@Super_Gorge
My 2 cents.
I do believe there is another thing that adds (not the main argument). The more i play the more i see on one side "legit vets" and cheaters. I'm surprised that cheaters entered the realm. The audience numbers should have prevented it. Now we have proof there ARE some cheaters and we have now "NS2BANS.COM". That sounds bad.
I'm not. There are youtube videos of cheaters in decent numbers on youtube showing obvious aimbotting as well as wall hacks. Anyone who's played a FPS in the past decade should be able to tell quickly that the players being recorded and uploaded are indeed cheating. I'm not sure what's going on with VAC and UWE. UWE claimed that they were updating VAC with known hacks, but the same people recorded cheating on Youtube are still playing the game, meaning VAC hasn't banned them. Any source game wouldn't tolerate this kind of bad behavior. VAC either doesn't work, or UWE lied about updating VAC. Either way, cheaters are still there. I'm not sure how anyone can reasonably claim there isn't a hacking problem when people like Ironhorse helped create NS2bans because VAC isn't working. A cursory search of Google turns up hacks from aimbots, wall hacks, wall charms and others, all recently updated or discussed recently. Aimbots appears to be private hacks, but wall charms aren't. At least servers aren't allowing for the most part the alien pastel skins. When there is a hack in the Steam Workshop, you know your game has some issues.
Personally, I do think the cheating isn't that bad, especially compared games like Counterstrike where cheating is rampant. What is way worse is the team stacking. Team Stacking went to extreme lengths during the sales with Veterans pulling 70:1 kill ratios on rookies. This is incredibly stupid behavior for them. Feeding your ego while creating a very toxic environment for new players means they won't stay around, and Steam Charts shows this. Today's player peak is the same as it was before the sales and before Build 250. Meaning, for those 3,000+ new players the sales netted, we are looking at maybe 200 new players sticking around. Someone should be fired for that. Can you imagine a law office where a partner had less than 10% client retention? That partner would be gone so fast your head would spin. This game is obviously heading back to oblivion and it's less than a year old.
-Thought i manage to deal with these cheaters by winning (me and the team) and make them look ridiculous. I can't help asking myself what will be the next kind of cheats in the next 2 weeks. It's not encouraging me to play more.
-This is embarrassing for legit players that just are good (positioning in rooms, anticipating etc.) and get the "cheater" sticker on their back just for being good. I still manage to kill them as i am a bastard skulk. Sorry i can't help it...
Part of the problem is the performance issue. Someone running a i7 3770k OC to 4.5ghz with a Titan is going to have way better performance than everyone else. And we all know the game has performance issues on mid-range to lower end systems. The "recommended specs" are nothing more than a bold face lie. Players struggle to get 30 FPS everything low with those specs. Thus, players with 144hz monitors getting 150+ FPS will have a distinct advantage. Most other games don't suffer from the dramatically different performance between mid-range and top end hardware. Team Fortress 2 for instance, will run very well on a mid range system and run better on a high end system, but the difference is hardly night and day like it is on NS2 and it won't give you any real advantage. So in a way, you can actually buy your way to significantly better performance in the game. Some would call that a form of Pay to Win.
I do think that some veteran players do get the cheater tag way too often, but at the same time, some veterans are using scripts, which when automating combat operations, are in a sense a form of cheating. Once first person spectate came out, it was obvious who was pistol scripting. 10 rounds with 1 click? Pistol script or a mouse macro. Either way, not fair. The game's high learning curve I think tends to push some newer players into spamming the "cheater" accusation more than they should. Not sure how you'd fix that.
But...
-A rookie that get into this environment "legit Vets", cheater, and people who accuse them, isn't the best "first contact". Why playing if the game is full of cheater. If you bought NS2 to fly away from a game full of cheaters... you don't like what you see.
-People ultimately see this more often as population drop. The % of cheater increase as population drops. You need only one accusation to ruin the mood of a entire server.
I do think NS2 would benefit from a ranking system as well as initial random teams and then every game balancing out the teams to prevent stacking. Game is looking at less than 10% new player retention based on the last two sales. There is a good chance it's already too late. How many of these new players who quit are going to buy another UWE game? How many will recommend a UWE to their friends? It's a studied fact that a "wronged" customer will tell something like 5 times the number of people about their bad experience then a satisfied customer will tell others. In some ways, these sales are making UWE's future worse.
