Despite an absolute glut of outstanding issues, development for the game unofficially ended years ago, and much like other scamware like Star Citizen, the developers only keep it online so that players can use the cash shop. I've been playing since 2011 or so but I haven't been able to understand any update from Gun Mettle on. All the various features they've added to take money are very grindy, making this one of the awful games where you don't just pay to avoid grinding, you pay for the ability to grind. The weapon skins look awful, just like in CS:GO, and every new gameplay feature is just a new way to grind for terrible looking weapon skins. Even after turning to the community to make content for the game, quality continues to slip exponentially; those who have played on Wutville know exactly what I'm talking about.

Matchmaking is a massive downgrade to the game, killing community servers and funneling players into low-quality hell-holes where there is no communication, no sprays, an absolutely terrible map voting system, and the regular voice lines have been replaced with idiotic gamer lines, like referring to 'missions' as 'competitions', divorcing the game from its original premise and desperately shoving it towards an awkward and unbearable esports vibe. Competitive matchmaking is dead and has an absolutely broken system that usually causes the match to end if there's a network issue, so even after waiting for an hour to find a match, it will almost certainly not finish. Despite having over 1,000 hours on this game, I don't have a competitive matchmaking rank, because the system doesn't work. Casual is just full of bots, you will never play a match that is bot free. You have to use community servers to avoid bots, which Valve has excluded from matchmaking.

For those thinking about playing the game, I'll put this out there: lots of cool people play this game and it's chill to hang out on. The actual gameplay of Team Fortress 2 is a 3/10 at best. Demo is ridiculously overpowered, Sniper shuts down servers when there's no class limit, and Spy has not worked properly since 2007, and everyone who plays him is more than happy to use bugs and exploits to annoy others. They've spent years trying to balance sticky bombs, have never succeeded, and ultimately gave up and left them absolutely busted. Currently most Demo players use a bugged weapon that has a projectile hitbox 8x larger than it's supposed to be. So these things combined make Demo pretty unbearable to play against. And there's literally no scenario in which Sniper or Spy are fun to play against; every interaction between them and another class is one-sided, pointless, and unsatisfying. If Demo's weapons were fixed and Sniper and Spy were removed from the game, it'd be pretty good. But as it stands, any engaging competition you have with another player will almost certainly be ruined by the three aforementioned classes.

Really the gist of TF2 in the last 10 years is that literally every update makes the game objectively worse, and while it is GOOD that Valve has canceled development of the game, they don't seem willing to roll back all of their updates and return the game to a previous, playable version. I'll probably keep playing it, just because I've spent years figuring out how to enjoy the game. But for any new player trying to get into, I strongly urge finding something else. You will almost certainly waste a lot of hours for no gain.

Despite an absolute glut of outstanding issues, development for the game unofficially ended years ago, and much like other scamware like Star Citizen, the developers only keep it online so that players can use the cash shop. I've been playing since 2011 or so but I haven't been able to understand any update from Gun Mettle on. All the various features they've added to take money are very grindy, making this one of the awful games where you don't just pay to avoid grinding, you pay for the ability to grind. The weapon skins look awful, just like in CS:GO, and every new gameplay feature is just a new way to grind for terrible looking weapon skins. Even after turning to the community to make content for the game, quality continues to slip exponentially; those who have played on Wutville know exactly what I'm talking about. Matchmaking is a massive downgrade to the game, killing community servers and funneling players into low-quality hell-holes where there is no communication, no sprays, an absolutely terrible map voting system, and the regular voice lines have been replaced with idiotic gamer lines, like referring to 'missions' as 'competitions', divorcing the game from its original premise and desperately shoving it towards an awkward and unbearable esports vibe. Competitive matchmaking is dead and has an absolutely broken system that usually causes the match to end if there's a network issue, so even after waiting for an hour to find a match, it will almost certainly not finish. Despite having over 1,000 hours on this game, I don't have a competitive matchmaking rank, because the system doesn't work. Casual is just full of bots, you will never play a match that is bot free. You have to use community servers to avoid bots, which Valve has excluded from matchmaking. For those thinking about playing the game, I'll put this out there: lots of cool people play this game and it's chill to hang out on. The actual gameplay of Team Fortress 2 is a 3/10 at best. Demo is ridiculously overpowered, Sniper shuts down servers when there's no class limit, and Spy has not worked properly since 2007, and everyone who plays him is more than happy to use bugs and exploits to annoy others. They've spent years trying to balance sticky bombs, have never succeeded, and ultimately gave up and left them absolutely busted. Currently most Demo players use a bugged weapon that has a projectile hitbox 8x larger than it's supposed to be. So these things combined make Demo pretty unbearable to play against. And there's literally no scenario in which Sniper or Spy are fun to play against; every interaction between them and another class is one-sided, pointless, and unsatisfying. If Demo's weapons were fixed and Sniper and Spy were removed from the game, it'd be pretty good. But as it stands, any engaging competition you have with another player will almost certainly be ruined by the three aforementioned classes. Really the gist of TF2 in the last 10 years is that literally every update makes the game objectively worse, and while it is GOOD that Valve has canceled development of the game, they don't seem willing to roll back all of their updates and return the game to a previous, playable version. I'll probably keep playing it, just because I've spent years figuring out how to enjoy the game. But for any new player trying to get into, I strongly urge finding something else. You will almost certainly waste a lot of hours for no gain.