@@Wladimir_Lenin not letting f2ps literally talk is the worse thing,you cant say medic and you cant chat,you cant even say sentry ahead if you found nest
Tf2 is pay yo win, if you dont pay you cant talk which puts you at an insane disadvantage Its crazy how this never gets called out and i'm almost certain that if it was any other game the outrage would be insane but since its the golden boy tf2 nobody talks about it
@@dazth3legend670 also f2ps get only 50 backpack slots which is not nearly enough, there are iirc 163 unique weapons or something like that so even if you exclusively play community servers where luckyly f2ps can talk freely your still at quite the dissadvantage if you dont wish to pay
Longest powerhouse game I have had before 10 minute timer was added was 2 hours. The first round was an Hour and a Half. One of my best games ever as the scoreboard was wild with everyone over I think at least 100 points and chat was hilarious joking about how long the game was.
13:43 I've been wanting to say this for a long time. Thank you for telling more people that yes - it's literally impossible to get rid of a party of six.
In counter strike you cant even get rid of a party of 2 in a 5v5 game because vote kicks have to be unanymous. So 2 people can ruin a game for their 3 teammates and 5 enemies. If you solo queue, and get a party of 4 people on your team, they usually queue with 4 intentionally to try to bully and troll and teamkill their one teammate and then kick him so he gets a matchmaking cooldown. The only thing you can do is report them for griefing and ask the enemy team to report them too.
Even the announcer voicelines changed: it went from "mission begins in x seconds" to "competition begins in x seconds". As if the mercs were there for a friendly competition and not to kill each other. Everything about the update was so on the nose about turning tf2 into a tryhard competitive esport
It was bound to happen with how Valve's other games were hyper-competitive multiplayers and 2016 starting the brainrot of everything needs to be competitive, people blame comp players for MYM but it was just the unfortunate climate of 2016 that did TF2 in
I'm glad somebody pointed this out. There was a time when the mercy had their horrible phoned in competitive voice lines instead of their battle cries at the beginning of a match as well but Valve reverted it. This isn't some game to the mercs, it's a literal war
This just goes to show that the people who made the Meet Your Match update were not the original TF2 devs, all they wanted to do is to re-invent the wheel with a new and "modern" change and look. The casual matchmaking system makes this game a chore to play. Just revert it back to quickplay, easily the best way to play a game like this, it might not be perfect, but we had the tools available to ease the stomp and keep players engaged in 1 server that could last up to hours.
Just give players an option and a reward for switching to the losing side. Even just a message "good job, you are a nice guy!" and a bit of xp bonus if they finish the game, would do the job. None of it matters objectively, because its just a text message and xp doesnt mean anything, but it would be enough to make a big difference.
Robin walker left tf2 in 2013 and i forgot when Moby Francke left (no wonder the art style went downhill) WE NEED Quickplay back! #fixtf2by vvv #AddQuickPlayBack #RevertTF2toPreMYM
@@TheSuperappelflap Back in 2013, high skill players would often join losing teams without any in game reward. They didn't need to be strong armed into it.
@damsen978 I meant it in the way to getting quick play back and undoing the bad nerfs. yeah, it's unrealistic to just give us outdated tf2 build. the 64 bit update is like the best thing to happen to tf2 for years and i would like to keep it (even with it few problems)
Fun fact, you can use console commands to vote even when the menu bug happens. vote_next_map 0 will do the map on the leftmost, 1 for the middle, 2 is the right side
The sense of dread I feel when one team is losing slightly, four people requeue, and then the bots start joining. You opened my eyes to how the bots are stronger with casual's ruleset
Party queuing on casual is especially detrimental on a region with a thin playerbase, such as Asia. I can't stress how much I hate payload nowadays because of those comp 6 stacks constant steamrolling the opposing team. It's either a boring or displeasing game. I used to blame them to queuing up as a party, but to think of it, it's all due to casual's flawed design. My God, MYM. What the hell did you do to TF2.
I love that the primary functionality of the badge/ranking system today is not to ensure balanced matches as intended, but rather to provide screenshots of all blue badges on one team and all red badges on the other, showing empirical proof that matchmaking isn't working.
yup, love it when I see like 1-3 max levels in the other team sprinkled with a few tier 3 and 2's meanwhile in my team everyone is tier 1 except me at tier 4, really paints the perfect picture.
Without question the best video I've seen covering casual mode, I've been thinking a lot of the same things for a very long time. The old 45 minute round system was perfect as it was and I've missed auto-scramble every single day it's been gone, and dreaded every single casual game that's been a completely one sided team stack in the same way. I think it's a shame that a lot of community servers that still abide by that old system will only ever run one map each, especially if it's not a particularly great map like 2Fort or Harvest. It must be frustrating on Valve's part to sink so much time and effort into a system that simply doesn't function as well as the old one, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There was no reason to make casual a diet-competitive mode in the same way there was no reason to make the Eviction Notice a diet-GRU.
The fact that community servers tend to run only a handful of maps is the only reason I still even play casual. It seems like community servers just host 2fort, dustbowl, and harvest.
I honestly found this video tragic. I used to love this game back in high school but lister put into words perfectly why I just haven't been able to enjoy TF2 in years :,(
The tf2 devs lobotomized their own game with meet your match, then screwed off and left us with the mess. The amount of sheer incompetence is unbelievable.
I only play it last October despite i know the community since 2015 (the Meet your match update year) i remember hearing multiple time that this update is horrible but i cant tell exactly why yet@damsen978
@damsen978 the funny thing is that after meet your match their numbers did drop. But it also afterwards revived better then ever and broke new records in player count. So statistically speaking you can make the argument that meet your match in the long run brought higher player count by the boat load. Though it is disingenuous cause you are only counting major updates (not the small seasonal ones) and only consider the numbers after the updatea without looking at the bigger picture.
