One recipient of a rare and controversial item granted last month to 100 players of Valve’s Team Fortress 2, is turning a negative into a positive and has organized a charity drive that will see owners of the items delete them in order to benefit the Child’s Play charity.
The item in question is the Golden Wrench, used by the game’s Engineer class. John Tran, the man behind the charity drive, received one of the items, but claimed, in talking with Bitmob, that they were not randomly distributed, as Valve had earlier stated.
Tran started contacting possessors of the Golden Wrenches and eventually rounded up enough owners to begin the Golden Charity Drive. He hopes to eventually reach 1,000 donors, that will donate at least $10 apiece, and appears to be very near his goal. So far, eleven Golden Wrenches will be destroyed on D-Day, August 31 (once they are deleted from a player’s inventory, they cannot be retrieved).
Valve has even endorsed the charity drive and wrote:
The TF2 team knew that the Golden Wrench event would be controversial -- an experiment in the distribution of an ultra-rare item. We never imagined that it would empower a small group of players to benefit a much vaster group of children in need. We are constantly shocked and impressed by the creativity of the Team Fortress 2 community, but today we are humbled.
Comments
Re: Deleting TF2 Golden Wrenches for Charity
They were given at random-ish, they set some times at random where you could get the wrench if you crafted at that time. The people that got banned was because the exact times of wrench drop were leaked and those people didnt bother to report the leak and just take advantage from it.
Re: Deleting TF2 Golden Wrenches for Charity
eh, all the golden wrench thing meant to me was more account phishing attempts.
Re: Deleting TF2 Golden Wrenches for Charity
See, something people always forget about Valve in the rush to point out that they are awesome game designers is that they are also masters of trolling.
That said, the whole Golden Wrench thing is, IIRC, the first time they have outright lied to their players, and their reasons for manually permabanning seven people are... suspect.
Regardless, good on Wingspann for taking this and running with it, and props to Valve for posting it on the blog. Word is, their money raised doubled overnight that day.