You are right that as the player population declines, the % of finding a cheater increases. Probably a good reason to stick to NS2ban servers.
UWE should really do something about it. Code more in the game to secure it in place of making more maps and modifications. It looks like UWE don't have any coders at all (keybindings are still a mess). Once you have the functionalities (passive for recording better, active for proper detection), this would be somehow breathable in there and a way better atmosphere.
That's one thing they need to do. Update VAC, visit the hacker websites to get the actual code and then update VAC, make a ranking tree, or somehow code something to prevent team stacking and then work on optimization.
However, something tells me that it's a bit too late for this. The Steam Summer Sale probably grabbed everyone who's willing to buy it in the first place. How many more potential players are there out there? Netting less than 10% of them based on the last few day's peak players suggests future sales may not help much. I could be wrong, but I haven't been yet about my predictions on NS2.
I don't know about everyone else, but I see my Steam friends list of active NS2 players dropping weekly. Before it was 20 active players. Now it's down to 9. And of those 9, only 3 have more than 10 hours. And one guy only plays Combat servers. So that's 2 out of 31 playing the stock game for more than 5 hours a week. And 1 of those two is an Ibis mod who 75% of the time I swear is just idling to maintain server population.
Really it's pretty pathetic of them (closing the slowly dying thread), it's a very poor way of dealing with information they don't like, people aren't stupid, it's obviously a hot topic which people want to discuss, even if they are honest and did it because they feel it's been discussed enough, a single mod shouldn't be allowed to make that judgement when plenty want to keep discussing it, anyway i think you're right and they don't like the truth, which says it all really.
Comparing the peak of the past few days to prior to 250 and the sales, game appears only to have retained between 300 and 400 new players. Seems to have stabilized. It's good that they're above 1,000 regular peak players, but it's appalling that so many quit the game in such a short time frame. It's about 1,000 to 1,200 daily peak now. Up from 800~900 daily peak. But when you look at the peak of 3,506 which was vastly new players, it's around 12%~18% retention rate. Game's not even a year old. Seems that whoever is in charge would rather bury their heads and then address the problems.
To me, the the biggest problem with how UWE is going about this, is not that they're ignoring the problems with the game itself, it's the fact that the message they send to first time buyers is that the company doesn't care. That isn't a way to grow your user base. How many people who quit early are going to either buy another UWE game or tell their friends to buy another one? I think we all know the answer to that. It's also worse when you consider the significant number of players who quit after build 250 who are either likely never to buy a UWE product again and persuade their friends from doing so as well. In today's market, you often only get one chance to make a good impression and UWE is blowing it.
Agreed and interesting stats, really does say it all doesn't it?
However, something tells me that it's a bit too late for this.
We are before "reinforced". So Heads or tail ?!
-Heads is finally more player are coming in and stay (so servers repopulate).
-Tail is you can't find more than 10 servers for a decent game (maybe 5 depending on region) before Christmas.
As i am a bastard (thought i love NS and its potential), Tail. Because i do not believe a change in balance will "retain" more players. First things first! Performance, key-binding and player experience, all the little things when put together rocks (like HL1 that was ugly all things considered). I'm still up for a good old 2D Bomberman.
I said it before but i think if they really want to keep the average gamer these days interested they should add stats, achievements and levelling to ns2, with purely cosmetic rewards to show for it, this way you keep the typical gamer interest and hopefully by the time they're done they'll love ns2's unique game play, personally im not bothered about that stuff but i can see how it adds something and gives people a reason to invest their time, ns2 feels like its missing something and i think this might be it, as at the moment when a game is over it just sort of ends and there's nothing to show for it, it doesn't feel meaningful and a lot of gamers expect it to.
We are before "reinforced". So Heads or tail ?!
-Heads is finally more player are coming in and stay (so servers repopulate).
-Tail is you can't find more than 10 servers for a decent game (maybe 5 depending on region) before Christmas.
As i am a bastard (thought i love NS and its potential), Tail. Because i do not believe a change in balance will "retain" more players. First things first! Performance, key-binding and player experience, all the little things when put together rocks (like HL1 that was ugly all things considered). I'm still up for a good old 2D Bomberman.
I'm voting tails. The Steam Chart data for yesterday's peak was 824. That's nearly the same as July 23rd of 875. It's officially below the pre-sale player population. From a business stand point, the two summer sales effectively failed to bring in large numbers of new players. I'd be interested to know how many older players fully gave the game up. The survey of 16% (of about 167 players) is clearly unrepresentative as many wouldn't have taken the survey period if they quit.
