TF2: You Will (Not) Play

Summary

"TF2: You Will (Not) Play" by Zesty Jesus delves into the tumultuous history of Team Fortress 2 (TF2), highlighting its neglect by Valve and the consequences of misguided updates. The video narrates the period from 2016 onward, when TF2 was plagued by rampant cheating bots, rendering the game almost unplayable. Valve's focus on competitive esports led to disastrous updates like "Meet Your Match," which dismantled the community's server-based culture and replaced it with a flawed matchmaking system. This shift alienated players, dismantled established communities, and left TF2 in a state of decay for years. Despite recent bot-fixing improvements, the video argues that Valve's neglect and mismanagement have left lasting scars on what was once a beloved game.

Highlights

• The video dissects Valve's shifting focus from game development to hardware, leading to TF2's neglect. 🎲
• Community servers once thrived, but evasive changes and the rise of unmanageable bots hit hard. 🌐
• Competitive matchmaking in TF2 betrayed its original spirit, causing widespread dissatisfaction. ⚔️
• Valve's attempts to blend competitive and casual modes failed to reignite TF2's popularity. 🔥
• Bot crises crippled gameplay, exposing Valve's delayed and minimal response strategies. ⚠️

Key Takeaways

• TF2 suffered from years of neglect and bot infestations before Valve took action. 🤖
• Meet Your Match update replaced vibrant community servers with a flawed matchmaking system. 🎮
• Valve’s competitive focus alienated the community, leading to a player exodus. 🚶‍♂️
• The failure to address core issues left TF2 in decay, despite fleeting improvements. 🔧
• The video criticizes Valve's priorities, showcasing TF2 as a lesson in mismanagement. 📉

Overview

Team Fortress 2, a game celebrated for its community-driven servers and chaotic fun, underwent a dramatic decline when Valve altered its focus from traditional game development to other ventures. By prioritizing competitive play, TF2’s original essence was lost, and the community suffered.

The infamous 'Meet Your Match' update was a key turning point, introducing a matchmaking system that dismantled age-old server cultures and ushered in a period of prolonged player dissatisfaction. Players found the new system frustrating, unbalanced, and far removed from the game’s casual origins.

During TF2's darkest years, rampant bots further deteriorated the player experience, showcasing Valve's neglect. Despite some improvements in recent years, the video critiques Valve's management decisions and their impact over the game, positioning TF2 as a cautionary tale of gaming mishandling.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction and Overview The introduction and overview chapter discusses the challenges faced by video games, such as discontinuation, hardware obsolescence, and fading into obscurity. It emphasizes that these issues are unfortunate but explores how one particular video game faced these hurdles.
• 02:00 - 29:00: The Early Days of TF2 (2007-2011) The chapter discusses the early days of Team Fortress 2, a popular online multiplayer game, highlighting the significant issues and challenges the game faced due to developer neglect. Starting in 2016, the game endured severe problems for nearly eight years, primarily caused by cheating bots that flooded game servers, leading to unplayable conditions. The chapter also covers frequent DOS attacks and server crash exploits that made the game sporadically accessible, alongside rampant cheating that went largely unchecked.
• 29:00 - 53:00: Rise of Microtransactions and Free-to-Play Model (2010-2011) In the summer of 2024, Valve took significant action against bots and cheaters by implementing a system to ban them. Although the longevity of its effectiveness is uncertain, this move was seen as the minimal maintenance required for one of their flagship titles. With the removal of bots, fans of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) are now able to focus on other aspects of the game without the distraction of cheating players.
• 53:00 - 78:00: Impact of Free-to-Play on Community Servers and Quickplay The chapter titled 'Impact of Free-to-Play on Community Servers and Quickplay' addresses the issues faced by the game Team Fortress 2 as discussed in a video. It highlights how the game developers, Valve, seemingly abandoned the game for years, leading to its decline. This situation is attributed to the introduction of free-to-play strategies, which resulted in an increase in bots and a lack of oversight, thereby affecting the community servers and quickplay experience. The chapter serves as both a reminder to those who lived through the changes and an informative piece for those who did not witness these events firsthand.
• 78:00 - 120:00: Valve's Push for Esports and Introduction of Matchmaking (2014-2016) Valve's strategic initiatives between 2014 and 2016 aimed to boost the competitive esports scene, particularly focusing on the popular game, CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive). The company introduced several measures to enhance player experience and the competitive integrity of the game. Among these were the implementation of effective matchmaking systems to ensure fair play and to accommodate players of similar skill levels into matches.
• 120:00 - 170:00: The Competitive Mode Testing and Feedback In this chapter, the focus is on the testing and feedback of a competitive mode in a game or activity. The excitement builds up as participants seem to reach a defining moment where they succeed or achieve victory. The chapter captures this pivotal moment through lively expressions such as cheers and applause, suggesting a triumphant end to a competitive session marked by what could be a crowning victory. The use of music and applause highlights the celebratory and energetic atmosphere of the event.
• 170:00 - 204:00: Meet Your Match Update and Its Impact (2016) This chapter discusses the significant update in 2016 to the video game Team Fortress, known as 'Meet Your Match.' It delves into the reasons behind Valve's decision to abandon the development of Team Fortress 2 after the update. The chapter aims to provide insights into Valve's motivations by exploring the background and roots of the game, which was originally intended to be a first-person shooter with a broad appeal to FPS players.
• 204:00 - 214:00: 26: Casual Mode Replaces Quickplay Chapter 26 discusses the evolution of a game from its beginnings as a mod for Quake, known as Quake Team Fortress. The original game focused heavily on individual skill and fast-paced action, as seen in one-on-one battles. Over time, the game evolved to become more accessible to a wider range of skill levels and engagement desires, while still retaining deep mechanics that reward players for investing time into the game. This careful balance maintains the fun of the game, evolving from its intense Quake roots into something more inclusive.
• 214:00 - 240:00: Issues with Casual Mode and Attempts at Fixing (2016-2017) The chapter titled 'Issues with Casual Mode and Attempts at Fixing (2016-2017)' discusses the challenges faced by casual players in Quake due to the game's mechanics. In team death matches or small team settings, like 2v2, skill discrepancies were highly pronounced. Minor differences in skill often dictated the game's outcome, setting a high entry barrier. Players who weren't deeply experienced faced punishment from nuanced skill differences, leaving their enjoyment dependent on these variations.
• 240:00 - 288:00: Community Server Decline Post-Meet Your Match The chapter discusses the decline of community servers in the gaming landscape post the release of Meet Your Match update. It highlights the gameplay mechanics that made the game challenging, such as moments to regain health which could be vital in combat. The game is described as having a steep learning curve, especially for new players, making it less approachable compared to modern games like OverWatch. The chapter also briefly touches upon how Quake Team Fortress mod shifted from a single player to a team-focused gameplay, indicating a need for more cooperative play in modern gaming.
• 288:00 - 368:00: Valve's Neglect and the Bot Crisis (2018-2024) The chapter discusses the evolution of team-based gameplay mechanics, beginning with Quake Team Fortress. Players were able to rely on team dynamics rather than individual skill alone. The introduction of unique classes with distinct weapons and abilities allowed players to concentrate on specific game mechanics instead of mastering all aspects of the game. This transition laid the foundation for future games like Team Fortress 2, with contributions from original developer Robin Walker.
• 368:00 - 395:00: Resolution of the Bot Crisis and Valve's Current Stance Valve aimed to cater to a broad spectrum of players with varying skill levels, from casual gamers to avid enthusiasts, as they developed Team Fortress 2.
• 395:00 - 398:00: Conclusion and Reflection on Valve's Handling of TF2 In the concluding chapter, the focus is on evaluating Valve's approach to handling Team Fortress 2 (TF2). The game was designed to cater to a wide range of players, from casual gamers to more dedicated players, by offering nine unique classes each with a high skill ceiling. This design decision aimed to allow players to engage with the game at their own pace and interest, providing satisfaction whether mastering all aspects of the game or focusing on specific elements. Valve's success in achieving this balance is highlighted as a key point of discussion.
• 398:00 - 400:00: Outro and Final Thoughts In this chapter, the design philosophy behind the Engineer class in a game is discussed. The Engineer is crafted to allow players to contribute to combat and have an impact without requiring direct shooting skills. This class appeals to those who prefer strategic gameplay, such as anticipating enemy movements rather than engaging directly. Also mentioned is the presence of another class called the 'Pirate.'

TF2: You Will (Not) Play Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 what is the worst thing that can happen to a video game discontinuation Hardware obsolescence Fading Into Obscurity all lamentable in their own right but one video game
• 00:30 - 01:00 experienced what could only be described as one of the worst if not the worst examples of mistreatment by the developer starting in 2016 and for nearly 8 years Team Fortress 2 was in a state of limbo game servers were constantly filled with cheating Bots rendering the game unplayable more often than not periodic dos attacks and server crash exploits would render the game entirely unplayable at times and cheaters would roam free unabated in the
• 01:00 - 01:30 summer of 2024 valve finally took action and implemented some kind of system that banned all of the Bots and cheaters we don't know how long this system will stay effective but valve finally performed the absolute bare minimum level of maintenance required for one of their most beloved Flagship titles but now with the Bots gone the blinders are off TF2 fans have been distracted by
• 01:30 - 02:00 Bots for years it's been so long we've likely forgotten why all of this happened in the first place why valve abandoned Team Fortress 2 why they turned a blind eye for years and left the game to rot under its own weight for those who were there let this video be a reminder and for those who weren't this is how valve crippled one of the greatest games ever made
• 02:00 - 02:30 [Music] International 2016 Champions but it's just aiel and it's done they had one goal that's it that's all they wanted
• 02:30 - 03:00 this could be it oh it's it that's it crowns they take it oh wow [Music] [Music] [Applause]
• 03:00 - 03:30 in order to fully appreciate why valve abandoned Team Fortress to you first need to understand its roots valve set out to create a first-person shooter that appealed to a wide range of FPS
• 03:30 - 04:00 fans a game that was accessible to a wide range of skill levels a wide range of desired levels of Engagement but also a game that retained deep mechanics that rewarded a player's time therefore making it fun this was an evolution from tf2's Roots in Quake originally TF2 was a mod for Quake called Quake Team Fortress Quake being a much more intense fast-paced series that greatly focused on individual skill expression since Quake players faced each other in 1 V1
• 04:00 - 04:30 death matches or small team sizes like two versus two with everyone using the same weapons and tactile movement mechanics minute differences in skill were vastly magnified and the tiniest of differences would largely determine the outcome of a game this set the level of entry into Quake very high if a player wasn't fully invested and experienced in the minutia of every mechanic they were heavily punished by those who were their fun would be at the total mercy of those minute differences in skill in a game like Quake you go in as long as you come
• 04:30 - 05:00 out on top in the fight you've got this little window to run around and bring yourself uh bring your health back up so even if you're only 5% better you might win every engagement qu gameplay winds up brutal tending towards blowouts and very frustrating for uh it did not have the approach ability for new players where a lot of more modern games things like OverWatch uh can be jumped into a lot more easily because team play is another aspect of that now the mod Quake Team Fortress took quake's single player experience and focused on prioritizing
• 05:00 - 05:30 team play now players could rely on each other to win instead of being solely dependent on their own skill and rather than everyone using the same weapons and mechanics Quake Team Fortress introduced classes each with unique weapons and abilities derived from quake's Gunplay now players could focus on a handful of mechanics rather than needing to master all of the games mechanics in order to be effective Robin Walker one of the original developers of Quake Team Fortress and later Team Fortress 2
• 05:30 - 06:00 States this we had a very broad spectrum of players with different skills there were some people who were not really hardcore Gamers at all but who wanted to come home to land parties and play classes seemed like an obvious thing for us to do as a way to make sure that everyone was having fun and as valve developed Team Fortress 2 they retained a familiar focus on high-intensity territory control and team play as seen in Quake Team Fortress however they wanted to retain that low level of Entry but they also wanted to reward a player's time spent with the mechanics
• 06:00 - 06:30 of their choosing without punishing them for not mastering every single facet of the game they successfully met these goals in several ways First Team Fortress 2's roster of nine unique classes the various but limited range of classes were intentionally designed to be mechanically deep with high skill ceilings so as to be satisfying to learn and master but also accessible for many different types of FPS players for example the developers understood that not everyone is a hardcore gamer Argo
• 06:30 - 07:00 they designed the engineer to essentially have the game play itself but retain a high level of Engagement for the player we understood that the engineer was a class that should exist to draw in people who wanted to be in combat and have an impact but didn't necessarily want to do it directly maybe they don't have the aiming skills they would like or maybe they just want to spend more time thinking about which way enemies would be coming in and where enemies would get to and exploit that TF2 also has the pirate a class that
• 07:00 - 07:30 doesn't require pinpoint aim in order to be effective in a similar vein we have the soldier and demoan but with markedly higher potential for skill expression we have other classes whose weapons do require pinpoint aim in order to be effective still offering players the choice to be rewarded or punished for those minute differences in skill we have the medic a purely supportive role and the mechanically complex spy with high-risk High reward tactile play valves spent years mtic ridiculously
• 07:30 - 08:00 balancing these classes with the presence of all others in mind this did away with the need to learn all facets of play in order to be effective valve wanted to avoid situations like this for example in Quake if you didn't Master bunny hopping at a basic level you would get annihilated whereas in Team Fortress 2 we have rocket jumping or more generally blast jumping which is an immensely powerful movement mechanic but you're not forced to master it in order to be effective because you can simply play as a different class with a different set of mechanics and still
• 08:00 - 08:30 have an impact on the game another crucial facet of play is that players are allowed to change their class at any time and there are no limits as to how many can be present players are free to play as they please with no restrictions of any kind they can stick with one preferred means of play or change it on the fly as they deem fit player classes form the backbone of Team Fortress 2's gameplay a player who's getting tired of one class can switch to another class and get a fresh experience they allow us to cater to players with of different
• 08:30 - 09:00 skills and desires beginning in advanced players can have fun together cautious cerebral thinkers strategic Defenders and twitch firing Adrenaline Junkies can all find their Niche so no matter how bad or good of an FPS player you are or how tired you are after work or school or what mood you're in there's always something fun for the player to do at the full discretion of the individual continued play is naturally encouraged by rewarding all play Styles and levels of Engagement instead of punish punishing the player for not using
• 09:00 - 09:30 certain mechanics or not playing in a certain way as a result of this Team Fortress 2 is an inherently chaotic amorphous free-for-all game without the strict need for coordination structure or metagames in order to win or have fun but this is a team-based game how does team play naturally fall out of this chaos tf2's large team sizes 12 versus 12 by default large team sizes successfully create the illusion of working to together without strictly
• 09:30 - 10:00 enforcing it players are going to have their own individual goals and a small view of everything going on our goal was to make it so that they all individually and locally optimize for their experience optimization at the team level falls out of that they could look left look right and see teammates doing some stuff and go man we're working well as a team even though we started with the base assumption that they were all ignoring everyone else because it turns out that's the way most players work even if players aren't intentionally coordinating in that moment players go
• 10:00 - 10:30 about their own single player experience as the class of their choice and affect all others around them without really thinking about it this isn't to say coordination doesn't exist it certainly does but it's not a requirement players are allowed to coordinate as heavily as they please all of these Design Elements create vanilla Team Fortress 2 an Ever evolving chaotic experience granting you infinite replayability at the individual level TF2 lacks a rid structure as it
• 10:30 - 11:00 intentionally allows players to play as they please whenever they like and however they like with as much or as little coordination as they desire there are no punishments for losing and no incentives for winning other than the personal satisfaction this alongside tf2's incredible mechanical depth naturally encourages continued play rather than forcing it along by over incentivizing the need to win either by brutalizing minimal differences in skill by punishing players for not strictly coordinating or using certain metagames
• 11:00 - 11:30 or by punishing players for not being intimately skilled with all of the minutia of the game's mechanics all of this creates the ultimate laid-back gaming experience it was a genius design philosophy breeding a highly addictive gameplay Loop that respected a player's agency and a player's time
• 11:30 - 12:00 [Music] [Music] [Music] Team Fortress 2 launched on October 10th 2007 and on release TF2 had no hats no microtransactions and and no official
• 12:00 - 12:30 game servers if you wanted to play Team Fortress 2 your only options were player operated servers henceforth known as Community servers through the '90s and early 2000s this was more or less the standard for valve titles and many other video games Quake halflife Counterstrike primarily consisted of servers ran by the players themselves and contained a server browser to access them entering the mid 2000s dedicated servers with game coordinators started becoming the norm so in that regard TF was very late
• 12:30 - 13:00 to the party as it lacked one entirely this was definitely a side effect of its nearly decade long development time which officially started back in the late '90s but for Team Fortress 2 this was largely to the players benefit you would open up the server browser search for a map or a specific server that you wanted to play on and connect if there were slots available you did this via ad hoc connections a term some of y'all might be familiar with ad hoc translating from Latin to for this or more Loosely for this moment or when
• 13:00 - 13:30 needed when a player wanted to play on a server for this moment when the connection was needed all they had to do was click on the server in the browser and join it directly that's it you simply got to start playing if the server you desired was full you could simply join a different server and play there while you waited for a slot to open killing time in one server while you waited for another was the norm and the entire time you were still playing the game not sitting around and waiting at the end of your play time if you like liked the server you could favored it
• 13:30 - 14:00 and return to it in the future or if you dislike the server for any reason you could Blacklist it and then never see it again through the server browser players were able to curate a list of servers over time typically returning to the servers they preferred rather than selecting one at random every time they played the server browser was a simple intuitive system that had all of the functionality players needed to play as such over time players would build up a list of regular servers where they would frequently meet the same players over
• 14:00 - 14:30 and over again eventually making friends also known as [Music] communities player hosted servers are the perfect environment for smaller networks of people with similar interests to get together and hang out there were countless smaller player bases where everyone knew each other this created server cultures with friendly bonds between players that encouraged them to interact and have have fun together and in all it took no
• 14:30 - 15:00 time for players to dive into TF2 start playing and find the servers that suited them best and for most players the experience that suited them best was Vanilla Team Fortress 2 aside from those aforementioned Roots what did Vanilla TF2 look like vanilla TF2 consisted of several server settings and Norms first ad hot connections allowing players to come and go from servers as they pleased second pretty much every server ran map timers a map would load in and would be
• 15:00 - 15:30 played for a set period of time typically anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour this allowed for long periods of uninterrupted play time you would complete as many rounds of TF2 that would fit within that time frame once the timer was up the map would change to the next one in the server's rotation or many servers used a plug-in where players could vote on the next map this map boat appeared as you played taking less than a second to interact with without interrupting your fun third if
• 15:30 - 16:00 teams were heavily unbalanced resulting in a steamroll where one team quickly loses to the other teams would be automatically scrambled this would Shuffle players around at random and even things out for the next round as the years went on players were unsatisfied with having to wait for the game to perform that shuffle in your normal round of TF2 it becomes apparent very quickly if the teams are unbalanced so players developed a server plugin where a vote could be called for a scramble this eventually became so so popular that valve added this vote as an
• 16:00 - 16:30 official option some years later so as players trickled in and out of servers and in tandom with scrambling features team balance would even itself out as the players sorted themselves out fourth players could choose their teams when they first joined a server and were allowed to change teams at any time if there was a slot available you want to help out the losing team for a challenge or out of pity you could do this you simply want to play defense or offense again you could do this you want to play with or against your friends on the same
• 16:30 - 17:00 server you could do this do you simply want to join your friends you could join their server directly via that ad hot connection and start playing with them immediately hell joining servers to specifically play against your friends was very common practice and oppositely playing with a whole bunch of friends known as team stacking was very much frowned upon the fifth and final somewhat annoying facet of vanilla TF2 was that if team weren't the same size
• 17:00 - 17:30 they would be automatically balanced given the design of TF2 this was a necessary feature and most players accepted their fate as they vented their frustrations thanks to these vanilla server settings and Norms there was no short-term finality to the gameplay Loop if you were satisfied after one round or 20 rounds you could come and go as you pleased all of these factors these vanilla game settings and the era of the mid 2000s led to a culture of everyone logging on to play with their friends Friends Play to have fun winning was
• 17:30 - 18:00 deemphasized and secondary to hanging out with everyone and having a good time Team Fortress 2 is by design a fun social game for everyone the game play was built to accommodate all skill levels at the same time in the same server the developers even Incorporated a bunch of features that encourage players to interact with each other all of which have absolutely zero bearing on the gameplay we have taunts kill cams text chat voice chat dominations Revenge
• 18:00 - 18:30 character voice lines hell we even have a ton of achievements that entice players to interact to either work together play with friends or even bully someone out of a server but it was like this this fun game where you would play casually and then what would happen for me often is I would say I'm going to only play till I die and then more people would join in and you'd have a good game and people would be talking and like you would kind of have a community around then just playing and you would just go play again and it
• 18:30 - 19:00 would just keep going and it used to be that the game just kept going and you could just keep going and going and going you didn't have these big resets you didn't win or lose I mean you left lost rounds or whatever but nobody cared it was just fun to play I actually played on private servers where people did book readings and kind of made this whole social thing about it this was the norm this was the vanilla TF2 experience for about 4 years but thanks to the fact servers were entirely player operated this allowed for custom settings and custom content historically in Quake Team Fortress and later to a much larger
• 19:00 - 19:30 extent in TF2 there is a massive community of players that create custom game content you have custom maps Cosmetics game modes the list goes on it was extremely common for many TF2 servers to run the vanilla game but play on custom maps custom maps were a huge part of server culture and many servers had Maps specifically made for their communities as time went on players started adjusting their experiences exploring new and alternative ways to play it was very common to tweak certain
• 19:30 - 20:00 game settings leading to many TF2 servers running close derivatives of the vanilla game no random crits no random bullet spread instant respawns 32 player servers the list goes on over time more extreme variations of the game emerged increasingly more far removed from the vanilla game all crit servers custom weapons and balancing Prop Hunt versus Saxton hail randomizer dodgeball jailbreak jump maps and countless other activities in mini games these other
• 20:00 - 20:30 game modes were definitively not Team Fortress 2 in many cases only resembling the base game because they cherry-picked elements that facilitated whatever experience they were trying to make Community servers allowed for players to pretty much do whatever the hell they wanted this instilled the idea within players heads that TF2 could become anything and to an extent this is true Community servers allow for this but importantly everything was rooted in the vanilla game the majority of TF2 players
