So I've been thinking...

Late last night I was playing TF2. As any gentleman gamer knows, the choice of head wear one sports while destroying his enemies is of dire importance. Well, I had been putting my long hours of gametime and item drops into the hopes of finally snatching up a desired hat for my favorite class, the Pyro. Well last night, I finally collected all 70-some items needed to craft a class-specific piece of head gear, but, when I crafted everything together I received one of the Pyro hats I had absolutely no interest in.

This left me a little fed up with the crafting/drop system. It took me my entire TF2 career to gather all of those items and I imagine it will take another extremely long time to get the same number again. This drove me to do the one thing which I have always hated the concept of: achievement boxing. As I have played TF2 I have never purposely set foot in an achievement server and it has been a point of personal pride that every single achievement I have managed to pick up has been done entirely within the scope of regular gameplay. And while I still stand by my rule of never getting an achievement in TF2 through achievement boxing, I have taken to sitting on the idling servers to quickly mass up on items so as to be able to get more chances at crafting the hats I want.

And this makes me wonder: is this a failure of some sort? Is it a failure on the devs part that the effort and time put in is not rewarded? Is it a failure on the community's part for standardizing what is essentially cheating the system? Is it a failure on my part for not understanding what hats represent and accepting their role in the system?

This makes me think back to a distant conversation Cello and I had about achievements and cheat codes in games. In general, what should the roles of the achievement and the cheat code be? If a cheat or an achievement only affects me, what is the connection between pride/morality and each on its own? And what about when one cheats to get achievements? What about that?

I don't know good sirs. I only have questions today. Anybody have any thoughts or any questions which might further shape or re-direct my own?