Hat Money and TF2 Maps.

A somewhat abbreviated history of the TF2 content creation community and its evolution through the years.

I wasn’t there at the start of it all in 2007. I started playing Team Fortress 2 with some friends back in 2009, only dabbling with the Hammer World Editor a tiny bit in my small college supplementary dorm room. But, still two short years after the initial launch of TF2 — the game had already garnered an active and thriving community of 3D modelers and level designers, creating hats and maps for the game. I can’t speak much for the game early on, so I’ll lend what insight I can. What I do know though is that the early community was much different than the current community, and this abbreviated history lesson will highlight the changes, major milestones and turning points in the community. The following is a bit of history lesson, mixed with some of my perspective, mixed with a bit of weird.

Grab your toque, because it’s a trip.

The Early Days

The first Pyro Update (June 2008) was the first major roadmarker for the creative community. In addition to new Pyro class weapons and taunts (made by Valve), the community made maps Turbine and Fastlane, were purchased and accepted into the game. This was the first time that we saw community created works get officially recognized and shipped with the game.

Fastlane — a 5 CP map.

For the other part of the community, the Sniper vs Spy update in May of 2009 was another major roadmark and arguably the most important update to TF2 ever — as it added the first set of hats to TF2. Modelers and artists started to make their own renditions of hats and weapons in many varying styles and influences. However, they were mostly as replacement mods, replacing existing items with a new look.

It was a good time to be a designer and artist in the TF2 community. Everyone was making whatever they wanted, because they could. There was no other reason to make something beyond “because I wanted to.” People were just making things to learn how to use 3D modeling software, or how to learn level design. It was a community built on the pure enjoyment of just making stuff. This is called intrinsic motivation — for any couch psychologists keeping track at home. You didn’t get into making stuff for TF2 for the money, or recognition or because you wanted something in game.

Turbine — a Capture the Flag Map

Additionally, the community at large started to coalesce into smaller, more focused communities — specializing in specific parts of the creative community. TF2Maps.net was formed in 2007 as the center hub for learning, sharing and enjoying community made TF2 maps, it still holds this role to date. The Emporium also was formed as the central place for making and sharing hats, weapons and miscellaneous items for players. If you need to blame anyone for all the hats in TF2 now, you can (lovingly) blame them. There was also smaller communities that helped with furthering the creative communities. GameBanana was a place to share hat mods and maps, 2fort2furious was a community that played and tested maps, along with the Cafe of Broken Dreams. Also not to mention all the competitive groups that were promoting TF2 as a competitive game.

The main thing I want to drive home with this specific era of TF2 was the fact people made things because you wanted to. Even after the first and second community contribution updates in the first half of 2010 (both big milestones), it still remained an intrinsically motivated community. The money wasn’t perceived as an achievable enough goal to be worthy of motivation, the support and enjoyment of the game overpowered it drastically.

Mannconomy update

Late in 2010, we saw a major shift the creative communities. Two Valve Sponsored community contests were going on: the TF2Maps.net hosted Artpass Contest and the Polycount hosted Polycount Pack Contest. The Artpass Contest provided mappers with a pre-designed map, and they were tasked with detailing and decorating it however they felt. Valve would judge the entries, and would pick the best one to be launched with the game (2 ended up winning). The Polycount Pack contest had 3D modelers to design a item set for a TF2 class of their choosing, and just like the artpass one, the best ones would be added to the game as official items.

These two contests alone drew a massive amount of people to their respective communities. The Artpass contest held the record for the largest amount of people visiting the TF2Maps.net website until 2015 and the Polycount Contest increased the amount of people lingering around the community. TF2Maps.net, The Emporium and Polycount would have all seen large active population growths during this time. The TF2 creative community greatly grew overnight. (Should point out, the TF2 workshop wasn’t released until a YEAR after this.)

This was great and fantastic — more people the better. Naturally, there was growing pains, but it was manageable. However, the update that announced and launched the winners of these contests changed things forever.

The Mann-conomy update (Sept of 2010) added an in-game store for purchasing hats, other cosmetic items and keys for opening crates which dropped while playing the game. This was exciting! People who had spent time making items for the game, if it was high enough quality to be accepted to the game, could now make some money back on the side. A month after the announcement, the winners of the Polycount Pack Contest each walked away with at least $39,000 USD in sales of their items in the first month.