• 20:30 - 21:00 engaged with the vanilla game or its close derivatives the more extreme offshoots of TF2 appealed to increasingly smaller minorities seeking out something different something not Team Fortress 2 which was totally fine there was no harm in this this wasn't a splintering of the player base into isolated spheres if anything this was a massive network of servers and players branching out and seeking other ways to play but all connecting back to the vanilla game because from 2007 to 2011
• 21:00 - 21:30 as Val was updating TF2 on a regular basis adding more maps tweaking game balance adding more weapons they did so only with regards to the vanilla game it makes logical sense to balance and maintain your game such that it preserves its original vision and such that it appeals to the overwhelming majority of players valve did not balance nor direct Team Fortress 2 based on what its Forks were doing as such all of these other spheres would simply
• 21:30 - 22:00 adapt to whatever changes valve introduced and of course this ushers in the single most influential of community- made game modes competitive Team Fortress [Music] 2 early on in tf2's lifespan some players wanted a more stru Ed orderly fast-paced experience where winning came
• 22:00 - 22:30 first since vanilla Team Fortress 2 doesn't facilitate this directly multiple competitive formats were born designed built and controlled by the players themselves the two primary and most popular forms of competitive play are 9v9 Highlander and six versus 6 also known as sixes in 9v9 Highlander each team has one of each class with a limit of one per team this format creates a roughly similar experience to vanilla TF2 however with given class limits and
• 22:30 - 23:00 slightly smaller team sizes certain classes have much stronger influence on the flow of the game than others creating vastly different player Dynamics interactions and balancing to that effect various weapons are banned and only a small pool of maps are played specifically to maintain the environment Highlander players find fun just like all other derivative forms of the game these competitive players built a new game to achieve their desired fun experience competitive Team Fortress 2
• 23:00 - 23:30 is entirely Grassroots built by the players seeking that flavor of fun that comes from winning after trying your hardest it's not managed by Valve in any way in competitive 6v6 gameplay gets even more far removed from vanilla TF2 some players wanted to recreate the Quake Team Fortress experience but inside of TF2 or at least get close to it therefore these players cherry-pick the classes and mechanics that facilitate a much faster predictable
• 23:30 - 24:00 Arena shooter style pacing over the staggered slowed and chaotic vanilla up to experience competitive 6v6 teams mostly use the metagame formatting of two Scouts Two Soldiers a demoan and a medic the most mobile damage dealers with weapons that magnify minute differences in skill mainly through high burst damage snapfire and also a Healer the other five classes who are either slow and take time to get established or have no means of increased Mobility are typically reserved for a small handful
• 24:00 - 24:30 of defensive scenarios changing classes from The Meta known as off classing is allowed but it's generally frowned upon to play as the other five classes full-time it's considered throwing in sixes since the format itself prevents these other five classes from being effective all the time so for about 95% of play only four classes are present and as with 9b9 Highlander many weapons are banned and only a small pool of maps are played the smaller teams sizes alongside weapon bands and class limits
• 24:30 - 25:00 significantly alter game balancing tf2's classes and mechanics were designed and tweaked with large team sizes in mind therefore in competitive 6v6 these same classes and weapons have vastly different balancing for example in vanilla Team Fortress 2 the Scout is very strong but he's kept in check by other classes namely the engineer he's also kept in check by larger team sizes since a higher volume of attackers prevents the Scout from playing leap frog from Target toar Target additionally many vanilla TF2 Maps
• 25:00 - 25:30 inhibit the Scout's greatest strength his Mobility Scout being far more effective on open air Maps like 5cp Granary rather than choke your Maps like dust bow therefore thanks to smaller team sizes and the usual lack of an engineer Scout is very powerful in competitive sixes and only moderately powerful in normal vanilla play perhaps a better example and oppositely in vanilla TF2 the engineer is extremely strong a single engineer can can control the entire flow of the game if he gets
• 25:30 - 26:00 set up in an ideal position and has teammates protecting him but these two factors can't happen in 6v6 Engineers can't keep up with a faster pacing he doesn't have time to get established and has fewer teammates around to protect him therefore the engineers buildings become far less effective outside of very specific defensive situations this same balancing discrepancy also applies to tf2's unlockable weapons some weapons are considered far too strong in competitive form formats and are therefore banned from play even though
• 26:00 - 26:30 they're well balanced and perfectly fine in vanilla play so to summarize for competitive 6v6 these smaller team sizes comprised of the most mobile damage dealers on open air linear pushpull Maps creates a much faster paced Quake light experience focused on strict coordination High skill expression rigid team structures and a highly repetitive predictable gameplay Loop focused strictly on winning competitive Team Fortress 2 especially competitive 6v6 is
• 26:30 - 27:00 wholly antithetical to the chaotic amorphous free-for-all experience that is vanilla TF2 just like every other far removed Fork of the game competitive Team Fortress 2 is a different game it is not vanilla Team Fortress 2 some of the same classes some of the same mechanics but very different experiences but this was F fine this vastly different balancing between competitive
• 27:00 - 27:30 and vanilla TF2 was understood by the competitive player base if brand new weapons or mechanics or Maps were added into the game that didn't fit into their formats these competitive players would simply ban them just like all other Forks of TF2 players adapted to whatever changes valve pushed out to the vanilla game all of these smaller spheres and vanilla TF2 existed harmoniously with no issues this era from 2007 leading up to 2011 was what many considered to be the
• 27:30 - 28:00 Peak form of Team Fortress 2 but all of this was about to slowly begin changing entering the new decade valve's focuses gradually shifted from game development to Hardware development culminating in Mass layoffs employees referred to this as the great cleansing with valve primarily laying off artists writers and designers with those who weren't fired leaving on their own accord due to valve's change into Direction valve now needed more resources to fund their new
• 28:00 - 28:30 hardware Ventures and Team Fortress 2 posed as the perfect Revenue stream after launch in 2007 TF2 continued receiving updates on a regular basis this Post Release period of TF2 was continued pseudo development valve hammering Out The Kinks in their game and updating it with fresh content to keep players engaged which was amazing for the player this was free additional content for a game they all already paid for and when valve first added Cosmetics
• 28:30 - 29:00 they were also completely free yes tf2's hats used to be free you just had to find them because at first the only way you could get Cosmetics was through the random item drop system here valve had dabbled with artificial Rarity whether or not it was intentional at this stage is unknown but artificial Rarity made Cosmetics exclusive and highly desirable valve also began tapping into tf2's Community for brand new content on a regular basis realizing that players
• 29:00 - 29:30 could make far more content with a greater ey for Quality than valve could ever hope to keep up with all of the work was being done for them 10 times as much content comes from the user base for TF2 as comes from us but even at this early stage we cannot compete with our own customers in the production of content for this environment and by 2010 valve had spent over 12 years working on Team Fortress 2 spending Lord knows how
• 29:30 - 30:00 much time and how many resources to create this amazing game so now it was time for a return on their Investments 2010 valve rolls out the manconomy update there was now an in-game store where players could directly purchase community-made content players could now Buy buy sell and trade their items birthing the micro economy
• 30:00 - 30:30 that fed all of valve's micro economies valve was now meeting increased player demand to purchase all new content directly but also admitting that n you know they just want to make more money but if players were allowed to purchase new content outright that air of exclusivity with cosmetic drops was now gone valve needed some way to retain artificial Rarity and therefore the desire to buy in behold the Manco supply Crate and the key to unlock pocket for a small fee a mere pittance of 2 bucks 50
• 30:30 - 31:00 players could now attempt to acquire rare special items whose increasing artificial Rarity creates increasing artificial value anyone familiar with loot boxes understands that this is just gambling game developers pushing an in-house casino to get more money flowing from addicted consumers of course valve certainly wasn't the first developer to introduce gacha into their games but they wanted to take this one step further because when you've built such a successful Casino why would you charge a fee for entry so
• 31:00 - 31:30 in the surface free-to-play games sound like a horrible idea but in a free-to-play game what you're really doing is uh you're creating a lot of goods that are related to uh uh status and affinity and hierarchy right you're creating uh a whole bunch of goods there and the marginal or the incremental value of an audience member is greater than the incremental cost of making that person an audience member so typically Al what we see with the freeo playay game which on the surface sounds like is
• 31:30 - 32:00 that your audience size goes up by a factor of 10 and your gross revenue goes up by a factor of three June 23rd 2011 nearly 4 years after launch valve Begins the great free-to-play experiment TF2 went free-to-play and player counts surged the active player base almost quintupling in size tens of thousands of new players were pouring into play and were spending money on the microtransactions valve successfully
• 32:00 - 32:30 created a massively profitable live service model when you've built such a successful Casino why would you charge a fee for entry the do's always open come on in but this move to freet to- play posed a problem valve was about to open the floodgates to a whole new wave of players they wanted TF2 to be as accessible as possible to retain as many new players as possible because that means players spending more time in game and spending more time looking at the
• 32:30 - 33:00 microtransactions we know that customizable characters in TF2 and Dota 2 are really valuable and popular but they work best when there's lots of chances to see the customization and in TF2 although it's a first-person game there are taunts and kill cams that give you lots of opportunities to see your customization or show it off to other players the problem was that by 2011 TF2 was dated it spent nearly 10 years in development hell and showed its age primarily in what was carried over from that era the server browser entering the 2010s
• 33:00 - 33:30 most online multiplayer games had something that resembled a game coordinator the now very dated server browser was not friendly to the unacquainted for one it was overwhelming you're suddenly presented with a massive wall of options using abbreviations lingo titles that you're not familiar with which the game doesn't Define or explain to you in any capacity this would cause for many new players to Simply leave at the door or get confused as to what the heck TF2 was supposed to
• 33:30 - 34:00 be for instance a player could see a server titled jailbreak and think to themselves well that sounds like tf2 and then Bumble into a server full of screeching role playing children I am not heavy if you [ __ ] you Additionally the fewer steps between opening the game and playing the fewer steps between the player's eyeballs and the mic transactions so what was valve's solution the famed quickplay system
• 34:00 - 34:30 [Music] now all new players had to do was click one big button of the game mode of their choice and a brand new game coordinator would automatically place them into a server this click click play System let new players circumvent the server browser entirely lowering the chances of them getting turned away at the door quickplay wasn't a matchmaking system in the modern sense in that that it didn't try to match up players of similar skill
• 34:30 - 35:00 it simply tossed players into populated servers which was perfect for a game like tf2 TF2 plays the best when servers get populated and then stay populated for long periods of time kicking off that aformentioned gameplay Loop and quickplay didn't interrupt the gameplay Loop to populate servers it would simply send players to servers with ongoing games that needed them well at least it tried we'll get back to that quick play was a new additional option for play nothing was removed the server browser
• 35:00 - 35:30 remained the same and more importantly alongside this new system valve began hosting their own dedicated Game servers henceforth known as valve servers these brand new servers strictly ran vanilla TF2 ad hoc connections 45-minute map timers team scrambles and a brand new feature voting taking a page out of the community's Playbook valve officially Incorporated a map voting feature into Team Fortress 2 all quickplay servers ran a set map rotation separated by game
• 35:30 - 36:00 mode once a map timer ran out the map would change to the next one in the rotation for that game mode or players could call a vote to set the next map choosing any map they desired from the rotation they could also vote to extend the current map without a server reset as with Community servers this vote would appear as you played without interrupting your fun also as before valve added vote scrambles and a brand new vote boat kicking feature very handy
• 36:00 - 36:30 quick play was valve drawing a Line in the Sand valve made these servers to expose new players to the vanilla game the intended experience rather than confusing them with a wall of options that potentially didn't match the game being advertised to them and to that effect valve also included Community servers into quickplay search but filtered out servers that weren't hosting vanilla play and like Community servers valve servers were also visible in the server browser owser you could search for a specific map and then join
• 36:30 - 37:00 them via ad hoc connections you could add them to favorites or Blacklist them this was simply a higher volume of vanilla servers to choose from which was great quick plays functionality on launch however wasn't great in fact quickplay sucked Q times were long much longer than it took to Simply find a valve server in the browser sometimes you'd get placed inside of an empty server that would never populate and since quickplay search through both vs Val and Community servers it was a brutal crapshoot to find a good server
• 37:00 - 37:30 right away valve servers were bog standard decent full of fresh players that didn't know what they were doing for a while after the game went free to play but still decent but Community servers were very polarizing because they varied from really good to really really bad that's because there were other issues with quick plays launch [Music] in order to parse Community servers
• 37:30 - 38:00 valve relied on a trust system they trusted server hosts to not lie about the data they sent to them unfortunately server hosters could just lie about the servers they were hosting they could hide custom settings or content they could spoof player counts or server hosters could even sneak in Pay to Win Options under valve's radar like gameplay altering donator perks now see here before quickplay these types of crappy commity servers weren't really a problem most players were experienced
• 38:00 - 38:30 with server cultures and would very quickly sus out and Blacklist these crappy servers so they couldn't proliferate additionally before quickplay many Community servers would also run advertisements but back in the day this was common practice and rarely an issue many good servers would run simple non-intrusive advertisements on the message of the day board you would look at one advertisement when you first logged on but that's it you could then play in the server for as long as you wanted usually for hours at a time no
• 38:30 - 39:00 other advertisements would play this was a mutually beneficial relationship between players and server hosters maintaining a service that was otherwise completely free or they would run no ads at all and would be completely sustained by donations from their own players and starting in 2009 players also had the option to disable HTML in the message of the day so advertisements wouldn't appear at all unfortunately after quickplay arrived this opened up the
• 39:00 - 39:30 floodgates to a constant stream of new fresh ignorant players to exploit they didn't understand server cultures they didn't know how the game worked and weren't told how the game worked let alone understand if a server was doing something it shouldn't therefore lying about server data and painfully annoying advertisements slowly started ramping up in the following months abusing and exploiting that influx of new freeo plays this guy had six Rockets they encourag new players to spend money on
• 39:30 - 40:00 in-game incentives they would spoof their player counts to trick the quickplay system into dumping players in and exposing them to advertisements server advertisements would become more widespread and cancerous and became clearly for profit servers would force you to watch them before you played many of them were video-based and would lag your game as they forcefully played in the background often times with earpiercing audio they would also keep popping up as you played disrupting your play time and sometimes causing you to die and some
• 40:00 - 40:30 servers would even force you to enable HTML in the message of the day forcing you to watch an ad or you couldn't play on their servers at all and since there was no option to search for valve servers only quick plays launch was for lack of a better word turbulent and yet despite the rough start in 2011 quickplay was a two-edged sword generally speaking even brand new players aren't that stupid they could very quickly sus out [ __ ] shitty servers and not give them the time of day and
• 40:30 - 41:00 quickplay was a massive artery for good Community servers funneling new players in and helping them grow quickplay was directly exposing brand new players to the existence of community servers and more importantly quickplay being crappy turned it into a gateway to the server browser on launch quickplay sucked and once new players realized how crummy it was and that they could access any server they wanted including valves servers faster with maps and settings of
• 41:00 - 41:30 their choosing they ditched quickplay this was an oddly symbiotic relationship one that lasted for about 2 years after that bumpy first couple of years valve took the players frustrations with quick play to heart and started making many tangible and really really good improvements to their new system come 2013 valve stopped the message of the day board from showing more than once so players weren't met with an advertisement as they played they also began combating servers that
• 41:30 - 42:00 were spoofing their player counts blacklisting servers that were trying to trick the quickplay system advertisements were still posing a problem so come the end of 2013 valve disabled HTML in the message of the day completely this meant that at this stage annoying server advertisements were completely gone this was a massive massive Improvement drastically improving the player experience yet even with this change some predatory servers persisted valves still could not keep up
• 42:00 - 42:30 with servers spoofing their player counts offering pay to win incentives or kicking out players that didn't enable HTML in the message of the day so come early 2014 valve through the kill switch by default quickplay would Now search for valve servers only players still had the option to search for Community servers as well but this was tucked away in a little tick box that frankly most people would glance over as a result
• 42:30 - 43:00 this change was a blow to community servers greatly restricting that artery of player traffic to those that were abiding by valve's rules however now that valve servers were dominant this killed off predatory servers in one Fell Swoop and the few that remained could now be completely avoided when using quickplay and generally speaking Community servers weren't completely cut off because quick play still wasn't great before long new players would still defer to the better option that was the server browser but valve did
• 43:00 - 43:30 need to do something the fact that valve was now redirecting most player traffic to their own servers and not highlighting Community servers You Know the Way by which people had traditionally engaged with their game for almost 10 years at this point that put a sour taste in a lot of players mouths so less than a month after this change they introduced the advanced options menu here players could search for many traditional non vanilla Vana options 32 Man servers no random crits
• 43:30 - 44:00 so on and so forth this was pretty awesome the addition of non-vanilla server settings was valve acknowledging Community servers they were giving players more options to experiment with and to that effect they added a brand new option for quickplay show servers instead of automatically connecting players to a server they could receive a uniquely curated list of servers based on their Advanced option settings this was basically a diet server browser but much more userfriendly new players could
• 44:00 - 44:30 easily explore both valve and Community servers and get used to the idea of selecting a server from a list this was a fantastic Middle Ground between the browser and quickplay and valve was once again acknowledging Community servers and giving players more options at this point in time the going was slow but valve was clearly intent on providing the best experience possible for their players quickplay was on the clear path towards Improvement and valve was incorporating more options for players to engage with don't get me wrong by
• 44:30 - 45:00 2014 quickplay was not perfect wait times were inconsistent players would still sometimes get thrown into empty servers so there certainly could have been more improvements obviously stop putting players into empty servers but players couldn't cue for more than one game mode let alone a specific map or Maps these were simple options that could have been added later but players already had these tools inside of the server browser you could search for any
• 45:00 - 45:30 specific map or game mode you enjoyed and even cue for multiple servers at the same time when you were already in one be it a valve or a community server sure the server browser was dated and could have used some Polish but we already had all of the functionality we could ask for it just needed some streamlining but regardless let me be abundantly clear by 2014 quickplay was finally good not great but good at this point in
• 45:30 - 46:00 tf2's lifespan TF2 players had the most options for play and the most amount of Freedom what options did we have well I'll summarize everything I've covered in this section we had the tried andrue server browser you want to play on a specific map or a server you could search for it and join add the server to your favorites and come back to it later or Blacklist it if you disliked it you could find and engage in any derivative form of TF2 you enjoyed we had quickplay the game would automatically search for
• 46:00 - 46:30 a server with a game mode of your choosing you could select valve servers only or both valve and Community servers you had a variety of game settings to fine-tune your search you could also use these settings to receive a uniquely curated list of servers tailored just for you potentially containing both valve and Community servers if you wanted to access a valve server you weren't forced to use quickplay because they were all available inside the server browser and you could join them via ad hoc connections and ultimately if
• 46:30 - 47:00 you were just lazy all you had to do was click twice on two big dumb buttons and have the game do all of the work for you across all means of play players could come and go as they pleased you could play with or against your friends as you pleased thanks to ad hot connections and team switching if you were inside one server be it a valve or a community server and wanted to be inside of another you could cue for it by using the server browser and you could queue for multiple servers at the same time
• 47:00 - 47:30 games would again balance themselves out as the players came and went or moved around on teams as they pleased or with vote scrambling and auto balance features players would be presented with up to 45 minutes of uninterrupted Play Time on valve servers or 30 minutes to an hour on most Community servers with nothing breaking the gameplay Loop players would vote on the next map and then the fun would seamlessly continue this massive list this right here this is what we had this is how TF2 played
• 47:30 - 48:00 from early 2014 onwards this was the best time to be a tf2 player back then when the game and valve respected a player's time and a player agency and I'll say this again just to be abundantly clear as clear as I can be quick play was not perfect it was not perfect but doesn't a good functioning system with all of these options sound
• 48:00 - 48:30 like a wonderful thing doesn't A system that placed you inside of vanilla valve servers or also Community servers with minimal Interruption of the gameplay Loop before during and after gameplay sound like a great experience for the player doesn't it make logical sense to keep this system and then keep improving it by hammering Out The Kinks H yeah no valve didn't think so either why bother with that when you can take all of this and then throw it out of the window for something else something worse far worse
• 48:30 - 49:00 because all of this went out of the window in the blink of an eye because valve committed to a tragedy of a decision that changed the course of this game forever all thanks my friends to this come us through the G now we will goodness y it's good as well blessed by
• 49:00 - 49:30 [Music] the [Music] gates Team Fortress 2 was one of the first games to popularize the free-to-play live service model but in 2011 this wasn't the industry standard
• 49:30 - 50:00 yet especially compared to today so many players wondered why valve would make TF2 such a successful game free to play at all but valve's motivations soon became very clear if you were paying attention entering the new decade valve was developing Dota 2 and before release a key point was placed on making this game free- topl at launch the game would be kept afloat by selling player made content inside of an in-game store and of course loot boxes Pages directly out of tf2's Playbook and valve didn't stop
• 50:00 - 50:30 there they were also developing the next iteration of their critically acclaimed Counterstrike series Counter-Strike Global Offensive and upon release in 2012 valve wasted no time with monetizing that game less than one year after launch valve introduced a paid in-game campaign system the operation a titled themed update shipping brand new player made content yet more pages taken directly out of tf2's Playbook but with
• 50:30 - 51:00 a new development a Game Pass upon purchasing this game pass players were granted access to new community-made maps via the game's matchmaking system passholders also received an operation coin which would track in-game stats and level up the mors you played on these new maps valve now had their vehicle for delivering new content into Counterstrike but Maps alone weren't going to bring in the money thankfully they had tf2s and do successes to rely on Cosmetics valve extended the first
