Workshop Irritation

I used to visit the TF2 Workshop a lot. Back when I first went there, going through the Workshop queue is a joy. Sure, there are some cosmetic submissions that are just lazy, some are stupid, and some made me lose hope in humanity. But a lot of them are interesting, and some of them are jaw-droppingly fantastic. There are also some that made me genuinely angry at Valve for not adding them into the game. Why aren’t you adding Aristotle into the game Valve? It’s the best pet cosmetic for the Spy I’ve ever seen! Get lost, Backstabber’s Boomslang.

And not to mention, the weapon submissions are also rather fascinating to look at. I’ve been a fan of the Bulletproof Battery and Calefactor because of their appearances. And weapon submissions like Valentina interests me because of the possible ways I think the guns would behave in-game based on how they looks like. For this particular submission, it suggests a Heavy primary that has a very low firing rate, but each shot deals a large amount of burst damage. It would reward twitch aim more than consistent tracking, switching up the Heavy’s playstyle.

But nowadays, I’ve grown rather tired of the TF2 Workshop. And it isn’t because I’ve been showered with fantastic submissions to the point that I’m sick of it. That never happened. Instead, it’s because of this:

The Workshop is now full of skin submissions. It’s been like this ever since the Tough Break Update, which is the update that first brought skins into the game. There is now an absolute avalanche of them.

And that isn’t surprising. With a cosmetic or a weapon submission, the creators need to make a model and its texture. With a taunt submission, animations need to be made at the very least, and most submissions have custom models and sound files as well. A skin submission is just a texture file. Not that making a texture file takes no effort, but it takes so much less effort than the others you can churn out a skin submission in far less time than any other types of Workshop submissions. Because of the relative ease of making them the amount of skin submissions now dwarfs the amount of submissions of everything else combined.

This is downright infuriating. There are so many great cosmetics to be added into the game. There are so many weapon submissions that I wish Valve will consider using for a new weapon. The Iron Gauntlet and Frontline submissions are absolutely top notch and deserve whole updates to themselves. And they are currently being buried under all those skin submissions that are becoming the TF2 Workshop equivalent of white noise!

And don’t you even dare tell me that they are harmless. Great submissions are hard enough to get into the game even without all these skins in the way. Submissions like the Eyelander Sheath, the Rum Runner set, the Plunderer’s Pauldron, the Nutcase, and the Totenwerfer, just to name a few that haven’t been mentioned at all up to now, are still being ignored. Now that all these skins are in the way and drowning them out, how is anyone at Valve going to be able to find them?!

Skin submissions on the TF2 Workshop are now reaching the same level of obnoxiousness as the FNAF submissions on the SFM and GMod Workshops back when everyone refused to shut up about those haunted animatronics for five bloody minutes. And those submissions can jolly well piss off so that I don’t have to skip through a whole lot of patterned squares for something genuinely great.