Balance right now looks heavy Aliens. I'm still unsure as to why, especially given the tech tree changes to Marines that are significantly more forgiving and much faster to tech to. But it's clear that from pub to competitive, Build 250 and 251 severely threw out the balance. But I don't think that's the real problem.
What UWE should have done prior to the sales and Build 250 was code an automatic balancing mechanism between rounds that did not let you re-pick your team. That I think would have done the most to keep new players around by preventing continuous team stacking that I believe is heavily responsible for why new players quit. UWE in my opinion, wasted the sales almost entirely in the context of trying to get and retain new players. I do find it quite disturbing that UWE in an interview admitted they had a problem because they didn't have any business focused staff, they ran the company as a bunch of developers rather than as a business. So to utterly fail to do incorporate a tool to prevent a toxic environment for new players AFTER admitting in an interview you didn't have someone business focused is incompetence. New players for a business like this are their lifeblood. Without new players entering and telling their friends to buy the game, the prospects are grim. If you had a bad experience with a product, do you buy it again and tell your friends to try it or do you do the exact opposite and recommend against it?
A simple balancing mechanism would, in my opinion, do wonders for the game. Anyone who's just gotten proverbially dominated in a team game isn't likely to stay around unless there's a team scramble that evens out the teams. You see this with servers on TF2 that don't have scrambles. A dominated team often sees anywhere between 25% to 75% of its players rage quit. Now, when there is an autoscrambler, that rarely ever happens because people who just lost are willing to give it another shot as they think the teams are now even, especially if a key player or two gets swapped.
UWE could produce a much better game if they simply took a step back and stopped viewing the game purely through the lens of a developer.
I'm not a fan of stats and achievements as I think it perverts the game (see Hat/Craft Fortress 2), but there is something to be said about player retention that way. Achievements that reinforce what you're suppose to be doing rather than dumb stuff like "Command Chairs killed with Spit" or "Armories destroyed by Parasite" or "Onoses killed by Axe" and rather "Damage repaired to Exos" and "Structures destroyed by Bile Bomb" it wouldn't pervert the game.
If I was UWE, I'd focus on anti-team stacking, anti-cheat, optimization to reduce the performance difference between hardware choices and mandatory tutorials before the next sale. I don't think they have many chances left to salvage this game from player depopulation. UWE has to fix the problems why people quit before doing anything else if they want this game to survive and to save their company's reputation.
I said it before but i think if they really want to keep the average gamer these days interested they should add stats, achievements and levelling to ns2, with purely cosmetic rewards to show for it, this way you keep the typical gamer interest and hopefully by the time they're done they'll love ns2's unique game play, personally im not bothered about that stuff but i can see how it adds something and gives people a reason to invest their time, ns2 feels like its missing something and i think this might be it, as at the moment when a game is over it just sort of ends and there's nothing to show for it, it doesn't feel meaningful and a lot of gamers expect it to.
If the stats/leveling/achievements don't impact the game play in a way that perverts it or creates uneven starting conditions, that would be fine if it actually retained players.
But I don't think that's the reason many people leave. Between the complex nature of the game and the massive public stomping players engaged in, those are the two key reasons.
When you look at non-sale player loss rates, they're relatively low at 10~15% and often recover. When you look at periods after sales, the player drop rates are crazy high. Both sales as I earlier pointed out had nearly 70% quit rates within 2 weeks twice. You don't see pub stomping during the 700~900 player counts. You do see outrageous pub stomping during sales and free weekend. I just don't get how people who love this game can act in a fashion that ensures the same game dies faster. I also don't get how UWE doesn't see this painfully obvious fact or they do and they just don't care. I'd prefer ignorance over apathy as the message apathy sends is worse.
Already stated in this thread that some sort of progression system, leaderboards, cosmetic store/unlocks would actually help the game grow. Not many small developers can't retain a playerbase or profit without these fundamental mechanics in place. Nearly every competitive game has them, most of them free but it's a model that seems to be working right? TF2, DOTA2, LoL, Blacklight, PS2, PoE, etc. I would be totally fine with purchasing the black marine skin despite the rage from people who already got them but I digress. Modding a skin doesn't work because other people can't see it. People love having the prestige of having a rare skin/model that's difficult to get and it's a reason to keep playing the game.