@@conqueenfador5037 nah Lister made a correction on the comment section of his video talking about Meet your match, turns out there wasn't a good increase in actual playercount even with the summer event, they were mostly trading bots and the game still has the same average playercount as when MyM released and made people quit tf2. still Meet your Match was what destroyed tf2 for many people, and personally I would preffer if valve just removed their official servers and made community servers and quickplay the main way to play the game. In the end Valve servers just made things overly complicated with no benefits at all, even their ranking system is meaningless because it doesn't even work, lol.
Thank God this means I’m not going crazy. Another thing to note is that since TF2 is a really old game, a good amount of players have had more than enough time to achieve godlike pubstomping skills. Which possibly amplifies the amount of steamroll servers Matchmaking can dump you in.
Something worth considering is that, likely, the devs didn't expect some players putting thousands of hours in any singular class, let alone the whole game.
its not that hard to pub stomp I'm pretty shit but if i got a somewhat similar skill teammate to help me it starts to snowball , the problem is as all games with a long lifespan the longer the life is the numbers of better players grows, and the skill gap with newbies widens who wants to be a new f2p scout running into walls only to be met with even a medium skill scout, or a wall of sentries, or fucking bots
@@kR-qj7rw the level of noobs gets raised super fast as even the lowest level players can provide a ton of support and info to someone completely alien to gaming and tf2 as a whole.
I've been keeping a little Excel spreadsheet on the reasons for leaving a Casual lobby. After about 300 matches, 35% of them are for matchmaking reasons (of which 24% are unbalanced teams, 7% are empty servers and 4% are maps that are already over). On average, I spend 8.1 minutes in a lobby before requeuing/logging off. Interestingly, just 7% of all requeues are due to bots or cheaters (however, those are specifically bot-ridden games that I have to quit, I don't account for solo bots that get kicked quickly)
@Excalibur13 maybe with source 3, with those ultra VR 4D meta gaming, valve would have the tools to fix quickplay and add a smol menu to their 15 yo game
game of ctf starts scout immediately runs in a straight line for intel and returns and nobody stops him the server collectively doesnt even have 5 points yet scouts cap twice more. its been like 2 minutes. i have 3 points back to the loading screen to go to the same map we were already on when i reconnect half the server is gone
You can see this in effect on your game hours. The number of hours spent in game is significantly larger than the sum of hours spent playing each class
2011 pre-f2p update veteran here, people talk about how to save tf2 like getting rid of the bots (rightfully so), but if you really want tf2 saved, we really need valve to revert casual back to quickplay that alone would do so much to help to make the game playable
Bots are a byproduct of MYM and casual mode. getting Quickplay will breathe so much life back to tf2. as also actually make it more enjoyable overall (we will just need to revert the bad nerfs of MYM and JI and everything will be perfect)
@@ehwa6780 Did you notice how I said "almost nonexistent"? That's because even though their presence was small back in the day, they did still exist to a degree because of course they would. The difference between then and now is that in my experience, and everyone I've talked to that played early-TF2, one could go 100 rounds before encountering the lone lmaobox sniper that would usually disappear for another hundred games. I'm sorry that your games were infested above the average for the time but for the vast majority of people, cheaters were a negligible issue for years. I mean the fact it took this long until the "community" started to actually care meant that things were objectively fine until 2016 and even then did it take another year or two for the spinbots to ramp up production. Just because car crashes exist in 1925, doesn't mean they were happening in the same amount as they were in 2024.
I'm also gonna have to agree, I didn't start noticing cheaters until about 2016-2017. When I did find cheaters it used to be a rare occurrence. Looking back, that's almost weird to say considering the current climate.
If there is one more thing I think we can all agree to change about casual is that re-enable the GOD,DAMN,VOICE COMMAND FOR F2P. What were they thinking when doing this ???? It barely worked to prevent bots spam voice chat,like at all,and only caused problem to TF2 players as a whole
God I wish I could've been around when you could freely spectate, switch teams, and more importantly, call for team scrambles. Casual is so often a miserable experience where there's a massive disparity of skill levels between teams, leading to one completely stomping the other, and it's not fun regardless of which side of the stomp you're on. It's a diet competitive mode where nobody is incentivized to stick around as soon as things don't look to be going your way. These days I don't even bother sticking around if the game's unbalanced, everyone's gonna leave at the end anyways.
@@MoistMarsupial this shit is so overblown, i swear people who say this played uncletopia once and now just have this exact sentence in their copy and paste clipboard
Queueing in casual is pretty much a gamble, like in mvm, you're more likely to be put on a losing team, since the losing players there are rage quitting, giving you their spot.
I just end up queueing and leaving the in progress games until I get a fresh one. Takes a few minutes, but at least Im not wasting my time fighting hard just to lose because people keep leaving a game they are slightly behind in
not even necessarily ragequitting, it's just more likely that someone gets bored on the losing side as they are probably not getting to play as they really would like to
I was on Snakewater and we had unbalanced teams (Snakewater moment) and a sniper asked me how bad it was on the second point and i had to do the soldier shovel taunt to communicate :( he didnt take me seriously and died to an uber push with a soldier
Finally, someone who agrees that you shouldn't be able to party with six players in Casual Mode. Team stacking is super lame. Unfortunately, you can't really do much to stop it, even in community servers where you can freely switch teams and scramble. But Valve's matchmaking system seems to encourage it.
Well well, look who is here, the biggest Meet your match and casual mode defender. what, it's ok now to call it bad ? where were you when we needed you the most to help Quickplay restored. Also aren't you the same guy who said that people in 5 years will look back and see that tf2 got better or something because of it ? IT BEEN MORE THAN 8 YEARS. and tf2 is not better with it. Also nice leaks. maybe you should patch it or something.
