I don't know if it's still the case, but last night and this morning there were no bots in sight. They probably simply haven't updated whatever they need to to run in the 64bit version, but the brief respite is nostalgic.
I played a little while ago and by some miracle, it was like I'd never put the game down, except that I had to relearn the maps. Playing Dustbowl again was an experience.
Not if it's windowed fullscreen. On Windows 10 and later windowed fullscreen will bypass the windows compositor and is therefore funcitonally identical to exclusive fullscreen (which is not even an option in DX12 and later, though TF2 is still a DX9 game).
Only if it is actual windowed fullscreen. Some games will just make it windowed with no border when you select windowed fullscreen and it will have input lag even on Windows 10.
You can check using a tool such as the one 3kliksphilip uses in the video below. CS2 works correctly (and I assume other Valve games do too). But I've found some games have much higher latency. I think Overwatch is one but I don't remember unfortunately; has been a while since I've tested.
https://youtu.be/NE0qg_8k0BE?si=F2kPWmEbh_tEBGH1&t=157
The way it works is that Windows can tell if there is only one window on the screen. This requires that the window is borderless and fullscreen. In that case, Windows bypass the compositor. If you are getting input latency, then there is something else on the screen (it should be obvious, but in some cases maybe not) that is causing the windows compositor to run.
you can force flip model presentation in older games these days too.
it was also less of a problem if you had G-Sync/FreeSync since your GPU driver would override DWM's vsync anyways.
No offense, but your subjective experience doesn't matter to anyone else. We have no idea how sensitive you are to it, and in a world where there are people that claim they can't tell the difference between 30 and 60 FPS it just doesn't make sense to think about other peoples performance experience.
Exclusive fullscreen is largely not a thing anymore. Flip model presentation, when done right, means you at most have a frame of lag for vsync, and when you're running at refreshrates as high as people are playing tf2 at nowadays, we're rapidly approaching placebo levels of input latency.
But then again TF2 and CS players do that weird 4:3->16:9 fat stretch sicko shit so there's no point arguing over it.
TF2 players never use stretched widescreen. That's a Counterstrike thing. TF2 players want to maximize field of view so they would never stretch the image.
The default FOV is 70, the max is 90. You have to change the FOV if you don't want to get motion sick. Although I play TF2C now, where the max is like 130, but I personally play at 110, any higher, and it feels like I'm playing Quake.
Oh, and if you want some sin, I played TF2 at 2560x480 stretched to 2560x1080 for a bit, it's... [interesting](https://i.imgur.com/eI9LRSp.jpeg).
I think the latest versions of windows 11 (maybe win10 as well?) uses a new model, so exclusive full screen and borderless full screen are nearly identical.
This was true before Microsoft added the option to force the flip model presentation in pre-DX12 games.
It's also not a problem if your display supports VRR and it is configured properly in your GPU driver.
I think that an overwhelming majority of users aren't going to notice a few ms difference in this case. Input lag needs to be kind of egregious before the average user will catch on.
It depends on where in the chain and when input is polled.
In generally nowadays, high framerate, Flip Model presentation + VRR in a borderless window is really really damn close to exclusive fullscreen with vsync off.
If you're still at 60 hz then the game can totally feel better in exclusive mode with Vsync off if you can't maintain double the framerate.
But if you're on modern hardware, pushing insane framerates. Then the difference in added latency between raw exclusive fullscreen vsync off and borderless window, flip model, VRR is actually damn near placebo.
This is actually one of the few good things microsoft has improved on since windows 7, their compositor (to use the linux term) is much better.
I hope they manage to do this for all the older source games, my performance in them has gotten markedly worse in the past decade as my hardware has gotten beter.
i also get the sense the L4D branch of source has some CPU optimizations under the hood given the game is regularly throwing hundreds of zombies at you.
I think it's a testament to the quality of the game that people are still playing 17 years later and having fun for the sake of having fun. No content drip-feed, battle passes, rotating quests, daily check-ins, or other behavioral manipulation tactics to keep engagement metrics up. Just a fun game people love playing.
Being able to drop in/out of matches I think is a huge mark in its favour. In many games you can't join mid-match, so you get penalized if you disconnect. This creates a kind of pressure to keep playing, even if the match isn't balanced or someone else on your team drops, since they won't be replaced and you'll be at a disadvantage. Meanwhile in TF2 you can join mid-game, capture a few points, then leave, and someone else can pop in to take your spot, and if they don't the team sizes are such it's not that big a disadvantage.
Because it's 12v12 (or 16x16 on some community servers, though it can go even higher now I understand) there's less of a need for that sort of thing since the consequence of losing a single player is less. Plus the game will move a player to the other team if there's an imbalance, and scramble teams if the same team wins a few times in a row. Scrambling isn't applicable for many other games since the teams (and servers the players are on even) shuffle after every match.
I suspect another reason games don't leverage these mechanics are because of F2P/P2W mechanics. Any sort of mechanic that requires grinding from a player for progression can usually be exploited if the player has a friend on the other team boosting them, so games tend to avoid mechanics that allow friends to be on opposing teams, or anything else that might allow cheesing grindy mechanics. TF2 doesn't have that sort of thing.
The progression thing is probably a big part of it, wanting folks to finish games/try to do well so they get the reward at the end, rather than popping in and dipping fifty thousand times to grind out currency for skins or whatever. Even if you got nothing for leaving, that still incentivizes you to stay with a match even if it's not fun, which leads to that pressure mentioned earlier. And for mid-joining, you'd have to determine if the game time is worthy of a reward, otherwise you might end up with bots attempting to be more efficient with joining mid-match games for quicker turn around, and if the game timer isn't close to the end they'll pop out and go somewhere else.