Another idea that I stand behind is more attention and more emphasis from both the community and the developer on mods like combat and xenoswarm. The game only has 1 game mode and it's pretty hardcore for new players, that's not a great selling point for the average customer. Giving more publicity and possibly making combat an official mode may retain more players due to the casual nature of combat and the variance in modes as a selling point.
I imagine my views might be frustrating for more experienced players to consider but I believe it's one of the better ways to retain a greater playercount rather than relying on a hit and miss community experience, steam sales and content updates. The game won't be selling enough from now on to make a decent profit, a transition to either a free-to-play model or/and a cosmetic store might help to retain players, keep them playing and keep money rolling in that isn't just from steam.
Already stated in this thread that some sort of progression system, leaderboards, cosmetic store/unlocks would actually help the game grow. Not many small developers can't retain a playerbase or profit without these fundamental mechanics in place. Nearly every competitive game has them, most of them free but it's a model that seems to be working right? TF2, DOTA2, LoL, Blacklight, PS2, PoE, etc. I would be totally fine with purchasing the black marine skin despite the rage from people who already got them but I digress. Modding a skin doesn't work because other people can't see it. People love having the prestige of having a rare skin/model that's difficult to get and it's a reason to keep playing the game.
Im not sure i like the idea and i would hate for it to become anything like tf2 and hats but people should be able to sell their black armour and other cosmetic stuff on the steam market, it's already there for ns2 with badges at the moment, think how much extra money they could make if they took advantage of this new feature, as long as it's not taken too far like tf2 i wouldn't have a problem with it.
I would be totally fine with purchasing the black marine skin despite the rage from people who already got them but I digress. Modding a skin doesn't work because other people can't see it. People love having the prestige of having a rare skin/model that's difficult to get and it's a reason to keep playing the game.
I would be totally fine with purchasing the black marine skin despite the rage from people who already got them but I digress. Modding a skin doesn't work because other people can't see it. People love having the prestige of having a rare skin/model that's difficult to get and it's a reason to keep playing the game.
Now it wouldn't be rare anymore, would it?
I more or less meant unlockable in-game that requires a lot of effort, could have it for a store, majority of people won't buy it, it just won't have that same prestige as before much to the dismay of people that already have it.
Im not sure i like the idea and i would hate for it to become anything like tf2 and hats but people should be able to sell their black armour and other cosmetic stuff on the steam market, it's already there for ns2 with badges at the moment, think how much extra money they could make if they took advantage of this new feature, as long as it's not taken too far like tf2 i wouldn't have a problem with it.
TF2 isn't the only game that does it, every free to play game does something similar and there are plenty of other FPS that do the same. It doesn't neccessarily have to be black marine armor, anything that is even a little bit interesting would be fine. The steam shop is a nice idea though.
TF2 isn't the only game that does it, every free to play game does something similar and there are plenty of other FPS that do the same. It doesn't neccessarily have to be black marine armor, anything that is even a little bit interesting would be fine. The steam shop is a nice idea though.
Your avatar gave me a good idea. Your avatar is the Necron Lord from The Warhammer 40k franchise right? That whole Dawn of War series offers a good cosmetic idea. Wargear without the stats boosts could provide cosmetic items and cashflow without disrupting the game.
Comments
I'm not. There are youtube videos of cheaters in decent numbers on youtube showing obvious aimbotting as well as wall hacks. Anyone who's played a FPS in the past decade should be able to tell quickly that the players being recorded and uploaded are indeed cheating. I'm not sure what's going on with VAC and UWE. UWE claimed that they were updating VAC with known hacks, but the same people recorded cheating on Youtube are still playing the game, meaning VAC hasn't banned them. Any source game wouldn't tolerate this kind of bad behavior. VAC either doesn't work, or UWE lied about updating VAC. Either way, cheaters are still there. I'm not sure how anyone can reasonably claim there isn't a hacking problem when people like Ironhorse helped create NS2bans because VAC isn't working. A cursory search of Google turns up hacks from aimbots, wall hacks, wall charms and others, all recently updated or discussed recently. Aimbots appears to be private hacks, but wall charms aren't. At least servers aren't allowing for the most part the alien pastel skins. When there is a hack in the Steam Workshop, you know your game has some issues.
