I am not articulate enough to adequately channel my frustrations with the state of this game in a way that would do either my emotions or the reality of playing it justice. The idea that six years of neglect has utterly shattered its reputation and discourse around it is still qualifies as an understatement is astounding. The only thing that has ever motivated Valve to even make a public statement about Team Fortress 2 in the past decade is mainstream media raking them over the coals. That should speak as to how they view the community their game has fostered over the past seventeen years.


Anyone reading this can find other reviews that go into those feelings. Instead, I'm just gonna write some cope about why we've been left in this state in the first place, and get this ♥♥♥♥ off my chest.

Where we are now is the result of how Valve works as a company. For all the talk about how only about 1,000 people on earth are qualified to work there, the only explanation that makes sense about how they function is that it's a group of individuals competing for recognition in office politics and projects to put on their resumes. Their entire company structure is designed to produce innovation and reduce burnout, but can only be sustained through a total monopoly over PC game distribution, and immediate abandonment of any project deemed less than glamorous. I'm so sorry that only three to five people at Valve can be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bothered to confront the task of maintaining a game that still gets tens of thousands of players every day, who give the company that runs it millions every year. Eric Smith still loves this game. Dave Riller still loves this game. Jill still loves this game. Dario Casali still loves this game. Joshie still loves this game, and Valve could only hire them as a contractor! To actually get work done, any one of those people would have to stake their reputation to beg their coworkers to stop working on Artifact or the Steam Deck and come navigate the awful pile of code that is TF2.

At least awful, soulless, corporate cashgrab gacha games have the decency to turn off microtransactions when development ceases. Is TF2's development over? No, not while we have Joshie. But that doesn't mean there will be significant changes to the game ever again. What we get are maps, skins, and unusuals twice a year (that's only created severe bloat over time). We can't trust Valve to fix anything, because they've had almost a decade to, and the best I can say we've gotten is a few blips of hope. When the most recent public statement from the creator of the game boils down to, "Yeah, I wish I could do something about how unplayable it's become," it's a blaring red flag that the institution in charge of maintaining it is in need of radical change.

If only there were people willing to work on Team Fortress, who run community servers and events for free. People like Uncle Dane, reno or anyone else who has organized spaces for people to actually enjoy the game. If only there were people like @everyone on discord , raspy, pazer, megascatterbomb, and especially the StAC team who fight the cheaters head-on. If only there were people like the TF2 Classic team, the TF Source 2 team, or the Open Fortress team who have rebuilt the game from the ground up on their own, at legal risk to themselves, to provide new fun for the community after almost twenty years. If only there were people who have done all of Valve's work for them, and circumvented the red tape surrounding this game to just #fix it for everyone. God bless mastercoms and everyone else who worked on it for handing Valve the literal golden goose that was Team Comtress 2. You know what Valve did with the project that solved the majority of the problems with this almost twenty year old game, offered to them for free? Cease and Desist. They'll use some of the fixes years later in 64-bit though, so that's nice, I guess.

I can't claim to know what goes beyond the scenes at Valve. I'm not an expert in intellectual property law, nor am I a programmer. What I am, is wholly disappointed. Someone who has built intuitive tools to completely overhaul some of TF2's most inaccessible features (mastercomfig) and improved the game experience for hundreds of thousands, with a proven track record of accountability, dedication, and communication wasn't able to convince them that the game would be better off in the hands of her team. This was off the back of leaked source code, so it's not like I don't understand Valve's position. I'm not going to get into Invasion, Meet your Match, or other terrible updates that set us on this course of community distrust and developer burnout in the first place, but I will say that we will never get the perfect storm of an opportunity like that again.

#SaveTF2 was a marked step in the right direction. We got Joshie, who gave us 64-bit. We got the Community Fixes tab on the Workshop, which is an excellent start that's sat dormant for two years now, and that's it. So far, all #FixTF2 has done is latch onto other stories from the past to create hope. I certainly hope the more organized petition approach goes somewhere, but June 3rd came and went. All we got was Valve telling people to stop spamming their GitHub. Asking for a company that's gone on record against both kernel anti-cheat and "treadmill work" is most likely a hopeless errand, though. But, I'm not going to say the movement is without merit. What's fruitless is sitting idle while the game continues to be actively assaulted from all sides.

I guess I'm just complacent. Uncletopia is enough for someone like me to enjoy the game. I've developed deep and lasting relationships with many wonderful people I've met through it, and I'm truly thankful that it exists. I wish that there were more community servers like it that cater to different audiences. I don't know what's going to happen to TF2. The best we can do as a community is create pockets of the game for people like us to enjoy, like we've always done.

Valve can do better, though. They've had the tools and the available manpower to rid this game of the poxes it's fallen under for a long time. I hope to eventually play the game they can make with them.