I love this game. However, Team Fortress 2, as it exists in its current state is a game that I cannot recommend or deem as a fully functional product in good faith, as much as I would want to say "there's nothing wrong with it if everyone just plays nice".

At the same time, it feels like you cannot #FixTF2 without a full remake, not just an engine port. The source code was leaked years ago and floats around on the internet, said code is held together by duct tape, the team which wrote it went missing, and was never heard from again. Yet the chances of Valve remaking it and trying to address the many issues of their golden goose for online multiplayer games directly is slim to none as of now. So at best you can either deal with the issues of the old game or move on. And even with games like Counter-Strike, which did start receiving proper support and updates once more, the latest incarnation remains an incomplete, bot-infested live service slot machine.

Many point to Meet Your Match and Tough Break as the turning point where everything went wrong. Some say that Love & War was the last we got of old TF2 and that's where the rot began. Some even say it was the Mannconomy update. There is truth to all of these, but even a rollback to a pre-MYM state of the game would be far little too late by this point.

The reality of the situation is; the game is infested with tens of thousands of bots (around 70% of the reported players), suffers from major performance issues due to bloat (in part with the way cosmetics are handled), map design has been entirely left to volunteers, innovation (in the form of things like Territory Control and whatnot) from the developer directly is hard to come by, parts of the user interface and default settings are needlessly clunky due to other parts of the UX being altered in a patchwork fashion, niche and specialized features that have been hid behind these changes have been forgotten, offline bot tutorials and training maps aren't sufficient or up to date for years, the ingame economy its self is flawed (no refined metal sink for instance, and the game being free to play results in endless item inflation, as the barrier to entry is nil), most of the weapon balance changes have been questionable since 2015, the battle pass gimmick with MVM just isn't compelling anymore, and VAC doesn't do anything even against public cheats now for some reason despite being heuristics based like your old AV.

The game might be a hot mess right now, full of jank, but please for the love of god don't let it wither away like Unreal and Quake. You had Counter-Strike suffer nearly the same fate until their own gunhat update, which almost fizzled out until more updates were implemented (and even then it's still a mixed bag, with CS2's introduction and the engine port still being a beta with most of the content from the old game missing, and it has the SAME bot problem with farms being set up in Russia and China to run them, especially since the game is now Free To Play).

Also, if you're going to be putting a game on community content life support please make the community server browser the first and obvious choice in addition to live-service matchmaking as it once was.

And if this great one of a kind game is just going to be dead and buried artificially, please at the very least be a dignified death. Tear these bots down and implement the necessary ingame measures to prevent their return. If that requires something like going back to a non-F2P model, then so be it. But the people running these bots are out there. AND THEY HAVE NAMES!

I don't expect all this buzz on the internet including these reviews airing grievances to do much as before, but I might as well try to at least name something in the spirit of giving the developers mail on what the players think of the game. And I tell you, these reviews aren't telling anywhere near to the full story or list of potential problems with the game right now. It's just not possible to do off-hand sometimes.

Thanks, and have fun.

I love this game. However, Team Fortress 2, as it exists in its current state is a game that I cannot recommend or deem as a fully functional product in good faith, as much as I would want to say "there's nothing wrong with it if everyone just plays nice". At the same time, it feels like you cannot #FixTF2 without a full remake, not just an engine port. The source code was leaked years ago and floats around on the internet, said code is held together by duct tape, the team which wrote it went missing, and was never heard from again. Yet the chances of Valve remaking it and trying to address the many issues of their golden goose for online multiplayer games directly is slim to none as of now. So at best you can either deal with the issues of the old game or move on. And even with games like Counter-Strike, which did start receiving proper support and updates once more, the latest incarnation remains an incomplete, bot-infested live service slot machine. Many point to Meet Your Match and Tough Break as the turning point where everything went wrong. Some say that Love & War was the last we got of old TF2 and that's where the rot began. Some even say it was the Mannconomy update. There is truth to all of these, but even a rollback to a pre-MYM state of the game would be far little too late by this point. The reality of the situation is; the game is infested with tens of thousands of bots (around 70% of the reported players), suffers from major performance issues due to bloat (in part with the way cosmetics are handled), map design has been entirely left to volunteers, innovation (in the form of things like Territory Control and whatnot) from the developer directly is hard to come by, parts of the user interface and default settings are needlessly clunky due to other parts of the UX being altered in a patchwork fashion, niche and specialized features that have been hid behind these changes have been forgotten, offline bot tutorials and training maps aren't sufficient or up to date for years, the ingame economy its self is flawed (no refined metal sink for instance, and the game being free to play results in endless item inflation, as the barrier to entry is nil), most of the weapon balance changes have been questionable since 2015, the battle pass gimmick with MVM just isn't compelling anymore, and VAC doesn't do anything even against public cheats now for some reason despite being heuristics based like your old AV. The game might be a hot mess right now, full of jank, but please for the love of god don't let it wither away like Unreal and Quake. You had Counter-Strike suffer nearly the same fate until their own gunhat update, which almost fizzled out until more updates were implemented (and even then it's still a mixed bag, with CS2's introduction and the engine port still being a beta with most of the content from the old game missing, and it has the SAME bot problem with farms being set up in Russia and China to run them, especially since the game is now Free To Play). Also, if you're going to be putting a game on community content life support please make the community server browser the first and obvious choice in addition to live-service matchmaking as it once was. And if this great one of a kind game is just going to be dead and buried artificially, please at the very least be a dignified death. Tear these bots down and implement the necessary ingame measures to prevent their return. If that requires something like going back to a non-F2P model, then so be it. But the people running these bots are out there. AND THEY HAVE NAMES! I don't expect all this buzz on the internet including these reviews airing grievances to do much as before, but I might as well try to at least name something in the spirit of giving the developers mail on what the players think of the game. And I tell you, these reviews aren't telling anywhere near to the full story or list of potential problems with the game right now. It's just not possible to do off-hand sometimes. Thanks, and have fun.