I have fond memories of stomping entire casual servers when me & my friends shitty comp team lost we’d just go to casual to take our anger out on random players. Now we’re more civilized & take our anger out on MvM instead.
looks like you forgot to mention that the match only lets people join in batches and sometimes you can sit alone in a server for hours before it decides to let 23 people in at once
Me and my friend had an instance where after the map was changed, there was like 4 players in server and no new players were joining. The other two players left eventually, and me and my friend remained completely alone on that server for quite a while.
I'm glad someone mentioned that "fixing" TF2 shouldn't only be about bots. Removing bots won't "fix" the game, without them it's still a fundamentally broken game.
I'm not sure how much 64-bit TF2 actually helped the performance, but it's still absurd that things like bogus collision (mainly facestabs) are still a thing. Also autobalance should be disabled if the match is likely to end soon. Like if there's a minute or less on the clock, no autobalance. If BLU is pushing the last point on Payload, no autobalance. If it's 5-Cap and either team has 4/5 points, no autobalance. CTF, if one of the teams is one point away from winning and currently has the Intelligence, no autobalance. Autobalance is fine when the match is still ongoing and there's a realistic chance of it actually evening things out, but there are jokes about getting autobalanced to the losing team five seconds before they lose for a reason.
I don't understand the full scope of casual's problems, but it has been repeatedly mentioned that the fixtf2 protests have to focus on the bots so the message doesn't get diluted with other things.
@@demomantf2999 most likely an account that got hacked into, it was quite often back then for people with rare items to get their accounts compromised
7:25 This does even more harm by allowing bots and cheaters to que 6 players in a server at once so they don't get kicked. Cheaters especially use this method to gaslight anyone who points out the fact that they are cheating and to kick the ones who try to kick them.
Bots rarely queue together (usually it's a bot hoster and a bunch of medic bots or something), usually it's a cheater stack and you can more easily dodge lobbies with them if they're stacked in. For one reason the matchmaking system will try to pair them with another stack, and for two you're not stuck there trying to convince the other team to kick the cheater they have and ignore them all match making you deal with an unfair game situation. When it's a stack, you know precisely that they can't be kicked so you know to leave the lobby rather than trying to tough it out or convince the casual playerbase that someone's cheating.
There is actually a button in the top left that you can select to make your party not stack together on the same team. But the button has said feature coming later since meet your match…
Learning about the “silent sbmm” does so much to explain why I have several great games, and then despite usually hanging around the top of the leaderboard I then have 3-4 games on different servers that are complete slogfests, finally ending with a decently balanced match only to start the whole process over again
valve loves doing this. same in counter strike. if i have a few games in a row where i get a good score, instead of giving me a rankup, and stronger opponents, the matchmaker just gives me a worse team, several ranks below me, so i have to either try even harder to win or lose, to keep me close to 50% winrate. and if you lose that game you lose massive amounts of matchmaking rating because the average rating of the match was lower.
Bro... PLLEEAAAASEEEE!! Attack Defend / Payload / any asymmetrical gamemode where Red defends and Blu attacks is NOT "stalematey". If an asymmetrical gamemode "stalemates" that just means Red is winning. Can people PLEASE learn this? Please? I don't even know where people get the notion from. Rest of the video is good tho
well guess what, that only happens if both teams are equally competent, and if you took those same teams and did put them in a symmetrical gamemode they would be at a stalemate
Its stale, matey, yarr, if the last point is so much more difficult to capture than the others. Nearly every game on payload, the blue team spends at least ten minutes trying to push it after easily getting through all the other points, and finally either wins or doesnt. The points should be more balanced so that that doesnt happen every time. We both know most payload maps are designed to work like this and it kind of sucks. If Blue can get out of their spawn, the first point is free, and then it doesnt get hard until the last one.
I’ve waited over an hour to find a doomsday just for it to be filled with bots. I desperately want to get all the achievements in this game but doomsday is the biggest issue. Every other achievement is doable (except the replay ones) but there is not a single doomsday game in the entire world consistently enough to get the achievements.
@@BoP0e Dead gamemodes are artificial because of Casual when you think about it. Nobody plays on pipeline or other PLR maps not because they're not popular, but because they're buried in the "alternative gamemodes" section of Casual. And because they're obscure, the effect is further amplified by long queue times and the abysmal 2 match limit of casual mode.
I miss the 24hr map specific servers. I will always consider those times as tf2’s golden years. I spent many hours playing double cross and goofing around with everyone
With the bots gone (for now) these issues are much, much more blatant, and have solidified my and many others' decision to stick to community servers with large map rotations.
This game has spent over third of it's life in this state and I am glad you have made this in the wake of FixTF2. It's not only about bots, but there are a lot of deep-seated, unresolved, retroactively forced design problems that caused TF2's decline. 12:48 OMG you actually know the source leak as the reason for bots was debunked years ago. This is the best informed FixTF2 thing ever and it's not even associated with it.
Quick Play was a 9/10 system. fixed casual mode is 4/10. also it's no coincidence that most of the vet tf2 team left around 2013 and most of the guys who worked on MYM where new to tf2 (they understood nothing about what made tf2 good)
2016s competitive esport climate was cool at the time but its had long lasting negative effects on multiplayer video games. None of them are like, "fun" anymore, like they can be enjoyable, but its all about being tryhard.
It’s really heartbreaking to see a beloved game like this be neglected so badly, played this first on the orange box for Xbox when it came out back in 2007, then switched to pc play it fully in 2010 right after I graduated high school. Had many fond memories of this game and all the updates I’ve played through most of my 20s. It was until MYM came out that the game started to become less enjoyable and that Valve literally just fucked up the entire game to try and accommodate competitive matchmaking, which wasn’t even needed and was a piss poor mode to, I was hopeful for the jungle update help the game, but that update was very lackluster. It wasn’t until wow classic came out that I decided to stop playing the game anymore, and never looked back since, and I co me to realize that Valve can’t even make any good updates or games anymore, and I won’t touch TF2 till they undo that shitty MYM update and fix damn game already.