• 51:00 - 51:30 operation by a month but not simply because of the operation success but to Usher Out The Arms deal update just like tf2 and DOTA valve birthed a brand new micro economy containing item drops trading and cosmetics but valve didn't go with Hats they instead went with weapon skins and of course it wouldn't be a valve game at this stage without some gambling but csgo's weapon cases were improved versions of t of 2's crates and dota's treasures now
• 51:30 - 52:00 perfected valve hit it big they had their free-to-play model they had two brand new games ready to go they had the addictive microtransactions valve was geared up and ready to rake in the revenue but how would they rake in the players well for that answer they looked over to their competitors thanks to League of Legends valve knew that Esports was quickly becoming a new future for video games and while both DOTA and Counterstrike had a history of competitive play their Esports scenes
• 52:00 - 52:30 paled in comparison to what Riot was achieving because Riot games started hosting their very own officially sponsored Esports tournaments for League of Legends think about that for a moment putting your game on the global stage as a competitive Sport with big money big opportunity camaraderie and rivalry between teams and entire nations means more eyeballs on your game which means more players which means more money spent on the microtransactions status Affinity
• 52:30 - 53:00 hierarchy and valve wasn't going to be left behind using their own MOA as the test bed valve devised a plan by simply copying riot in 2011 valve synchronized the release of Dota 2 with their very own officially sponsored Esports tournament the international incentivizing players to join in with a massive prize pool valve invest big into Esports and their plan worked by 2012
• 53:00 - 53:30 dota's Esports scene exploded massively boosting its popularity and exponentially increasing its growth copying that success with DOTA valve wasted no time making a similar push with Counterstrike in 2013 valve began sponsoring the majors also with huge prize pools and in a similar fashion this Drew in players by the hundreds of thousands and by the end of 2014 but both DOTA and Counterstrike had become two of the biggest Esports titles in the
• 53:30 - 54:00 world valve sponsored tournaments garnered massive audiences driving Torrance of traffic to these games and of course to the microtransactions both titles amassed hundreds of thousands of players daily millions of unique players monthly earning valve billions rapidly eclipsing the player base and the profits of Team Fortress 2 leaving it far far behind in fact where was TF2 during this
• 54:00 - 54:30 massive growth period for valve well stagnating by 2014 tf2's player counts had flatlined the game was not growing valve likely expected for continued growth as a result of the game going freeo play typically after you launch a product the the product cycle goes like this right you have this big spike at launch and then it just continues downwards until you have this long tail um TF2 and Dota 2 both have
• 54:30 - 55:00 this big spike and then they just keep going up and that's the model that we wanted to to go for right but despite frequent content updates and continued Live support TF2 was slowing down valve did not like this lack of growth frankly no company wants this growth is dollars stagnation is death and in typical fashion if the branch Withers it must be pruned but this wasn't an option for valve and it never will be Team Fortress 2 is one of their Flagship titles if the
• 55:00 - 55:30 microeconomic economies ultimately shutters its doors that would send seismic shock waves through valves other games players would realize that their Investments could suddenly become worthless entirely out of their control let us not forget all of those virtual items are nothing more than zeros and ones being housed in a dank server room somewhere you don't actually own anything that you've purchased in these games let alone the game itself and
• 55:30 - 56:00 obviously valve wants to prevent that thought from entering their consumer heads well if the Hat game is doing fine then what do we have to worry about therefore for the obvious sake of profit valve wanted Team Fortress 2 to grow just like their other games that begs the question why was TF2 not growing TF2 was a well-established popular game it had a massive dedicated following a huge Community consistently cranking out content on every corner of the internet boosting its publicity and its
• 56:00 - 56:30 popularity what was this valve title missing one could postulate many reasons as to why but TF2 struggled and still struggles to grow to this day for one reason Team Fortress 2 is not very friendly to new players oh I to go that way social media is very good at portraying TF2 as this fun and Whimsical place but good Lord Almighty on the inside does this game put new players through the ringer oh the teleport's broken GG yeah I don't even know how to
• 56:30 - 57:00 swap class you burner Team Fortress 2 is a very mechanically complex game no one can deny that TF2 might be easy to understand but it's not easy to learn and even harder to master the level of entry into even the barebones basics of gameplay has always been extremely high because on launch and still to this day TF2 offers little to know information as to how well anything works even Robin Walker acknowledged that tf2's lack of
• 57:00 - 57:30 information was a problem for player retention one that could be solved by simply giving players more information but in typical Val fashion they only swung halfway in 2010 they made a brand new tutorial sort of training mode but this wasn't added until 3 years after tf2's launch and in its initial form offering basic information for only one class it was later updated to include three others in 2011 but then all
• 57:30 - 58:00 development of this crucially needed source of information for new players just stopped and to this day it leaves out five of the nine classes and countless mechanics that aren't disclosed to the player in any capacity for example how medic heals players faster if they haven't been damaged for a while or that spy revolver becomes more accurate if you delay your shots hell spy own training mode doesn't even tell you that he has a gun you can't even try it out I can't believe that and
• 58:00 - 58:30 you and also you wonder why fresh install pyro R this I'm off script now you wonder why fresh install pyros rarely Air Blast if ever it's because they're not even told that the Pyro can Air Blast unless by happen stance they come across the correct gameplay tip as they load into a server there are countless gaps in basic information like this and this doesn't even consider tf2's massive pile of unlockable weapons each with unique stats and sometimes with mechanics that are are completely different than stock Weaponry in every way and this doesn't stop here the game
• 58:30 - 59:00 tells you nothing about basic fundamentals like what controls do what for each class what their weapons do what game objectives are and how they function what how did the time get reset and the list goes on none of this information is evident or available inside of TF2 outside of its half-baked tutorial mode and short introductory videos this forces players to learn all of this via trial and error or external research this lack of information stunts tf2's growth because it immensely
• 59:00 - 59:30 steepens the game's learning curve and turns many players away at the door unless someone has a friend ushering them in it's very unlikely that new players will tough out their first few hours familiarizing themselves with the game also there's a teleporter how do I use it you just stand on it for a while if you're a brand new player joining a tf2 server for the first time and you didn't do any research before installing this game I got two words for you good luck it's hard to make your game popular when no one really quite knows how it's
• 59:30 - 60:00 meant to be played but you know rather than easing a player's introduction to TF2 by giving them more tools to climb the Steep learning curve or perhaps addressing other issues that would increase player retention like performance optimization valve instead opted to place their focus on microtransactions and even more gambling which did not spur the growth they wanted not to mention valve had just fired or lost many of their writers artists and game designers including
• 60:00 - 60:30 those that worked on TF2 valve was in a serious bind and they didn't have much to fall back on to keep growing the game except one last option A tried and true working formula well they made DOTA and csgo massive Esports fueling their insane growth so why not TF2 obviously valve wanted to take the success of DOTA in csgo's Esports scenes and push TF2 in a similar direction we even have evidence of valve dabbling
• 60:30 - 61:00 with competitive play from as early as 2012 they created a beta Lobby system for quickplay which was mediocre at best and then later repurposed for Man versus machine but valve faced a massive glaring problem with chasing the TF2 esport competitive formats were not very popular with tf2's player base let alone mainstream and traditionally never have been entering the early 2010s TF2 did have an Esports scene but its size paled in comparison to both DOTA and
• 61:00 - 61:30 counterstrikes for instance by 2014 concurrent viewership of DOTA Internationals and csgo Majors consistently met or outnumbered the total number of concurrent players whereas for Team Fortress 2 viewership of the most popular Esports Tournaments has always represented a mere fraction of its concurrent player counts even at its highest peak viewership in history these different ratios are proof that competitive TF2 formats have always appealed to a small minority of the
• 61:30 - 62:00 player base and according to some polls and some older server population data no more than 10% of TF2 players engage with competitive formats in some form or fashion genous generously speaking that's like 5% of players it was just it was just kind of mind-blowing to me and I was like wow like I'm really surprised that valve even bothered to create a matchmaking game mode when like so much of their player Bas is clear clearly extremely casual before I get ahead of myself why was competitive Team Fortress
• 62:00 - 62:30 2 unpopular with the player base some players cited the lack of accessibility as the primary deterrent since competitive formats were derivative forms of the vanilla game not baked into the game itself you had to take extra steps to participate if you were even interested in playing competitive TF2 you had to play on community servers hosted by Third parties you had to make accounts register for teams schedule matches and organize plays entirely on your own other players suggested that competitive tf2's popularity limped from
• 62:30 - 63:00 a lack of publicity both inside and outside of the TF2 sphere this notion is notably false within the TF2 sphere as many of the largest public figures in TF2 YouTubers streamers and other personalities have almost always consistently been involved in the competitive scene in some way even valve would consistently make blog posts and announcements about Esports related events they've been doing this since before the game went freeo play yet even
• 63:00 - 63:30 with this publicity the established TF2 player base largely did not take interest in competitive formats thus much of the blame fell on valve for not sponsoring competitive TF2 tournaments much like their other games many thought that this greater Spotlight paired with more money pumped into prize pools which let's face it is the primary Intrigue would translate into greater interest more players and therefore more growth and to an extent this is correct if you dangle a $1.5 million prize pull in front of a bunch of people you're going
• 63:30 - 64:00 to get a lot of them getting good at the game but valve was immensely hesitant to sponsor TF2 tournaments and almost never acknowledged competitive TF2 outside of their blog posts and in-game tournament medals if valve like won't even acknowledge us that's definitely pretty depressing pretty disappointing you see valve putting so much effort into um CSG go and um Dota 2 you know like to us a lot of us it just seems like it'd be so easy for valve to support TF2 to like
• 64:00 - 64:30 just copy and paste the [ __ ] that they have for that game and put it in TF2 but why why was valve reluctant to support the TF2 Esports scene this brings us to the single biggest reason why competitive Team Fortress 2 did not grow and the biggest problem that valve would need to overcome if they wanted to push TF2 as their next big Big esport Vanilla TF2 and competitive TF2 are completely
• 64:30 - 65:00 different games competitive plays only similarities to vanilla are the handful of mechanics and class interactions that have been cherry-picked to facilitate Homebrew competitive formats the most popular form of competitive Team Fortress 2 6v6 and therefore its entire Esports scene cannot exist unless you remove about 70% of gameplay content have the team sizes and enforce class limits which drastically changes tf2's
• 65:00 - 65:30 structure pacing and balancing this drastic difference turns many players away at the door and is the primary reason why valve didn't rush head on into tf2's Esports class restrictions weapon banss smaller team sizes this wasn't the game being sold to the players this was not the game that the vast majority of players came for and stuck around to play for years even competitive players would often times return to the vanilla game because
• 65:30 - 66:00 competitive TF2 is not a replacement it's just a different game as another example other than my Scout and engineer discussion from before do you primarily play Heavy spy pyro engineer or sniper sorry given the nature of the most popular competitive TF2 format these other five classes can't keep up with 95% of sixes play if you want to play these classes outside of very specific scenarios let alone fulltime it's greatly frowned upon to do this and is
• 66:00 - 66:30 considered throwing this difference alone turns more than half of players away at the door because these players would now be forced to engage with mechanics they have no interest in mastering which in tandem with class limits and weapon bands is wholly antithetical to tf2's Freedom of Choice which was integrated into the game by Design you also have additional information terminology and tactics that competitive players use all of which that is otherwise not required in vanilla play you have call outs rollouts
• 66:30 - 67:00 Uber counting metagame formats and loadouts weapon bans special plugins Loadout binds what's a pocket what's a RoR what's a combo you have to do homework before you can even start playing an established competitive format because this is a different game Additionally the competitive Community as a whole can't even agree as to what should or should not be allowed in competitive formats there are multiple Community operated leagues each with different rules weapon bands and map rotations resulting in a fractioning of
• 67:00 - 67:30 the competitive player base there is no unifying rule set for competitive play so what is the ideal TF2 esport is it 6v6 well okay if so which version which League's rules well if not sixes then maybe Highlander if not just one format then maybe both and what about lesser competitive formats fors 7v7 ultio how does this nebulous umbrella of competitive TF2 work for a standardized esport it can't compare this to
• 67:30 - 68:00 Counterstrike where the highest levels of play in major competitive tournaments across all of their leagues all the way down to normal play at home are almost one for one the exact same game even counter strike's casual mode resembles the highest levels of play just with larger team sizes and slightly different rules the same knowledge positioning game sense Tac ICS strategies guns balancing and movement slight differences yes but for the most part
• 68:00 - 68:30 the same game is being played by almost everyone at every stage and at every level there is no massive disconnect between competitive play and vanilla play the transition from different spheres of play is seamless because it's only one sphere you need this seamless transition in order to Market an esport otherwise it will never take hold valve could not push competitive TF2 as built by the community as their next big
• 68:30 - 69:00 esport because they needed everyone playing the same game and for years many competitive players and YouTubers cited this disconnect as the fabled gap between vanilla and competitive TF2 a gap that must be bridged in order to assure their Mutual survival to ensure a future for the game as a whole at least that was the sentiment but that sentiment would soon be revealed as a farce for that disconnect isn't merely a gap it's a wide deep M of a Chasm that
• 69:00 - 69:30 no Bridge could ever hope to cross and valve was all too aware of this but they knew they would have to try spanning that Chasm if they wanted to push TF2 as their next big esport so it could grow just like their other games and if you don't believe me if you think I've simply assumed this a valve that they didn't know what they were doing and just pulled this out of thin hear it from the horse's mouth yourself it's been around long enough that we
• 69:30 - 70:00 used to sort of regard casual and competitive as separate communities right and now we view that as outdated and we instead want to think of our player base as a single Community with a spectrum of players part of that is fixing some of the things that serve as sort of a barrier between those groups uh one example would be the competitive players have on their own sort of created this other version of the game with different rules and they'll restrict things like classes and they'll ban most of the weapons and so we'd like to fix that by finding some sort of a
• 70:00 - 70:30 common ground between the communities there's a lot more work we want to do there but uh what we're basically working toward is trying to have that one audience that we're really sering that one audience that we're really sering so even valve directly acknowledged and understood that competitive players were playing a different game but to them well this was now outdated thinking valve didn't want to face facts in fact they couldn't because they needed to serve one
• 70:30 - 71:00 audience a competitive audience and have everyone playing the same game it's just Insanity that valve thought the best course of action to grow their game was to consult and cater to less than 10% of their player base not only that but 10% that was playing a different game and wanted a different experience than what vanilla TF2 offered instead of addressing the issues that were affecting the game's grow at large and as a result of this graduation from outdated thinking valve would begin
• 71:00 - 71:30 engaging in a series of steps that set Team Fortress 2 on the path towards disaster 2013 a group of competitive players takes a trip to valve's offices trying to Garner more support for competitive play they express their desires for in-game lobes and a tab showing live streamers hoping to increase player exposure and accessibility the are our main reason of going up there was uh to try to encourage Val uh to take more of a role
• 71:30 - 72:00 with competitive TF2 and to start taking the steps to really integrating competitive TF2 more into um just what what TF2 is but the Gap the massive differences between vanilla and competitive play could only be addressed by changing game balance and at first valve was extremely hesitant to do this they wanted to support Esports within TF too as it would Garner insane growth that was the goal but they didn't want to make any drastic changes to the
• 72:00 - 72:30 vanilla game that would otherwise deter the established player base from engaging with a new competitive format you know you get these players who are like tf2 cool like I didn't know people play that competitively I'm at this land like yeah let's play some TF2 and then they're like what like why are you telling me I can't use like half of these weapons you know that's really frustrating for newer players who are starting to see the competitive side of TF2 and I think ultimately this system will provide a bridge into sixes valve was intrigued by 9b9
• 72:30 - 73:00 Highlander as this was much closer to the vanilla game at least all classes were present even Robin Walker stated that the presence of all classes and weapons inside of a tf2 esport would make for a better gaming and viewing experience and he's not wrong because what he really means is that if all of tf2's recognizable facets were consistently present inside of its ort it would be that much easier to drive engagement and facilitate that seamless transition again valve wanted everyone
• 73:00 - 73:30 playing the same game they wanted that one audience just like Counterstrike entire elements of the game's identity could not be absent so whatever format valve would push it needed to closely reflect vanilla play but also somehow bridge the gap towards competitive play and how was this to be done well no one knew not even valve but come summer of 2014 their work began anyways steam database updates showed that valve began
• 73:30 - 74:00 working on a competitive matchmaking system so no overwatch's announcement later that same year was not the reason why valve began pushing competitive Esports inside of TF2 this certainly did accelerate valve's efforts which we'll get back to later but this wasn't the Catalyst work on the competitive system was probably going on in the background but at the same time valve began testing the waters valve began imitating their
• 74:00 - 74:30 other games inside of TF2 and they started with one of the most anticipated updates in tf2's [Music] [Music] history end of the line a massively hyped update built by the community but a pathetic flop thanks to its implementation valve scrapped most of
• 74:30 - 75:00 the expected content last minute and only released a brand new loot box this fumble put a strong sour taste in the mouths of many players and as an extra bonus tacked on top they added a paid in-game campaign uh sort of now players could purchase a duck token upon purchasing this token rubber ducks would drop when you killed players you could collect the Ducks and level up your token to then have the game drop
• 75:00 - 75:30 more Ducks yeah the volume of ducks collected was tracked on your coin and on a global leaderboard but that's it nothing else just useless in-game stats tracked by an in-game token that would level up as you played and if it wasn't painfully obvious by now they just copied the operation passes and coins from Counterstrike end of the line was valve testing a csgo style update for TF2 this is like the stupidest update of all time and sure enough their test
• 75:30 - 76:00 worked it proved that an operations functionality was feasible inside of TF2 and well there you go what works in one game must work for another so come 2015 valve would release not one not two not three but four operation style updates for TF2 in the span of 6 months the gun metal update was first arriving on July 2nd TF2 now had weapon skins following
• 76:00 - 76:30 almost a one forone copy of CSG skin system TF2 now had limited time campaigns with access granted via in-game passes players would complete in-game contracts and receive exclusive item drops as rewards all pages directly from counterstrikes Playbook many players dubbed the gunmal and tough break updates as the TFO updates as all of this was a blatant copy and paste job of a csgo operation and valve beginning to push TF2 as another csgo and by the
• 76:30 - 77:00 end of the year valve had pushed out an obscene amount of content but even with this imitation game TF2 still did not grow in fact player counts fell into a steady decline after the disaster that was end of the line and yet despite this continued decline valve was still busy banking on their Ace in the Hole to turn the tide in their favor the wind in the sails that would be competitive
• 77:00 - 77:30 matchmaking let's rewind for a moment in 2014 another group of competitive players concerned with the development of valve's new competitive mode decided to write them a letter in this letter they outlined what they called prioritized feature requests that would most benefit the community a CSO style streaming list a matchmaking system and Bug fixes and quality of life improvements obviously these first two greatly benefited the competitive community and were essentially a repeat of what was discussed at valve back in
• 77:30 - 78:00 2013 competitive players still wanted valve to facilitate competitive play inside the vanilla game and later on these competitive players alongside some YouTubers were ultimately invited to valve's offices in the spring of 2015 and this time they were explicitly told by Valve that they were indeed working on a competitive matchmaking system basically that news the major point of that news is to announce that valve has shared with us and is allowing us to share with you that valve is working on
• 78:00 - 78:30 matchmaking as a high priority project as for the details well they didn't share much publicly other than that it was to be Loosely modeled after counter- strikes game modes the primary competitive format had yet to be determined whether this meant 9v9 Highlander 6v6 weapon bands class limits no one knew for sure not even valve yeah so we heard quiet a few things and um honestly a lot of people probably had like um they they kind of guessed that
• 78:30 - 79:00 valve would lean towards one format or another but it's not really anything like that honestly they wanted a similar style to CS:GO in a sense where like you could basically the idea is it'd be really simple to get into a matchmaking format and uh just go for it they're asking what format because not everyone may know but uh 6 versus 6 is the big format uh for competitive TF2 uh worldwide there's also 9v9 and there are all these different formats and stuff so what what's the answer from valve on that it's kind of a good answer right
• 79:00 - 79:30 well to start with I want to just say that the whole philosophy behind it is that they just don't know and I don't think we should be urgant enough to know that we know the best solution either so as of now the answer is they have no idea K me valve was still struggling with the gap between vanilla and competitive TF2 valve again stressed that they did not want to enforce weapon or class restrictions of any kind but
• 79:30 - 80:00 they knew that they wanted to evolve the player base towards engaging with a proper end game they really talked about how they wanted to kind of like uh I want I want to say evolv the player base in a sense that they wanted a a way to give an end game to to the general public you're just you know seeing the transition seeing the the work of the competitive Community has put and everything uh that it's really is the end game of TF2 and keeps players
• 80:00 - 80:30 playing hearing that valve once again said they were trying to reshape TF2 into a vehicle for Esports proves to me just how disconnected they had become from their own game so disconnected so lost that they openly admitt to their own players directly to their faces that they had no idea what they were going to
• 80:30 - 81:00 do that's a massive red flag in of itself but that paled in comparison to the biggest hurdle valve had yet to overcome how would they push a competitive format how would they keep everyone playing the same game so the level of entry into competitive play was low and an eort could grow option one going with no class limits or weapon banss but rebound balancing everything that competitive players ban or rarely use to facilitate a new format this
• 81:00 - 81:30 would have everyone playing the same game but valve would then face the problem of needing to rework a ton of weapons and mechanics that isn't possible without greatly disrupting established vanilla Play If I haven't made it very obvious by now smaller team sizes alongside class limits severely Alters game balancing tf2's class balance is explicitly designed within the context of all other classes and mechanics being present with varying quantities and large team sizes these facets of play are not self-contained
• 81:30 - 82:00 components that can be removed limited or adjusted without affecting game balance as a whole other than my engineer and Scout discussion from earlier the best example I can provide is the Pyro in 9v9 Highlander the Pyro primarily exists to spy check and deny projectile spam or Air Blast in Uber once before he dies his low burst damage and speed prevents him from having a greater impact he's generally viewed as a support class and in 6 versus 6 the
