Which is an easy technical problem to solve, but the liability of abuse when sharing user content with other users is not palatable.

It is also not impressive to others, not a status symbol, and that's actually the purpose of skins in the modern day. No one grinds 1000hrs of warframe for a skin just because they think it looks cool, they think it makes THEM look cool. They want people to be impressed that they had $2000 to spend on a knife, not that the knife skin was neat. The skin is an auxiliary component to the task.

This is what turned me off of Global Offensive, and CS2 I guess but it doesnt look like much(if anything) has changed between GO and CS2 compared to the changes made from 1.6 -> Source -> GO.

Looking back to ~2012/2013 and its seeming to be clear now that the introduction of weapon crates, the steam marketplace, and all of the other MTX in all of their(proprietary) competitve games may have been a good indication that these would be the last games Valve would develop in-house.

To be fair though and just to give a counter-example, the "clout chasers" with the $1000 knife skins is essentially the same as the bragging rights of a 4/5/6 digit steamID during 1.6 and CS:Source. Although flexing SteamID length was something I only really saw in the competitive scene and of course had a much smaller(unofficial) market.

Oh well, RIP Steam games, long live Steam software(their platform/Proton, etc) and hardware...minus the steam controller.

Huh, I wonder what my steamID length was. I would have signed up very early. I will have to check!

And making it cheaper wouldn't fix anything, I guess?

Making status symbols cheaper means they're no longer exclusive or grant status. So people go looking for other exclusive status symbols.

Making it cheaper reduces the status symbol aspect, since that's mostly about signalling wealth. But maybe not the rarity/exclusivity signals for items made artificially rare or hard to get.

> Which is an easy technical problem to solve

Where do people get this impression? It's not trivial to build user comments on a web page let alone a proper chat app but people think it's easy to share game assets for some reason.

It's really not that crazy. You log onto a server, the server communicates your skins to the other clients. Counter strike itself literally did this in the 2000s, it was removed. Modders for other games working for free figured it out. Games used to automatically download maps and skins in a bunch of Valve games as well as other games.

I would also consider building comments into a webpage pretty trivial, it was like the second thing I did when teaching myself web applications years ago.

I bet it's harder in modern frameworks than it used to be, but that doesn't make it a hard problem, we just surrounded an easy problem with more difficult but unrelated problems.

> You can still do local game mods just fine

'sv_pure' exists and says no for the official servers, sorry

Community servers are a thing, so is a worse experience. The well-maintained community days passed. We wanted curation and we got it: matchmaking and even our customization/spending.

So-called skin changers (which modify what skins you yourself see in-game) are actually considered bannable cheats.

That's sad. I remember a time before sv_pure. Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done. And it was just your game, before streaming.

> Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done

This undersells how bad it was to play a game with people who can see through walls and hear your footsteps from a mile away. No skin is worth that.

sv_pure specifically actually allows the server admin to allow selective model/material swaps.

I was thinking of your description of the situation before sv_pure. What you wrote sounded like "sure some people completely destroyed the game but you got to see some cool skins". Skins can't make up for wallhacks, and wallhacks won't let you enjoy the skins. It wasn't a tenable situation.

Well, both. I wish less servers had enabled sv_pure in extra strict mode, but it was a solution to the wallhacking and extra loud footsteps. It was also the start of the decline of being able to run your own mods.

A lot of people buy CS2 community servers to use a WeaponPaints addon which allows anyone in the server to use any skin.

I’d say 90% of ours have it enabled.

They used to ban accounts but I don’t think they have (on community servers) since it went F2P.