Yes this is an issue that I've always had with valve's system of not giving you every weapon as a stock.

More skins as unlocks is a good idea, but removing all unlocks may not be good. I quite enjoy my gunboats, xbow, kritzkrieg, and the winger.

However, removing these unlocks probably won't break the game. For example, people would just have to learn to play like they did years ago, with needles and only a medi beam as the only source of healing.

TF2 probably could use a bit of both, like a bit of essential unlocks for competitive, but mostly reskins of stocks. It's too late to remove the unlocks though.

I think the ability to obtain these unique weapons should not be random drops. It'd be nice if there was a very simple progress system where everytime someone completes a task they unlock a weapon.
Example:
Play scout for the first time
Get 10 kills with the scattergun
Unlock a new weapon.
Get 50 kills
Unlock new weapon.
Get 20 captures (CP or CTF)
Get unlock.

The balance issues just need to be fixed and then I think this system would be good to implement.

it takes so little time to collect all the weapons. remember services like scrap.tf exist that offer free auto weapon scrapping/buying.

what they should do is allow all unlocks for mp_tournament 1 since that represents the minority of matches played, and it means comp matches aren't at the mercy of the item server (which used to be a major problem but downtime has been way better recently)

As much as I'd like for some weapons to be removed, any that are in existence currently are likely not to be removed.

Example: There's someone out there whose pride and joy of tf2 is only playing pomson engineer. So much so that whoever it is invested in a collector's strange professional killstreak pomson for some odd reason. If valve were to remove the pomson, that person would tell a lot of people and start a mass riot because of it.

you used to actually unlock the weapons by getting class specific achievements, but now there are just way too many fucking weapons for that to be possible.

right now a player can buy a key and then trade them out for all functional weapons and still have half the worth of the key in metal left over

aside from the initial purpose, the only thing holding people back from doing that is just not knowing how, which is pretty disingenuous of valve when weapons sell for like 1-5 dollars in the store.

i dont think that actually removing the whole drop system is much of an option at this point. theyve existed for too long. i think the store and crafting system deserve a price overhaul at this point though. and an "ultimate starter pack" with all the weapons would probably leave me less disappointed for anyone who ignorantly just buys a weapon theyre interested in. Maybe bundle it with the competitive pass as well once thats not a mess.

http://puu.sh/s0d2b/a4a86ba5fb.png

Valve needs to stop selling yellow text weapons for over 200x their market value.

Uniques should be easier to unlock and they should sell some weird "mann co." quality items for people who care.

The issue is community involvement. Had valve created every existing weapon, I doubt they'd hesitate to make a solution for the problem. But because contributors created the models, They're obligated to keep them as unlockables. Not every weapon is available in forms beyond unique (strange, community, genuine, ETC) so if every item were made 'stock' then certain weapon contributors would cease any form of revenue for their hard work. There's a few ways to 'remedy' this.

- Make unlocks easier to obtain.
Valve tried this by making class weapon packs for 'cheap' when they released mym. Not a very effective strategy, as it still makes people required to pay money to be on par with players who already have items unlocked. The only other ways to acquire unlocks are trading, crafting and achievements- all of which are confusing, time consuming or too expensive for new players.

- Treat weapons like maps, ala stamps
Basically, turn all weapons stock and replace their store variants with weapon stamps/stickers of some sort. Maybe they can be placed on the weapon they're made for, which would support the contributor and give buyers a reason to use them (customization)?

- Make all unlocks stock, give every weapon a strange/community/etc variant, and make contributors income based on said stranges and community variants.
This is my preferred option. It keeps valves revenue system in tact while making it so contributors aren't fucked over by any adjustments. By replacing all store unique buyables with stranges you make an easy way to obtain stranges and no more kids wasting $10 on a unique machina/phlog. This choice creates issues with the economy, however, because of a large influx of stranges, and it could very well fuck hard with crates which are as it is now the main place to obtain strange weapons. But given valve mostly only uses cases for cosmetics, I feel like this wouldn't make an issue going forward, but rather make some complications looking backwards. All previously purchased uniques will turn vintage, or something like that.

Or, just jerryrig a solution.
Something like making all items equippable but only during competitive mode. During casual/community server/all other forms of gameplay they will only be equippable if you own them.

All unique items are very easy to get either through achievements or through trading. Plus most of the best weapons are stock and there are almost no weapons that are direct upgrades.

Things like the ubersaw, vita saw, quick fix, loch n load, disciplinary action, gru, sandwich etc etc are all items that open up insane opportunities not available to players who just installed the game. While it's not hard to get these items through trading or crafting, no new players are going to understand of feel obliged to work to get these because of that. Achievements are long and arduous, crafting is time consuming (gathering up random drops, learning how to craft, learning how to find the recipe, learning how to craft potential recipe ingredients, etc etc etc)

Just because things are easy to an experienced player do not mean they aren't tedious and potentially difficult and deemed not worth it by casual or new players

For the sake of competitive, there needs to be ways to alleviate this. I like the idea of giving access to all unique weapons for competitive only, and then just having the rest of the game require you to earn/make them. This would help them gather data too, because now you can base your equip/usage rate on the total playercount and not only those who own said items.

but how will valve make easy $10 from kids buying phlog from store

Would you be able to have unlocks even when the item server is down with this idea ? Like for example having a server command to allow everyone to equip any unlock, even if they don't have it. If so, then that might be a great way to solve 2 problems at once : Give unlocks to new players for competitive and always having unlocks when playing scrims/officials.

cant you craft every weapon anyways?

Youre capped to 8 drops a week so getting crafting fuel takes a while

I'm not sure. While it should be possible to see it in your inventory (a-la grappling hook which only appears when the proper setting is enabled, the command being passtime specific), we've never really had a case of changeable stock weapons so all we've ever seen is the stock unchangeable loadout. If classes were to get multiple stocks per slot, something would need to still keep track of what the user has equipped. I would guess unless that can be handled server-side, it would end up being an item server dillema.