• 82:00 - 82:30 Pyro is rarely seen outside of specific defensive scenarios he's almost never played in the eyes of many competitive players especially sixes players on one hand the Pyro is weak useless and would need drastic changes to keep up with the faster pacing but then on the other hand the Pyro is all around despised overpowered and too easy to play many sixes players view the Pyro as wholly incompatible and too disruptive within their home brew format so the Pyro is
• 82:30 - 83:00 overpowered but then he's not overpowered he's this brutal nightmare to fight and yet no one plays him to win it's a weird contradiction it also doesn't help that the weapons that do Boost a Pyro's damage output and Mobility are typically banned for the sake of preserving six's players desired environment but in vanilla TF2 the Pyro is largely fine the larger team sizes slower pacing presence of all classes and blend of present skill levels
• 83:00 - 83:30 enables him to be consistently viable and mostly balanced but as a solution to bridge this difference valve could simply rework the Pyro so he's more compatible with sixes play or more generally competitive play some people call this trickle down balancing balancing your game for top competitive play and then well hoping that everyone else just deals with it sometimes this philosophy can work because highly skilled players can push a game to its limits and can figure out what's broken which therefore normal players can
• 83:30 - 84:00 exploit too but remember for TF2 competitive players are playing a different game this philosophy can't work here what's broken in tf2's competitive formats isn't always broken in vanilla that one didn't age quite so well as more direct proof of this balancing discrepancy back in 2009 valve performed a closed beta test with top competitive players in order to get more data for new weapons and balance changes one of these weapons was the gloves of
• 84:00 - 84:30 running urgently an item that was specifically designed with competitive players in mind so the heavy would see more use in competitive formats well even after testing and release the gloves of running urgently were almost unanimously banned across all competitive leagues why the gloves of running urgently made the heavy run urgently which is something that competitive players hate you you might be familiar with the concept of heavy to Mid where a heavy can quickly get to the front lines and partake in the action
• 84:30 - 85:00 when a round starts but competitive players hate this they find this too disruptive for their home bro formats which was enough for them to ban the item altogether for years and even when unbanned six's players never play the heavy outside of specific defensive scenarios so to summarize valve wanted to see Heavy more often in competitive play so they worked with competitive players to make a weapon viable for competitive heavy play but then the competitive weapon designed for
• 85:00 - 85:30 competitive play was immediately banned from competitive play you can't make this [ __ ] up they were left with a weapon that was broken in competitive play and messy in vanilla play going through iterative nerfing throughout the years to make it more compatible with the base game shocker that a weapon designed for competitive play had issues with vanilla play and then mere months later valve releases un another weapon that boosts the heavy speed the buffalo steak sandwich and shocker competitive
• 85:30 - 86:00 players ban this too the gloves of running urgently was the very first speed bump that valve slammed into with catering towards competitive play a decision that even back then many players considered foolish thankfully valve learned their lesson and pumped the brakes on this practice at least for a little while so rather than jeopardize losing their existing player base that they needed to Usher into their next D sport by disrupting vanilla game balance too much option one was entirely off the
• 86:00 - 86:30 table so option two would be to contain a new competitive format within its own uniquely balanced game mode like man versus machine or Manpower many players expected this and this option was easily the healthiest choice for the game if players enjoyed the new competitive game mode they could go play it with ease and it wouldn't have any impact on the vanilla experience balance changes smaller team sizes class restrictions and even weapon banss would be permissible at a base level it could
• 86:30 - 87:00 copy Community competitive formats like 6 versus 6 and appeal to the already established competitive scene however this option couldn't bridge the gap they needed everyone playing the same game and a new game mode carries with it a brand new risk player interest if a game mode is too different from vanilla play it will only appeal to a small minority this has been been historically proven time and time again with man versus machine Manpower Pastime or other
• 87:00 - 87:30 community- made game modes like versus Saxton hail valve wanted everyone playing the same game playing competitively not just a small group that wouldn't fly for an ort so valve couldn't take option two either as it would retain the chasm between vanilla and competitive play and it would create too much work for valve if valve rebalanced everything to fit into a new competitive game mode similar to Man versus machine this meant that valve would have to simultaneously develop and
• 87:30 - 88:00 maintain two different games which is ultimately why work on man versus machine slowed to a crawl after a year or so and there was an additional problem with options one and two competitive formats and rules were designed built and dictated by the players not by Valve so if valve Incorporated one of the community's formats whose rules would take precedent which format which league for example in some competitive leagues those aformentioned pyro weapons aren't banned
• 88:00 - 88:30 while in others they are moreover would valve keep constant tabs on the competitive scene maintain constant communication and update their game based on their desires or would they establish their own standardized rules and if the latter happened would the competitive scene conform to those rules or continue playing on their own servers as they always had since they built these formats themselves and would therefore relinquish that control over the valve so what was valve going to do
• 88:30 - 89:00 by 2015 they admitted themselves to those visiting competitive players that they had no clear path forwards with option one there was no way they could force their players to accept a new vastly different version of TF2 by massively reworking the vanilla game to accommodate competitive play but with option two there was also no way to magically convince their established player base to play an optional competitive format that most players
• 89:00 - 89:30 always knew existed but traditionally did not care about and listen to be a bit more candid the problem with all of this everything the mere idea of pushing an official competitive format was that TF2 wasn't designed to be an esport it's not why the vast majority of people played this game much unlike many modern titles including valve Zone TF2 wasn't designed to facilitate Esports a matchmaking system skill ranks strict coordination a sport-like viewing
• 89:30 - 90:00 experience any of that TF2 was designed to be fun first at the individual level valve's own words not mine that was their philosophy when making this game it was designed to be fun for as many skill levels as possible for as many desired levels of Engagement as possible for players where no matter what mood they were in after work or school that there was always some something fun to do on their own with friends with as much or as little coordination or effort as they desired at the full discretion
• 90:00 - 90:30 of the individual no no no no [Music] no tf2's Esports scene only existed because a small handful of players optimize that design philosophy out of the game restricting and cherry-picking facets so TF2 could facilitate that sport-like viewing experience where winning comes first where trying your hardest always was the requirement the
• 90:30 - 91:00 polar opposite of vanilla TF2 wholly antithetical to its design a completely different game again there's nothing wrong with this part of tf2's traditional structure was Community servers where players could do whatever the hell they wanted include play other games that weren't TF2 but it becomes a problem when you impose that onto the vanilla game when you try to transform Team Fortress 2 into something it is not and
• 91:00 - 91:30 imposing was valve's only option to try and shove their existing player base into a new mold into that competitive mindset which brings us to the final hurdle the one obstacle that would prove insurmountable their final test as to whether or not they could succeed in pushing the TF2 esport skill-based Matchmaker [Music]
• 91:30 - 92:00 in again TF2 wasn't designed to facilitate skill-based matchmaking but now valve had to retroactively incorporate this feature in order to facilitate competitive play that matchmaking system was what valve was spending most of their time on and the rules for competitive play weren't even on their radar yet because a matchmaking system is a nightmare for a game like Team Fortress 2 a wholly incompatible system for instance let's just start at
• 92:00 - 92:30 square one if valve simply applied matchmaking onto the vanilla game team sizes of 12 versus 12 it would take an excruciating amount of time to find 24 players of an even roughly equal skill level valve could knock this down to 9 versus 9 to mimic Highlander but this is still 18 players and with tf2's smaller player base a Matchmaker would take far too long to form games because even in a game like Counterstrike with a player base over 10 times the size of tf2s its
• 92:30 - 93:00 game coordinator struggles to match teams of five in under 5 minutes now on top of that imagine if they imposed a restriction of some kind say something simple like one of each class per team and then how that would magnify Q times as a game coordinator tried to handle the lack of admissible player combinations also valve would have to tackle the single biggest issue with a skill-based matchmaking system how would the game measure skill the problem is
• 93:00 - 93:30 that Team Fortress 2 is an immensely complex game TF2 has nine classes with a huge variety of weapons and abilities all influencing each other's Effectiveness as players work together or don't players are constantly changing weapons and classes during play changing their impact on the flow of the game from moment to Moment by Design different mapping environments facilitate varying levels of Effectiveness for all classes mechanics and team compositions all players have
• 93:30 - 94:00 varying amounts of skill and experience with each class and weapon every player's desired level of Engagement and therefore effort and level of sweat changes from day to-day or even from game to game being allowed to change classes weapons Effectiveness play style on the Fly is the Achilles heel for a skill-based matchmaking system in for example a single round of TF2 how can the player with 500 hours on medic who then changes to his 20 hour pyro who then changes to his 5,000 hour Scout be
• 94:00 - 94:30 compared to the guy who just installed the game and only played stock engineer and what if that game was on Dust Bowl where Scout and engineer have vastly different impacts than say on CP process what if that game was 12 versus 12 where the engineer becomes far more effective and the Scout less so what if it was 6 versus 6 where the engineer becomes far less effective and the Scout far more so what if the engineer has teammates protecting him enabling for his buildings to earn him more points does it mean that he performed better or the
• 94:30 - 95:00 players around him how could a Matchmaker differentiate the impact of other players on an individual's performance and then appropriately assign a skill rank what if in the next round the stock engineer decides to play Demonite the competitive Scout main decides to play Heavy what if it's on a different map a different game mode how can these performances across rounds be compared for assigning skill ranks how on Earth could you apply a set of generalized performance statistics funnel every single player down that
• 95:00 - 95:30 same slide and then expect something that resembles a balanced game at the other side you can't TF2 is inherently chaotic free-for-all design can't facilitate a skill-based matchmaking system TF2 players aren't all doing the same thing with the same level of effort at the same time for every single round for every single game therefore matchmaking systems work pretty well for games like tennis or chess but not TF2 let alone many other modern team-based
• 95:30 - 96:00 video games this is why TF2 had team scrambles instead of trying to predetermine a player's Dynamic and constantly changing impact before the round even starts team scrambles let things play out for a bit before making the decision to shuffle players around by using the points earned from the previous round or two the game evens things out for the current team compositions for everyone's current desired level of Engagement which generally works pretty freaking well for a game like Team Fortress 2 it makes no
• 96:00 - 96:30 sense to try and predetermine a player's Effectiveness before the round even starts determining skill levels by using previous game experiences that look nothing like the current one being played is for a lack of a harsher word asinine don't get me wrong team scrambles aren't a perfect system but implementing a skill-based matchmaking system into a game like tf2 was a Fool's errand and that's a generous understatement all of this everything
• 96:30 - 97:00 that you've just heard in this section valve absolutely knew everything they aren't stupid but despite all of these red flags invalidating tf2's Core Design philosophy competitive TF2 being a different game the clunkiness of a matchmaking game coordinator assigning skill ranks in an immensely complex game all of these Mass massive massive warning signs screaming at valve no stop what are you doing Turn back now valve
• 97:00 - 97:30 pushed forward with competitive matchmaking and overall you know just a lot of energy at valve everybody there was just like dude we want the same thing that you guys want we want to see TF2 get as big as these other games get as big as these other games get as big as these other games get as big as these other games get as big as these other games get as big as these other games get as big as these other
• 97:30 - 98:00 games January 2016 out of the blue valve announces that beta testing will soon begin for tf2's brand new competitive mode and what did valve establish as the format to bridge the gap between vanilla and competitive play teams of 6 versus 6 but nothing else no item banss no class limits and no restrictions of any kind only disabling random crits and random
• 98:00 - 98:30 bullet spread valve couldn't restrict any game content that players traditionally always had access to smaller team sizes was as far as valve was willing to go because anything beyond this would not only create too much work as I've already shown but remember competitive play and vanilla play had to be as similar as possible so the transition between those spheres was seamless and an esport could grow valve hoped this halfway in halfway out approach would be enough to get players interested but they still faced that old
• 98:30 - 99:00 problem with derivative forms of TF2 player interest most players would not be interested in playing a competitive format that they traditionally did not care about nor would competitive players engage with a new format that didn't reflect what they built for themselves so unfortunately this brand new competitive mode created this bizarre middle ground that no one really wanted sure it was novel and many players were excited about trying it out but not
• 99:00 - 99:30 because this was going to become the new competitive format but because most players assumed there would be more to come that item banss class limits a pick band system something would come later to cater more towards what the established player base understood and knew as competitive TF2 the competitive mode beta first began with close testing players were granted access via beta passes which would generate new passes over time that could be traded to more players after enough seating had taken place valve announced a series of public
• 99:30 - 100:00 stress tests which would be orchestrated inside of a steam group and as soon as that group opened up thousands of players poured in eager to see what valve had been working on and rightly so valve's new competitive mode was still shrouded in mystery streamers YouTubers competitive players and even valve themselves had been hyping up this impending competitive update for months now everyone was buzzing with anticipation and excitement it was finally tf2's turn it was finally this
• 100:00 - 100:30 beloved game's chance to break out into the Limelight into the mainstream to stand toe-to-toe on par as equals with some of the biggest Esports titles in the world valve was finally giving TF2 the attention it so desperately deserved the gates of the first stress test opened up on March 1st everyone dove in geared up ready to go ready to Usher in tf2's Renaissance As the next big
• 100:30 - 101:00 esport oh no yeah valve's new competitive mode was a broken shambling mess plagued with massive glaring problems most of them intentional first of all the real reason why valve went with Team sizes of six other than minimizing the load on a matchmaking system and appealing to the already established competitive sixes scene was because valve already had a functioning Lobby system for team sizes of six man versus machine instead of creating a new Lobby
• 101:00 - 101:30 system valve simply copied mvms Matchmaker slapped on a ranking system and then called that competitive mode since Man versus machine in competitive mode piggybacked off the same game coordinator players queuing for Man versus machine were placed into competitive matches how can you mess this up valve had been working on this for nearly 2 years and this is what they had to show for it this was already a massive red flag and sure by the second stress test they fixed this problem but
• 101:30 - 102:00 the MVM hiccups paled in comparison to another massive flaw during the first stress test games would automatically end if a player disconnected no bot filling the vacant slot no fresh player getting plugged in nothing game over instantly players abandoning matches would receive timeouts as punishments with increasingly longer cooldowns the more they abandoned which also lowered their priority in the matchmaking queue once their time was up and at face value
• 102:00 - 102:30 I'm sure nothing seems wrong with this it makes sense to do this for a competitive mode because that's what works for competitive games but maybe just maybe instilling the idea that you can't abandon a game into a player base that traditionally for 8 years prior was always allowed to come and go as they pleased H might be a recipe disaster and sure enough once open to the public players abandoned games in Mass ending most competitive matches
• 102:30 - 103:00 before they even started this was a brain dead decision on valve's part something that's not even seen in Counter Strike and these Mass abandonments compounded with the single biggest problem with valve's new competitive mode most matches didn't even start not simply because someone abandoned the game but because someone's game crashed due to for fored Graphics settings yes valve's new competitive mode would have forced Graphics settings in a video game where custom graphical
• 103:00 - 103:30 configs were almost a necessity thanks to its hideously unoptimized nature a problem that valve did nothing to address for years finally came back to bite them in the ass thanks to forced Graphics settings players with custom Huds certain cosmetic mods or using low-end computers would immediately crash upon loading into a competitive match crashing out of a match counted as an abandonment and then slapped that player with a timeout and ended the game immediately sure there was a rejoin feature to avoid the timeouts if you
• 103:30 - 104:00 managed to fix whatever issue you had but most of the time it simply didn't work and slapped players with that timeout anyways players with lower-end machines who by some miracle didn't crash would be subject to hideous game performance drastic drops in frames per second frame drops as they played stuttering screen tearing freezing sometimes their game would just go black and forced them to restart TF2 you also could not use DX8 a setting that thousands of players relied on in order
• 104:00 - 104:30 to run TF2 with playable performance and as a result countless players would abandon the game and also receive that timeout penalty and then when that happened that blatant copy and paste job of MVM quickly became apparent because these timeout penalties carried over to Man versus machine why were they truly unable to separate these two matchmakers and if this was intentional why would you punish someone for leaving a competitive match by limiting their access to Man versus machine other
• 104:30 - 105:00 bizarre MVM bugs popped up as well like competitive mode signs and doors appearing in MVM and at one point even trying to cue for Man versus machine would crash the game during the stress tests and throughout all nine of the competitive mode stress tests yes a total of nine over the course of 2 weeks there were thousands and I literally mean thousand thousands of complaints from players about forced graphic settings game crashes abandonments failed connections the list goes on I
• 105:00 - 105:30 cannot stress enough how widespread and pervasive these performance issues were forced Graphics timeouts and abandonments were hilariously out of touch oversights from valve since the entire TF2 player base was accustomed to coming and going as they pleased abandonments happened all the time either because players didn't like the new game mode they didn't like the map they ended up on because they couldn't pick it or they had no choice other than leaving because their game crashed or they had performance issues as a result
• 105:30 - 106:00 the vast majority of matches had uneven team sizes 4 V6 3v2 this was the norm not the exception timeout penalties which should have prevented players from wanting to leave did nothing to stop them because you can't suddenly convince the entire T of two player base to not leave a server when they always had that freedom for eight years prior what did valve think was going to happen that everyone would magically fall in line As for the forced Graphics settings
• 106:00 - 106:30 many normal players and most competitive players ran graphical configs or ran the game on DX8 to significantly improve their game performance sometimes out of necessity lest they be unable to run TF2 at all but now the game would force their settings and screw them over the freedom to come and go as you pleased Huds configs and mods were all part of tf2's functionality and culture since launch and now these things weren't permissible inside of valve's new
• 106:30 - 107:00 competitive mode lest they break the game this further proved that valve had done almost no testing of this new system and it showed that whoever was working on competitive matchmaking did not understand TF2 let alone play it they forced graphic settings and timeouts because this is how it works for Counter Strike no custom Huds or visual mods everyone on the same playing field and punishing players for leaving a game remember valve explicitly told
• 107:00 - 107:30 those visiting competitive players back in 2015 that they were going to model tf2's competitive mode after Counterstrike and oh lo and behold the TF team at the time just so happened to be sharing an office with the Counterstrike team and they said this whole one section was was TF2 and it looked closer to no no it was they share one with CSO they also said that some of the new like people they had hired recently wanted to work on TF2 a lot of veterans have moved on to other things
• 107:30 - 108:00 but some of the newer people that they've added wanted to work on TF2 he said the only couple people who have been working on TF2 since it's heart was Dave anderic they've been there since you know 2007 since the game was released and before that since they were working on it up to the release as well so and I think that they'll they'll work together with the people in like the csgo department or DOTA Department that have already implemented these features that they're trying to add now so like they'll all work together and learn from each other it's it should it should work out it's very safe to assume that valve
• 108:00 - 108:30 had Counterstrike developers building tf2's competitive mode and making decisions for its functionality forced graphics and abandonment penalties were massive screw-ups but instead of addressing these issues in any constructive way by the second stress test valve tried to sweep these under the rug by just disabling rounds from ending if someone disconnected and this didn't anything all this did was Grant players the privilege of playing with uneven team sizes all the way to the end instead of automatically booting them
• 108:30 - 109:00 back out to the lobby screen after 40 seconds and since the teams would remain uneven everyone left anyways and instead of fixing performance issues with Huds or mods or loosening restrictions on forced graphic settings valve just told the players to stop using Huds or visual mods in the video game that always let them do that wow these stress tests were a [ __ ] show and I'm just getting started because tons of other issues manifested all of which valve simply ignored for
• 109:00 - 109:30 example you could not kick players was someone AFK was there a cheater sorry you're stuck with them and there were plenty of cheaters which the mobile authenticator did nothing to stop because spoofing a number is as easy as taking candy from a baby imagine not incorporating some way to kick people inside of a game mode that could be very easily influenced by a single bad actor even CS Go's competitive mode let you kick players why didn't they incorporate
• 109:30 - 110:00 this feature there is no conceivable excuse for them excluding vote kicks other than matches automatically ending if someone disconnected a vote kick feature was likely incompatible with the system they had built this was a joke the best valve could do was add an in-game report feature well I mean thank God not that reporting someone for Cheating in TF2 has ever worked before so that was useless and tons of other bizarre bugs persisted including but not limited to phasing through walls phasing
• 110:00 - 110:30 through props coaching glitches that let you teleport across the map I'm following you I'm going through walls freezing in spawn if someone disconnected during the initial countdown horrific connectivity issues where your game would try to connect to a server fail several times in a row and then slap you with a timeout penalty and a slew of other visual bugs and glitches and on top of all of this the cherry on the [ __ ] show Sunday valve was avoiding the two biggest concerns from early beta
• 110:30 - 111:00 testers which were primarily top competitive players no class restrictions and no weapon banss nothing that resembled their preferred means of competitive play was present other than the smaller team sizes thanks to this the balancing for this new competitive mode was in complete disarray as I've made apparance several times so far vanilla tf2's balancing doesn't work for team sizes of six very quickly new metagames and strategies evolved around abusing mechanics that were far more
• 111:00 - 111:30 powerful with smaller team sizes but otherwise balanced in vanilla play five Scouts and one medic three demomen and three Medics two Heavies and four Medics three Gunslinger engineers and three Scouts Quick Fix vaccinator gloves are running urgently it was fun to mess around sure but this enraged competitive players because their sixes meta wasn't being adhered to and resulted in most matches being complete steamrolls speaking of steamrolls the Matchmaker rarely produced balanced games from the start more often than not matches were
• 111:30 - 112:00 complete Stomps why the ranking system simply did not work shocker I know implementing a ranking system in TF2 was a Fool's errand but also the ranking system they chose started everyone at the same level rank one since matches could be rarely completed high-skilled players couldn't rise the ranks and were sent back down into the pile with fresh installs but wait there's more the maps that valve chose for their rotation were palatable to questionable Capture the