In the old system, playing with friends worked just fine. If you're just 2 or 3 friends, you can switch teams over the course of a match. When there are more, you just get split up into two groups meaning you are simultaneously playing with and against your friends, which is the best of both worlds. So yeah, don't reserve slots for friends in the same team, just let people switch teams on the fly. This works fine for Uncletopia, which is basically the only way to normally play TF2 at the moment by the way.
Although I firmly believe TF2 is a casual game at heart, I still think competitive has a place as an official thing, but it needs to be treated as a fundamentally different game mode from casual. Most games with a competitive scene have casual as basically a diet version of Comp but TF2 isn't like that, Casual and Competitive are so inherently different from one another that creating an environment where they are interchangeable is virtually impossible without ruining what makes TF2 so good in the first place. What I mean with this is that Comp in TF2 should be treated the same way as MVM, a different game mode that changes how things are played without affecting the main game, because otherwise is like adding Upgrade Stations, Tanks and Sentry Busters to Casual.
@@tomas6621 Community comp is not tf2. that being said. tf2 should offer more serious option that resemble the base game. I played back in the day and when casual had Stopwatch mode. people actually did tryhard. stopwatch mod is basically the best way to make tf2 match more serious. community comp will still exist because they offer different thing and more power to them. but tf2 should not be rebalanced for 2% of the community who don't engage what the normal game.
i think not being able to switch teams is one of the biggest reasons stomps happen so often, it used to be that if you were a bad player on a losing team you'd try to switch to the winning team and if you were a good player who wanted to try to help the losing team for a challenge you'd swap and overall it would balance out, but now if the good players are paired there's no dynamic flow of skill between teams
Worst is that veterans and competitive players then joins the server and matchmaking puts you up against them . I get they don’t have place to play casual but unfortunately that is sacrifice for begin best you just can’t play casual anymore since you ruin it. It’s like when a champion fights against local players and is surprised that they hate it
This video has been a long time coming. I think acknowledging just how flawed the current layout shows that the rose tinted glasses have fully come off, and that people are done giving Valve the benefit of the doubt.
Matchmaking has had a couple changes as of November 14th, 2024. Matchmaking performances were increased overall and the thing that happens where it abruptly stops queuing with no warning now notifies you, and fixed certain cases of servers losing connection to steam (so new players joining are more common) This is a VERY small start but i believe these simple changes can go a long way, people can join quickly/easily and balance out the teams sooner making one sided stomps slightly less common, and when they are less common many people are less likely to leave, making full games more common, which means everyone is having fun more often than not. Literally any minor change to casual can SERIOUSLY make the experience so much more enjoyable, heck some changes that are even EASIER to fix would do an even better job than these like letting us pick the teams This ONE change alone is super slept on because it would literally GET RID OF NEARLY ALL OF CASUAL’S FLAWS, you would need NO pre round timer since you won’t have 3+ more people on one team but not the other, autobalance would actually fucking work as intended, and it just gives you more freedom, like the fact it predetermines them for solo queuers is fucking stupid and completely DESTROYS casual as a whole and amplifies the rest of casual’s flaws dramatically. Oh and random crits and random bullet spread can go too lol
Casual mode killed 85-95% of tf2 maps. if you don't have the five most played maps selected. you will never play on anything else. At Least Quickplay allowed least played maps to actually have players. i remember playing on hydro and nightfall years ago. it been so long since i got one of those maps.
@@artifactU It's not about agreeing with you. god forbid someone have common sense. Also some regions don't have a lot of active normal community servers, just like here in Asia. So don't judge us with your bubble. like do you honestly think most of people who play tf2 don't know about community servers ? we do know about them. do you think it's good use of my time to stay on empty server waiting 20-30m until someone join me ??? Or maybe just give us Quick Play so the other peoples who also want to play but don't know others also want to play. can be put together on a server with others.
The only solution is to retvrn to quickplay. Which Valve will never do, because Valve will never admit to such a mistake, much less revert it, and especially not this late into the game's lifespan.
I think quickplay could be reimplemented as a simpler way for new players to find community servers, like another option instead of the complicated and outdated server browser
Ey Hivemind, was working on a video with similar points. Another problem I have with Casual is if you go from a Casual game to a Community one, the Casual Match Maker will pull you back to the Casual game with no way to get out! Back in the day of Ad Hoc Connections, you could pub stomp on a Valve server for a few minutes while waiting for a slot in your favourite Community server. I think if this bug ever gets fixed it would be a massive boon for community servers.
I started playing in 2014 right after the love and war update, so I did get a few years of quickplay in. Anyway, I think you are spot on about how casual is fundamentally flawed, and the best solution seems to be to return to quickplay! Though with a few minor changes like changing autobalance like you suggested. I think that what casual tries to implement is useless and doesn't make any sense. The ranks you get are useless because they don't mean anything. I play pubs most of the time and I think I am pretty good at the game, but I am only tier 3 in casual because I mainly play on Uncletopia or Skail, or other vanilla (or similar) pub servers. For those who don't like casual, I can recommend to look at the community server browser even if you don't like uncletopia. There are a bunch of random servers that get filled up at peak hours that play just like normal tf2 or have normal custom maps or 32 players. They are a lot of fun and feel like quickplay with how the fun keeps going on if you stay in the server. Also, the bot problem portion is spot on, because bots can't take hold if there is a server that is constantly full or nearly full. Great video.