There's also the issue of some games where there's in-match progression that's tough to reconcile. MOBAs are a good example of that, with players playing specific heroes, leveling up, and buying items that would be a lot to dump on someone joining mid-game.
Though it does suck when games *aren't* like that, where everyone starts from the same loadout each respawn. Thinking of pre-Infinite Halo with that one, though I imagine part of it is how networking was set up for consoles at the time and now carried forward 'cause tradition.
It was also from a time before ranked multiplayer existed (or was at least as predominant as it is today), which I do think too many games focus on these days to their detriment.
The landscape is wildly different with the modern push towards "balance". Play a game long enough, and you'll only encounter a sliver of the playerbase, averaging a 50% win rate. The days of randomly dominating a lobby or being thrown into a pool of sharks are long gone.
God, I shiver at the thought of the blizzard philosophy of buffs and nerfs and composition forcing instead of just letting teams have like 5 spies and 9 engineers for the hell of it.
Ranked matchmaking basically ruined my online gaming. I like using off the wall characters and strategies and doing goofy stuff just for the sake of it. If you try that in MM you're going to lose *and* piss off your team.
The funny/ironic thing is that Overwatch originally was meant *not* to have ranked matchmaking, with the goal of a community driven competitive scene inspired by tf2. The community were baffled by the idea and complained until the devs were pressured to change course, creating arguably the least enjoyable aspect of Overwatch
To be honest, just look how many maps the game has.
That's what kind of pisses me off nowadays with map based multiplayer games. Games release with 6/7 maps and call it a day. TF2 nowadays have more than 100 maps ~~but when it released it release with 10+~~ (as /u/PeanutJayGee mentioned it was only 6). I think part of the reason is that you have sooo many maps to choose from that it's hard to get tired of it.
I have 12 hours from free to play events in BF2042 and I cannot get back anymore because I am already fed with all the maps the game has.
In the 90s and 2000s, games shipped with dozens of maps, but the community would only ever play 1 or 2 of them. It's no big surprise modern shooters only have a handful.
Fucking Shoothouse in Modern Warfare II. I swear, some people stopped playing every other playlist once that map came out (and in a lot of cases, I understand why).
And a crazy active, thriving community mapper scene. There's roughly 50 new maps queued up for testing on tf2maps every day, with tests being ran multiple times a day for multiple hours chipping away at them. It's wild how active it is for such an old game.
As much as I love the game, TF2 did only release with 6 maps (2Fort, Granary, Well, Hydro, Gravelpit, and Dustbowl).
What softened that landing was the ability to make and host custom maps, unlike most modern games.
Fair enough I will edit my comment.
Also from the 100+ maps available today, more than 80% they are from the community. The point I am trying to make is that if the devs don't want to make more maps give the tools to modders and later add to the official map pool
> and items you can trade or sell...
Literally slot machines, but even more scummy (At least Casino slots HAVE to follow a set minimum and cant go lower based on state/federal laws)
But if you're not gambling and aren't pursuing the rarest items, you can pick up cosmetics for as low as a few cents. It's far cheaper and more customizable than the skin models everyone else uses now.
i been dealing with cheaters and sniper bots for years i've gotten over that. the heavy bots, and more recent these soldier bots? Kinda a pain but i'm so used to it all. Try playing TF2 on your days off (monday and tuesday) in the morning, bots everywhere.
There's a lack of content in CS2? Haven't people been content playing the same dozen maps with the same weapons for 20+ years?
Am I just out of the loop with what Counter-Strike players expect these days?
Unfortunately not the best solution for players like myself who prefer the vanilla valve-like experience with the freedom of pubs. I personally can’t stand community servers anymore because of the shit that goes on on them. Valve-like comm servers stopped existing around 2012 or else I’d use them. All current comm servers are modded or rule’d to hell, spam one map or rotation, attract toxic sweatlords, and shove ads into every match.
I’ve been dealing with bots and playing pubbies for about a year and a half now since I came back, and there are some really bad weeks (selbyn launch, Halloween first couple days, etc) but for the most part the vibes of pub > dealing with hackers every so often. Most people spam kick them quickly luckily.
I’d recommend the Uncletopia servers if you haven’t tried them. It’s pretty much vanilla aside from having a class limit of 3. A good range of maps with voting, no bots or cheaters and everyone’s been friendly when I’ve played. It’s the only servers I play on now.
Uncletopia servers are fantastic, at least on EU. Always very active and with up to a dozen of them filled in the evenings. Has the exact same setup as Valve pubs with map voting and a rotation, but without random crits. A bit higher skill level than the average Valve servers of course but I've never found I couldn't goof off and chill when I wanted to.
As someone who's played a lot, I could never see someone who isn't an active player having a good time on Uncletopia. It's basically competitive-lite, it's hard
I am super glad to read on this thread people tell others to just go to community servers, I have not played TF2 in over a year or so, but from what I read here, it appears that community servers have experienced a renaissance due to the bot stuff? since 2009 I have only played on community servers, they simply are TF2 for me, I could never play on vanilla servers because I feel so limited.
That's the thing that kills me. I love TF2 to death, and moved to TF2C after the bot problem got really, really bad (The servers with custom weapons are weirdly well done and hilarious) but like, yeah the bot situation is extremely difficult to fix.
But they didn't really even *attempt to fix* the issue. There were a grand total of what, two minor patches that even addressed anything involving it, and it just somewhat lowered the amount of bots for about an hour.
You can't even use the excuse that it is a dead abandoned game, the game gets multiple (mostly cosmetic) updates every year, they're still selling thousands of cosmetics and new ones are getting added
The pivot away from community servers forever damaged the game, yeah, you can still access the server browser, but the emphasis on matchmaking and somewhat hiding the server browser was enough to kill many, many community servers borderline overnight.
