paltry selection of items visible in my Steam inventory. I declined the request, not really wanting to deal with the sort of person who would just send out random invites to strangers, but I was nevertheless puzzled at just what would drive someone to do this. ![]() We had no friends in common, no groups in common, he had no name that I recognised – there was absolutely nothing to link us in any way. It all started a few months back when I got an unsolicited friend request on Steam from a user who appeared to be a complete stranger to me. However, a short while ago I happened to have my attention directed towards the hat economy purely by chance, and what I discovered absolutely fascinated me. This would be a mistake, but it’s true that a casual player of the game like myself doesn’t usually give hat trading any significant thought. A lot of people dismiss TF2’s hats as one of those weird internet phenomena that only obsessives really care about. With 235 hats currently in the game along with many, many variations on the theme – Strange hats, Unusual hats, Vintage hats, paintable hats – these jokes do have a seed of truth in them, for all that Valve (presumably) use the proceeds from hat sales to create massive, regular and entirely free injections of new content for the game, which itself went free-to-play a couple of years back. Thanks to its focus on hats and a real money shop in which you can buy said hats, Team Fortress 2 tends to be the butt of a lot of jokes about being the world’s premier hat simulator. ![]()
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