Best game of all time. I mean it. This is my favourite game ever.

The visual design, the iconic characters, the brilliant soundtrack, it's all an amazing work of art that brilliantly enhances the already amazing game play. Each of the 9 classes provides a very distinct and fun way to play and so every game feels different. This game has a style of humour and player-to-player interactions that no other game does leading to some of the most funny and memorable experiences I've ever had.

The developers who worked on the game clearly put enormous amounts of effort into making the game as special as it is and as a consequence, despite the game being almost as old as I am, it still holds up amazingly today.

But this game has been left to rot.

I don't understand how the company that made this game as good as it is can be the same company that abandoned it almost entirely and left it to be overtaken by bots.

The complete lack of updates and the gradual overtake of community-made filler content that is supposed to make up for it I can excuse, but not the refusal to put a sliver of effort besides copying and pasting the occasional community-made hat to sell cosmetic cases. I can't believe that the same company that made this masterpiece of a game is the same one who abandoned it and decided it wasn't worth their time.

Valve is selling a product that doesn't work. That shouldn't be allowed. I love this game and I want to see something done about it.

#FixTF2 #SaveTF2 and all that.
Please Valve. Do something.

"I am not trapped in a facility full of robots, you are all trapped in here with me!" - The Solder, Mann vs Machine (R.I.P. Rick May)

Seven years in the making, Valve's paramount title, Team Fortress 2 is still one of the best Free-to-Play experiences to have come out of the 2000's. As far as multiplayer FPS games go, this would be my personal choice for a grand time sink. I can hop onto servers, both official and community for a great casual experience. With nine playable characters, each with a boombastic personality and unique, adjustable playstyles, the combat of this game offers much enjoyment to behold. And the movement! Rocket Jumping, Sticky Jumping, even Detonation Flares feel so satisfying to master. The humor that this game offers through the characters charming attitudes and the randomness of the casual server antics, TF2 is truly the Saturday Morning Cartoon experience I've been looking for in a FPS game. With over 1,000 hours poured in, TF2 is amongst some of my absolute favorite games of all time!

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.

йее (оооууу)
тик ток хеви лайк и бринг трак лукинг лайк айм тип тап шайнинг лайк э вристватч тайм вилл граб юр врайст лок ит даун тил зе зигс поп кэн ю стик эраунд фор э минот тил зе риг стоп? Плиз год тик ток хеви лайк э бринг трак лукинг лайк айм тип тап шайнинг лайк э вристватч тайм вилл граб юр врайст лок ит даун тил зе зигс поп кэн ю стик эраунд фор э минот тил зе риг стоп? Плиз год (плиз год)

эс тайм кип слипинг эвей (слипинг эвей) гёрл донт старт филлинг э вей (филлинг э вей) ю энд ай ви ар ван энд зе сэйм ловинг ин пэин ловинг ин (ловинг ин пейн) эс тайм кип слипинг эвей (слипинг эвей) гёрл донт старт филлинг э вей (филлинг э вей) ю энд ай ви ар ван энд зе сэйм ловинг ин пэин ловинг ин

тик ток гимми гимми биг бакс зэтс ис ол ай до гёрл ай жаст хит зе джекпот ай виш ю вёр хир виз ми нау со ай куд фил сам ай виш ю хир ту холд ми даун лайк зе рил ван, рил ван лив лонг вонна би а биг шот шудв стайед эвей бат олвейс хэв а вик спот айв бин он зе роад энд айм сорри фор зе микс ап иф ю стилл лав ми кэн ю си ми дуринг лифоф (лифтоф)

эс тайм кип слипинг эвей (слипинг эвей) гёрл донт старт филлинг э вей (филлинг э вей) ю энд ай ви ар ван энд зе сэйм ловинг ин пэин ловинг ин (ловинг ин пейн) эс тайм кип слипинг эвей (слипинг эвей) гёрл донт старт филлинг э вей (филлинг э вей) ю энд ай ви ар ван энд зе сэйм ловинг ин пэин ловинг ин

Виз май хендс ин зе оушен.....
Виз май хендс ин зе оушен.....
Виз май хендс ин зе оушен ай прей, ай прей, ууууу, ай прей....