Personally, I do think the cheating isn't that bad, especially compared games like Counterstrike where cheating is rampant. What is way worse is the team stacking. Team Stacking went to extreme lengths during the sales with Veterans pulling 70:1 kill ratios on rookies. This is incredibly stupid behavior for them. Feeding your ego while creating a very toxic environment for new players means they won't stay around, and Steam Charts shows this. Today's player peak is the same as it was before the sales and before Build 250. Meaning, for those 3,000+ new players the sales netted, we are looking at maybe 200 new players sticking around. Someone should be fired for that. Can you imagine a law office where a partner had less than 10% client retention? That partner would be gone so fast your head would spin. This game is obviously heading back to oblivion and it's less than a year old.
Part of the problem is the performance issue. Someone running a i7 3770k OC to 4.5ghz with a Titan is going to have way better performance than everyone else. And we all know the game has performance issues on mid-range to lower end systems. The "recommended specs" are nothing more than a bold face lie. Players struggle to get 30 FPS everything low with those specs. Thus, players with 144hz monitors getting 150+ FPS will have a distinct advantage. Most other games don't suffer from the dramatically different performance between mid-range and top end hardware. Team Fortress 2 for instance, will run very well on a mid range system and run better on a high end system, but the difference is hardly night and day like it is on NS2 and it won't give you any real advantage. So in a way, you can actually buy your way to significantly better performance in the game. Some would call that a form of Pay to Win.
I do think that some veteran players do get the cheater tag way too often, but at the same time, some veterans are using scripts, which when automating combat operations, are in a sense a form of cheating. Once first person spectate came out, it was obvious who was pistol scripting. 10 rounds with 1 click? Pistol script or a mouse macro. Either way, not fair. The game's high learning curve I think tends to push some newer players into spamming the "cheater" accusation more than they should. Not sure how you'd fix that.
I do think NS2 would benefit from a ranking system as well as initial random teams and then every game balancing out the teams to prevent stacking. Game is looking at less than 10% new player retention based on the last two sales. There is a good chance it's already too late. How many of these new players who quit are going to buy another UWE game? How many will recommend a UWE to their friends? It's a studied fact that a "wronged" customer will tell something like 5 times the number of people about their bad experience then a satisfied customer will tell others. In some ways, these sales are making UWE's future worse.
You are right that as the player population declines, the % of finding a cheater increases. Probably a good reason to stick to NS2ban servers.
That's one thing they need to do. Update VAC, visit the hacker websites to get the actual code and then update VAC, make a ranking tree, or somehow code something to prevent team stacking and then work on optimization.
However, something tells me that it's a bit too late for this. The Steam Summer Sale probably grabbed everyone who's willing to buy it in the first place. How many more potential players are there out there? Netting less than 10% of them based on the last few day's peak players suggests future sales may not help much. I could be wrong, but I haven't been yet about my predictions on NS2.
I don't know about everyone else, but I see my Steam friends list of active NS2 players dropping weekly. Before it was 20 active players. Now it's down to 9. And of those 9, only 3 have more than 10 hours. And one guy only plays Combat servers. So that's 2 out of 31 playing the stock game for more than 5 hours a week. And 1 of those two is an Ibis mod who 75% of the time I swear is just idling to maintain server population.
Agreed and interesting stats, really does say it all doesn't it?
We are before "reinforced". So Heads or tail ?!
-Heads is finally more player are coming in and stay (so servers repopulate).
-Tail is you can't find more than 10 servers for a decent game (maybe 5 depending on region) before Christmas.
As i am a bastard (thought i love NS and its potential), Tail. Because i do not believe a change in balance will "retain" more players. First things first! Performance, key-binding and player experience, all the little things when put together rocks (like HL1 that was ugly all things considered). I'm still up for a good old 2D Bomberman.
I'm voting tails. The Steam Chart data for yesterday's peak was 824. That's nearly the same as July 23rd of 875. It's officially below the pre-sale player population. From a business stand point, the two summer sales effectively failed to bring in large numbers of new players. I'd be interested to know how many older players fully gave the game up. The survey of 16% (of about 167 players) is clearly unrepresentative as many wouldn't have taken the survey period if they quit.
Balance right now looks heavy Aliens. I'm still unsure as to why, especially given the tech tree changes to Marines that are significantly more forgiving and much faster to tech to. But it's clear that from pub to competitive, Build 250 and 251 severely threw out the balance. But I don't think that's the real problem.
