I've noticed an interesting way Valve has to push people into upgrading to premium status. I, like most people don't want to spend a hundred dollars for 20 accounts. That's quite a bit of coin for some fancy items in a database that really amount to "look at me! I have a cool hat!". While I build slowly on my premium upgrades, I've noticed a striking difference in item drops between the two types of accounts, above and beyond the not getting hats part.
On average, my premium accounts receive between 7 and 11 items per week. This is well within the bellcurve of the item drop system. See here for more information. However, my F2P accounts tend to stop at exactly 5 items a week, approximatively 50% of the time. (based on 50 data points, 24 accounts being exactly 5 item drops) While I don't have quite enough data points to make a full conclusion yet it seems quite apparent that Valve makes it much harder for F2P accounts to get items, even if as they claim, the drop system works the same way regardless of their payment status.
Another interesting problem I've found involves accounts stalling out in item drops. This happens when a particular account just stops getting any drops for weeks. To be fair, I think some of the problem is me forgetting to update my item yield spreadsheet, but it has happened on several occasions. To resolve the problem, I've had to load up the account on my main desktop, and play for several hours, actually sit there and play (annoying as I'm not leveling up my stranges...). This seems to jump start the accounts again. My request to Valve support has not been answered (which is odd, they tend to respond quickly, even if its just the generic piss off response).
Also just another tidbit of information. I've found that if you don't have the hl2 window focused while idling inside a VM, it tends to lose connection to steam, causing you to lose all hours put into it for that week. So make sure to keep those windows focused!
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