Why the Gibus died

The Ghastly Gibus is the hat of the new player. The newbie. The n00b if you’re feeling cruel. For many people, whether they played before the Uber Update or after, the Ghastly Gibus was often their first hat, or at least one of their early ones. Yet the Ghastly Gibus has become a much rarer sight these days. Odd.

Being an achievement hat, you can assume that almost everyone but the newest players has a Gibus, whether it’s the classic first level Gibus or the Ghostly Gibus or the Ghastliest Gibus. The Gibus is unique in being one of the few hats that evolves, almost like a Pokemon or something. Unfortunately that stopped a while back, and now it’s either Ghastly or Ghostly. That’s it. Many of us are still waiting for the Ghastlierest Gibus. Or maybe the Most Ghastly Gibus. The feeling is that of evolving a Pokemon, only to find out that the previous stage was just as good and now you’re stuck with a moron that keeps on putting itself to sleep. I doubt there IS a Pokemon like that, but you get the idea.

But despite being a wholly common hat, it seems that the Gibus is fading out. Most people think it’s because of the quality of the current player base. Unfortunately, most players these days aren’t that good, often the fate of many F2P games. Makes me wonder how Dota 2 copes. Even so, getting a domination isn’t that hard. I’ve seen plenty of people, newbie or otherwise, get a domination, whether it’s via targeting bad players or spamming power classes. It seems preposterous to assume that players these days are too stupid to get one domination.

A good reason behind all this is the sheer number of hats available these days. Becoming premium has always been quite easy in TF2, especially if you already have a full Steam account and a few spare trading cards. Sell them up and buy yourself a paint or something and yay, you have a big backpack and are eligible for hat drops. And with 60k players at peak times, a lot of hats are around, most available for only a refined or two. A single key can get you a lot of hats as well. With so much choice, why bother wearing that dusty, old, untradable achievement hat?

But there is more. Let’s take a step back and see what the Gibus represents: Noobishness. It’s always been the sigil of a new or bad player. But this trope reached a point where people would wear the Gibus to disguise their skill. It was no longer the case that new players were the only people wearing this hat. Good players would wear a Gibus to pretend to be a bad player and catch people unaware. A point was reached where you had no idea what the skill level of an enemy was by looking to see if they had a Gibus or not. Trolls were basically trolling each other.

So with the trick of wearing a Gibus to fool others no longer working, people started wearing other hats. Combined with the huge choice in cosmetics, achievement hats and earned hats as a whole start to fade from view. For a hat like the Spiral Sallet or the Mann Co. Cap or the Alien Swarm Parasite, this is hard enough, competing with better looking hats that are easier to trade for than to achieve, but this is doubly hard for the Gibus. Think about it. If no one is wearing the Gibus, then no one can get the achievement. That, on top of its newbie stigma and the ease of getting nicer hats, has knocked the Gibus off people’s heads completely.

The Gibus wasn’t killed by players being stupid. It was killed because it went out of fashion. How can you dominate a player wearing a Gibus if no one wears it?