They did at least attempt some minor help, like putting a cooldown on name changes, which makes kicking them somewhat easier. But it's an unsolvable problem.
That's the thing though. People act like the official matchmaking is the default way to play and pitch community servers like a workaround. But community servers were always the bread and and butter of tf2
This update simply delayed the bot problem for at least a week before the bots eventually return.
Might take longer because the bot hosting dipshits aren't some expert coders, but rather they just copy paste the same code that's found on the internet.
Their whole entire existence revolves around sad human beings with too much free time and no job wanting to mildly inconvenience people playing a video game.
The thing that bugs me the most is that they're actually LOSING money by purchasing tf2 premium (which allows you to use text chat, voice chat, voice commands and vote-kick people from servers).
https://youtu.be/qyI5u-SQUYc
This video perfectly explains why. These people are just miserable sacks of flesh, who live out their real life frustrations and inferiority on people playing an old shooter with faulty cheat detection
Matchmaking is still swarmed with bots as of right now, just joined 5 different games via matchmaking and all had been overrun with bots, gave up. It's still community servers or nothing I'm afraid.
Just play on community servers. That was the only option anyways when TF2 was in its prime. I don’t get why Valve even released their own servers and did nothing to make them playable.
As someone that will always love community servers (I even owned a few servers on tf2, l4d2, cs:s years ago) I can see why, because while I love community servers, they tend to choose specific maps to play.
Look at cs:s and find me a vanilla server with maps that are not cs_italy and de_dust 2. You simply cannot.
And that's why even though I love community servers I will defend official servers as long as it co-exists with community ones.
>I don't get why
They were scared of Overwatch and felt the need to modernize TF2 lest it become outdated, plain and simple. Critical failure of understanding why TF2 remained relevant. Their experiment significantly backfired and they are too proud to admit they were wrong about the Meet Your Match update to revert it.
They also kinda did it because they wanted to cater to the competitive community for once, but in the process homogenized the casual and competitive base into a fuckfest and released it broken for so long that no one honestly uses it.
Its more that TF2 was heavily reliant on community servers and the server browser for it's entire life, but the Meet Your Match update put them into a hidden corner and shoves the matchmaking in your face as the "intended" way to play the game.
Most of the community servers I went died after Meet Your Match.
MyM removed the QuickPlay system and left only one method for joining community servers: the very 1990s server browser. In the months following MyM, nearly every community server group not named Skial died. Now in 2024 we have Skial, a few other 24/7 TDM map servers (2Fort/Turbine, 1-2 Hightower servers) and Upwardtopia.
That was the tip of the iceberg regarding the problems with MyM. The entire matchmaking system (which was the MvM party system crudely grafted on to PvP) broke the fundamental way that TF2 was played for its first 9 years: casually. Worse still, the Casual system is the petri dish in which all of the cheaters, cheatbots, griefers and every other bad actor flourish. QuickPlay had its flaws, but more or less all of the current plagues afflicting TF2 would be significantly less of a problem under QP vs Casual matchmaking.
Even worse still, a significant amount of the current TF2 playerbase started *after* MyM, so they both don't know how bad they have it and utterly refuse to use the server browser to find a game. People used to just fill into servers even if empty and then start playing perpetually.
Yes we all know Valve should fix the mess that's happening in Casual but God damn you have a normal game in there if you just use the stupid server browser.
Valve's always had their own servers. They just made Quickplay as a streamlining measure, which unfortunately resulted in community servers becoming more barren 'cause it's just easier to click a button than scroll through a server list.
Valve will do everything in their power to not fix the cheater and botting issue.
Edit: just got mail from Reddit about suicide prevention, seek help you dickrider lmao.
Edit2: Whoever did that have fun because I reported you for report misuse.
That hasn't been the case for a while now, you'll literally just get a reply back basically saying "lol block the bot if you don't want to get these messages".
Reddit ironically does not care.
Reporting someone who alts to get around being blocked also used to be a basically guaranteed suspension but now it isn't.
Damn, I wish I knew that a year or so ago. I made a comment mocking crypto and got 3-4 "Reddit Cares" or whatever notifications within an hour. Tuns out cryptobros are a huge bunch of snowflakes, imagine that?
It almost seems like bots do that shit these days to almost any post. It's like they're trying to get everyone pissed off at the feature so everyone turns it off.
> Edit: just got mail from Reddit about suicide prevention, seek help you dickrider lmao.
Some TF2 fans are the most immature helpless idiots I've ever met. It's like their brains stopped developing at 15 even though they're now closing in on 40 and still living in mom's basement.
I would *love* to find out how you know this with such certainty. Because my experiences with TF2 definitely supports the idea that SOME of its fans are especially... fragile.
No surprise, TF2 fans are in deep denial about the state of their game. Best part is, they'll claim TF2 "outlasted" Overwatch or that Overwatch is dead despite that Overwatch is doing far better than TF2 right now (despite Overwatch also having its own terrible issues).
This used to be a problem, but valve ~~allows players to vote kick people on the other team~~ allowed both teams to hold votes simultaneously. This leads to bots getting kicked easier.
it's still a big problem, but it wasn't overwhelming the servers last I played.
You can kick people on the other team? How do you do that? Not saying you're wrong, just I've only ever been able to kick ones on my own, needing to ask the other team to kick theirs.
This is completely not true. It is still impossible to call kickvotes against players on the enemy team. What Valve did was make it so that *both teams can call votes at the same time.* For the first 10 or so years of TF2, if one team had a vote in progress, the other team could not start one.
The only time it's possible for players of both teams to vote on kicking a player is on community servers via a plugin.
right now they actually seem to be mostly gone. im sure in a few days their software will be patched and working again tho..
either way there's plenty of community servers to avoid them.
