The amount of love I have towards this game can't even described. It has played a huge part of my childhood and helped me get through tough times with it's humor, characters, design and just the nature of the game. But as the saying goes "All good things must come to an end" and that's sadly the case of TF2. This game has been plagued by bots for a very long time and it doesn't seem to get any better. What doesn't make it better is that a video came out recently by "Zesty Jesus" where he tried to make out how many bots there actually are. It turns out that this game is 80% bots and only 20% "real" players. Compare that with Valve almost never updating the game you got a dead game with a delusional community. Unless you want the game to stay like this you shouldn't give Valve any type of money to show them that you won't accept this. And if you think that they don't have the tools to fix it, trust me they do!!

I played this sometimes back in the day not really a competitive gamer myself i spent more time in Man Vs Machine and Saxon hale because i prefer PVE & Co - Op
Man was Saxon hale so much fun haha
It was always fun watching the meet the character videos and waiting for them to come out felt like it took forever. This game had a really strong community that still lives on in other games.
In my opinion this is one of the greats, one of those games that started it all and laid out the framework for games alike that came after.

My fav was Pyro
I remember modding all the characters with MLP Skins

fun af game
so many bots tho, like jesus christ
i wanna go back but the game has been overrun by racist bots that keep saying the n word
That along with the total lack of community support dont have me coming back immediately
Will pick it back up tho with friends tho

Something that quite puzzled me over these last couple of years, after TF2 stopped receiving meaningful updates, is how the vast majority of the playerbase begged for new weapons constantly. New weapons, of course, to change how the game is meant to be played with each class. To add “variety” to your options. This is nonsense; the amount of guns added to the game has only led to a massive bloat and contradicting mechanics that go against the simple yet elegant design of the game. Even core mechanics to the classes (that NEVER were intended to exist) are horrible. I will expand on this later.

Let's start with the best secondary alternative to the soldier, the gunboats. They are essentially a dpm trade out for a massive amount of mobility. So, you don't have access to the shotgun anymore, and it will be a bit tougher to kill some classes, like the scout, but that's not a big deal; your rocket launcher still does a really good amount of damage -even if it's just splash damage and not a direct-, and now you can rocket jump for no more than 20 or 25 self-damage. That's a massive tradeoff. You can essentially be a homing missile across some maps if you know the geometry, leading to some insane plays and picks that no other class has access to. Now, of course, it requires skill and practice and it's not easy to do. You have to practice rocket jumping for the gunboats to be justified in your equipment slot, otherwise it's just a waste of damage (see, it's pretty funny and cute to watch a new player who barely knows how to rocketjump, that's part of the charm of the game). So, with all this being said, you'd think that the gunboats are a pretty great addition to the game, and you'd be correct. However, a new problem has just appeared, one that I haven't ever seen people discuss.

The soldier is way, way too mobile. The class now is just dumbed down and can get away with a lot of dumb plays and careless positioning. With the shotgun equipped, you take about 40 to 60 damage with each rocket jump, depending on the angle of your shot. Thus, rocket jumping is an extremely valuable tool, yet it is also really limited due to the amount of self-inflicted damage mentioned. You have to choose carefully when and where to rocket jump. This is totally undermined with the gunboats, you can just fly around the map like an idiot (I won't deny that it's fun as hell tho) with little consideration to your positioning. Obviously, better players, with experience, will position themselves much better than novices, but the consequences remain the same for both. You can see soldiers essentially do a suicide-bombing across the map trying to get a medic pick. The gunboats have allowed these kinds of plays.

And the gunboats are only the tip of the iceberg, really. There are far, far more atrocious unlocks with different classes, for example, the engineer. The engi has some of the most infuriating unlocks in the entire pool of guns of the game. The short circuit disintegrates any enemy projectile in close range, essentially making soldiers and demos (two of the three most important classes to destroy sentry guns) worthless. The wrangler gives an absurd amount of health to the sentry guns, essentially making soldiers and dem- wait, what? Yeah, two unlocks that completely undermine one of the most basic class interactions. The rescue ranger permits the engi to repair his buildings from afar, so he doesn't have to run the risk of eating spam damage near them. And what about the spy? You have the dead ringer, replacing the default watch and making any positioning thoughtless, giving you an easy escape out of dangerous situations, a “get out of jail free card” sort of thing. And the medic? Well, if you feel like receiving only 15 damage to explosives, hitscan or fire, you can use the vaccinator. A medigun that helps the medic more than it helps the team. Woah.

And it just doesn't stop there. I said a couple of paragraphs before that also core class mechanics are horrible, mechanics that were put without any kind of thought into them. The pyro, way way back in the original state of the game, never had airblast. Pyro was conceived to be an ambush class, having to take flank routes in order to be effective and had to be smart with their positioning (can you see the recurring problem here?). Pyro was one of the least versatile classes (and due to this I guess least picked, although I can't confirm this since I didn't play the game in its first years) in the game, he was sort of a one trick pony but it served its purpose rightfully. So, in order to be more versatile, Valve gave them the airblast, which would be fine in itself; now the class has a defensive option. However, the way it was implemented was terrible. When the airblast reflects any projectile it does so as a mini-crit, and it also has a ridiculous and nonsensical radius, and also does not take into account the movement of the game. If you get airblasted and happen to be on air, you cannot strafe properly and you're completely defenseless movement-wise.

Another stupid mechanic is the medic-scout speed buff, added a couple of years back. Scout was already one of the best classes of the game, with a tremendous speed and movement options and really big dpm if you played him properly. The tradeoff to this is his low health, so if you are playing carelessly you can get killed pretty easily. But guess what, this doesn't matter that much, a medic can heal a scout and go at the same speed as him. Now the scout is the best class in the game and a running psychopath that kills everything in his path. You better give the uber to a scout instead of the heavy.

Honestly I could go on and on with similar design decisions, but it's just really tiring.

Compare TF2 to a more grounded game, like CS. Both games share almost no similarities, beyond using the same engine (and thus sharing a similar basic movement; i.e. strafing). But the strength of CS is that it has never diverged too extremely in its original design. 1.6, source and CS2 are virtually the same game, the same core concept, the same ideas, the same guns, you get the idea. You can argue that this philosophy of design leads to staleness and conservatism, to never change or to seek new and unexplored ideas, and I concur to some degree. However, CS has only gained from this, and it has never lost its identity and what makes it stand out from other FPSs (compare cs to valorant, the latter being a much lesser FPS, where the devs keep introducing character after character to maintain a playerbase and to appear as “fresh” as possible), even adding changes that are natural and logical conclusions of the design (albeit really late, valve time as always…), like the smokes in CS2.




I really don't know if it's just the nostalgia of my past highschool days that sometimes makes me play this every once in a while; messing around with friends, trying to get better, playing competitive with not so friendly people, getting airshots with the soldier… but when all of that is gone and you are only left with the present, what does it offer? For the new player -if they can endure the large amount of bots or cheaters and don't care about the lack of updates- it may be the goofiness and the charisma of the characters that drew them in, or the sheer amount of chaos that's not present in any other FPS. And perhaps, eventually, they find joy in the little intricacies of the game and the design. And they will devote their time to this game for years, whether it be in a casual setting or the more unlikely scenario that is the competitive scene. For me, after an embarrassing amount of time spent in the game, the experience is so diluted in junk that I just can't stand it anymore. At its core, TF2 is an extremely fun and deep game, full of curiosities and subtleties that few other FPSs have. I just wish it had been handled differently, with a dev that gave it the love it clearly deserved.