Stupidly Simple Changes – Quality of Life Fixes Edition

Originally, I was going to call this article “A bunch of fixes for weapons that totally don’t need it”, but two problems cropped up. Firstly, it’s a stupid idea, no one wants to read about purposefully overpowered weapons, secondly the idea kinda fell flat on its face because there was too much to talk about and thirdly, it’s just dumb. So why not turn to fixes that we could actually do with. You know, like those two Stupidly Simple Fixes articles I did. You know, this one and this one.

A Quality of Life fix is basically what the Spy’s new reload animation is – A change that’s not necessarily a direct buff, but it makes life better for the player affected. Before the Spy’s new reload animation, every time you’d reload your Ambassador, you’d smack yourself in the face. Not great for when you’re supposed to be keeping an eye out for enemies. Other, more ninja-y QOL changes include the Minigun first person model being slightly smaller, so you can see more. Of course there’ll also be some non-QOL changes here, because I’m not very good at sticking to a subject.

The first thing is a problem that the community occasionally fixes, only for it to be unfixed by Valve. A lot of first person models are incredibly large in TF2, any Heavy main can attest to this. As could Spies before Gun Mettle. A good way of fixing this is to disable first person view models completely and to use the 3D character in your HUD to see what weapon you’re using, but that’s not for everyone. Others change their FOV so their weapons are really stretched out, but that looks weird. The community ended up making transparent view models. You can see through the gigantic, mannly weapon you’re currently holding. Valve should just add this officially.

While we’re talking about clarity, one thing we could do is have the option to disable or reduce particle effects. They eat up resources and distract players. Yes, they make you a lot of money, but they really can be a strain on anyone’s computer. Been in the middle of a Sentry Buster explosion? Boom, there goes your FPS. Now, a lot of particles are actually made up of smaller particles. So why not just give us an option to turn off the smaller particles? Or just turn them all off.

We could have an option to disable cosmetics too. Or is that too much to ask for?

Next on our list is something completely different. Cosmetic stuff. You ever painted a hat, say, a Ghastly Gibus, and fancied one day wearing a normal one? Well, tough, you’re stuck with your painted hat. But wouldn’t it be cool if hats could have different paint styles, the same way some items already have different model styles. The Ghastly Gibus has multiple styles, so why not? Of course, it’d be limited to 2-3 different paints, but I think it’d be a cool thing to have.

This styles thing could also come in useful for weapons. Decorated weapons could have the option to come with a couple of wear and tear styles, with which you can decide just how tattered you want your tattered, painted gun to look. What would be even better is the ability to adjust strange counters. The ability to reset individual counters, pause and unpause counting kills and remove kills counted would be nice. We’ve all done it where you accidentally join a fun server and ruin/farm your counter.

Going back to being distracted, I think another valuable tool might be the ability to enable or disable more notifications. You can already disable a few notifications (trades, gifts, etc.) but more customization is always good. Sometimes a bigger chat that shows more text would be nice, but you also don’t want your chat filled up with people getting achievements or ranking up their weapons. Dominations and Killstreaks are other nuisances that get in the way, especially with their blaring sound effects and emblems and particle effects. Dominations in particular have a nasty habit of tunnelvisioning players, but more on that later.

Finally, I’ve got one more suggestion. Increase the default FOV for all players. Many players don’t even realise you can change the field of view. It really opens up the world to everyone. And it literally lessens tunnelvisioning.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Hopefully these are easy enough to do, since the groundwork for these features are already in use elsewhere.