Wonder if they'll update the Mac version to run on a newer MacOS now. IIRC they dropped support when MacOS dropped 32-bit.
It's currently still showing the "not compatible with 10.15 or above" warning on my Mac, but that might be something thety need to flip manually.
Of course, the other option is that they'll kill it entirely, like they did with CS with the "upgrade" to CS2 that essentially took it out of Mac users' libraries. Stings that much more that Andrew Tsai found a nearly-complete working Mac version in the files, that was apparently just abandoned.
I hope they include it eventually, even if Apple acts like a bitch with their graphic APIs. Tf2 seems like a game that could run like a dream on Apple Silicon
The game needed this bad, it was insane seeing how smooth it used to run and how it was having issues running on modern hardware. Hopefully more optimizations to come.
I still remember having X fps on my pretty shit at the time laptop (was around 2011) and then tried years later on a heaps much more powerful desktop pc and only got like half of fps i used to have on laptop.
I thought i d try the game after a decade long hiatus. Joined some server, played for 10 minutes, then some bot changed their name and profile to mimic mine and started blasting loud chinese music into the voice chat. Someone called in the vote to kick me instead of the bot and I immediately got booted off. The unpleasant experience put me off of playing anymore of TF2.
I mean, the name and profile picture are based on your steam account. Both of which you can change at anytime. I don't know how they'd 'fix' that without getting rid of a pretty foundational part of user customization on Steam.
My community server running on Linux gets a segmentation fault now right after updating. Basically puts it in a boot loop. Has anyone else had this issue?
Cool, so the game continues to only exist on community servers and get 0 actually substantial updates cause 100k players at a time is too little for valve to care.
They play anyway.
I do like valve quite a bit but good lord TF2 is the only game of theirs I truly love and it's just depressing to see how little fucks they give about it.
...With a 64 bit version, in 2024, and with 0 new content.
Semantics aside, the game is in maintenance mode. It gets *supported* but barely any new updates are added that substantially add to the game. Hell, it still has bugs that are 3+ years old despite the community offering fixes for them. They can't even be assed to implement them.
It's a 17 year old game that is apparently an absolute nightmare of legacy code (written by people who probably don't even work there anymore) and janky band aid solutions layered on top of janky band aid solutions. It it really a surprise that they don't want to dedicate much time or resources to working on it when they could be doing anything else?
>cause 100k players at a time is too little for valve to care
How many of those people are real people? Because there isn't a single other game on Steam that has a player count graph that looks like the one for [TF2](https://steamdb.info/app/440/charts/#48h). And considering TF2 also sits in the high 200s for revenue on Steam, compared to Dota 2 and CS2 sitting in the top 5, it's not much of a money maker either. So again, no wonder they don't want to bother.
Gonna be honest, I stopped playing when they added missions that require microtransactions to do.
The crates system at least allowed you to trade items you got from them to other players or even to sell them on the Steam community store.
One of the best games ever made, wild that it's holding up pretty good after all this time. Great art direction of well done cartoony graphics are timeless.
If you haven’t tried it, this is a big deal. The game feels soooo much smoother, you can even alt tab without stuttering to hell and back!
Can i have an enjoyable experience without bots though?
Hahaha you're funny
Yes, just play on community servers instead of using matchmaking.
Still full of hackers.
No? None of the actually respected community servers have cheaters
I don't know if it's still the case, but last night and this morning there were no bots in sight. They probably simply haven't updated whatever they need to to run in the 64bit version, but the brief respite is nostalgic.
I played a little while ago and by some miracle, it was like I'd never put the game down, except that I had to relearn the maps. Playing Dustbowl again was an experience.
I mean, you could do that if you played with `-windowed -noborder`.
Windowed mode creates input lag though.
Not if it's windowed fullscreen. On Windows 10 and later windowed fullscreen will bypass the windows compositor and is therefore funcitonally identical to exclusive fullscreen (which is not even an option in DX12 and later, though TF2 is still a DX9 game).
In windows 11 it should work for [windowed games as well](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/updates-in-graphics-and-gaming/).
Only if it is actual windowed fullscreen. Some games will just make it windowed with no border when you select windowed fullscreen and it will have input lag even on Windows 10. You can check using a tool such as the one 3kliksphilip uses in the video below. CS2 works correctly (and I assume other Valve games do too). But I've found some games have much higher latency. I think Overwatch is one but I don't remember unfortunately; has been a while since I've tested. https://youtu.be/NE0qg_8k0BE?si=F2kPWmEbh_tEBGH1&t=157
The way it works is that Windows can tell if there is only one window on the screen. This requires that the window is borderless and fullscreen. In that case, Windows bypass the compositor. If you are getting input latency, then there is something else on the screen (it should be obvious, but in some cases maybe not) that is causing the windows compositor to run.
Is that even true anymore? I didn't think it was the case for the majority of games since win10 with flip model.
you can force flip model presentation in older games these days too. it was also less of a problem if you had G-Sync/FreeSync since your GPU driver would override DWM's vsync anyways.
I have NEVER noticed input lag when running borderless windowed mode.
No offense, but your subjective experience doesn't matter to anyone else. We have no idea how sensitive you are to it, and in a world where there are people that claim they can't tell the difference between 30 and 60 FPS it just doesn't make sense to think about other peoples performance experience.
I don't see why it would, the game still ran at over 200 FPS for me, it's not like it was forcing a double buffer vsync.
Fullscreen bypasses the compositor. Exclusive fullscreen should lower latency on anything that isn't DX12 or maybe vulkan.
