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Hey everybody Dom here. Breaking news: competitive matchmaking may be coming to Team Fortress 2

Competitive matchmaking and serious competitive play in Team Fortress 2 isn’t well supported within the game. For years player have had to go to third-party sites for competitive play things such as tournament and lobby functionality. This may change in the not-to-distant future.

Early 2015 the popular competitive Team Fortress 2 gaming network teamfortress tv got in contact with Valve. After an exchange of emails Valve requested a list of prioritized features the competitive community would like to see. A list was made and in early April 2015 a few people who where noteworthy characters in Team Fortress 2’s competitive scene took a trip to Valve’s headquarters. They where surprised to find - Valve already at work on changes to the game to better support competitive play.

The following is information from the people who visited Valve. They published a blog post on April 29th, 2015 and talked on a podcast May 1st. Links to all this stuff will be available alongside this video. This information may not be reliable and things may change in the future. With that small disclaimer out of the way, here are all the things know about the future Team Fortress 2 competitive matchmaking update.

• When matchmaking is added it’ll likely not be up to par. Valve sees it as an iterative process where they’ll collect community feedback and make improvements over time.
  
• Valve sees competitive matchmaking as a good way to collect data on how to balance weapons in the future.
  
• Ideally Valve balances all weapons so that everything can be used in competitive play. In the mean time there will be a way to ban weapons from being used. They themselves don’t want to force item restrictions however.
  
  
• A pay to enter system, comparable to tour of duty tickets for mann versus machine isn’t out of the question but Valve doesn’t really know yet if they want to use such a system or monetize in such a way.
  
  
• In standard competitive play, currently the most popular formats are 6-on-6 or 9-on-9-highlander. (Highlander is what it’s called one every player on each team has to play a different class.) Valve hasn’t yet decided what formats they what to support but are leaning towards smaller groups of people versus a server’s standard 12 on 12.
  
• Matchmaking games will use Valve’s existing network of servers. No word on if third parties can also provide servers for matchmaking games.
  
  
• Matchmaking may use system to match players of comparable skill levels to play together.
  
• It will be possible to queue up with friends in matchmaking.
  
• The competitive matchmaking system may have a ‘seasons’ or ‘ladder’ component. The idea is players earn points or something and climb a leaderboard. At some undetermined interval of time the leaderboard is reset and everyone has to start over.
  
• As part of the system player will ‘level up’. This is based off how good the player is over-all and not as one class.
  
• There may be an item like a badge that players can where that keeps track of statistics.
  
  
• The final bit of information is: Valve is estimating matchmaking to release in October 2015. Note this isn’t an absolute date set in stone so don’t get disappointed if it launches outside of October.

That was all the information about competitive matchmaking. There are a few other interesting things learned from the trip to Valve.

• Team Fortress 2 will be getting some sort of integrated feature to watch live streams.
  
• Right now around roughly 20 people at Valve are working on Team Fortress 2.
  
• Valve wants to help out big tournaments. They ask people organizing big tournament events to email them as they may send free merchandise and stuff for the event.
  
• A Source Engine 2 port of Team Fortress 2 is not out of the question to happen sometime in the future. It’s just not a priority at Valve at the moment as there isn’t really a reason for the port yet.

And that’s about it for this breaking news update. Thanks for watching. Like if you enjoyed or learned something new and subscribe for more videos like this one. Au revoir.

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Quick backstory: It isn’t clear as to when work started on competitive matchmaking or a competitive play-mode however some code dating back to October 2014 makes reference to players skill levels getting tracked in someone way, thus suggesting work started at around that time.

Valve also makes Dota 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Both games featuring robust competitive play support. Valve’s good at making this sort of thing so competitive matchmaking in Team Fortress 2 was inevitable.

April 29th blog post[teamfortress.tv]

The May 1st podcast.

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