• 112:00 - 112:30 Flag turbine seriously it seemed like valve was trying to appeal to the vanilla player Base by dangling a familiar map in front of them oh well hey look it's that map you guys like playing on 32 player instant respawn servers why not try that out for our new competitive mode during all nine stress tests there were heaps upon heaps of feedback recommendations comments concerns outcries and valve addressed none of them all they were willing to do was patch smaller bugs and glitches and
• 112:30 - 113:00 of course there were countless adjustments to abandonment penalty shocker but none of the major problems negatively affecting the core functionality of competitive mode were addressed not a single one and after those nine stress tests revealing countless massive glaring flaws valve goes silent nothing no announcements no more stress tests not a word on competitive matchmaking for nearly three months during this downtime valve
• 113:00 - 113:30 finally added that twitch list that competitive players wanted onto the main menu not that anyone has ever used this since then if anything it just got in the goddamn way people are here to play TF2 not watch someone else play TF2 Beyond this that's it perhaps they slipped back into their offices back to the drawing board to make improvements to their shambling system system everyone expected changes well hence the testing right surely this was going to become something great valve just needed
• 113:30 - 114:00 more time the world could always use more [Music] Heroes May 24th 2016 OverWatch releases with Fanfare it explodes in popularity this was now the premere team-based shooter with massive Global Esports tournaments sponsored by blizzard themselves thanks to
• 114:00 - 114:30 overwatch's release and rapid growth in the Esports scene a fire was lit under valve's asses they had to push out tf2's competitive mode and fast to meet OverWatch headon what was valve going to do players were anxiously awaiting on valve's word for any kind of progress and then out of the blue a valve employee John shonick AKA Jill who had had been coordinating the stress tests on Steam posted on face punch forums saying that the next update was going to be Neato well [ __ ] that's official word
• 114:30 - 115:00 from valve's mouthpiece that the competitive update was coming up next everyone exploded with players quickly adopting Neato as the new catchphrase the Neato update the competitive update was right around the corner and a couple of weeks later valve poked their heads out with Jill coordinating two more stress tests at the end of June players excitedly poured in it was finally here the improved competitive mode except nothing had changed competitive mode was
• 115:00 - 115:30 exactly the same as it was 3 months prior and almost the same as it was on day one the 11th and final stress test officially ended the competitive mode beta but valve had done nothing they didn't address any of the major issues affecting competitive modes functionality abandonment penalties forced graphic settings messed up balancing questionable map selections unbalanced teams terrible performance issues horrible connectivity issues the practically non-existent ranking system
• 115:30 - 116:00 nothing why why were there no changes to their system well because the competitive mode valve had created was fundamentally flawed from the start valve could not turn off abandonment penalties they could not allow for games to continue if someone left TF2 was going to be an esport now these Fe featers had to be present they couldn't enforce class limits or weapon banss because vanilla TF2 and competitive TF2
• 116:00 - 116:30 had to be as similar as possible so their new esport could grow and forcing these things was not only wholly antithetical to vanilla TF2 and how the majority of players engaged with the game for almost a decade prior but all of these decisions simply broke their game competitive mode was barely functional and that's being generous most play ERS were really excited about this new competitive mode they had hope they expected for these stress tests in the beta to you know work towards
• 116:30 - 117:00 improving the system but once that last stress test ended the beta not the alpha the beta the last step before official release that optimism and excitement very quickly turned to doubt and fear some were wondering just what the hell valve was doing this whole time and were greatly and rightly concerned by their ineptitude put on public display Val 's competitive mode barely functioned but it seemed like they were about to release it as is but all of these outcries were simply ignored it was all
• 117:00 - 117:30 drowned out by even louder title waves of praise the hype around competitive matchmaking had gained too much momentum it was now too big to fail many players unsurprisingly were even vehemently defending valve riding off any criticisms as meaningless complaints if you were worried about the update if you had fears criticism or concerns you were insulted you were attacked you were labeled as entitled as moronic you should have just been grateful that
• 117:30 - 118:00 valve even wanted to work on this 8-year-old game at all anymore and with June coming to a close the entire TF2 player base was at the edge of their seats players expected improvements expected for this new competitive update to be far better than what was beta tested there was no way valve was going to push out that buggy broken mess of a matchmaking system as the final product right right this was valve the valve the company that made halflife portal Counterstrike they know how to make
• 118:00 - 118:30 video games they know how to turn them into Esports they've done this twice they were definitely working on fixing competitive mode and were about to release something great valve knows what they're doing this was practically routine for them what could possibly go wrong
• 118:30 - 119:00 July 7th 2016 the meet your match update finally arrives tf2's brand new competitive mode was now live and it was exactly the same as it was at the end of the beta all of
• 119:00 - 119:30 those massive glaring flaws brought to light from stress testing remained totally unresolved as tens of thousands of players poured into the new skill-based matchmaking system Team Fortress 2's competitive mode collapsed the forced graphic settings caused Torrance of game crashes unplayable performance and widespread abandonments in stly ending most competitive matches before they even started since most players were used to coming and going as they pleased abandonments happened in Mass ensuring that the vast majority of
• 119:30 - 120:00 matches never played to completion players still could not call for a vote kick this was inexcusable when there was a cheater or someone went AFK players could do nothing they were now forced to abandon ship and take the timeout punishment for themselves Q times were further compounded by the sheer volume of people people cramming into the game coordinator valve's Matchmaker simply could not keep up if by some miracle players got into a match and it played
• 120:00 - 120:30 to completion it would be over within minutes the non-functional skill-based matchmaking and ranking systems weren't addressed resulting in steamroll after steamroll after steamroll steamrolls were further compounded by players abusing those mechanics otherwise banned in sixes but balanced for team sizes of 12 and to top it all off matches still ended instantly if someone disconnected so no one stuck around to endure a 6V 5 match I cannot stress enough just how
• 120:30 - 121:00 miserably broken competitive mode was at launch valve willfully pushed it out like this everything was functioning exactly as they intended valve couldn't make any changes to competitive mode TF2 was going to be an esport now so competitive mode had to function like this rounds couldn't continue if someone left otherwise how could the Matchmaker score Players to balance the next match valve had to force graphic settings so all players were fairly on the same playing field valve could not impose
• 121:00 - 121:30 class limits or weapon banss or properly balance this game mode because then vanilla TF2 and competitive TF2 wouldn't be the same game and it wouldn't Usher the existing player base into their new esport thanks to valve's unwillingness to accept that their competitive mode simply could not succeed it was dead on arrival it shipped in a pathetically broken State resulting in a total disaster even without all of the
• 121:30 - 122:00 technical issues this new competitive mode was doomed from the start it was made to appeal to everyone but ended up appealing to No One aside from its novelty this game mode was quite literally a bridge to nowhere no one wanted this bizarre hybrid between vanilla TF2 and competitive 6v6 without weapon banss or class limits competitive mode failed to meet competitive players expectations they didn't want this they wanted their own rules in balancing and for everybody else the vast majority of
• 122:00 - 122:30 players who enjoyed vanilla TF2 why would anyone bother with this new game mode this was just pseudo vanilla TF2 with smaller team sizes so why put up with all of the rules the lack of functionality the Q times balancing issues broken matchmaking forced Graphics the timeout penalties why bother when the normal game was right there [Music] what the [ __ ] is this piece of [ __ ] quick play was gone replaced with a
• 122:30 - 123:00 brand new game mode with its own skill-based matchmaking casual mode valve learned from their stress tests that there was no way to convince the entire established player base to abide by the new rules and requirements for competitive mode and they knew that most players would not engage with an optional game mode that they traditionally did not care about so so valve had to force them to care they had to forcefully convince the player base to take TF2 seriously to treat it
• 123:00 - 123:30 competitively so valve restructured their entire game so players would be forced to abide by those new rules valve was so certain that their competitive mode would work that TF2 would become their next esport that they mangled their entire game into a vehicle for their competitive mode just as valve intended exact ly as they told those competitive players they used Counterstrike as their model casual play and competitive play are almost one for
• 123:30 - 124:00 one the exact same game just with smaller team sizes and slightly different rules players engage with casual mode to learn the mechanics and then graduate to competitive play this was a sad pathetic joke even the name casual was a farce casual implies that the normal vanilla game the way most people enjoyed of2 for almost a decade was now the Lesser way to play this fed into the Warped notion that valve's competitive mode was now the real game
• 124:00 - 124:30 the way it was truly meant to be played from now on normal vanilla TF2 was to be an organized competitive light experience with real winners and real losers players were now forced into a rigid structured system that strongly encouraged winning and trying their hardest this wasn't merely a paradigm shift imposed by the nomenclature of the update no sir now there were real tangible Stakes all of vanilla TF2 now used a skill-based matchmaking system
• 124:30 - 125:00 your performance winning and losing would now directly impact the quality of your play time now there was an incentive to win and try your hardest not just to level up a purely cosmetic badge but to get into better matches if you didn't you would be punished by being placed into lower quality matches yes you have an mm rank for casual mode and always have and the game tries to use this statistic to put you into balanced games and not only that now the
• 125:00 - 125:30 skill level of everyone else on your team would impact the quality of your play time this isn't tennis or chess this is a team-based game other players would now impact the scoring of your performance and therefore the quality of your matches all of this everything was disgustingly antithetical to everything TF2 was built upon for eight years prior there was no punishment for losing or benefit to winning other than the personal satisfaction TF2 was explicitly designed to be a chaotic and
• 125:30 - 126:00 free-for-all experience where players were always allowed to take the game as seriously as they wanted to with as much or as little coordination as they desired but now instead of encouraging continued play because the game is fun a matchmaking system now told players you need to win in order for the game to become fun and to what end why should the common player be forced to treat TF2 like an esport why impose this on everyone to reach this endgame end game end game of what exactly an
• 126:00 - 126:30 Esports tournament with some mythically massive prize pool yeah where less than a fraction of a percent of any player base reaches usually through manufactured teams with bot players from other countries this is hard proof that valve no longer cared about Team Fortress 2 it was now to be a vehicle for competitive play for Esports no matter the cost no adjective is strong enough to describe the sheer ignorance of it all hell players hadn't even
• 126:30 - 127:00 touched casual mode yet all of this was apparent if you read this tiny paragraph on the update page no one expected casual mode no one wanted casual mode vanilla players didn't ask for this competitive players didn't ask for this literally no one valve gave zero indication not even a hint that they were going to do this casual mode came completely out of left field and popped all of us in the head again everyone expected that whatever matchmaking
• 127:00 - 127:30 system valve implemented would get placed into its own game mode like man versus machine and that quick play would remain then at the very least meet your match would have only amounted to an overwhelming disappointment of a competitive mode but no valve had just completely gutted their own game in fact casual mode came as a shut talk namely because valve had continued updating quickplay just a few months prior and here's something even more insane when
• 127:30 - 128:00 casual mode was implemented valve introduced a brand new user interface this hideous Lobby screen but the old quickplay UI wasn't removed it was hidden and you could still access this with a console command Pastime a game mode that was in beta during quickplay was officially released with meet your match Pas 's quickplay artwork looked like a blueprint and it had a tag sign that it was still in beta but when meet your match arrived if you pulled up this now hidden quickplay UI pastimes artwork was updated no longer a blueprint and
• 128:00 - 128:30 the beta tag was now gone this isn't an image filter either someone went in manually changed the artwork and removed that beta tag so it seems like in the update that removed quickplay valve also updated quickplay this is the Smoking Gun showing that this new casual mode was h Twisted into the game last minute likely within the preceding month so it could stand toe-to-toe with OverWatch because OverWatch had casual in competitive modes CSG go had casual and
• 128:30 - 129:00 competitive modes therefore Team Fortress 2 needed that too and if this wasn't evidence enough for you that this brand new casual mode was a rushed lastminute decision brought about by the incompetence of new hires in csgo developers the dumpster fire that is day one should be day one casual mode functioned exactly
• 129:00 - 129:30 like competitive mode except with Team sizes of 12 random crits and random bullet spread the matchmaking system would try to find 24 players first and then populate a server the game would not begin until all 24 players were found naturally this resulted in hideously Long queue times players were waiting five 10 20 sometimes 30 minutes or more for a single game despite all warnings valve attempted to matchmake 24 players at the same time if a player
• 129:30 - 130:00 base the size of counter strikes can barely handle team sizes of five how on Earth did valve expect for this to work this is yet even more evidence that casual mode was rushed valve more than likely just copied competitive mode increased the team sizes and then called that casual mode players could no longer join valve servers by ad hot connections that option was gone permanently the only way to play on valve servers was through casuals Matchmaker that freedom
• 130:00 - 130:30 that precious Freedom that players had to select whatever server and whatever map they wanted was now gone replaced with a pick 2 game mode system and that's it and do you remember the show servers option I talked about earlier which had all of those filters allowing for players to curate their own experiences and receive a list of servers tailored just for them do you remember being able to include Community servers into your search if so desired sorry all of those options were also
• 130:30 - 131:00 removed valve made these changes because TF2 is an esport now everyone must be funneled down the same skill-based matchmaking slide they needed to strictly standardize The Experience otherwise everyone wouldn't be playing the same game and Casual mode wouldn't feed into comp competitive mode once players finally loaded into a server they were faced with the single most detrimental change that Team Fortress 2
• 131:00 - 131:30 has ever experienced this is no exaggeration and you'll understand why soon casual mode uses a skill-based matchmaking system yes meaning the game must automatically assign players to their teams first based on a skill rank before they load in this is the bare minimum requirement for a skill-based matchmaking system this may seem benign at face value but this single change has caused nothing but horrific problems since its implementation first of all
• 131:30 - 132:00 TF2 skill-based matchmaking simply does not work and has never worked the overwhelming majority of casual matches were and always will be complete Stomps shocker that a game like tf2 is wholly incompatible with skill-based matchmaking unbalanced games were never a problem with quick play because servers had multiple means to balance games out but now with meet your match valve disabled auto balance they disabled auto scramble they disabled vote scramble they disabled spectate mode and they disabled team switching
• 132:00 - 132:30 you couldn't even call for a godamn vote kick all of these features got removed because game balance was now the matchmaker's job and since it could never do its job resulting in miserably unfund Stomps using the freedom players always had they kept leaving servers in hopes of finding a better game but if someone left the server team sizes were now doomed to remain uneven the game coordinator was programmed to not fill vacant slots players were no longer
• 132:30 - 133:00 allowed to get plopped into the middle of an ongoing game like with quickplay this only compounded the Stomps even further because once one player left their team everyone else left too because the game had zero chances of getting balanced out huh wait a minute I'm sorry did you just abandon that casual match suicide is bad ass yes leaving casual matches resulted in a Timeout penalty think about that for a moment for 8 years TF2 always allowed
• 133:00 - 133:30 for players to come and go as they pleased never punishing a player for leaving a server for any reason this defined tf2's laid-back nature and let players find the servers that suited them best this was a baffling move from valve but a move that made total sense valve did this because the number one problem with with competitive mode were abandonments valve needed to forcefully convince all of their players that they can't abandon games anymore they needed
• 133:30 - 134:00 casual mode to train players for competitive mode once players were done waiting for their timeout to expire and done waiting on the 20-minute que times they weren't allowed to start playing right away now all players were presented with up to two more minutes of waiting on pre-round timers valve implemented these timers because the matchmaking system assigns players to teams first before they load in so the game needs to give everyone time to finish connecting if they didn't do this
• 134:00 - 134:30 games would begin before everyone's finished connecting meaning the team that has more players load in first would have an advantage Uber Advantage Engineers getting set up players getting into position Simply Having more active players valve can't fully control how quickly players load in because they can't control player Hardware nor their internet connections all they can do is give time at the expense of everyone else waiting this was never a problem with quickplay since you would load into the server first and then choose your
• 134:30 - 135:00 team not the other way around this ensured that team sizes remained even with the same amount of active players without forcing anyone else to wait before they got to start playing if by sheer willpower you manage the stomach all of the waiting on cues all of the waiting on timeouts all of the waiting on pre-round timers all of the waiting on ruing and all of the steamrolls and made it to the end of the preciously rare and balanced casual match sorry you
• 135:00 - 135:30 got booted out of the server Maps no longer ran on a 45-minute map timer they now ran on a best of three or single round limit you were no longer allowed to enjoy long periods of uninterrupted Play Time additionally all attack defend and payload Maps now ran stopwatch mode a feature from competitive play the game mode that stood to offer the greatest amount of play time with these new round limits would now be even shorter tf2's traditional gameplay Loop was completely
• 135:30 - 136:00 shattered players could no longer play on the same server with the same people with their balanced teams for as long as they wanted to valve did this because there simply must be an official beginning and an official end to every single round there must be real winners and real losers otherwise how would the nonfunction matchmaking system be able to carry out the fundamental requirement of handing out skill ranks so it can balance the next Wicked fun match of TF2
• 136:00 - 136:30 well hey misery loves company at least players could still join their friends that were already in a server H sorry you want to play with your friends ad hoc connections to valve servers were disabled remember if you wanted to play with your friends you were forced to use the brand new party system you could no longer join a friend's ongoing game you first had to wait for your friend to finish their game mind you L they get a timeout penalty for leaving you had to wait for them to finish then party up and then you were given the privilege of
• 136:30 - 137:00 waiting together and if you had more than one friend you wanted to play with good luck wait times drastically increase due to larger party sizes forcing you to wait even more and if you wanted to play against your friends sorry you can't team switch anymore so you could only play with your friends not against them traditionally none of this was a problem with quickplay because valve's old server settings let you click on your friend's steam profile hit join server and then you could play
• 137:00 - 137:30 with them right away with them against them however you wanted but now allowing for players to join their friends ongoing game or change teams wouldn't make for a fair and balanced competitive match you can't have Team compositions changing mid game because that would defeat the purpose of skill-based matchmaking 8 versus 5 how is this fun how is this fun and since ad hoc connections were disabled there was no way to bypass the horrific casual system
• 137:30 - 138:00 players were forced into casual mode by Design with intention so they became trained for competitive mode no options no choices no freedoms casual mode or nothing I cannot stress enough just how miserably broken and unplayable casual ual mode was at launch games consistently had unbalanced teams resulting in one-sided Stomps players leaving servers would further exaggerate the misbalance and therefore the stomp
• 138:00 - 138:30 because slots wouldn't get filled back up and also because you didn't have Auto balance or team scrambles games would be over within minutes and boot players out of the server Q times were abysmally long the timeout penalties further compounded The Waiting being forced to wait for everyone to connect before you started playing further compounded the waiting and since the match maker could not handle the volume of people cramming into the game coordinator that even further compounded The Waiting players were consistently spending more time
• 138:30 - 139:00 waiting than actually playing the video game you quite literally could not play Team Fortress 2 Meet Your match was an unmitigated catastrophic disaster valve's brand new competitive mode was an unplayable abysmal failure casual mode Twisted Team Fortress 2 into this pathetic broken mess that only served to waste a player's time and prevent them from playing the game here's that list again this massive list all of those freedoms tools and options to engage
• 139:00 - 139:30 with TF2 almost all of this was now gone and replaced with restriction after restriction after restriction there was no good reason to remove quickplay it was a perfectly functioning system that placed players into servers and let them enjoy TF2 at their own pace uninterrupted for long periods of time sure it had its problems but why remove the functioning system that was tolerable and let players play the video game and replace it with an infinitely
• 139:30 - 140:00 worse system with even more problems well the only logical reason why valve yanked this abortion of an update out was to compete with OverWatch which had launched just 1 month prior and all valve managed to do was successfully make themselves a laughing stock in the eyes of their competition and the worst part about all of this was that it was completely intentional valve was fully aware of the flaws with their system they had performed those stress tests
• 140:00 - 140:30 they were wrestling with supporting Esports in TF2 for years they knew everything wrong but they pushed out meet your match anyways all of this this apocalyptic train wreck was just day one July 8th the day after meet your matches launch valve made a blog post acknowledging the rough launch for their
• 140:30 - 141:00 update valve knew they screwed up and started engaging in damage control competitive mode was a complete flop but the much much bigger issue was that Team Fortress 2 as a whole was nigh unplayable priority number one was getting the game functional again and this blog post kicked off a painfully slow and only partial walking back of meet your match they began with a couple of their more controversial decisions on the same day as the blog post valve removed abandonment penalties for casual
• 141:00 - 141:30 mode confirming that this was indeed an intentional feature their blog post stated your feedback has convinced us it is more important for players to be able to come and go as they please this confirms that valve wanted to punish players for leaving the normal game again to Absolute trained them for competitive mode they then claimed the long Q times were a bug and not a feature which was very hard to believe given that the matchmaking system was
• 141:30 - 142:00 organizing 24 players at the same time valve also allowed for players to select one game mode instead of forcing two for casual mode claiming we'd intended to roll out the number of match options available to players incrementally which was simply valve dismissing the fact that their update was not ready for release and dismissing the much bigger fact that players already had countless match options available to them which were forcibly removed to facilitate their broken matchmaking system and
• 142:00 - 142:30 shockingly instead of doing the correct thing which would have been rolling back meet your match to quick play until casual mode was fixed this blog post was valve doubling down they refused to go back they could not admit failure and they ended their blog post with this we are not always as talkative as we perhaps should be but we are listening everyone and I mean everyone knew this was [ __ ] valve clearly no longer
• 142:30 - 143:00 cared about Team Fortress 2 and they sure as hell didn't listen to the player base and that player base unanimously pushed back against what they had just done for the first time in tf2's history Steam Reviews plummeted to mixed as players cried out against the update there was a deafening plea for valve to bring back quickplay but that plea would fall on deaf ears because the only people valve was willing to listen to was that tiny minority of the player
• 143:00 - 143:30 base the competitive players the Esports enthusiasts and the YouTubers not the majority of their player base that played vanilla TF2 no sir only those that fed into their confirmation bias that this update was a good idea but valve didn't listen to these guys either even this tiny minority did not want this well most of them because tf2's casual and competitive modes should be as similar as possible in order to make
