In life outside GTAIV, Team Fortress 2 was updated last week with a new map, new medic achievements, and new unlockable medic weapons.

Unfortunately, the way the new unlocks were handled was a misstep for Valve.

Unlockable weapons aren’t a new idea in and of themselves. The Battlefield series gives you the option to pick up new guns as you advance in ranks, which is in turn furthered by the completion of achievement-like ribbons and medals.

The key difference, however, is that the Battlefield games ship with all the weapons and goals in place. For TF2, new weapons are being released one class at a time.

So come patch day, when everyone wants to play with the new toys, what do they do? They load up a medic and get to work grinding out the achievements that they’re hidden behind, leading to teams with way, way more medics than is useful. What should be a reward becomes a punishment.

In addition, many of the achievements are gimmicky, like the “Assist in killing 3 enemies with a single Uber-Charge on a Scout,” and a medic focused on completing them can actually be counterproductive to the team. That’s anathama for a game where the team is so important that they put it right in the title.

Since console unlocks were removed soon after the patch, we might be seeing oceans of medics for quite some time. Hopefully future releases will find a way to resolve the issue.

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