What UWE should have done prior to the sales and Build 250 was code an automatic balancing mechanism between rounds that did not let you re-pick your team. That I think would have done the most to keep new players around by preventing continuous team stacking that I believe is heavily responsible for why new players quit. UWE in my opinion, wasted the sales almost entirely in the context of trying to get and retain new players. I do find it quite disturbing that UWE in an interview admitted they had a problem because they didn't have any business focused staff, they ran the company as a bunch of developers rather than as a business. So to utterly fail to do incorporate a tool to prevent a toxic environment for new players AFTER admitting in an interview you didn't have someone business focused is incompetence. New players for a business like this are their lifeblood. Without new players entering and telling their friends to buy the game, the prospects are grim. If you had a bad experience with a product, do you buy it again and tell your friends to try it or do you do the exact opposite and recommend against it?
A simple balancing mechanism would, in my opinion, do wonders for the game. Anyone who's just gotten proverbially dominated in a team game isn't likely to stay around unless there's a team scramble that evens out the teams. You see this with servers on TF2 that don't have scrambles. A dominated team often sees anywhere between 25% to 75% of its players rage quit. Now, when there is an autoscrambler, that rarely ever happens because people who just lost are willing to give it another shot as they think the teams are now even, especially if a key player or two gets swapped.
UWE could produce a much better game if they simply took a step back and stopped viewing the game purely through the lens of a developer.
I'm not a fan of stats and achievements as I think it perverts the game (see Hat/Craft Fortress 2), but there is something to be said about player retention that way. Achievements that reinforce what you're suppose to be doing rather than dumb stuff like "Command Chairs killed with Spit" or "Armories destroyed by Parasite" or "Onoses killed by Axe" and rather "Damage repaired to Exos" and "Structures destroyed by Bile Bomb" it wouldn't pervert the game.
If I was UWE, I'd focus on anti-team stacking, anti-cheat, optimization to reduce the performance difference between hardware choices and mandatory tutorials before the next sale. I don't think they have many chances left to salvage this game from player depopulation. UWE has to fix the problems why people quit before doing anything else if they want this game to survive and to save their company's reputation.
If the stats/leveling/achievements don't impact the game play in a way that perverts it or creates uneven starting conditions, that would be fine if it actually retained players.
But I don't think that's the reason many people leave. Between the complex nature of the game and the massive public stomping players engaged in, those are the two key reasons.
When you look at non-sale player loss rates, they're relatively low at 10~15% and often recover. When you look at periods after sales, the player drop rates are crazy high. Both sales as I earlier pointed out had nearly 70% quit rates within 2 weeks twice. You don't see pub stomping during the 700~900 player counts. You do see outrageous pub stomping during sales and free weekend. I just don't get how people who love this game can act in a fashion that ensures the same game dies faster. I also don't get how UWE doesn't see this painfully obvious fact or they do and they just don't care. I'd prefer ignorance over apathy as the message apathy sends is worse.
Another idea that I stand behind is more attention and more emphasis from both the community and the developer on mods like combat and xenoswarm. The game only has 1 game mode and it's pretty hardcore for new players, that's not a great selling point for the average customer. Giving more publicity and possibly making combat an official mode may retain more players due to the casual nature of combat and the variance in modes as a selling point.
I imagine my views might be frustrating for more experienced players to consider but I believe it's one of the better ways to retain a greater playercount rather than relying on a hit and miss community experience, steam sales and content updates. The game won't be selling enough from now on to make a decent profit, a transition to either a free-to-play model or/and a cosmetic store might help to retain players, keep them playing and keep money rolling in that isn't just from steam.
Im not sure i like the idea and i would hate for it to become anything like tf2 and hats but people should be able to sell their black armour and other cosmetic stuff on the steam market, it's already there for ns2 with badges at the moment, think how much extra money they could make if they took advantage of this new feature, as long as it's not taken too far like tf2 i wouldn't have a problem with it.
Now it wouldn't be rare anymore, would it?
I more or less meant unlockable in-game that requires a lot of effort, could have it for a store, majority of people won't buy it, it just won't have that same prestige as before much to the dismay of people that already have it.
TF2 isn't the only game that does it, every free to play game does something similar and there are plenty of other FPS that do the same. It doesn't neccessarily have to be black marine armor, anything that is even a little bit interesting would be fine. The steam shop is a nice idea though.
Your avatar gave me a good idea. Your avatar is the Necron Lord from The Warhammer 40k franchise right? That whole Dawn of War series offers a good cosmetic idea. Wargear without the stats boosts could provide cosmetic items and cashflow without disrupting the game.