This is by far the best video I've ever seen regarding the technical problems with Casual. Personally, I retain the same opinion I've had since July 7th, 2016: remove matchmaking entirely. The system does not work, has never worked, and will never work as well as what we had back in the day. You can add in features from the old system to matchmaking, but it doesn't matter because the design doesn't work for TF2 in the first place. The fact that nu-Valve never undid that damage is testament to their elitism and incompetence.
Here's my pitch to solve casuals problems: - First off, quick play needs to come back. This is to mainly mitigate the need to turn casual into this sort of Frankenstein hybrid of old and new. With quick playback, we can fully focus on helping casual cater to a more coordinated environment, which is what the point of casual was in the first place. - I agree with lowering the pre match timer to 30 seconds, as you said. It helps tone down with the amount of waiting. - Ditto with reloading the same map again. Instead, simply reloading the game modes logic and starting again would do wonders to save time and make players stay. (Like what happens on a per round basis). - I also want to add that matches can start when there are a minimum of 4 players on each individual team so that matches start sooner, and latecomers are easier to add to that match. - While I agree that team stacks can be problematic, automatically splitting them might not be the ideal way to do things. There is an option to do so in the main menu (still labeled as coming soon, lol), but I would rather propose that starting a vote against a person in a party will simply not take the party members vote into consideration only the other members of the same team. That helps with dealing with cheaters while also helping people play together on a team if they so choose - (Again, assuming quickplay is back) I don't think giving people the option to freely change teams would be a good idea for casual. However, I fully agree with the return of spectating. I hope these are at least somewhat decent changes, but I'd love to hear other ideas. (Or if mine are flawed in some way)
The option to switch teams and spectate are my #1 wish changes, I enjoy switching teams to help balance games, winning isn't inherently fun and I don't like stomping teams. And one of my favourite things is getting auto balanced to the other team and get separated from my friends because then the game turns into a hunting game where we're trying to kill each other. Those are easily one of my fondest memories of TF2.
@WaiGee_ That's completely fair, but I was making these changes with the assumption that both quick play and casual coexisted, such that both of these ways to play would be represented. The more relaxed games of quick play could satisfy that fun and loose feeling while keeping casuals' more coordinated vision, if that makes any sense.
Trying to give TF2 a standard “competitive-based” matchmaking system is equivalent of jamming a giant octagon into a tiny square-shaped hole. With a sledgehammer.
People usually call me an old-head when I say that pre meet your match casual was better in multiple ways other than just the Quick Play system. This entire video is what i've thought but couldn't explain for years. The entire vibe of new casual is different, this just opens my eyes a lot lol
I really like modern casual. It's perfect in my eyes. None of the issues you discussed have ever been something that I've experience and disliked (aside from bots of course). Also, I re-queue constantly bc I want to play with different people. I really like the fact that I can re-queue from anywhere in the game, even from in a casual server. Most games don't do this and most games also do not allow you to choose the maps you want to queue for.
Playing with friends is horrible, before we could queue together, or just join the server through steam, and either play together, or have fun against eachother. After MyM, we NEED to queue together, which leads to longer searching times, and you MUST be on the same team. Most annoying thing for me is that playing together, it went from me seeing a friend playing and me just joining them, to needing to ask to leave the game, create a party and queue up again. May be one of the reason why everyone I knew (myself included) drifted away from the game.
Nothing like winning the game by defending the point from the final pub push, dying after killing most of the enemies and winning the game, only to be autobalanced within the last 3 seconds. Then your old teammates come kill you, the administrator tells you"YOU FAIL!" and Gaben forces you into a three minute wait timer for the next round (on the same map!). And of course that means the teams get scrambled, which completely invalidates the work autobalance did. It's incredible the main game mode has been this broken for years.
@@TheSuperappelflapautobalance works on a checkpoint system and one of those happen to be in the last seconds. it's a mechanic made to punish, not balance.
I fundamentally disagree that casual *can* be fixed. As you explain at the start of the video the whole concept of casual is not only flawed, but fundamentally wrong for the game. I made a video about how the whole issue with bots could be solved, or at least greatly helped, by returning to quickplay with only community servers with proper moderation. Plugins to ban all known bot accounts, vote bans and an actual human that can unban falsely banned human players. Quickplay community servers needs to return, valve servers and casual need to go, that's the only realistic way the game can be fixed.
I honestly haven't played too much since 2016, but whenever I hop on and have to see that scoreboard and wait on map select it's like a cold splash of water on my face. Like do people really want to map swap so often (no, obviously)? Why am i waiting for so long? Why is everyone leaving the server? I also really miss being able to swap teams and scramble at any time, as well as face my friends when I wanted to. I really miss the old systems man.
the real question is why do you have to reload if people vote to play the same map again? Server could just reset score, scramble teams, and put everyone in spawn and go again in 3 seconds.
This is actually one of the biggest problems in tf2 right now and for the past few years, if not the biggest problem, but most people seem to ignore it
being reminded of quickplay and how it used to work is such a shame, it literally just worked. you'd think "isn't casual just quickplay renamed?" but, no, it was a straight downgrade and the beginning of the bot problem right there.
Its really sad that Valve had about 7 years to revert all of the changes from MyM and they still refuse to do so. People were begging for them to revert the changes during the first WEEK of the update releasing, but if they werent willing to bring Quickplay back back then, they arent ever going to now. Remember everyone, we are here now because Valve wanted to cash in on the comp shooter trend
This just made me realize why I couldn't bring myself to play this game since 2017. I should've been playing community servers and mods since the start. Thanks for that, Lister!
