Over the thousands of hours I've spent playing team shooters, Team Fortress 2 has remained so appealing to me because of its clear focus. By not taking its roster anywhere near as seriously as your Overwatches, your Rainbow Six Sieges, etc., players are allowed to fulfill their role-playing fantasies in a kind of self-parody and the result is (mostly) a community that finds a balance between competitiveness and fun goofing off. TF2 Classic is arguably better than the base game at the moment because it removes a lot of the weapon clutter, forcing each class to play their class better rather than relying on swapping in and out cheesy gimmicks.

Some of the new additions are excellent. The jump pad is the real star of the show, but plenty others feel like they're keeping in mind the role of the class and adding something that's a reasonable extension of that.

I don't like the state of melee weapons in the game, and I think how awkward medieval modes feel demonstrate what I mean. I think every class should be able to get crits if some of them are - and I don't mean random crits which still feel iffy even if they're only for melee now. Maybe they could make it so Medic can manually charge up Shock Therapy, but doing so means he's not healing.

Hopefully they'll find a way to add more good weapons and balancing in future updates, but things have been refreshingly good. My biggest hope is they add back pl_swiftwater and group dancing. Sniper is still a frustrating class. Someone on YouTube suggested making it so that the longer he charges his rifle the more visible a faint laser sight should be. That might encourage Snipers to get better at quickscoping rather than holding sightlines to get kills, while still keeping the oppressiveness of the class just without literally sending people to spawn so often.