absolute trash in its' current state
valve doesn't care at all about all the bots that keep popping up nor do they care to update the game so it stays at least somewhat alive

the community degraded overtime, now it's all just a bunch of reddit zoomers who play just to win or to farm kills like the boring morons they are, i suspect this is due to the garbage matchmaking system that replaced the perfectly good old one
can't choose teams, can't spectate, the only thing you can do is to get queued into some dumpster fire of a match where you either get rolled or roll because apparently this game has no idea how to balance the two teams
i also wanna address the fact that they could fix this by simply adding back the scramble teams vote, that way we could mostly get rid of unbalanced matches by having a vote to mix up the teams
valve implemented autobalance (the worst mechanic to ever exist in any video game) to fix it, but it does absolutely nothing, and that's not all
when you gave your all to cap a point and get your team more time to win YOU CAN GET AUTOBALANCED BECAUSE SOME BRAINDEAD MORON IN THE ENEMY TEAM LEFT MID MATCH, WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?

speaking of balancing, some of the fun weapon combos got nerfed into the ground (sandman, caber, bfb), as if the game wasn't dead enough
some of the weapons are BLATANTLY OVERPOWERED WHILE THEIR SKILL-BASED CONTERPARTS GET ABSOLUTELY MURDERED BY THE BALANCING TODDLERS (looking at the ambassador and the diamondback)
also i may have figured out why they balanced this game in such a ridiculous way, it's because they listened to b4nny of all people
the 6v6 rat, who unironically had the gull to say that pyro is the weakest class while having like 7 hours on this class, was asked by valve to make the balance changes for this game, it's just completely baffling to me

and pyro?
pyro is ABSOLUTELY BROKEN, thanks to the jungle inferno update
airblast is a spammable win-any-encounter button, flames do way too much damage and can kill any class (except heavy (and even then, dragon's fury can obliterate a heavy on full health)) in less than half a second
we got to the point where PHLOG is the most fair weapon for pyro, because it lacks the most broken weapon mechanic in this game

also this game still has random crits, what an excellent mechanic
yea right
they were designed to "settle stalemates", but all they do nowadays is just slow the game down when your team does a push
all they get as a reward for that push is a lucky soldier spamming a random crit into a choke and killing everybody
sounds just fun putting RNG mechanics into a skill-based movement shooter, doesn't it?
they are also mostly at fault for this game having so many unbalanced matches, because if you didn't know, random crits scale with damage, meaning the more damage you do the better your chance is to get a random crit
so, the turbosweaty tryhards playing spam classes with pocket medics up their ass will constantly get rewarded because of how much damage they do and there's not much you can do in this situation, except pray that they don't get random crits

also, the game has become so bloated with stupid hats, skins and gaudy unusual effects that it's hard to play this game without a gamer config that turns it into roblox and kills the charm
can you genuinely imagine getting 30 fps in a 2007 game with something like 1060 6gb and i5 6400?
well, you don't have to imagine in tf2

this is kind of a nitpick, since this only affects new players and there's not a lot of them, the default settings are also absolute dumpster fire - defaults for the fov are 70 and the interp is set to 0.1, are you kidding me?

this game is a prime example of outdated game design, and this game comes from one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet
shame on you, valve
and shame on you, gabe, for turning this soulful game into a husk of what it once was