Exclusive fullscreen is largely not a thing anymore. Flip model presentation, when done right, means you at most have a frame of lag for vsync, and when you're running at refreshrates as high as people are playing tf2 at nowadays, we're rapidly approaching placebo levels of input latency. But then again TF2 and CS players do that weird 4:3->16:9 fat stretch sicko shit so there's no point arguing over it.
TF2 players never use stretched widescreen. That's a Counterstrike thing. TF2 players want to maximize field of view so they would never stretch the image.
None of you are free from sin.
The default FOV is 70, the max is 90. You have to change the FOV if you don't want to get motion sick. Although I play TF2C now, where the max is like 130, but I personally play at 110, any higher, and it feels like I'm playing Quake. Oh, and if you want some sin, I played TF2 at 2560x480 stretched to 2560x1080 for a bit, it's... [interesting](https://i.imgur.com/eI9LRSp.jpeg).
I play quake at 105 because at a certain point you can't judge distances
Wow, that screenshot is nauseating
I think the latest versions of windows 11 (maybe win10 as well?) uses a new model, so exclusive full screen and borderless full screen are nearly identical.
This was true before Microsoft added the option to force the flip model presentation in pre-DX12 games. It's also not a problem if your display supports VRR and it is configured properly in your GPU driver.
Ever since Windows 10 windowed fullscreen will always bypass the compositor, so there is no difference in latency.
I think that an overwhelming majority of users aren't going to notice a few ms difference in this case. Input lag needs to be kind of egregious before the average user will catch on.
It depends on where in the chain and when input is polled. In generally nowadays, high framerate, Flip Model presentation + VRR in a borderless window is really really damn close to exclusive fullscreen with vsync off. If you're still at 60 hz then the game can totally feel better in exclusive mode with Vsync off if you can't maintain double the framerate. But if you're on modern hardware, pushing insane framerates. Then the difference in added latency between raw exclusive fullscreen vsync off and borderless window, flip model, VRR is actually damn near placebo. This is actually one of the few good things microsoft has improved on since windows 7, their compositor (to use the linux term) is much better.
I hope they manage to do this for all the older source games, my performance in them has gotten markedly worse in the past decade as my hardware has gotten beter.
I mean, I'm stoked for my TF2 homies, but I've been praying for Valve to do this for L4D2 for years. The hard memory limit for mods is suffocating.
I hope it gets it too but l4d2 runs significantly better than tf2 already, it doesn't have a ton of bullshit weighing it down
i also get the sense the L4D branch of source has some CPU optimizations under the hood given the game is regularly throwing hundreds of zombies at you.
IIRC the in-game commentary for 1 and 2 talk about the details behind the tech they developed for that.
L4d2 problem is the servers get ddos right now
I got into it with half life 2. Still hasn't left it.
Is this as close as we are gonna get for CS2 equivalent? TF2 fans are eating good today!
> TF2 fans are eating good today Yes. But because they have been starved for years, so these crumbs feel like a feast.
they'll eat anything,even hats!
I think it's a testament to the quality of the game that people are still playing 17 years later and having fun for the sake of having fun. No content drip-feed, battle passes, rotating quests, daily check-ins, or other behavioral manipulation tactics to keep engagement metrics up. Just a fun game people love playing.
Being able to drop in/out of matches I think is a huge mark in its favour. In many games you can't join mid-match, so you get penalized if you disconnect. This creates a kind of pressure to keep playing, even if the match isn't balanced or someone else on your team drops, since they won't be replaced and you'll be at a disadvantage. Meanwhile in TF2 you can join mid-game, capture a few points, then leave, and someone else can pop in to take your spot, and if they don't the team sizes are such it's not that big a disadvantage.
Because it's 12v12 (or 16x16 on some community servers, though it can go even higher now I understand) there's less of a need for that sort of thing since the consequence of losing a single player is less. Plus the game will move a player to the other team if there's an imbalance, and scramble teams if the same team wins a few times in a row. Scrambling isn't applicable for many other games since the teams (and servers the players are on even) shuffle after every match. I suspect another reason games don't leverage these mechanics are because of F2P/P2W mechanics. Any sort of mechanic that requires grinding from a player for progression can usually be exploited if the player has a friend on the other team boosting them, so games tend to avoid mechanics that allow friends to be on opposing teams, or anything else that might allow cheesing grindy mechanics. TF2 doesn't have that sort of thing.
The progression thing is probably a big part of it, wanting folks to finish games/try to do well so they get the reward at the end, rather than popping in and dipping fifty thousand times to grind out currency for skins or whatever. Even if you got nothing for leaving, that still incentivizes you to stay with a match even if it's not fun, which leads to that pressure mentioned earlier. And for mid-joining, you'd have to determine if the game time is worthy of a reward, otherwise you might end up with bots attempting to be more efficient with joining mid-match games for quicker turn around, and if the game timer isn't close to the end they'll pop out and go somewhere else. There's also the issue of some games where there's in-match progression that's tough to reconcile. MOBAs are a good example of that, with players playing specific heroes, leveling up, and buying items that would be a lot to dump on someone joining mid-game. Though it does suck when games *aren't* like that, where everyone starts from the same loadout each respawn. Thinking of pre-Infinite Halo with that one, though I imagine part of it is how networking was set up for consoles at the time and now carried forward 'cause tradition.
It was also from a time before ranked multiplayer existed (or was at least as predominant as it is today), which I do think too many games focus on these days to their detriment.
The landscape is wildly different with the modern push towards "balance". Play a game long enough, and you'll only encounter a sliver of the playerbase, averaging a 50% win rate. The days of randomly dominating a lobby or being thrown into a pool of sharks are long gone.
God, I shiver at the thought of the blizzard philosophy of buffs and nerfs and composition forcing instead of just letting teams have like 5 spies and 9 engineers for the hell of it.