WHICH WAY WESTERN MAN? : A) playing casual for the 5% chance of a well balanced lobby but only seeing the 95% chance of bots and closet cheaters ruining the game B) playing vanilla community servers and getting rolled by comptards C) playing sourcemods like TF2C and OF but having to deal with tiny server sizes
play uncletopia. i have mostly had positive experiences. no bots, very few cheaters who are extremely closeted and still get kicked fast, and enough skill level on both sides to make the game fun to play even if your team is losing slightly
@@TheSuperappelflap every single time I have played uncletopia or even skial vanilla there is a person with 50,000 legitimate kills on a strange removing any morsel of fun I could possibly attain by playing a casual shooter that's designed to fuck around in
For some reason I really miss having unlimited rounds an a map. Part of it is just that having the map reset after 2 rounds is really time consuming and it kind of breaks the flow of the game. But it's more that I just miss having those back and forth matches that go on forever. Something about seeing a score of 45-36 was just really satisfying and fun.
The forced server restart when the map isnt even changed could surely be simply fixed with few lines of code like this: if ( chosenMap == currentMap) { StartNewMatch(); }
FINALLY Someone is talking about balancing lobbies problem. I play only 3-5 maps in casual, which I like, and amount of times I put into team of newbies brought me to a thought of some kind of hidden pool in casual mode. In 8 of 10 matches I get into one-sided ownage, where one team consists of experienced players with hundred or thousand hours and they do an objective and my team consists of players, who barely knows how to move. And guess what is the result: I have to requeue for another match in hope, that this time I will be put into competent team...
regarding the map vote bug there is a fix if you want it If the vote for the next map is glitched and does not allow you to vote, go into console and type: next_map_vote # the number is 0, 1, and 2 depending on which map you want to choose (for instance: if I wanted to vote for the first map, I would put in 0)
thank you for this video. I understand the bot crisis is the main problem in casual right now, but a lot of people will just never acknowledge how unsatisfying casual is in it's "fixed" state. I've played this game from 2019, far past the Quickplay days, but within a year or so I started to realize how unfair, short, and frustrating matches are with the current system we have. And yet it always confused me why no one seemed to call out these issues as often, and treated the problems with casual being "part of the experience".
Tbh I feel like your suggested changes to Casual can be summarized with just "Revert back to Quickplay", but I'm afraid Valve (like most gaming companies and developers) are just too proud to admit fault and do so, even to the small capacity of implementing those changes to Casual itself.
Quickplay was also a fucking nightmare, since quickplay I haven't had to wait hours upon hours just for a single match. Now if I want to wait hours I need to queue Degroot Keep or other extra modes.
At this point I'd honestly suggest that we should just return to the old community based servers instead of relying on the current awful MM-- or whatvs. Let them run back the good old join whichever team and leave whenever.
Hell no, Quickplay sucked too. Nothing like being dropped into a Pinion server where I get a bunch of ads before I can play and then theres only like 5 people there. Quickplay sucked, no idea why people worship it so heavily post-mortem.
this probably the best video on the issue with casual. and since the bot are gone(for now) I've started to noticed the more intrinsic issue with the system. not having the old 45 timer is massive boon cuz it feels like matches end way to quickly. the whole best 2 out of 3 system should only bee for comp where it fit NOT in casual mode. we should really be pushing valve to fix casual, which should of been on of the main things on the bucket list with the fix tf2 movement you know that long with actually letting fps call for medic and use voice lines.
Yeah, one-sided matches is something I'm all too familiar with. I have been playing TF2 since 2012, and was solely playing on community servers, so, I never experienced the game during the Quickplay era, so, reverting Casual to be more closer to Quickplay as discussed in this video would be great...but, as it currently stands, I have my doubts. I WANT to be proven wrong.
It’s really funny too hear the rant about how long it take to get into a match because I’m used to games that take MUCH longer too que like ow and apex legends before I started playing tf2 so too me tf2 que times are a magical experience
One flaw regarding the "don't reload the whole map again if it is voted for" is that it will end up getting preference votes purely to save time, however this might just be me since I like map variety in my day to day TF2 experience. Badwater is a decent map, sure. But i don't want to repeat it 6 times in a row.
I never realize how problematic the Casual mode it is, but when you talk about it, I now just realize how patience I am, or maybe because every time I wait, I just go watching YT video then come back.
throughout those 2 years i was able to experience Quick Play, I can confirm it was the best way to play this game as it allowed to experience both official and community servers without hard diviation of players. How many community servers died due to not having enough players all of a sudden?
TF2 was much better with the quickplay system. It wasn't perfect, and there's never going to be any form of matchmaking that is perfect - it's simply impossible. What isn't impossible, however, is to make something infinitely worse, and Valve is a perfect example of doing exactly that. I've ranted about this exact thing since 2016, and I was pampered. I played the game before Quickplay was even introduced, and when it was, it made playing the game 10 times easier, because I didn't have to scrub a server list. I picked what I wanted; no crits? no spread? max player count? Didn't matter what I wanted. I configured it, the game scrubbed the server list for me, and found a server with the lowest ping that checked off all the boxes. I even remember, back in the day, you could call votes on Valve servers to disable things like spread and crits; so as long as everyone agreed, you didn't even need to step outside of official servers to get that more consistent & less random/goofy experience. I've been pissed since 2016 that Valve simply got bored with TF2, hired a bunch of random people who had no experience with this game to update it, sent them on their way, and effectively haven't touched the game since. I don't care about ban waves, matchmaking bug fixes, rebalances, or anything else. That's not updating the game, that's doing the bare minimum - which they still aren't doing, since MM is extremely buggy and damn near unusable to this day, 8 years later. The only thing that's changed is the number of community servers that are actually fun to play on, and there are hardly any left these days. You can make the argument that, back then, there were also large amounts of community servers that were malicious or ran by badmins, but it truly was a fraction of the whole, and easily avoidable by leaving and blacklisting. Most players who didn't play the game before 2016 won't get it, and it's a shame they never got to experience it, because despite its older and arguably horrendous balancing, it was still, at its core, a much more fun game, and a game that was much easier to pick up, play, and use to connect with other people. I still play TF2 today, but the TF2 I once knew died when MYM was released. It sucks, because I love this game, and always will, but the quality of the game has dropped significantly since 2016, and ironically, despite MYM's intention, hasn't even improved much in the competitive scene - there were more leagues and divisions back in the day, and most of the leagues were ran professionally, while the only available NA league, RGL, is quite literally infested with badmins, drama, and even more terrible egos than ever before. I'm not even going to throw the in-house competitive mode into the mix, because it's been a waste of time since day 1.