• 143:30 - 144:00 the transition from learning the ropes to testing your abilities as seamless as possible and I am very confident that 5 years from now there will be an entire generation of TF2 players who will cite competitive mode as a reason why they started to play the game in the first place just as there are tons of people who attribute TF2 becoming freet to playay as the reason for them playing it today right now the just need to add better incentive competitive
• 144:00 - 144:30 mode well this sucks the decision to not roll back meet your match would serve to be a brutal one it would be months before TF2 became playable again and as a result the game began hemorrhaging players in fact after meet your match players left in droves because why stick around for game that had just been turned onto its head and rendered borderline unplayable why stick around for a video game that you could no longer enjoy as you had for eight years prior and in a beautifully hilarious
• 144:30 - 145:00 twist of fate many of the biggest names in the competitive scene and even the YouTube scene left for OverWatch and I don't blame anyone for leaving don't get me wrong this was the expected reaction to meet your match especially for competitive players why stick around for an esport that not only had no money in it but also for a video game that had just been completely demolished by the developers as for the competitive players that didn't jump ship it didn't take them long to abandon all prospects they returned to their own servers with
• 145:00 - 145:30 their own rules and balancing again they didn't like this new competitive mode they wanted their own home brew versions of TF2 to reside in valve had successfully alienated the very people they were so desperately trying to cater towards absolute [ __ ] poetry [Music]
• 145:30 - 146:00 after the July 8th blog post valve would begin slowly updating casual mode in an attempt to clean up the train wreck they had derailed themselves but casual Mode's functionality namely its matchmaking system is so deeply flawed that as each time valve attempted to solve one problem they created even more
• 146:00 - 146:30 problems culminating into the final form of casual mode that we all still use today at least half of the modern player base if not the majority started playing Team Fortress 2 after meet your match casual mode is the only form of the game that many have ever experienced as a now 14-year veteran allow for me to show you just how miserably broken casual mode is by taking you through its update [Music]
• 146:30 - 147:00 history 7 days after meet your matches launch valve allowed for players to select specific maps for casual mode if it only took a week to do this why not have delayed the update for at least this feature it would have softened the blow and and what's sad about this change is that players were gaslit into thinking that for the first time ever they had been given the privilege to play on a specific map inside of a valve
• 147:00 - 147:30 server something that before meet your match the server browser the show servers option and AD hot connections let them do anyways while players could now narrow their selection of maps instead of queuing for an entire game mode this map menu created several new problems players were now presented with a massive wall of options a familiar situation to the server browser the game does nothing to show off any of these Maps or game modes many players especially newer players won't touch Maps they've never seen nor heard of
• 147:30 - 148:00 before and many players especially newer players won't bother scrolling through this massive list it's clumsy and not streamlined in any way even the server browser had filtering options scrolling is easy sure but most people just want to play the game right away they don't want to bother combing through a whole bunch of collap ible tabs and ticking off a bunch of boxes with names they've never seen before many players simply take the path of least resistance opting for whatever is the fastest to click either entire game modes maps at the top
• 148:00 - 148:30 of the list or everything hell 22% of the player base nearly one out of every four players doesn't bother selecting individual maps for casual mode that's a sample size of over 10,000 by the way so thanks to this new map list many TF2 Maps some that have been been in the game since launch rapidly depopulated into ghost towns Freight cold front Nightfall pipeline well doomsday how many of you watching this right now even
• 148:30 - 149:00 knew these Maps existed many traditionally fun and popular Maps got shoved in the middle of an ocean of choices or at the bottom of a list where many people won't bother searching so as a result they get no traffic when in the hell did payload race become an alternative way to play TF2 it's been in the game since 2009 Nightfall and pipeline were very popular Maps back in the day but this map list killed them off completely even high tower got its wings clipped here I am queuing for just
• 149:00 - 149:30 doomsday on a Saturday night I gave up after 10 minutes then I tried queuing for just hi Tower and the game gave up on me after 2 minutes and threw me into a European server what about Sawmill you know Sawmill shout it from the mountain tops baby I guess I'm not playing that tonight and even if you do get the map you wanted you're only allowed to enjoy it for one game and then the game ends the server resets and it's right back to queuing none of these problems existed
• 149:30 - 150:00 with quickplay 2 minutes 5 minutes 10 minutes you never had to wait this long just to start playing let alone on a specific map you could consistently find a server running the map of your choosing if players wanted a specific map all they had to do was search for a server in the server browser or use the show servers option baked in with quickplay both of these options not only let you select a map you wanted from a list with variety but also select a server with good ping you can't even do
• 150:00 - 150:30 that with casual mode you just have to trust the matchmaking system will place you into the best server possible and apparently for me someone who lives in Texas that's somewhere in Europe while this might not seem like an upside at first but a huge benefit to quickplay was that you could only select game modes this meant that players could be placed into any map within that category as such quickplay kept significantly more maps populated as it fed players to all of them so it was very easy to find a full server with the map you wanted
• 150:30 - 151:00 because they were all more consistently populated this also exposed players to a wider variety of maps broadening their taste to further keep them populated if players didn't like the map they landed on they could simply find a different server just as they do now with casual mode but at a much higher frequency because map run on a single round limit rather than a 45-minute map timer quickplay the server browser and the show servers option created this wonderful balance that either let
• 151:00 - 151:30 players choose or experience variety but now map selection only serves to kill off traffic to entire areas of the game areas that were traditionally thriving generally map selections work pretty well if you have a small map pool with a large player base but not the other way around if you cram in over 100 active maps for a player base that's no larger than roughly 40,000 people at any given time what do you think's going to happen when meet your match came out there were
• 151:30 - 152:00 67 maps in the active rotation that's already too many but as of January 2025 there are now 112 almost double this is a nightmare for a matchmaking system if you're placed into anything other than upward badwater Harvest process or dust ball chances are your server is going to be partially or half empty even on relatively popular Maps this is a common occurrence I don't understand how some people still defend valve's decision to
• 152:00 - 152:30 bloat TF2 with this many Maps when all this does is cause more harm than good more isn't always better it's not just a matter of avoiding the content you don't like there's not enough players to go around it stretches the player base too thin and it increases Q times a problem that reared its ugly head just this past year here more on this later hence why some games use map rotations is this a good solution for TF2 at this stage probably yes but I also don't like the
• 152:30 - 153:00 idea of restricting content that's always been available on a pink cookie fueled whim valve might decide to remove Thunder Mountain for an indefinite period of time and I love that map I don't want to be forced to play on New Gen OverWatch Maps like Odyssey and Phoenix which both play like [ __ ] and well hey we may not have the same tastes but everyone watching this certainly has a map that they would not want removed if presented with bad water or bread space which one would you have stay in the game unfortunately that decision
• 153:00 - 153:30 wouldn't be up to you it would be up to valve and I don't trust them long story short the addition of this map list caused far more problems than it solved as for some positive changes in this first patch valve finally gave players the privilege to call for a godamn vote kick and not a moment too soon soon because cheaters were having a field day with meet your match and valve removed stopwatch mode from Attack defend and payload Maps thank God because stopwatch
• 153:30 - 154:00 mode is cancerous for a game like tf2 funnily enough disabling stopwatch mode only serve to further depopulate entire areas of the game since the skill-based matchmaking system doesn't work most games are Stomps ending in mere minutes but now with stopwatch mode removed the only game mode that serves to offer the greatest am of play time is payload since other game modes use control points that start capping as soon as someone touches them these game modes vastly magnify misbalances and therefore steamrolls on attack defend and five
• 154:00 - 154:30 control Point Maps there's nothing there to slow down the winning team other than the losing team points start capping instantly thanks to the lack of balancing both rounds end in mere minutes and the game is over on King of the Hill there's at least the 3 minute timer for the point but it's only 3 minutes in the the event of a steamroll which happens more often than not you only get to play for at most 6 minutes assuming you were placed into the server at the beginning of the game if not that's even less time playing but with
• 154:30 - 155:00 payload slow moving cart these maps are by Design staggered and draw out gameplay payload at the very least slows down the stomp to match the pace of the cart and gives the illusion of a balanced game because the stomp takes longer to complete it's no wonder that everyone flocks to pay Lo because compared to all other game modes you get to play TF2 for more than 10 minutes before the server resets and then everyone leaves why bother with these other game modes when you can hardly enjoy them for more than a few minutes
• 155:00 - 155:30 at a time this is a serious problem one that is baked in with casual mode thanks to its inability to form evenly skilled teams and thanks to the single round or best of three limit which is mandatory in order to hand out these useless skill ranks that were supposed to form evenly skilled teams in the first place valve also adjusted the game coordinator in this patch so it would start prioritizing filling empty slots in ongoing games they cited this as a problem and not a bug which I strongly
• 155:30 - 156:00 doubt because labeling this as a problem leads me to believe that valve didn't want their Matchmaker to fill up vacant slots and only walked this back once they realized how badly they screwed up allowing for players to join ongoing games thankfully reduced Q Times by a lot but sadly this move to put players in ongoing games would only create other problems which I'll get back to in a moment 21 days after meety your match's
• 156:00 - 156:30 launch valve finally rolled back one of their worst decisions and gave players the privilege to start playing TF2 with fewer than 24 players you know how the game functioned for 8 years prior it took valve nearly a whole month to finally bend the knee and give up their dreams of vanilla TF2 being this rigid structured vehicle for their third big esport the problem is that a matchmaking
• 156:30 - 157:00 system breaks Team Fortress 2 if you allow for games to begin before all players connect and allow for players to come and go as they please functions from quickplay are wholly incompatible with a matchmaking system quick play and skill-based matchmaking are completely antithetical systems and when valve injected features from quickplay into casual mode in their desperate attempts to fix their own mess they managed to utterly ruin how TF2 plays those of you
• 157:00 - 157:30 that started playing TF2 within the last8 years have been experiencing an inferior broken form of the game let me break it down for you with casual mode skill-based matchmaking the Matchmaker automatically assigns a bunch of players to their teams first and then loads everyone in at the same time as players are connecting the game considers these now reserved slots as filled and active even if those players haven't finished connecting this means the problem that
• 157:30 - 158:00 pre-round timers Were Meant to prevent now became a widespread issue whichever team has their players finish connecting faster will have the advantage on attack Defender payload Maps the setup timer gives more time for everyone to join but the team that has their players load in Faster will have the advantage Uber Advantage Engineers getting set up and players getting into position this has Monumental impacts on the start of the game and therefore it's balancing on King of the Hill are five control Point maps without a setup timer there's even less time so take everything I just said
• 158:00 - 158:30 and then add a numbers Advantage The stragglers Who load in Faster have to catch up to where the uneven team fights already taking place but by then it's too late the round already started as a 12 v9 the losing team can't slow the winning team down and then the game ends this is another serious problem with casual mode team balance is consistently uneven before rounds even start simply by the nature of how the matchmaking system works this was never a problem with quick play for several reasons
• 158:30 - 159:00 first players would choose their teams first after they finished connecting this ensured that the number of active players on both teams was always the same second servers ran on a 45-minute map timer servers weren't constantly getting gutted by resets causing for everyone to leave servers would get full and then stay full for long periods of time so after the very first round when that 45-minute timer started all of the consecutive games would start on an even playing field because the server was
• 159:00 - 159:30 already full of active players third players had an incentive to stick around in the event of a misbalance because they knew the following rounds would become balanced thanks to team scrambles team switching and auto balance but thanks to Casual Mode's best of three or single round limit with all of the balancing features removed and the Matchmaker throwing everyone into the server at the same time the Matchmaker sets up these misbalances for every single game this problem persists after the first round as well after round one
• 159:30 - 160:00 of the stomp team sizes usually look something like this with quick play autobalance would immediately even the playing field by moving the better players from the winning team over to the losing team then more players would load in select their teams and keep team sizes even but with casuals Matchmaker it tried to keep team sizes the same as it loads in a bunch of new players so this happens give me strength this only prolongs the misbalance because the losing team still has fewer active
• 160:00 - 160:30 players and now has to wait for half of their team to connect at varying speeds just like the first half of the game the team with more active players will have the major advantage guaranteeing that the second round will be another Stomp and God forbid someone loses connection or crashes while playing which happens all the time when this happens their slot becomes reserved for a little while that's what this yellow text means originally the Matchmaker gave players a chance to reconnect to avoid that timeout penalty but with timeout
• 160:30 - 161:00 penalties gone this was now a useless feature now the team that had a player drop out had to wait for them to reconnect or wait even longer for the reserved slot to open up and have a new player connect which only prolongs the misbalance watch as my team is down three players for almost 3 minutes during play with no way for new players to connect and fill these slots this reconnection feature drastically prolongs misbalances all the time and is baked in with the matchmaking systems
• 161:00 - 161:30 functionality valve decreasing Q Times by allowing for players to connect ongoing games didn't solve anything this only increased the frequency at which players could cycle through the broken matchmaking system they enjoy getting their [ __ ] pushed in for a few minutes and then it's right back to server hopping consistently unbalanced and un teams are baked in with the Matchmaker thanks to the fact it can't form evenly skilled teams and thanks to the fundamental requirements it must abide by assigning players to teams first
• 161:30 - 162:00 based on useless skill ranks and resetting servers after every single game to assign those useless skill ranks again this is another major flaw with casual mode that has drastically negative impacts on game balance as a whole and drastically reduces the amount of time you spend playing playing the game you ever wonder why so many of your games in TF2 are total Stomps you ever wonder why you recue so many times this is why it's the matchmaking system
• 162:00 - 162:30 players are constantly playing with uneven team sizes seriously take note of how often this happens in casual mode even if it's only one or two players this hurts game balance that one player could be a medic building Uber an engineer getting set up a sniper getting into optimal position we all know how influ FL ential a single player can be and the cherry on top of the [ __ ] show Sunday the pre-round timers which were supposed to prevent this entire mess no longer served a purpose they now only
• 162:30 - 163:00 waste your time delaying the inevitable of an unbalanced game these major flaws will only continue to persist so long as the matchmaking system continues to persist the only way to remedy these flaws is to remove the matchmaking system itself this is not normal this should not be normal this is not how Team Fortress 2 behaved before meet your
• 163:00 - 163:30 match 67 days after meet your match's launch valve adjusted the matchmaking system again so that it matches parties of similar size against each other this sounds like a smart move except the party system sucks the game tries to match parties of equal size so parties of increasing size have to wait longer to start playing party size of two or three generally no problem party size of more than three ah good luck you're at the mercy of the matchmaking system now since the game tries to reduce Q times
• 163:30 - 164:00 with a party of four or more this basically guarantees you're going to get placed into a half empty server and God forbid someone in your party loses connection with steam you'll waste your time queing only for the queue to suddenly stop in order to fix this issue everyone has to disband restart their steam client and then try again wasting even more of your time this [ __ ] still happens today except now the game at least tells you when this happens so you know you have to restart your steam
• 164:00 - 164:30 client instead of guessing as to what's wrong by the way players still couldn't join their friends in ongoing games anyone that was in a server had to leave their server first and then party up quickplay never had any of these problems while the party system does dump you and your friends into a server at the same time something quick play didn't do before meet your match you could almost do the exact same thing in a fraction of the time if you wanted to play with a friend in an ongoing game you could simply click on your friend on Steam and join their server directly
• 164:30 - 165:00 with an ad hoc connection typically with little to no wait time no need for a party system no need for them to leave their ongoing game or if no one was in a server yet you could quickly spot a valve or a community server inside the browser share the IP and have everyone join together in mere seconds before meet your match you almost never had to wait to play with friends but now waiting is the norm in casual mode by the time you and your friends party up and queue for a map everyone could have ad hocked into a valve server and would
• 165:00 - 165:30 already be playing and thanks to 45-minute map timers you wouldn't be forced to recue after every single game and wait even longer than solo players to start playing again you could also play with as many friends as you wanted 2 3 5 10 friends you could find find a server in the browser with enough slots and populate it yourselves it was very common place back in the day for large groups of friends to pile into a server but now sorry you're limited to six anything greater than six people would
• 165:30 - 166:00 put too much load on the broken matchmaking system and well valve had to modernize TF2 so they could push it as their third big esport adding features that do nothing but waste a player's Time tf2's party system sucks and will always be inferior to the Simplicity and the speed of the ad hoc connections we once had 82 days after meet your matches launch valve introduces the rematch system now instead of all players
• 166:00 - 166:30 getting booted out of the server after one game they were granted with the privilege to choose to keep playing on the same server with the same people man it's almost like we had that with quick play sadly all this rematch feature did was waste more of a player's time the rematch vote didn't appear as you played instead it would appear at the end of the game lasting 30 seconds if the vote went through the server would reset and a brand new game would begin on the same map but with the exact same teams so no
• 166:30 - 167:00 one ever voted for a rematch without team switching team scrambles or Auto balance there was no way for teams to become balanced so why would the losing team typically at the receiving end of a stomp ever vote Yes to losing again as always everyone would leave the server and search for a new game in the preciously rare event that a game was balanced no one stuck around for a rematch anyways because they now had to wait on the rematch vote and then wait on the server reset and then wait on the
• 167:00 - 167:30 pre-round timers adding even more time on top of their cues and incessant server resets rather than waste even more of their time everyone opts for door number two and even if the rematch vote went through no one stuck around anyways because they had to wait the server would end up half empty new players would load back in at varying speeds if at all any semblance of balance achieved by the end of the previous game was now gone and the next game would be another stomp quick play didn't have any of these problems
• 167:30 - 168:00 players had an incentive to stick around and keep playing because unbalanced teams would become balanced and players didn't have to wait to play servers ran on Long map timers and weren't constantly resetting and making everyone leave unsurprisingly implementing a vote feature that made players wait even even more wasn't going to work
• 168:00 - 168:30 out 167 days after meet your matches launch yeah valve was moving this slow valve removed the worthless rematch system and introduced the map voting system that we still use today players were now not only given the privilege to stay on the same Sur with the same people but also given the privilege to vote for the next map features that we had with quickplay before meet your match valves quickplay servers ran a set
• 168:30 - 169:00 rotation of all maps in a specific game mode and would automatically cycle to the next map once the 45-minute timer ran out during play any player could call a vote for the next map from any map in the rotation you weren't limited to three choices or players could call a vote to extend the time on the current map being played if the vote went through more time would get put on the clock and play would continue without a server reset interrupting your fun this voting system was seamlessly integrated
• 169:00 - 169:30 into gameplay you would hit F1 or F2 and that's it it took a fraction of a second to interact with but now after meet your match valve magnified map selection Time by a factor of 100 which only serves to waste even more of your time players only only had the pleasure of enjoying a single game usually lasting less than 10 minutes then they had the joy of waiting 30 seconds for the map vote and then waiting on the server reset and then waiting on the pre-round timers even if
• 169:30 - 170:00 the same map is selected the server resets anyways forcing players to wait so no one sticks around for the map vote either for the exact same reasons as the crappy rematch system why bother waiting when you can recue and get put into a new game faster why stay in the same server with the same teams if you're just going to lose again and now thanks to the map vote becoming the standard two new problems manifested first thanks to horrific balancing issues most games
• 170:00 - 170:30 end pretty quickly many players didn't have their fill of the map they selected players were now even further incentivized to leave why bother staying in a server that was changing to a map you didn't want to play on this happened far less often with quick play because Maps ran on a 45-minute timer by the time it was up most players were ready for a new map and stayed in the server for a map change if they weren't ready they would simply vote for the same map again extend the timer and the fun would
• 170:30 - 171:00 continue without a server reset forcing everyone to leave and if at any point players had their fill they could simply leave the server whenever they wanted to they didn't need an official beginning or an official end to a round to tell them it was time to leave the second new problem with this map vote that I guarantee every single one of you has experienced is that since a whole bunch of people bail out of the server right as the game ends the Matchmaker now sees these newly vacant slots as needing to
• 171:00 - 171:30 be filled so very often players get placed into servers right as the game ends their QE time was for nothing the server resets wasting even more of their time another problem that rarely if ever happened with quickplay simply by nature of servers not resetting after every single game I'd also like to point out that this map voting system hasn't worked properly for 8 years since 2016 often times it just breaks and you can't vote there is no excuse for this it's
• 171:30 - 172:00 pathetic that this is still broken as a bonus in this patch ladies and gentlemen 167 Days Later valve reintroduces autobalance here once again we have valve adding back a feature of quickplay into casual mode in an attempt to remedy the glaring problem that his team size is being constantly uneven at first the game would politely ask players if they wanted to change teams few would ever
• 172:00 - 172:30 vote Yes because why willingly move to the losing team those that did willingly change teams simply wanted to change teams anyways another option that was available in quick play but one that valve would never put back in a later patch once valve realized that autobalance doesn't work if you ask someone to to change teams Auto balance was adjusted so it would automatically move players but now this was the exact same feature from quickplay so this is where it breaks unlike quickplay in casual
• 172:30 - 173:00 mode autobalance doesn't work right away if at all it first gives the Matchmaker time to try and fill vacant slots even if team sizes are greatly mismatched after some undisclosed amount of time then it will try and balance the teams but by the time Auto balance kicks on it's too late the vacant slots have now been reserved by the matchmaking system so it can load in new players sometimes one or two players might get swapped but most of the time the slots get reserved