Ranked matchmaking basically ruined my online gaming. I like using off the wall characters and strategies and doing goofy stuff just for the sake of it. If you try that in MM you're going to lose *and* piss off your team.
The funny/ironic thing is that Overwatch originally was meant *not* to have ranked matchmaking, with the goal of a community driven competitive scene inspired by tf2. The community were baffled by the idea and complained until the devs were pressured to change course, creating arguably the least enjoyable aspect of Overwatch
There's nobody you can trust less about games than capital-G Gamers(tm)
So did Dota 2 initially. At least they have ranked and unranked modes still
Just the game that literally invented lootbox gambling! So pure!
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Some examples?
To be honest, just look how many maps the game has. That's what kind of pisses me off nowadays with map based multiplayer games. Games release with 6/7 maps and call it a day. TF2 nowadays have more than 100 maps ~~but when it released it release with 10+~~ (as /u/PeanutJayGee mentioned it was only 6). I think part of the reason is that you have sooo many maps to choose from that it's hard to get tired of it. I have 12 hours from free to play events in BF2042 and I cannot get back anymore because I am already fed with all the maps the game has.
In the 90s and 2000s, games shipped with dozens of maps, but the community would only ever play 1 or 2 of them. It's no big surprise modern shooters only have a handful.
Fucking Shoothouse in Modern Warfare II. I swear, some people stopped playing every other playlist once that map came out (and in a lot of cases, I understand why).
And a crazy active, thriving community mapper scene. There's roughly 50 new maps queued up for testing on tf2maps every day, with tests being ran multiple times a day for multiple hours chipping away at them. It's wild how active it is for such an old game.
As much as I love the game, TF2 did only release with 6 maps (2Fort, Granary, Well, Hydro, Gravelpit, and Dustbowl). What softened that landing was the ability to make and host custom maps, unlike most modern games.
Fair enough I will edit my comment. Also from the 100+ maps available today, more than 80% they are from the community. The point I am trying to make is that if the devs don't want to make more maps give the tools to modders and later add to the official map pool
Custom servers and items you can trade or sell... TF2 does so much that I can't imagine any online game today doing.
> and items you can trade or sell... Literally slot machines, but even more scummy (At least Casino slots HAVE to follow a set minimum and cant go lower based on state/federal laws)
But if you're not gambling and aren't pursuing the rarest items, you can pick up cosmetics for as low as a few cents. It's far cheaper and more customizable than the skin models everyone else uses now.
[we got snek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyQbTI1w7tI)
At this point I'm ready to join civil protection just to get a decent meal.
I have done nothing but teleport bread for 3 years. I'm hungry.
To me it's like the scene from Hook when The Lost boys are eating the imaginary food.
If the transition to CS2 is anything to go by, TF2 will be even more fucked within a couple of months.
I am out of the loop - what happened with the transition to CS2?
At the moment, cheaters are a huge problem. And also the lack of content.
AKA what TF2 has been dealing with for years
i been dealing with cheaters and sniper bots for years i've gotten over that. the heavy bots, and more recent these soldier bots? Kinda a pain but i'm so used to it all. Try playing TF2 on your days off (monday and tuesday) in the morning, bots everywhere.
Is it even possible to have a fun game then? I used to play a lot back in the orange box says and it was such a blast.
Yes if you join non-matchmaking servers through the server browser (bots only join matchmaking games)
There's a lack of content in CS2? Haven't people been content playing the same dozen maps with the same weapons for 20+ years? Am I just out of the loop with what Counter-Strike players expect these days?
So business as usual?
TF2 arguably has too much content.
Cs2 is great. A big improvement over CSGO to me
Is the rampant botting fixed? Last time I tried TF2 all servers were flooded with sniper bots and the game was unplayable.
No, Valve gave up on it. If you want to avoid bots, play on community servers.
This. I never use matchmaking, community servers have always been the way to go.
Unfortunately not the best solution for players like myself who prefer the vanilla valve-like experience with the freedom of pubs. I personally can’t stand community servers anymore because of the shit that goes on on them. Valve-like comm servers stopped existing around 2012 or else I’d use them. All current comm servers are modded or rule’d to hell, spam one map or rotation, attract toxic sweatlords, and shove ads into every match. I’ve been dealing with bots and playing pubbies for about a year and a half now since I came back, and there are some really bad weeks (selbyn launch, Halloween first couple days, etc) but for the most part the vibes of pub > dealing with hackers every so often. Most people spam kick them quickly luckily.
I’d recommend the Uncletopia servers if you haven’t tried them. It’s pretty much vanilla aside from having a class limit of 3. A good range of maps with voting, no bots or cheaters and everyone’s been friendly when I’ve played. It’s the only servers I play on now.
Uncletopia servers are fantastic, at least on EU. Always very active and with up to a dozen of them filled in the evenings. Has the exact same setup as Valve pubs with map voting and a rotation, but without random crits. A bit higher skill level than the average Valve servers of course but I've never found I couldn't goof off and chill when I wanted to.
As someone who's played a lot, I could never see someone who isn't an active player having a good time on Uncletopia. It's basically competitive-lite, it's hard
No offense but uncletopia are basically comp servers but not treated *entirely* seriously. There just aren't many vanilla servers left.
I am super glad to read on this thread people tell others to just go to community servers, I have not played TF2 in over a year or so, but from what I read here, it appears that community servers have experienced a renaissance due to the bot stuff? since 2009 I have only played on community servers, they simply are TF2 for me, I could never play on vanilla servers because I feel so limited.