![The Button That Broke MVM [TF2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JTLoN_SgUQ4/mqdefault.jpg)
![The Button That Broke MVM [TF2]](/img/tr.png)
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Not allowing f2ps to call medic is criminal
too real 😢
@@Wladimir_Lenin not letting f2ps literally talk is the worse thing,you cant say medic and you cant chat,you cant even say sentry ahead if you found nest
Tf2 is pay yo win, if you dont pay you cant talk which puts you at an insane disadvantage
Its crazy how this never gets called out and i'm almost certain that if it was any other game the outrage would be insane but since its the golden boy tf2 nobody talks about it
Or warning the team about a Spy that's breached the base.
@@dazth3legend670 also f2ps get only 50 backpack slots which is not nearly enough, there are iirc 163 unique weapons or something like that so even if you exclusively play community servers where luckyly f2ps can talk freely your still at quite the dissadvantage if you dont wish to pay
The legend says that that one Powerhouse you left is still going
Nice, I chuckled.
The five engineers on last are powerhouse employees
@@axyw more employees than the "TF Team"
I love Powerhouse, the games take so long that teams balance out after a while.
Longest powerhouse game I have had before 10 minute timer was added was 2 hours. The first round was an Hour and a Half. One of my best games ever as the scoreboard was wild with everyone over I think at least 100 points and chat was hilarious joking about how long the game was.
13:43 I've been wanting to say this for a long time. Thank you for telling more people that yes - it's literally impossible to get rid of a party of six.
Not to mention it also encourages trolls to party up with 5 other trolls for the sole purpose of ruining people's day.
I think a healthy limit would be 3 or 4, like how most co-op games have 4 player squad limits.
In counter strike you cant even get rid of a party of 2 in a 5v5 game because vote kicks have to be unanymous. So 2 people can ruin a game for their 3 teammates and 5 enemies.
If you solo queue, and get a party of 4 people on your team, they usually queue with 4 intentionally to try to bully and troll and teamkill their one teammate and then kick him so he gets a matchmaking cooldown. The only thing you can do is report them for griefing and ask the enemy team to report them too.
Even the announcer voicelines changed: it went from "mission begins in x seconds" to "competition begins in x seconds". As if the mercs were there for a friendly competition and not to kill each other.
Everything about the update was so on the nose about turning tf2 into a tryhard competitive esport
It was bound to happen with how Valve's other games were hyper-competitive multiplayers and 2016 starting the brainrot of everything needs to be competitive, people blame comp players for MYM but it was just the unfortunate climate of 2016 that did TF2 in
As if the mercenaries were not there to kill each other? That's their whole purpose.
I'm glad somebody pointed this out. There was a time when the mercy had their horrible phoned in competitive voice lines instead of their battle cries at the beginning of a match as well but Valve reverted it.
This isn't some game to the mercs, it's a literal war
This just goes to show that the people who made the Meet Your Match update were not the original TF2 devs, all they wanted to do is to re-invent the wheel with a new and "modern" change and look. The casual matchmaking system makes this game a chore to play.
Just revert it back to quickplay, easily the best way to play a game like this, it might not be perfect, but we had the tools available to ease the stomp and keep players engaged in 1 server that could last up to hours.
Just give players an option and a reward for switching to the losing side. Even just a message "good job, you are a nice guy!" and a bit of xp bonus if they finish the game, would do the job. None of it matters objectively, because its just a text message and xp doesnt mean anything, but it would be enough to make a big difference.
Robin walker left tf2 in 2013 and i forgot when Moby Francke left (no wonder the art style went downhill)
WE NEED Quickplay back!
#fixtf2by vvv
#AddQuickPlayBack
#RevertTF2toPreMYM
@@TheSuperappelflap Back in 2013, high skill players would often join losing teams without any in game reward. They didn't need to be strong armed into it.
@@hoonterofhoonters6588 okay but thats not the current situation
@damsen978 I meant it in the way to getting quick play back and undoing the bad nerfs. yeah, it's unrealistic to just give us outdated tf2 build. the 64 bit update is like the best thing to happen to tf2 for years and i would like to keep it (even with it few problems)
Fun fact, you can use console commands to vote even when the menu bug happens. vote_next_map 0 will do the map on the leftmost, 1 for the middle, 2 is the right side
Yeah I bound my numpad 7,8, and 9 to these commands and it's so nice having divine judgement on where the server goes sometimes
Your tism is showing, the correct command is "next_map_vote 0" 🤡
it's next_map_vote
@@ethandavis7310same dude, I love rigged democracy
@@dsobransinghyou should move to russia
The Meet Your Match update broke so many things about TF2 (not just matchmaking) that it becomes absurd when you think about it.
Worst update ever
Thanks Comptards
Any guides or tutorials to cancel the meet your match and downgrade?
@@Armolitskiy You could not play online.
Meet Your Match was the day this game died. It sealed the fate for the game.