• 173:00 - 173:30 for players that haven't loaded in yet watch as autobalance is interrupted by the matchmaking system loading in new players every single one of you has witnessed this these slots are now occupied by players who aren't even in the server this only prolongs the misbalance that autobalance would have sorted out right away but but in casual mode it's fighting the matchmaking system filling the slots it's trying to balance out so autobalance might as well not exist in casual mode it infrequently does its job because it can't do its job
• 173:30 - 174:00 it's constantly at odds with the matchmaking system shocking that autobalance a tool designed for quickplay doesn't work with a completely antithetical system this is also why valve can't add back team scrambles well they could but it wouldn't work how do you scramble players that haven't finished loading in yet into slots that are being reserved by the matchmaking system this is also why valve can't add back team switching or ad hot connections how do you swap or connect to what's functionally a vacant slot that's being reserved by the matchmaking
• 174:00 - 174:30 system there is no functional Middle Ground between casual and quickplay thanks to the existence of the matchmaking system 470 days after meet but what the [ __ ] 470 days what why this long between patches well meet your match was also meet your match players had voted on whether the heavy or the Pyro would receive a new update the Pyro won and
• 174:30 - 175:00 now valve had to deliver come October of 2017 jungle Inferno arrived and yep it was just another csgo operation for TF2 more contracts more loot boxes more skins and an in-game currency store this was new and it was was a feature that valve would later incorporate back into Counterstrike for the shattered web operation talk about a kick in the dick valve mangled their own game but continued to use it as a guinea pig for their other successful titles that aside
• 175:00 - 175:30 jungle Inferno brought us yet even more adjustments for casual mode valve overhauled the UI to what we see today and I think this menu is hideous valve removed all of the charm and soul of the original menu in favor of making TF2 look like a modern Chinese competitive shooter the damn storefront selling Trinkets and gambling is bigger than the button to start playing the [ __ ] game valve's true intentions never fail to show themselves through their actions anyways with jungle Inferno players were graciously given the privilege to do
• 175:30 - 176:00 other things as they queued for a server instead of being trapped to the lobby screen but now you could at least you know look at your backpack maybe do some shopping or how about some gambling while you waited what's extremely bizarre for me is that when jungle Inferno came out play were praising Val for giving back the very features they had taken away like they had never been there before features that had been in the game since launch except now in an inferior form with limitations we never
• 176:00 - 176:30 had before in a custom server you can que up for casual looking around your backpack you can queue up for casual want to check on your contract progress while queued for casual you sure can this feature is obviously a long time coming before meet your match using the server browser you could do other things while you waited you could find a server queue up and that was it you could queue for multiple servers at the same time and you were allowed to play in another server while you waited yes you could do
• 176:30 - 177:00 this with valve servers which brings us to the final change from Jungle Inferno valve finally gave players the privilege to join their friends during ongoing games in valve servers something else you could do before meet your match using adhawk Conn connections but sorry you're still forced to use the shitty party system and what does that mean you guessed [Music] it there's not a space in our party it
• 177:00 - 177:30 says player connecting is that you it's not me NOP they they put a tier one it's not me so yeah so so someone else other than me got put in the server awesome one two where's a slot right now it's not putting me in why someone else is connecting someone else again yeah someone else got put in the game [ __ ] sake bro how it's been 2 minutes now and they still haven't found a guy for this red team what is going on yeah so just for the record the enemy team has a slot open that I could have been placed into sometime within the
• 177:30 - 178:00 past 2 minutes the team I'm trying to join that my friends are on has had multiple people placed in their game before me they're not in a party they're not friends with anyone in the server they check their profiles so what is the matchmaking system doing why am I not the server yet no idea you were never able to play with friends easily in TF2 you never had the ability to join servers via ad hoc you never got to play with friends in mere seconds that just never existed it never happened the game was always this way guys we lost someone
• 178:00 - 178:30 we lost someone hold on okay you lost someone okay let's see let's wait it's is putting someone in not me [ __ ] that's three people the original purpose of the matchmaking system was to form evenly skilled unchanging teams for a competitive match allowing for players to join ongoing games wasn't even a consideration it's no surprise that when valve retroactively added this feature back that it couldn't hold a candle to an ad hoc connection thanks to the Reliance on the party system you're only allowed to play with your friends not
• 178:30 - 179:00 against them second as you just witnessed for whatever reason party members don't always have q priority it seems like party members are placed into the same queue as all other players even those not queuing for that specific server forcing you to wait even longer to start playing with friends quickplay servers didn't have these problems we had ad hoc connections if there was a slot available on either team your friend could join in a fraction of the time that it takes with casuals party system you could simply click on your
• 179:00 - 179:30 friend on Steam and join them directly or have your friend share the server IP no need to waste your time forming a party or waiting on the broken Matchmaker and thanks to team switching you could play with or against your friends hell playing against your friends in TF2 is a whole experience in of itself and that's been missing from the vanilla game for almost 9 years ger versus Star ger versus Star everybody wants to see this happen valve took that
• 179:30 - 180:00 away from us and I guess everyone just forgot ad hoc connections and team switching were amazing freedoms that benefited players and servers in so many ways but since that meant players were forming the games and not a matchmaking system they had to go and that was it that that's all jungle Inferno brought I do find it quite hilarious that so many players cite jungle Inferno as this pivotal moment for casual mode when by this point in time valve had done nothing to improve gameplay thus far
• 180:00 - 180:30 since meet your match valve had only sped up Q times and allowed for players to do other things as they waited giving them the illusion that they're spending more time playing than they actually are 629 days after meet your matches launch valve ushered out the final form of casual mode that we still use today valve finally gave players the privilege to queue for a different server if they were already in one something else that
• 180:30 - 181:00 shocker you could do with quickplay if you were already in a valve server you could pull up either the quickplay UI or the server browser and Cee for either a valve or a community server seamless no issues I guess people just forgot that quickplay could do this and unsurprisingly the features we have with casual mode are worse than quick plays you can't even kill time in a valve server while waiting for a community server anymore God forbid you try to
• 181:00 - 181:30 join a community server when you're in a casual server the UI breaks and forcefully tries to put you back into casual mode you have to leave the Casual server first and then try to join the community server wasting even more of your time and interrupting your play valve also swapped casual and competitive mode skill-based matchmaking algorithm to the glyos system why they did this who knows maybe it's because that's what csgo was using at the time and they said screw it try this as I'm
• 181:30 - 182:00 sure many of you are painfully aware this didn't improve game balance at all as the final change in this patch valve also overhauled competitive mode yeah that's a surprise many players thought competitive mode had been abandoned but no it received its first ever major changes since release valve added seating matches and a brand new ranking system they did this in hopes of reigniting interest in competitive mode this was their one last chance to have
• 182:00 - 182:30 TF2 become their third big esport but they still refused to address its biggest flaws forced graphic settings widespread abandonments messed up balancing so just as it always had been competitive mode stayed dead to this day no no one touches it this lump of scar tissue will always and forever be an ugly reminder that valve utterly failed at trying to turn TF2 into another csgo and that's it this was the last
• 182:30 - 183:00 significant change for casual mode and for Team Fortress 2 in general well actually there was one final change 3,052 days after meet your matches launch yeah we'll get back to that Gap in time later for the first time in over 6 years valve rolled out matchmaking improvements this came as a shock for many of us because why after over 6 years of no updates for casual mode did valve decide to touch it that's because
• 183:00 - 183:30 valve had to the matchmaking system broke during Scream Fortress 2024 we had an obscene 163 maps in the active rotation when you dump this many Maps into the rotation this breaks the game the player base was stretched too thin the Matchmaker simply could not handle that volume of maps it was pushed to its absolute limits resulting in Long Q times for all players then after Scream
• 183:30 - 184:00 Fortress ended the map rotation went back to normal but Q times stayed long it's as if though the Matchmaker got sent through a Taffy puller and couldn't sort itself out then and only then after 6 years of nothing valve had to step in and throw on a Band-Aid a Band-Aid that that didn't do anything aside from putting Q times back to normal maybe speeding them up a little bit which again only allows for players to cycle through the broken matchmaking system it does nothing to improve gameplay since
• 184:00 - 184:30 week one of meet your matches launch valve has effectively done nothing to improve gameplay for what's now going on 9 years we've been left with this wreck of a matchmaking system that is inferior to quickplay in every way possible to this
• 184:30 - 185:00 day casual mode does not form evenly skilled teams consistently resulting in one-sided Stomps for the majority of games with absolutely no tools to even things out throughout casuals update history I saved this for right now valve attempted to to improve balancing not once not twice not three times not four times not five times but six times and Casual still can't do its job wasn't
• 185:00 - 185:30 that the point of all of this that alone should be enough to Warrant the removal of the broken matchmaking system and if that wasn't enough for you casual mode is also plagued with bugs and critical flaws many of them baked in with the matchmaking system itself the Matchmaker form ing unbalanced games due to slot reservations endless waiting on cues timers map votes server resets and partying the non-functioning autobalance system dead Maps the list goes on none
• 185:30 - 186:00 and I mean none of these problems existed with quickplay they just got piled on top of the few problems quickplay already had only being players sometimes getting placed into empty or half empty servers and that's about it this is a problem with casual mode as well to a much much larger degree the only upsides to Casual mode are the map menu which is debatable because that kills off traffic to entire areas of the game and slightly faster Q times that's
• 186:00 - 186:30 it let me put this to rest right now quick play was quick by 2014 the average Q time to join a server directly or use the show servers option was less than 20 seconds and quickplay could have been improved further which valve was actively doing through 2016 there are hundreds of examples of this just look up old TF2 streams on YouTube sure it's not the 5 to 10 second
• 186:30 - 187:00 Q times we have now with casual mode on a good day but wouldn't you much rather wait an extra 5 to 10 seconds just to find a server you would stay in for hours at a time valve didn't need to remove quickplay it was a perfectly functioning system with tons of tools and freedoms that players had to engage with the game at their own pace the amount of time you waste searching for a good game in casual mode is astronomically higher than it ever was with quickplay you are consistently
• 187:00 - 187:30 looping through stomp after stomp completing 3 to 5 minute games in search of that one Gem of a round that lasts more than 10 minutes the relief that players experienced over about 2 years of casual mode fixes had nothing to do with valve improving gameplay it was either allowing for players to do other things in menus while they waited to play or speeding up Q times all of the half measures that valve took by reincorporating some features from
• 187:30 - 188:00 quickplay only served to break the game even further every single time they did this they only created more problems than they solved because quickplay and Casual are wholly incompatible systems oil and water cats and dogs you can't cherry-pick pieces from quickplay put them into casual mode and then expect them to work again I cannot stress this enough there is no functional Middle Ground between casual and quick play we have a 2year history of this failing you
• 188:00 - 188:30 can't improve A system that was never going to work in the first place and we have proof of this less than one day after meet your match launched the very instant valve removed abandonment penalties from casual mode this was valve's admission that their matchmaking system was a total failure that their competitive Esports vision for TF2 immediately needed to be walked back to keep the game functional they then made concession after concession allowing for
• 188:30 - 189:00 players to join ongoing games allowing for games to start with fewer than 24 players putting back autobalance sort of all functions that are purely antithetical to the very purpose of a matchmaking system with every single concession valve was ad admitting that a skill-based matchmaking system that forced rigid competitive play does not work for Team Fortress 2 they conceded that quick play was a better system as
• 189:00 - 189:30 they kept trying to rework their shambling Matchmaker to copy it if valve conceded this much why not remove the matchmaking system the source of all of these problems and provide an objectively better experience for everyone it's Years Years overdue to simply remove the broken system and put back the one that worked this should have happened on day one valve admitted to the players by removing abandonment penalties that this should have happened on day one and it's not too late to make
• 189:30 - 190:00 the change some people wildly OV exaggerate how bringing back quickplay would be this Earth shattering Schism that would cause another Mass Exodus but if valve put back quick play today there would be some disgruntled players but once they engage with the system and experience higher quality games oh my [ __ ] god everyone would be happy moreover engaging with quick play isn't that different than engaging with casual mode the process by which you start playing is almost the same you open up
• 190:00 - 190:30 the menu you queue up you get thrown into a server you pick your team and then start playing no pre-round timers this one tiny additional interaction that is picking your team signifies the removal of the matchmaking system system this would have Monumental improvements on gameplay then everything else under quickplay hood would be doing the work to keep the game flowing a matchmaking system would no longer be reserving slots setting up misbalances and
• 190:30 - 191:00 prolonging misbalances autobalance and team scrambles could therefore actually do their jobs so unbalanced games would become balanced play out over longer periods of time and encourage players to stay in the server yes team scrambles and auto balance are not silver bullets for unbalanced games but good Lord Almighty they're better than the nothing we have now with casual mode where players are consistently subject to permanently unbalanced games where a steady stream of players on the losing
• 191:00 - 191:30 team keeps leaving because they know the game will never become balanced ultimately ensuring that a stomp's momentum never slows down the 45-minute map timer and integrated map boat would only increase your play time without interruption you would no longer be wasting your time on pre round timers post round map boats incessant server resets and constant recing you would simply get to keep playing the video game switch the next map to Borneo oh yes I love that map vote Yes ad hoc
• 191:30 - 192:00 connections would give players another way to directly join valve servers running the map of their choosing and breathe life back into dead areas of the game through the server browser ad hoc connections and team switching would allow for players to play with or against their friends with as many as they wanted to No Limit of six if individual map selections would become far faster with next to no wait times and ultimately if you don't want to play more than one game if you've been Stockholm syndrom into leaving servers every 10 minutes hell every 5 minutes
• 192:00 - 192:30 you can leave the server whenever you want to and go find a new game you don't need the [ __ ] Tobuscus doors telling you it's time to go let me remind everyone that the final version of quickplay I'm referring to is the final form that was achieved in 200 14 no server advertisements no MLP x 10 roleplay servers which was never an issue to begin with if quickplay returned today if there was a complete and total reversion of meet your match
• 192:30 - 193:00 right now players would have all of those features and freedoms given back to them they would be relieved of the broken matchmaking system that does nothing but waste their time and prevent them from enjoying the game an outright reversion of meet your match would monumentally improve the overall quality of every single TF2 fans playtime there is no serious argument in favor of the contrary
• 193:00 - 193:30 [Music] if Team Fortress 2 was such a mess after meet your match why didn't players flock to community servers that seems like the logical conclusion to all of this the normal game becomes unplayable so you go
• 193:30 - 194:00 to where it was traditionally always playable well we did after meet your match TF2 was in the most literal sense unplayable for about 6 months Community servers were the only stable options for vanilla play however as the months went on community servers slowly died in The Fallout of meet your match but truth be told Community servers started suffering back in 2014 this is worth addressing remember that before 2011 TF2 only had
• 194:00 - 194:30 Community servers when the game went free to play and valve introduced their own game servers there was suddenly a massive glut of vanilla options to choose from however since quickplay originally fed into both valve and Community servers they weren't directly competing with each other in fact the volume of community servers exploded after the game went free to play since they had a steady stream of players being fed to them sadly this is why those predatory servers took off ultimately leading to valve making quickplay default to valve servers only
• 194:30 - 195:00 but not before nuking advertisements in the message of the day in 2013 which was a very welcome change this may come off as controversial for some old heads but quickplay defaulting to valve servers only was a necessary evil in order to combat the predatory servers that were exploiting freeo plays yes valve would have never had to do this if they never made the game free to play yes this was the easy way out valve absolutely had the manpower to find a more elegant solution so Community servers didn't
• 195:00 - 195:30 take a hit some servers did die as a result of this decision primarily vanilla servers but a compromise of some kind was necessary and quick play was a compromise the decision to remove Community servers from quickplay search by default did heavily constrict their flow of players but it didn't outright cut them off players still had the option to incorporate Community servers into their game searches and more importantly valve servers appeared in the server browser and ad hoc
• 195:30 - 196:00 connections were allowed players still had reasons to use the server browser and therefore be exposed to community servers Additionally the vast majority of players preferred picking a server from a list not only for map selection but also for Ping or an ideal play account in order to coordinate with friends the server browser and the show servers options were the primary means by which players joined servers default quickplay was mostly used by the freest of freeto plays who over time learned
• 196:00 - 196:30 they had access to these other features and eventually migrated over to them even the servers button was right next to the start playing button that's about as visible as you can get this was a perfect symbiosis that kept feeding players into all areas of the game players still had the choice to engage with Community servers and their content quickplay was a compromise between valve and the community a reasonable palatable balance between ease of access freedom of choice and minimal inconvenience
• 196:30 - 197:00 could there have been improvements absolutely quick play was not perfect but when meet your match arrived there was no compromise valve made no attempt to accommodate Community servers valve disabled ad hoc connections to their own servers hid them from the browser removed the show servers options and then tucked the server browser at the bottom of the new menu ensuring that it's something many players especially newer players would never see nor bother
• 197:00 - 197:30 with new and veteran players alike no longer had any reason to explore the browser when their only option to approach the bulk of vanilla servers was casual mode killing off that indirect exposure for Community servers and by permanently omitting Community servers from all game searches valve sealed that final artery of player traffic you're not even given the option with casual mode no choices no freedoms no compromise casual mode valves vehicle
• 197:30 - 198:00 for competitive play or nothing this led to an unprecedented mass extinction of community servers when meet your match released almost instantly Community servers experienced a drastic drop in their player counts even health server networks experienced decreases in traffic of up to 70% and as time went on it only got worse TF2 is free to play there is a constant flux of new players in and old players out as newer players
• 198:00 - 198:30 replaced older players the number of people even aware that Community servers were an option shrank even more leading to their mass extinction not to mention there was a mass exitus of tons of veterans after meet your match came out hundreds and I mean hundreds of amazing servers and their communities just died and not an organic death like many communities do over time but a rapid forced artificial demise CP orange servers 32 man Hydro servers countless
• 198:30 - 199:00 247 map servers all of these just vanished this still doesn't answer the question if casual mode was such a mess why weren't players flocking to community servers it's pretty easy to do isn't it so just go there and why weren't players making their own servers in response to meet your match well this is something of a prisoner's dilemma a prisoner's dilemma is if two people work together it would produce the best mutually beneficial outcome but these
• 199:00 - 199:30 people usually don't because it's easier to work in their own self-interests and get a smaller usually easier to attain individual payoff when people play video games on their own it's typically out of self-interest they're not even close to thinking about their fellow players that individualist mindset was baked in to Team Fortress 2 by Design optimizing for the individual experience and then having team play fall out of that quick Place functionality and its server
• 199:30 - 200:00 settings directly facilitated the best experience possible for this philosophy and alongside the server browser it gave players multiple options to engage with the game on their own terms as individuals naturally and seamlessly allowing for players to populate servers themselves but when all of those freedoms were ripped out of the game for casual mode everyone was forcefully funneled down that same matchmaking Slide the path of least resistance there
• 200:00 - 200:30 were no other options valve removed them you click on the big dumb Play Now button for a faster mediocre game why waste your time and bother trying to see the community server for an overall better experience when this one button will do all of the work for you faster as for making new servers the fact that starting and maintaining a new server is literally cost intensive only compounds with the prisoners dilemma why bother making a new server when someone else can do it why bother making a server if
• 200:30 - 201:00 no one's going to play on it speaking from experience by the way I have my own vanilla TF2 server that's pretty much dead 24/7 unless I make an announcement and have my audience play on it with me this ultimately Left Behind only a handful of community servers to choose from with many of them not running pure vanilla TF2 nowadays if you don't have the social muscle to populate your own game your only options for a somewhat vanilla te up to experience outside of casual mode are ugc and skyle servers
• 201:00 - 201:30 and these servers are [ __ ] they spoof their ping and their player counts I know for a fact I don't have 12 millisecond ping to Australia servers that's some [ __ ] Beyond skyle and ugc we have crappy trade servers a handful of times 10 [ __ ] fests and un lopia uh back in the day before meet your match there used to be countless populated servers of all kinds but nowadays hell I can't even find a populated CP Orange server anymore there were tons of these servers running all kinds of variants of CP orange but now
• 201:30 - 202:00 they're just gone and that's one example one of my favorite servers a 24/7 double cross server slowly died after meet your match came out all of the friendly faces that I would see on a regular basis just did disappeared I recorded one of my first ever videos there back in 2016 and then I stopped playing TF2 for about 6 months casual mode barely functioned and all of my favorite servers were either dead or dying I only came back to Team
• 202:00 - 202:30 Fortress 2 when I was allowed to vote on the next map which at least made me feel like I was playing the game as I once was but by this point casual mode was my only option all of my favorite Community servers were dead I had nowhere else to go it was normal routine to play with the same people and get to know them I never thought that my favorite internet hangout spot would suddenly get taken away like this I never thought that I would wake up one day to find my favorite game turned inside out after years of play the very lifeblood of
• 202:30 - 203:00 server cultures that built the base upon which all of TF2 had thrived upon for nearly a decade that ecosystem that network of play where players could seek out whatever experiences they desired engage in that sense of Comm Ry and Community true community that everyone was here in the same game to play together and have fun all of this was replaced with a soulless husk of a matchmaking system where you're dumped
• 203:00 - 203:30 into a random server and play with a random set of people every 10 minutes you never speak with them you never get to know them or have a good time together afterwards we've all been trained to say GG after one game get our ELO and then go right back to the grindfest TF2 is competitive now got to get that ELO got to get that rank up got to click on that badge while you wait for a [ __ ] game for 5 minutes the soul is gone man the camaraderie is gone you get little pieces of it here and there in the voice chat and player interactions you know funny gibbus heavy exploding in the middle of two for but it's all a shadowy spectre of its former
