Recent reviews by Ava

the trivia game is ass

Unplayable in its current state

Casual:
-littered with bots
-matchmaking frequently creates unbalanced teams (missing players or vastly different skill levels from team to team)
-when a large amount of people leave a match (almost always happens during map changes) the matchmaking system struggles to replace the new spots, meaning the next game will have a fraction of the people in it
-no more ad hoc connections on casual servers so you can't even try to use the community browser to find a match yourself
-map voting system frequently breaks, not letting anyone vote for a new map at the end of a round
-feedback rating system is a spit in the face, there hasn't been a significant change to matchmaking since the casual/competitive system was first introduced
-matchmaking literally copy-pasted from mvm, meaning every single problem here (aside from bots) also occurs there as well

Competitive:
-half baked idea from over 4 years ago
-same matchmaking as casual
-nobody plays it so you will never find a match
-at least theres no bots right?

Community Servers
-menu design is completely user-unfriendly (same system as csgo, cs source, and even earlier multiplayer games)
-can be very hard for new players to get into
-unsustainable - it costs server owners money to keep the server running which usually means hoping for donations from those who frequent the server

Content Updates
-drag and drop from the workshop for halloween and christmas events
-last major named update was in 2017
-even major updates are mostly workshop content
-despite this valve refuses to give the reigns to the community, which has not only fixed the bot problem and REMADE THE GAME (tf2classic) but also fixed tons of bugs and balance issues the game has had for years (most of these fixes were discovered within a week of the source code leak)

obviously the bot problem is the biggest issue right now, a lot of these problems can be overlooked if you just take some time and be patient, but the bot problem is impossible to deal with. 90% of the casual games you join will have bots in them, and while people have gotten pretty good at kicking them, sometimes there are so many that they can win the majority vote anyway.

VAC is a great system, but it's simply not enough for whats happening right now, there needs to be more work done than just sitting and waiting for VAC to catch up and maybe doing some manual bans along the way.

This, and valves refusal to let the community have more agency over the game, is why tf2 is dying


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So, valve recently added an official VSH mode. This seems like a pretty slam dunk idea right? One of if not the most popular community game mode, which people have been wanting on official valve servers since it was first introduced. A standardized rule set and map pool, with a new model and new voice lines?

Unfortunately, as with a lot of things valve has done to their existing IP lately, this update was executed extremely poorly.

Most people can't actually play this game mode for more than a round (or even about 30 seconds) before tf2 just completely crashes. This has been like this since launch and has not been fixed. It has happened to me on every setup I've tested this on, new and old. There are some ways to temporarily work around this, but they aren't ideal.

Also, just in general, knowing valve's relationship with this game lately, why did they think it was a good idea to add a whole new game mode which would require meticulous balancing when they can barely keep up with patching the game as is? (see above). There are some absolutely broken combos and even game breaking map glitches which as far as I know still work and have worked since launch.

And of course there is all the same problems with matchmaking in general. Did you know the vast majority of tf2's player count on steam is idle bots that don't even leave the menu screen?

But the biggest problem with this, in my opinion, is how it has destroyed the community VSH servers. So many of these servers completely died when the update dropped, because everyone went to play the official version of the game mode. A lot of these servers had tight knit groups of regulars, and now that they were gone it was impossible to populate the servers. As the hype around the official version died down (and people realized how terrible it is to try to deal with), these servers never really recovered. Now you mostly find servers hosting the official gamemode, which as stated above is basically unplayable for a large amount of the player base. I've had an extremely hard time finding freak fortress servers with any amount of players on them ever since, it's really sad to see.

It baffles me how valve seems intent on destroying their old online games, despite the fact that they still have the potential to make loads of money.

Instead of trying to balance the game and make it more fun for everyone, they just completely change how it works with every major update. If you want a game to get invested in, don't pick this game because by the time you've built anything up they will anounce an update that completely changes the system and forces you to start from scratch. It's already happened multiple times since i played it back when it first started out and it's happening again with the "infinity update"

For as much as this game was marketed back in the day as something that would fix problems that other party games had in regards to pacing and energy/excitement level, it's ironic and pretty disappointing how much the execution has been botched. And weirdly, it actually started out being pretty fun, back when I played it during early access I had a lot of fun, and that fun grew even more when workshop support was added.

Unfortunately, coming back to the game today it's kind of awful... There are so many new gamemodes that are either reskins of other gamemodes or straight up boring or both, and because there's so many it makes the game selection chaotic and stressful (moreso than it already is.) You only get a few seconds at the top of the game to pick your gamemodes, which are in a gigantic unsorted list. And i'm not sure why they even decided to go this route, since in couch party mode it only lets one controller do the choosing anyway (and theres no time at all for the group to discuss what to pick.)

It sucks because I can't even give the game a fair shot by only picking the gamemodes I know i like because the UI actively works against allowing you to do this. And for some reason the game runs terribly regardless of my setup or how much I absolute slash the graphic settings down, the game lags during some gamemodes no matter what, and the controls feel clunky and slow, which seems antithetical to a game called 'move or die.'

I want to add a quick disclaimer to mention I only every play couch party mode, and ignore the online servers. If the online experience is better that's great, but this game was *heavily* advertised as a couch party/local multiplayer type game, so I don't feel bad solely judging it through this lens. I know there's item unlocks and such when you play online, which seems like a bad move for this style of game especially after opening the workshop can of worms, but it ultimately doesn't matter.

Update: honestly, looking at other reviews it seems like the online side of this game is *even worse* in execution, which is really disappointing. And the fact that this game has both changed its item progression system so many times, and locked content behind progression in the first place is appalling. This is a *party game* that's meant to be fun, exciting, and comedic in nature. You shouldn't have to grind by yourself online to get to the content that allows you to have fun with friends online or locally.

I genuinely feel like I would have a better player experience playing the game day 1 than I've had trying to revisit it the last couple months. It's sad to see.