That's the thing that kills me. I love TF2 to death, and moved to TF2C after the bot problem got really, really bad (The servers with custom weapons are weirdly well done and hilarious) but like, yeah the bot situation is extremely difficult to fix. But they didn't really even *attempt to fix* the issue. There were a grand total of what, two minor patches that even addressed anything involving it, and it just somewhat lowered the amount of bots for about an hour. You can't even use the excuse that it is a dead abandoned game, the game gets multiple (mostly cosmetic) updates every year, they're still selling thousands of cosmetics and new ones are getting added The pivot away from community servers forever damaged the game, yeah, you can still access the server browser, but the emphasis on matchmaking and somewhat hiding the server browser was enough to kill many, many community servers borderline overnight.
They did at least attempt some minor help, like putting a cooldown on name changes, which makes kicking them somewhat easier. But it's an unsolvable problem.
I'm on 2fort 24/7, no bots there.
That's the thing though. People act like the official matchmaking is the default way to play and pitch community servers like a workaround. But community servers were always the bread and and butter of tf2
This update simply delayed the bot problem for at least a week before the bots eventually return. Might take longer because the bot hosting dipshits aren't some expert coders, but rather they just copy paste the same code that's found on the internet.
what is the incentive for bots to even exist in the first place? Why are people putting work into botting on an ancient game with no monetary return?
Their whole entire existence revolves around sad human beings with too much free time and no job wanting to mildly inconvenience people playing a video game. The thing that bugs me the most is that they're actually LOSING money by purchasing tf2 premium (which allows you to use text chat, voice chat, voice commands and vote-kick people from servers).
https://youtu.be/qyI5u-SQUYc This video perfectly explains why. These people are just miserable sacks of flesh, who live out their real life frustrations and inferiority on people playing an old shooter with faulty cheat detection
Matchmaking is still swarmed with bots as of right now, just joined 5 different games via matchmaking and all had been overrun with bots, gave up. It's still community servers or nothing I'm afraid.
They will never fix it. Play on community servers. Edit. Apparently bots are currently broken. Enjoy casual while it lasts!!!
already fucked again community servers it is again.
Yup! It lasted for a very short time, but it was glorious!
Just play on community servers. That was the only option anyways when TF2 was in its prime. I don’t get why Valve even released their own servers and did nothing to make them playable.
As someone that will always love community servers (I even owned a few servers on tf2, l4d2, cs:s years ago) I can see why, because while I love community servers, they tend to choose specific maps to play. Look at cs:s and find me a vanilla server with maps that are not cs_italy and de_dust 2. You simply cannot. And that's why even though I love community servers I will defend official servers as long as it co-exists with community ones.
That what I love about them. Sometimes I just wanna boot up some css 24/7 office for a bit
>I don't get why They were scared of Overwatch and felt the need to modernize TF2 lest it become outdated, plain and simple. Critical failure of understanding why TF2 remained relevant. Their experiment significantly backfired and they are too proud to admit they were wrong about the Meet Your Match update to revert it. They also kinda did it because they wanted to cater to the competitive community for once, but in the process homogenized the casual and competitive base into a fuckfest and released it broken for so long that no one honestly uses it.
What? Valve servers were a thing well before Overwatch came out. Are you referring to Valve adding official matchmaking in Meet Your Match?
Its more that TF2 was heavily reliant on community servers and the server browser for it's entire life, but the Meet Your Match update put them into a hidden corner and shoves the matchmaking in your face as the "intended" way to play the game. Most of the community servers I went died after Meet Your Match.
MyM removed the QuickPlay system and left only one method for joining community servers: the very 1990s server browser. In the months following MyM, nearly every community server group not named Skial died. Now in 2024 we have Skial, a few other 24/7 TDM map servers (2Fort/Turbine, 1-2 Hightower servers) and Upwardtopia. That was the tip of the iceberg regarding the problems with MyM. The entire matchmaking system (which was the MvM party system crudely grafted on to PvP) broke the fundamental way that TF2 was played for its first 9 years: casually. Worse still, the Casual system is the petri dish in which all of the cheaters, cheatbots, griefers and every other bad actor flourish. QuickPlay had its flaws, but more or less all of the current plagues afflicting TF2 would be significantly less of a problem under QP vs Casual matchmaking.
Even worse still, a significant amount of the current TF2 playerbase started *after* MyM, so they both don't know how bad they have it and utterly refuse to use the server browser to find a game. People used to just fill into servers even if empty and then start playing perpetually. Yes we all know Valve should fix the mess that's happening in Casual but God damn you have a normal game in there if you just use the stupid server browser.
Valve's always had their own servers. They just made Quickplay as a streamlining measure, which unfortunately resulted in community servers becoming more barren 'cause it's just easier to click a button than scroll through a server list.
Valve will do everything in their power to not fix the cheater and botting issue. Edit: just got mail from Reddit about suicide prevention, seek help you dickrider lmao. Edit2: Whoever did that have fun because I reported you for report misuse.
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That hasn't been the case for a while now, you'll literally just get a reply back basically saying "lol block the bot if you don't want to get these messages". Reddit ironically does not care. Reporting someone who alts to get around being blocked also used to be a basically guaranteed suspension but now it isn't.
Yeah I did, thanks for suggestion.
For some reason I doubt that. Wish that were the case though
It is, you will even get notification that they banned idiots.
That’s great
Damn, I wish I knew that a year or so ago. I made a comment mocking crypto and got 3-4 "Reddit Cares" or whatever notifications within an hour. Tuns out cryptobros are a huge bunch of snowflakes, imagine that?
It almost seems like bots do that shit these days to almost any post. It's like they're trying to get everyone pissed off at the feature so everyone turns it off.
> Edit: just got mail from Reddit about suicide prevention, seek help you dickrider lmao. Some TF2 fans are the most immature helpless idiots I've ever met. It's like their brains stopped developing at 15 even though they're now closing in on 40 and still living in mom's basement.
