The premier Online Hat Simulator, 2007 Edition. If you are reading this and have never played this game, please don't start now. TF2 is a pyramid scheme with a fat guy on top. It has fantastic art style which has both aged gracefully and been completely ruined by endless idiotic cosmetics. It has a sputtering mess of an engine that can barely keep up with all the features and functions stuffed into it over the last decade. It has a dedicated and long suffering player base that have grown accustomed to accepting the table scraps Valve offers (now at a rate of barely once a year.)

TF2 is as much a social platform as it is a video game. It's an first person dress up chatroom where users attempt to extract profit from virtual hats and other cosmetics. There's also an FPS minigame which I hear is occasionally populated.

Unfortunately, with the Meet Your Match update in the summer of 2016, Valve removed the QuickPlay function from TF2, killing off all community servers not named Skial. Now the landscape consists of 24/7 2Fort, Harvest, Hightower and Turbine. It's more or less impossible to keep a community server populated for any length of time without running one of those maps.

With MyM Valve did introduce an official competitive mode, which is both stillborn and a haven for hackers. The casual mode they released at the same time is the opposite of what it seeks to be. It's more difficult to join a game, much harder to find a specific map (especially if it's not one of the maps mentioned above) and the entire process takes far longer because of a mandatory 60 second pre-round and forced map reload at the end of game. Player churn is huge in casual mode, and for good reason.

TF2 still has huge balance issues. Sniper, a poor fit for the game in 2007, is insanely un-fun to fight against 11 years later. There are completely legit snipers that are harder to deal with than hackers. The class needs a fundamental rework to remove the "insta-kill all classes from any range" mechanic. Scout is right behind, becoming almost unfair to fight against at the highest skill levels. Since 2016, Medic runs at Scout speed with any medi-gun, making Scout completely dominant in 6s competitive. Heavy, the only tank class, remains a butterball, nerfed into oblivion. Core game changes (global faster weapon switch speeds, spy movement speed increase, etc.) all make him easier to kill but don't benefit him at all. Since 2014, Heavy's minigun starts at 50% of its base damage. Spy is both UP and OP at the same time. Baguette now runs at Medic speed, and faster than Scout when he pops the Dead Ringer. Valve nerfed the Ambassador into the dirt (it needed a nerf for years, but in classic fashion, Valve overdid it by a factor of 2). They have left the Diamondback (lets a class that can cloak and disguise store critical hits) untouched.

As of this writing, the big 3 TF2 cheats (the "L" word, the "N" word, and the "C" word) are all undetected. Hackers are rampant in Valve's competitive and casual modes, and there's plenty on the few populated community servers as well. The hasn't been a major VAC ban wave in TF2 for all of 2018.

All of this would be problematic but possibly understandable if Valve were a small company keeping their game alive. The company is worth nearly 20 BILLION dollars at this point. Half of that is in Gaben's back pocket. There's like 5 dudes who work on TF2 (Valve has claimed "up to 16" at one point) and while I am sure they are working hard, they're very understaffed.

Valve's "flat" structure was a dumb idea 20 years ago, but the company did manage to produce many gems for their first decade. For the last 10 years, the company has grown hugely and made so much money they don't even know what it means to give a ♥♥♥♥. The company's internal structure actively works to the detriment of the customers.

If you're still reading and you've actually played this game, you know what I'm talking about. I'll see you on Doublecross later this evening.