• 203:30 - 204:00 self a shadow left behind by casual matchmaking because casual matchmaking can't allow for communities it can't allow for Server cultures it cannot allow for players to curate their own experiences [Music] because that would mean Team Fortress 2 isn't being played competitively it
• 204:00 - 204:30 would mean the player experience isn't being forcefully standardized for an ort it would mean that valve isn't serving that one audience valve couldn't outright remove Community servers for the sake of competitive play lest they anger the established player base that they needed to Usher into their next esport but they could starve Community servers and starve them they did because they had to bridge that Gap
• 204:30 - 205:00 remember four years valve worked on meet your match for four years they spent 2 years working on competitive mode which was ultimately just a copycat of man versus machine they spent about a month working on casual mode in reaction to OverWatch which was just a copycat of competitive mode which was just a copycat of man versus machine they then endured two years of hellish damage
• 205:00 - 205:30 control just to keep the game's pulse after they took Buckshot to its skull only afterwards only after valve twisted and malformed Team Fortress 2 into this contorted mess that it is today did they finally drop this game throw their their hands in the air and say [ __ ] it we're done we're never touching this game again valve utterly failed at trying to turn TF2 into their third big esport it was no longer worth dedicating time and resources towards for any kind of
• 205:30 - 206:00 meaningful work the branch of Team Fortress 2 had withered strangled by their own hands but it could not be pruned not without striking fear into the core of their other multi-billion dollar microecon for counter in particular I'm curious you feel like gambling has imp feel it's grown interest in the past years um yeah so I mean well what what what's
• 206:00 - 206:30 the question has gambling led the greater interest in Counterstrike has it yes um we don't know uh we don't have any data um to support that yeah yeah if Team Fortress 2 goes if the grandfather passes away well that'll happen to your fancy Counterstrike skins one day too so valve took their only
• 206:30 - 207:00 option from 2018 onwards they would begin to neglect Team Fortress 2 and I'm not talking about a lack of updates no nothing silence three loot boxes a year with some broken maps and that's it just enough so from the outside looking in everything seems fine everything seems economically stable a beloved game kept on life support so its
• 207:00 - 207:30 microeconomia did this would have been the happy ending compared to what came next because there was one final gift from meteor match the number one enemy of a cheater is a full server during the quickplay era
• 207:30 - 208:00 when players join a server they would first log on and then choose their team once chosen players could enter the map and then start playing you could not choose one team if the other had fewer active players thanks to This Server were gradually populated by active players in a staggered fashion so if a bad actor logged on say a cheater the server was already populated by an active majority and the bad actor would get vote kicked immediately maps on
• 208:00 - 208:30 quickplay servers ran on a 45-minute timer with no time wasting features between server resets servers would get populated and then stay full for long periods of time greatly preventing Bad actors from invading quickplay server also allowed for players to spectate each other and catch cheaters this way once spotted they could be quickly kicked this was the powerful self-moderation that all game servers had be it a valve or a community server
• 208:30 - 209:00 cheating was common before meet your match there's no denying this however it wasn't a widespread pervasive issue servers were a naturally repulsive environment for cheaters they could only enter Solo or in small numbers slow slowly and could therefore be quickly addressed but when meet your match arrived valve completely destroyed self moderation on their own servers a cheater's number one enemy is a full server which casual mode is very good at
• 209:00 - 209:30 preventing casual servers reset after one game so every 5 to 15 minutes at most rather than every 45 minutes at minimum the entire server empties out during play the Matchmaker almost always sets up one-sided Stomps so the losing team is constantly bleeding players searching for a better game this Perpetual emptying and filling of servers results in a ton of player churn the ideal conditions for Bad actors to
• 209:30 - 210:00 exploit tons of empty slots to occupy what's worse the matchmaking system directly facilitates invasions by multiple cheaters most of the time after servers reset the server is now mostly empty the Matchmaker tries to fill as many slots as it can while keeping team sizes the same so it loads in a whole bunch of new players at the exact same time and since the matchmaker is always forming new matches servers are constantly having a fresh set of 24
• 210:00 - 210:30 players dumped into them this means multiple cheaters can pile in at once automatically with zero coordination instead of one bad actor trickling into the server at a time it now becomes two three four five per team simultaneously since many servers frequently start from an empty or a half empty State they can be consistently overwhelmed since you can only kick one player at a time per team it now becomes a chore to kick more
• 210:30 - 211:00 than one or two people by the time you've kicked one cheater one or more have already logged back on once two or more cheaters get on one team you might as well just leave the server will never recover then we have the party system which further enables groups of cheaters it not only enables groups of two to six to log on at once but thanks to it being the perfect party size of six got to have 6v6 you got to enable Esports vote kick majorities are never reached against their favor and since slots are
• 211:00 - 211:30 constantly emptying out on the losing team even with two or three cheaters votes will never pass thanks to automatic server resets and the ease of recing with a simple click Bad actors can server hop indefinitely with minimal input they require abs absolutely zero coordination to [ __ ] Game servers because the matchmaking system does all of the work for them additionally thanks to map selections being a simple toggle rather than a manual search and selection via a human's eyeballs
• 211:30 - 212:00 automation can easily Target specific maps and lock them down for an entire region which for a player base the size of tf2s doesn't take much and the cherry on top of this [ __ ] show Sunday valve disabled spec mode so players could no longer catch cheaters and have them kicked valve's casual System created the perfect environment for Bad actors and after meet your match came out it was only a matter of time before they figured that out which didn't take long
• 212:00 - 212:30 human cheaters usually play solo or in small groups but now casual mode opened up the floodgates for a whole new type of exploitation Bots within days after your matches launch not weeks not months days spinbot parties started appearing in casual mode this was never seen before cheaters found out they could consistently invade Game servers and take them over as time went on it only
• 212:30 - 213:00 got worse more and more learned they could do the same and as the months went on cheating spin Bots slowly took over Team Fortress 2 the first notable waves of spin Bots began as early as 2007 17 remember catbots these got memory hold for some reason and once their software was released to the public on GitHub it was over the bot crisis was in full swing 2018 Crash Bots and lag Bots 2019
• 213:00 - 213:30 entire Maps getting shut down by Bots 2020 even more waves of spin Bots 2021 2022 2023 2024 Team Fortress 2 was in the most literal sense unplayable able for almost 8 years straight almost every single time you played casual mode you would be met with spin bots in your server make no mistake the entire functionality of casual mode directly
• 213:30 - 214:00 facilitated the bot crisis it simply could not have happened with quick plays game coordinator and the server settings it used without a matchmaking system multiple Bots had no way to efficiently and automatically invade Game Servers Bots require that constant player turn which quickplay simply did not have servers weren't constantly resetting and a matchmaking system wasn't dumping in a bunch of new players into a server at the exact same time half of the server wasn't inactive and unable to pass vote
• 214:00 - 214:30 kicks because the game had begun before all players could connect and directly targeting servers with ad hoc connections is hideously ineffective what was a bot Hoster going to do cycle through a list of ips of full game servers over and over again until he could get enough Bots into one server and then what were the Bots going to do pile into an empty server was the Hoster going to coordinate all of his Bots with more code or do this manually yeah [ __ ] right literal
• 214:30 - 215:00 trogoderma but after the update came out it's like a switch got flipped the entire casual system was a massive after afterthought on valve's part remember they developed this over the course of a month in response to OverWatch so it's no surprise that they didn't even think about the lasting repercussions of its functionality in regards to cheaters other than spin Bots bot holters
• 215:00 - 215:30 gradually found other vulnerabilities with Game servers frequently dodsing crashing or otherwise rendering servers inoperable using a variety of exploits after meet your match came out Team Fortress 2 exponentially decayed into Raw hell for the first four years of the bot crisis not days not weeks or months four years when things were getting really bad valve did nothing the only
• 215:30 - 216:00 action they took was back in 2017 preventing kicked players from rejoining servers meaning a bot couldn't immediately join back once it got kicked that did Jack [ __ ] because another one would simply take its place beyond this there were no f fixes no actions no statements nothing and let us not forget instead of dealing with the Bots by you know developing a functioning anti-che valve decided to punish the players instead many Bots would spam obscenities
• 216:00 - 216:30 in game chat including a colorful variety of racial slurs valve was perfectly content on just letting this happen for years until some game journalists picked up on no no words being said in a video game valve let's raise Bots run a muck in their games the Articles write themselves Sound the Alarm mere days after these articles came out valve took action to quell the bad press they didn't do anything about the Bots no sir that would be too much work they instead muted freeo plays
• 216:30 - 217:00 these accounts could no longer use text chat no longer use voice chat and for some reason no longer use in-game voice commands Now new players could not access some of the most basic features for play without first paying a fee they could not call for a medic they could not call out a spy it was a laughably pathetic Band-Aid that valve slapped on the problem in order to avoid bad publicity and muting freeto plays didn't
• 217:00 - 217:30 even prevent chat spam it did nothing because guess what it's not that hard to acquire premium TF2 accounts for botting like buying them for pennies a piece that video comes later muting freeto plays solved nothing it only served to harm the real players and earn valve even more money quite a few new players specifically purchased something in game just so they could have access to these gameplay features this was a colossal [ __ ] angering thousands of players and
• 217:30 - 218:00 it was all valve's fault for two more years the bot crisis would continue totally unabated with new waves of bots and server crash exploits continuing to render the game unplayable outside of community servers the few that remained it seemed like valve would keep ignoring the problem and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse but come
• 218:00 - 218:30 2022 something happened at some point during that year a contractor recently hired to work on Steam deck related projects decided to play Team Fortress 2 with some friends thanks to the Bots they couldn't this p P them off so much that they asked valve if they could work on the game part-time valve agreed and starting around the summer of 2022 evidence of this contractor working on tf2's anti-che surfaced finally 2
• 218:30 - 219:00 years later in June of 2024 valve implemented some kind of system that banned all of the Bots it took this one contractor and maybe some others helping them here and there we don't know two years of part-time work to address the Bots think about that for a moment this confirms that valve was perfectly content with doing nothing about the Bots was doing nothing about the Bots and would have continued doing
• 219:00 - 219:30 nothing about the Bots and only when a contractor not even an employee but a contractor asked to work on TF2 did valve finally graciously allow for something to happen if one guy working part-time fix this in 2 years imagine how much faster Bots could have been addressed if they started on day one with more than one person not only that all of the cheats and Bot hosting software were open source a mere Google search away valve could have reigned
• 219:30 - 220:00 holy Hellfire down on these subhumans but they didn't even lift a finger this was all valve was willing to do let one person work on one of their most beloved games part-time and not just to put hats in loot boxes but to fix the biggest catastrophe that any game could face That's how little valve cares about Team Fortress 2 and hey what great timing on that bot fix around summer of
• 220:00 - 220:30 2022 valve started working full bore on deadlock otherwise known as neon Prime valve saw what was coming if they were going to release a brand new team-based shooter while their current one was unplayable there would be hell to pay this was likely why valve let that contractor work on TF2 in the first place and oh what a coincidence not too long after valve started closed testing of Deadlock with leaks slowly entering the public sphere valve pushed out the
• 220:30 - 221:00 fix for Bots and I don't believe in coincidences valve isn't stupid after almost 8 years the Bots were finally gone and after a week or so of fanfare it's like it never happened valve was right back in everyone's good graces no TF2 player and I mean none should ever forget this never let it slip your mind that after valve failed to turn TF2 into their third big esport another multi-billion dollar money printer after
• 221:00 - 221:30 they broke their game they willfully neglected Team Fortress 2 for years driving it to near death and likely would have kept doing so if they weren't going to push shout a new game all the while the only consistent work that valve performed on Team Fortress 2 was taking content they didn't even make and throw it into loot boxes three times a year they more than happily kept taking money from the players earning tens of
• 221:30 - 222:00 millions from microtransactions knowing full well that their game the product being offered as playable was in the most literal sense unplayable what were you upset about earlier I don't know I don't remember and for those who doubt how much money TF2 earned during the bot crisis steam's best of the Year Compares games by how much money they earn ordered by gross revenue from 2020 to 2023 arguably the worst years of the bot
• 222:00 - 222:30 crisis TF2 consistently placed in silver tier it was standing toe-to-toe with other multi-million dollar games vales neglect was a disgraceful pathetic display that borders on Criminal this should be embedded deeply as a permanent stain an ugly scar on their reputation if any other game developer did this as publicly and shamelessly as valve did they would have been destroyed the only
• 222:30 - 223:00 reason why valve gets a pass the only reason why they're never held to the same standards is because they made halflife they made really good games 20 years ago Gabe Newell is Santa Claus and the toys are suers and gambling valve is not the same company that it was 20 years ago valve is not your friend they take you all of you for granted they do not care about their customers they do not care about their players they do not
• 223:00 - 223:30 listen to their players their reluctantly offered shreds of communication are Hollow and always have been do not forget that well I'll tell you this uh regarding the matchmaking system I actually think that it's it's helped a lot with TF2 and I I I like it a lot and uh you like the
• 223:30 - 224:00 matchmaking system I yeah yeah I think that quick play definitely uh has a lot of like Nostalgia goggles for a lot of people uh I think that a lot of people and in the whole silly versus serious casual versus competitive friendly versus tryhard who do you cater to debate I say 100% that we should be working to make Team Fortress 2 a more competitively focused game I fully believe that the future of this game is in its viability as a competitive sport esport whatever this game is too good to
• 224:00 - 224:30 be treated like another Garry's Mod and deserves to be treated like Counterstrike to all of you who feel like tf2 is being taken over by the people on this side of the scale they literally cannot take what you like about the game away from you and you don't need to act like they are actually played on private servers where people did book readings and kind of made this whole social thing about it then they added this competitive structure to it that whole you're going to go for this match and then it's over and then it's going to go away and you got to go queue up again it just really killed the game for me and I think about
• 224:30 - 225:00 that a lot I think about that as it's such a big misstep I wish we they could roll that back please if you're listening roll that back it's that knowing like everyone wants to be the big competitive game everyone wants to be the game that like it's counter- strike right Counter Strike absolutely it's about Counter Strike isn't about grinding out leveling up or anything like that right counter- strike is about the matches the play and all of that and it does that really well but TF2 isn't about that and making it about that just killed that game and I mean you got to ask yourself what's the cause of these problems because bad updates poor
• 225:00 - 225:30 balancing decisions it's not just isolated to the meet your match update this has been happening for years and in my opinion and the opinion of I think most people it really comes down to communication outside the fact that valve don't really see to understand the game that they're messing with valve's only communication with the TF2 Community seems to focus entirely on competitive players people like Banny EXT sln are aside from the few sfm artists the few people who have been
• 225:30 - 226:00 given real personal one-on-one meetings with the tf2 Team but there's a problem the way that they see TF2 is just not the way that the vast majority of TF2 players see the game right now valve's only real insight into the TF2 Community comes from a competitive perspective and the reality is this is only an absolutely minuscule portion of the TF2 player base changes like removing valve servers buffing the flisat nerfing the bison and claiming that it being able to
• 226:00 - 226:30 penetrate enemies was a glitch even though it's been on the tip screen for like eight years now these are all things that show valve understands absolutely nothing about their game or the wants of the vast majority of people that but play it once upon a time competitive TF2 Community complained for like four years in a row maybe five that they wanted competitive
• 226:30 - 227:00 matchmaking and I'm you know okay sure I'm there with you we had TF2 lobbies and maybe you want like official support I I I can respect that I guess and then it finally came out and was one of the worst updates ever cuz it removed Community servers or whatever the [ __ ] it did on launch um and then they all always begged me to make videos about competitive TF2 and then whenever I did they had 10% the views of the normal videos I would
• 227:00 - 227:30 make and then when I played competitive with those players like in open or like in Esa they would all only go to kill me and [ __ ] talk me then we won open and they all said I got carried and and then I won Highlander and they were like [ __ ] you [ __ ] the competitive players just be happy there once upon a time I like
• 227:30 - 228:00 thought they were all awesome and respected all of them was like dude competitive players it's so awesome you're playing like the highest level of the game that's crazy you guys are awesome respect that and then and then then I realized that they had no souls God I look like an old man was a mistake to shave my face how do you end these I I don't know how to end these things I've been I've been
• 228:00 - 228:30 working on this video for the greater part of the past year longer than that at this point and um I just figured uh we'll have a little heart to heart as a way to end this just to to end this out I got some notes to my left side just to keep me on track but but for the most part this is off the cuff for many of you that started playing TF2 over the past you know six seven eight years this ugly abhorent neglect is all you've ever known for many of you this is fine then
• 228:30 - 229:00 this is normal and nothing is wrong hopefully now after watching this video you understand that this is not fine that valve willingly broke Team Fortress two over eight years ago and then they just left it that way nothing has changed hopefully now after watching this people will start just demanding for valve to do better start holding them accountable for their
• 229:00 - 229:30 actions for once it's such a simple thing to do and it never blows it it it never ceases to amaze me it always blows my mind just how exceptionally lucky valve is and how tremendously spoiled they are to be in the position they're in they have this brutally loyal fan base that will defend every action they do and that just enables them to get away with murder these people will throw
• 229:30 - 230:00 themselves at valve's feet kiss the very dirt they walk on when they give the slightest tiniest shreds of attention to anything other than Steam and you know why they do this because valve is a product and service company that made really good games 20 years ago valve can do no wrong hey they give us a summer sale they gave us you know good games cheap you know they give us you know they have they have certain morals and standards they abide by you
• 230:00 - 230:30 know no AI no ads in video games all well and good it builds this wonderful facade of a reputation but if you just look a bit more deeply for more than five minutes and they have a history of egregiously mishandling their games TF2 Counter Strike but we just sweep that under the rug we just ignore that we got a summer sale coming up we got a spring sale coming up we got gambling Gabe Newell is this wonderful man he is the
• 230:30 - 231:00 face of the company and not their actions yeah just demanding for valve to do better is a very very easy thing to do and in the case of Team Fortress 2 why does the buck stop at Bots like removing the Bots is the bare minimum not even the bare minimum that's not even that's not even fixing the game that's just scraping off the excrement that was squirted on top of it right not
• 231:00 - 231:30 that it seems to be working anymore either because Bots are slowly making their way back into the game based on recent months of reports awesome so whatever valve did seems to slowly be breaking down great they can ever fix that they going to update that probably not it's valve after all and given their history with handling this game I I don't trust them to do anything they've lost my trust and they've lost my respect they lost it years ago and they're never going to get it back and
• 231:30 - 232:00 just like I'm done I'm done pretending that any part of tf2's current state is somehow okay I'm done pretending that any part of tf2's current situation and any part of Val treatment of the game over the past decade comes from this place of integrity and genuine care for the game it doesn't Val does not care about their games they don't care about their consumers they care about this and I'm so done pretending that any part of
• 232:00 - 232:30 tf2's current state is somehow healthy for its longevity longevity that valve clearly wants pretending that valves treatment is a good thing that tf2's current state is a good thing thing is this monstrous ahistoric Distortion of reality far more extreme than what the most Rose tinted pair of glasses could ever hope to provide remember right valve is a multi-billion
• 232:30 - 233:00 dollar company billion with a B they earn tens of millions of dollars off of tf2's microtransactions every single year TF2 is offered as a playable currently active product that valve profits from so there is no reason no excuse none to stop asking for improvements for better treatment until valve tells us that
• 233:00 - 233:30 there will be none and how do you do that you just talk you can talk about a game's problems it's okay to complain it's never complaining for the sake of complaining my God it's okay to complain about the thorn that's been the knife not the thorn the [ __ ] Bowie knife that's been shoved into your side and twisted for years you can acknowledge that it's okay [ __ ] like nothing ever gets done until you say what the problem is Jesus Christ and it's like it's been
• 233:30 - 234:00 so long so many people have cycled out of this game that we forgot that we have this blade shoved in between our ribs right time to pull it out take off that band-aid and go hey valve you left this here right enough of this [ __ ] man just talk it's perfectly within your right as the consumer to express your disdain for the company's mismanagement like it's and it's not hard you just talk like I'm doing right now the most disgusting
• 234:00 - 234:30 thing about all of this right it's not just valves mishandle like valves mistreatment is awful don't get me wrong but it's just how so many people give it a pass how so many people just like turn the blind ey like oh Val this wonderful company we love you valve you do so much stuff for us oh you gave us a little seal and you gave us all these cool hats so we love you valve and like enough pretending that they're your friend enough pretending that they care look
• 234:30 - 235:00 what that's got us look where that got us a [ __ ] middle school textbook full of players names hand delivered Dev valves offices by a bunch of YouTubers like oh wow look they invited they they they took the YouTubers into their home it's where they made the game look it's Robin Walker look it's Dave rer these guys are great we got them on a [ __ ] live stream where they talked about games they don't care about you they don't care about the game they don't care about their consumers they care about this you are a number on a page in
• 235:00 - 235:30 their checkbook balance that they account for every year you are nothing more than that so just keep spending money on the game it's totally fine won't have any impact on how they treat their products right like you can't you're not allowed to get emotional about these things right like you you you're not allowed to get emotional about a video game or or a piece of media or what have you because people immediately insult you and attack
• 235:30 - 236:00 you in LM bass you like oh he's crying over a [ __ ] video game or he's crying over a piece of media but like it's so much beyond that it's so like tf2 has touched millions of people's hearts it's brought so much Irreplaceable Joy over the years and to just let that wither and rot at the hands of the company that's in charge of the game and then to pretend that it's fine to pretend that this is okay and just to be happy with it like oh who cares who just
• 236:00 - 236:30 be happy valve is even acknowledging this game anymore oh my God imagine if that argument was used with any other game company offering any other game that is just as old as Team Fortress 2 they wouldn't get away with it like if there's no improvements for Team Fortress 2 like if this just continues as it has been TF2 will go down in history as the most egregiously mishandled game of all
• 236:30 - 237:00 time which it is [Music]
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• 238:30 - 239:00 I know we will be free again in the end
• 239:00 - 239:30 you be in a tra bur you set your for the Sun [Music]
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