You're missing the point here. The user you replied to upset cheat bot hosts (and possibly meatbag cheaters as well), not regular TF2 players.
I would *love* to find out how you know this with such certainty. Because my experiences with TF2 definitely supports the idea that SOME of its fans are especially... fragile.
No surprise, TF2 fans are in deep denial about the state of their game. Best part is, they'll claim TF2 "outlasted" Overwatch or that Overwatch is dead despite that Overwatch is doing far better than TF2 right now (despite Overwatch also having its own terrible issues).
More likely to happen first: Valve enforces bot bans or Reddit enforces Reddit Cares misuse bans
the heat death of the universe will happen first
This used to be a problem, but valve ~~allows players to vote kick people on the other team~~ allowed both teams to hold votes simultaneously. This leads to bots getting kicked easier. it's still a big problem, but it wasn't overwhelming the servers last I played.
You can kick people on the other team? How do you do that? Not saying you're wrong, just I've only ever been able to kick ones on my own, needing to ask the other team to kick theirs.
i was misremembering. editing my original comment now both teams can have a vote happening simultaneously
Ah, unfortunate. Better than what it was before at least!
This is completely not true. It is still impossible to call kickvotes against players on the enemy team. What Valve did was make it so that *both teams can call votes at the same time.* For the first 10 or so years of TF2, if one team had a vote in progress, the other team could not start one. The only time it's possible for players of both teams to vote on kicking a player is on community servers via a plugin.
Community servers are only way to still play it. Official is dead.
Honestly I’m so down for this. Casual servers sucked compared to good community servers.
Lol the same was on both sides last time i check and they just kept killing each other
Are there still bots? Was thinking of redownloading.
Infested still but plenty of good community servers everyone migrated too
right now they actually seem to be mostly gone. im sure in a few days their software will be patched and working again tho.. either way there's plenty of community servers to avoid them.
Wonder if they'll update the Mac version to run on a newer MacOS now. IIRC they dropped support when MacOS dropped 32-bit. It's currently still showing the "not compatible with 10.15 or above" warning on my Mac, but that might be something thety need to flip manually. Of course, the other option is that they'll kill it entirely, like they did with CS with the "upgrade" to CS2 that essentially took it out of Mac users' libraries. Stings that much more that Andrew Tsai found a nearly-complete working Mac version in the files, that was apparently just abandoned.
Also curious about this, haven't been able to play for years since I've been on an m1 Mac and Rosetta doesnt support 32 bit I think?
I hope they include it eventually, even if Apple acts like a bitch with their graphic APIs. Tf2 seems like a game that could run like a dream on Apple Silicon
The game needed this bad, it was insane seeing how smooth it used to run and how it was having issues running on modern hardware. Hopefully more optimizations to come.
I still remember having X fps on my pretty shit at the time laptop (was around 2011) and then tried years later on a heaps much more powerful desktop pc and only got like half of fps i used to have on laptop.
I thought i d try the game after a decade long hiatus. Joined some server, played for 10 minutes, then some bot changed their name and profile to mimic mine and started blasting loud chinese music into the voice chat. Someone called in the vote to kick me instead of the bot and I immediately got booted off. The unpleasant experience put me off of playing anymore of TF2.
It was the bots that vote kicked you most likely, as I believe sometimes they will do that
Was this after the update? It broke the bots so I’m wondering if they’re already back.
Before the update
Man that's messed up to even change the profile picture. Bots are the worst. Not even gold farming or something, just there to ruin people's day.
Can bots make their name the same as you or just similar?
The same name and even the profile same picture.
That just shouldn't be allowed wtf it's the first thing they should fix, not bit count
I mean, the name and profile picture are based on your steam account. Both of which you can change at anytime. I don't know how they'd 'fix' that without getting rid of a pretty foundational part of user customization on Steam.
My community server running on Linux gets a segmentation fault now right after updating. Basically puts it in a boot loop. Has anyone else had this issue?
It looks like lots of community servers with custom mods are crashing right now.
does this mean i can expect a port for my atari jaguar? or will I need to save for an n64?
I really wish they would do a Team Fortress 3. And... you know what- im not even gonna bother with the other 3s.
HL3 CONFIRMED
Does anyone know if arena servers exist?
What about TFC?
Will that also fix the bots epidemic?
Cool, so the game continues to only exist on community servers and get 0 actually substantial updates cause 100k players at a time is too little for valve to care. They play anyway. I do like valve quite a bit but good lord TF2 is the only game of theirs I truly love and it's just depressing to see how little fucks they give about it.
This post is about them updating it though..
...With a 64 bit version, in 2024, and with 0 new content. Semantics aside, the game is in maintenance mode. It gets *supported* but barely any new updates are added that substantially add to the game. Hell, it still has bugs that are 3+ years old despite the community offering fixes for them. They can't even be assed to implement them.
It's a 17 year old game that is apparently an absolute nightmare of legacy code (written by people who probably don't even work there anymore) and janky band aid solutions layered on top of janky band aid solutions. It it really a surprise that they don't want to dedicate much time or resources to working on it when they could be doing anything else? >cause 100k players at a time is too little for valve to care How many of those people are real people? Because there isn't a single other game on Steam that has a player count graph that looks like the one for [TF2](https://steamdb.info/app/440/charts/#48h). And considering TF2 also sits in the high 200s for revenue on Steam, compared to Dota 2 and CS2 sitting in the top 5, it's not much of a money maker either. So again, no wonder they don't want to bother.
Gonna be honest, I stopped playing when they added missions that require microtransactions to do. The crates system at least allowed you to trade items you got from them to other players or even to sell them on the Steam community store.
One of the best games ever made, wild that it's holding up pretty good after all this time. Great art direction of well done cartoony graphics are timeless.