A few months back, Valve introduced the poorly-thought-out system of random weapon unlocks in TF2. Previous to that, you'd earn weapon unlocks by playing and getting achievements. Their random system involved a percent chance of getting a random weapon unlock every 25 minutes or so. A few people discovered that this timer would count down even if you were only idling on a server, so you didn't even have to play.

A player by the nick of Drunken_F00l discovered that you'd even get unlocks if you pretended to idle, so he wrote a program that made Valve think your game was idling. I initially didn't use it for several weeks after hearing about it because it sounded hinky. But since so many were using it without consequence, and because Valve never said word one about it, I started using it. Since the weapon unlocks were random, it was not uncommon to find a duplicate of a weapon you already had. In those instances, I'd delete one of them (it may have been the original or the duplicate).

Today, after knowing about this for 3 months, Valve decided the idle program was cheating and made the author shut it down. They then deleted all "illegal" items gathered by this "cheating". And yes, this included weapons that were duplicates. In the case of duplicates, if the original unlock had been deleted by the player, the player is left with nothing. They've now punished their most enthusiastic players by leaving them with less than they started with.

The end result is that despite having 13 milestones, the meta-achievements that unlock items, the assholes at Valve have left me with 1 single solitary unlock. An unlock I don't even use or like. All of this because of Valve's fuck up and they were too busy planning this punishment to even ask Drunken_F00l not to run or distribute his program.

Way to go, morons at Valve. Have you been taking customer relations lessons from the fucking RIAA?