SAXTON HAAAAAAAAAAAAAALE

This changed things. If the original contests drew a large group of people, this announcement drew in hoardes over the next few months. Community members started to organize together and began to work together towards more grander community-made-content. We saw hats and items being made by the thousands. Hats and other items were now continually added to the game in almost all major updates. As such, the idea of getting an item in game wasn’t so etherial, it became the motivation for a lot of people.

Robotic Boogaloo

As I mentioned before, after Mann-conomy update, we started to see more concentrated group efforts to create themed ‘packs’ of updates. Multiple ones of these were made by the community, for the community. There was a theme, people made items or maps in that theme and then a nice website was made to showcase all the work people made (The Medieval “update”, for example). One that stood out the most though, was the Robotic Boogaloo update. Boogaloo was, the first ever community-made update, to be officially accepted into the game. Launched May, 2013 it featured metallic themed inspirations and recreations of existing TF2 hats and items.

Robotic Boogaloo’s trailer

By this time, the modeling community had gotten hat-making, publishing and workshop ‘marketing’ down to a science. It was formulaic on what to do. Knew the formula? You were already ahead of pack. If you were ahead of the pack, you normally worked with people within the pack, not outside it because they didn’t have ‘that quality’. It was the first time I started to really see the clique-ness of the community stand out. Members of the ‘pack’ sometimes would refuse to help new members, normally giving the reason “What do I get from it? Whats the worth?”. Things were starting to severely draw away from the original foundation of the community, where everyone was just making things because they wanted to — and helped others out so they could make their cool things too. Admittedly, I’d argue that for the most part, the original ideals of the original community were now a figment of their previous focus. They were there, but they weren’t the driving motivation. External motivation was sharing space with intrinsic motivation in the item creation community, and that, to me, was bad… but more on this in a bit.

But, what about the Maps

After the Mannconomy update, if the item community took one direction, the mapping community took another. By now, about 90% of the mapping community went through TF2Maps.net. The Mannconomy update didn’t really effect mappers motivations all that much. There was the addition of map ‘stamps’ — which were an item a player could buy for 99 cents and all the proceeds went to the maps creators. It was a nice, but not as luxurious as item making. Intrinsic motivation still drove the growing mapping community, but an air of demotivation lingered. Maps, either official or community, were not added to the game with much regularity at all, and when they were it was maybe 1, 2 sometimes 3 maps at a time, one per year… and when they were added it was pretty rare. There was no TF2 Map Steam workshop (changed in 2015), a place for mappers to share and post their work via the Team Fortress 2 workshop. So, while the original community foundation was there — you made maps because you wanted to make maps — it only could carry a community for so long. It was a lot like sitting under the christmas tree and watching your twin sibling get all the fun, expensive toys every year, while you had the play with the same stuff.

Big credit to the TF2Maps.net community though who really kept moving the TF2 Mapping community forward through contests, tutorials, and daily map-testing. Intrinsic motivation drove the community forward, and while it was really thin for a while, it did well. The mapping community is doing well, despite lower number of people actively mapping. Admittedly, this might be why it didn’t move the same way as the item community. There’s a whole other article that could be written about this.

End of the Line

The End of the Line update was the second official community made update. It was an update that was built around a TF2 short directed by James McVinnie. The End of the Line update at the time, was one of the most anticipated updates in TF2 history. This lead to a lot of issues, as the hype for the update out-grew what the update was going to be, and despite various attempts to control it, misinformation and hype could not be contained. At launch, this hurt the update as things that people were speculating would be a part of the update, were not. This really hurt the item and map making community — as it showed that the creative community couldn’t properly control the rest of the communities (So, all non-creative community members) expectations. Additionally, the rest of the community developed this idea that the creative community really wasn’t that great when it came to making TF2 items, and that it had lost focus with what should be made. There’s a lot debate around this and blame is shared all over. It wasn’t super-ground shattering, but it was impactful enough to mention. The creative community did recover for a bit.

