All the Latest Headgear

by Seyon, in Games: Hats, Rant, Team Fortress 2 (No Comments)

Who would have thought that the addition of hats to Team Fortress 2 would have caused so much player aggravation? Hats are purely aesthetic. They don’t make you play any better, they just add a touch of uniqueness to your character. The first nine hats we received were during the Sniper/Spy update, the other eighteen we received during the Classless update. This makes for a total of 27 hats.

I’ve been on holiday over the past two weeks, played some 80 odd hours of TF2 and only saw one hat drop. That makes for a very low drop rate. So then the question is, exactly how low is that drop rate?

Not long after the first hat update, Drunken_F00l over at SourceOP.com released a beta for an idle program. This program basically makes it where you don’t have to be logged into an actual server to idle for TF2 items, hats included. One of the nice little side benefits of  this program was that he has been able to pull together some information on the drop system. We now know that every 25 minutes, you have a 1 in 4 chance of getting an item: approximately one item every 100 minutes. Of those drops, he determined a 0.45% chance of being a hat. Hats also do not drop on the same 25 minute interval, so any ‘hats per drop’ numbers we come up won’t be exact – at least until we determine the interval, if there is one.

But you just want to know how long you’re going to have to play or idle before you can expect a hat. Here are the numbers we know:

• Hat chance per drop: 0.45% or 0.0045
• Drop chance: Every 25 min, 1 in 4.

Let’s start with 2000 drops:

2000 drops x 0.0045 hat chance = 9 hats

Breaking that down to one hat:

2000 drops / 9 hats = 222.2 drops per hat

222.2 drops per hat x (1 drop per 100 min) = 22,222 min

= 15 days 10 hours 22 minutes

Okay, now that we have our base time, we can calculate some other interesting facts. For instance, our 24 man server which commonly has 16+ people on it should see at least one hat drop a day. If you take all the time I’ve spent playing TF2, I would be about 2,000 minutes away from my second hat.

To truly understand how low this chance is, consider this. To earn every hat available, assuming trading is implimented and no duplicates, you would have to play approximately 416 days, 15 hours and 54 minutes. Yes, that means you would have to play continuously over a year and two months of to “catch them all.” And let’s say that you are an avid player who plays two hours a night, seven days a week, for a total of fourteen hours a week. To get all 27 hats, you would have to play for 13 years, 8 months and 15 days.

And with that, I have one more calculation. But this one goes to Valve:

                     /"\
                    1\./1
                    1   1
                    1>-<1
                 /'\1   1/'\..
             /-\1   1   1   1 \
            1   =[%]=   1   1  \
            1   1   1   1   1   \
            1 ~   ~   ~   ~ 1`   )
            1                   /
             \                 /
              \               /
               \    _____    /

PS: There is at least one bad side effect of all this.