The full End of the Line Short

More importantly, despite the community backlash at launch, contributors to the End of the Update made a lot of money, breaking all previous revenue records for community creators. It was a “profitable” update (Probably the most profitably community-made update), even though it was not necessarily something that started off as a for-profit update. As someone on the End of the Line team, I will say what I always say —it was an outlier. The reasons for this are not something that can replicated, nor should they be attempted. However, some folks still heard about the major revenue, and decided “we can do better.” For some, this external motivation had completely taken over.

TF2 is Life

Something I want to touch on was a growing trend of people who made TF2’s for a living — like, their income was nothing but TF2 royalty payments. It became an addiction. They HAD to make things for TF2 and they HAD to do everything they could to get it in game, so they could make money. For some, this caused health issues around major update launches, just stressing over if their items were going to be accepted or not. These people (and I hope you know who you are) have flown so far from the original ideals of the creative community that I’m not even sure if they’re really part of the community prop anymore.

Some of these people, at the time of writing, have been able to ‘break free’ and now work happily, stressfree on non TF2 projects.

Anyways, time to talk about arguably the single most impactful thing on the TF2 creative community, ever.

The Invasion Update

I am biased in saying that I think the Invasion Update was the worst managed community made TF2 updates in the history of the game. Details of the ordeal are on the interwebs, so I won’t go into it too much as you can look into it yourself. What I know I am not alone in saying is that the Invasion Update is one of the most community changing, and potentially damaging updates ever for TF2. It fundamentally changed the TF2 creative community at the core, across all communities, and not for the better.

As I mentioned previously (and often), the item and map creating communities of TF2 were founded on intrinsic motivation. People did what they did because they wanted to, not to make money. Despite the contrary from its organizers, the Invasion Update was the first “for profit” community update. From the start, it was always about pitching the update to the TF2 team, and making something that would be included to the game. It wasn’t about what the community wanted, it was about what Valve was going to want. They saw and heard about how End of the Line went, and “wanted some of that action.”

Probed — a King of the HIll map from the Invasion Update

This fundamentally went against the foundations of the creative community, even the evolved community. At the start, there was a lot of debating and arguing over the direction of the project. Members of the team wanted to go one way, the leaders forced it another. The project was being treated like a business. A massive force of tension grew in the team. I won’t get super into the details, but know that it embodied everything that the content creation community wasn’t, even though it branded itself as ‘by the community.’ The major point of contention between everyone? How and how much everyone would get paid. Admittedly, it wasn’t just the leaders who were the bad guys, I’d peg just about everyone on the team with blame. Money became such a huge issue — this would not have happened even 4 years ago. Finally, should be noted that this wasn’t just an item community issue, this included maps too — it was a whole creative-community wide event.

In the end, the TFTeam had to step in and dictate things so that it could make it to launch day without incident. The update itself was generally considered a success, a couple crates worth of items and four new maps — the things the community wanted. Didn’t change the fact that the creative community had changed fundementally, again.

The present day

After the calamity that was the Invasion Update part of the community decided that it was just time to get up and go. There wasn’t any reason to stick around in the community anymore. It wasn’t fun anymore. People moved onto other things. This migration away from TF2 isn’t drastic, but it is starting to gain some momentum (from my perspective). TF2 isn’t going to die because of this, it’s just changing.

The other part of the community decided that they could do better than Invasion when it came to community updates, and in the following year, we’ve seen no less than four community based updates get announced by their founding groups. Each one has had varying levels of success and adoption by the creative community and TF2 community-at-large. If you stuck around, or are just getting started for the first time in content creation for TF2, it’s now a pretty good time to do that. Ontop of that all, any talk about making money off the projects gets squished rapidly. It’s not a factor anymore, we’re (somewhat) back to intrinsic motivation.

However, this ‘golden age of content creation’ is more formed on fear and hatred, just as much as it is formed on ‘being better’. There is fear of recreating another community-shattering event like the Invasion update, and hatred towards the leaders who caused it, and those who share their mentality.

Additionally, because of the Invasion update and the mess it had within its team, Valve has implemented a new policy on community updates . If a community update project wants to be ‘officialized,’ they can suggest the theme of the update to Valve. If Valve likes it, they will open the theme up for everyone to contribute to, officially. They will then pick what they feel works best for the theme and update. I feel like this is good because it pushes back at externally motivated creators, and forces intrinsic motivation back onto the community. In another year, we may find ourselves back at a 2012 like TF2 community, and that’s not bad.