The sense of dread I feel when one team is losing slightly, four people requeue, and then the bots start joining. You opened my eyes to how the bots are stronger with casual's ruleset
Party queuing on casual is especially detrimental on a region with a thin playerbase, such as Asia. I can't stress how much I hate payload nowadays because of those comp 6 stacks constant steamrolling the opposing team. It's either a boring or displeasing game. I used to blame them to queuing up as a party, but to think of it, it's all due to casual's flawed design.
My God, MYM. What the hell did you do to TF2.
I love that the primary functionality of the badge/ranking system today is not to ensure balanced matches as intended, but rather to provide screenshots of all blue badges on one team and all red badges on the other, showing empirical proof that matchmaking isn't working.
yup, love it when I see like 1-3 max levels in the other team sprinkled with a few tier 3 and 2's meanwhile in my team everyone is tier 1 except me at tier 4, really paints the perfect picture.
@@Mateumt"Meet your Match"
Blue and red badges? Are they not all gray?
Without question the best video I've seen covering casual mode, I've been thinking a lot of the same things for a very long time. The old 45 minute round system was perfect as it was and I've missed auto-scramble every single day it's been gone, and dreaded every single casual game that's been a completely one sided team stack in the same way. I think it's a shame that a lot of community servers that still abide by that old system will only ever run one map each, especially if it's not a particularly great map like 2Fort or Harvest. It must be frustrating on Valve's part to sink so much time and effort into a system that simply doesn't function as well as the old one, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There was no reason to make casual a diet-competitive mode in the same way there was no reason to make the Eviction Notice a diet-GRU.
The fact that community servers tend to run only a handful of maps is the only reason I still even play casual. It seems like community servers just host 2fort, dustbowl, and harvest.
I honestly found this video tragic. I used to love this game back in high school but lister put into words perfectly why I just haven't been able to enjoy TF2 in years :,(
The tf2 devs lobotomized their own game with meet your match, then screwed off and left us with the mess.
The amount of sheer incompetence is unbelievable.
I only play it last October despite i know the community since 2015 (the Meet your match update year) i remember hearing multiple time that this update is horrible but i cant tell exactly why yet@damsen978
@damsen978Sad but true, Meet Your Match was the true beginning of the end for TF2.
@damsen978 the funny thing is that after meet your match their numbers did drop.
But it also afterwards revived better then ever and broke new records in player count.
So statistically speaking you can make the argument that meet your match in the long run brought higher player count by the boat load.
Though it is disingenuous cause you are only counting major updates (not the small seasonal ones) and only consider the numbers after the updatea without looking at the bigger picture.
@@conqueenfador5037 most of them are bot tho?
@@conqueenfador5037 nah Lister made a correction on the comment section of his video talking about Meet your match, turns out there wasn't a good increase in actual playercount even with the summer event, they were mostly trading bots and the game still has the same average playercount as when MyM released and made people quit tf2.
still Meet your Match was what destroyed tf2 for many people, and personally I would preffer if valve just removed their official servers and made community servers and quickplay the main way to play the game. In the end Valve servers just made things overly complicated with no benefits at all, even their ranking system is meaningless because it doesn't even work, lol.
Thank God this means I’m not going crazy.
Another thing to note is that since TF2 is a really old game, a good amount of players have had more than enough time to achieve godlike pubstomping skills. Which possibly amplifies the amount of steamroll servers Matchmaking can dump you in.
Something worth considering is that, likely, the devs didn't expect some players putting thousands of hours in any singular class, let alone the whole game.
its not that hard to pub stomp I'm pretty shit but if i got a somewhat similar skill teammate to help me it starts to snowball , the problem is as all games with a long lifespan the longer the life is the numbers of better players grows, and the skill gap with newbies widens
who wants to be a new f2p scout running into walls only to be met with even a medium skill scout, or a wall of sentries, or fucking bots
@@kR-qj7rw the level of noobs gets raised super fast as even the lowest level players can provide a ton of support and info to someone completely alien to gaming and tf2 as a whole.
That doesn't justify why they can't be matched with each other
@@jared8515 depends tbh, stand in a tall place and shoot fown and you can clear mos casual teams
I've been keeping a little Excel spreadsheet on the reasons for leaving a Casual lobby. After about 300 matches, 35% of them are for matchmaking reasons (of which 24% are unbalanced teams, 7% are empty servers and 4% are maps that are already over). On average, I spend 8.1 minutes in a lobby before requeuing/logging off.
Interestingly, just 7% of all requeues are due to bots or cheaters (however, those are specifically bot-ridden games that I have to quit, I don't account for solo bots that get kicked quickly)
could I see the full sheet pls? just out of curiosity
same as that other guy, can we pls have a look at it?
can we look at it?
Whats the other 65%
excel convention vibes in here
Imagine if we could vote on the next map DURING the current game
Impossible, technology simply isnt there yet
@@Excalibur13I hope you're joking.
@Excalibur13 maybe with source 3, with those ultra VR 4D meta gaming, valve would have the tools to fix quickplay and add a smol menu to their 15 yo game
@@nnoossiirr no one would ever tell a joke in a youtube comment section
@@Excalibur13 Community servers in question:
game of ctf starts
scout immediately runs in a straight line for intel and returns and nobody stops him
the server collectively doesnt even have 5 points yet
scouts cap twice more. its been like 2 minutes. i have 3 points
back to the loading screen to go to the same map we were already on
when i reconnect half the server is gone
You can see this in effect on your game hours. The number of hours spent in game is significantly larger than the sum of hours spent playing each class
Thats also because people go idle in main menu to do other stuff or alt tab, its not like tf2 main menu takes up 20gb of ram
@@TheSuperappelflap yeah but that shouldn't make that big of a difference specially to players uninterested into trading
2016: Wait your match
2024: Requeue your match
It's been nearly 8 years since MyM and I still miss being able to duel my friends at any valve server at any given time.
2011 pre-f2p update veteran here, people talk about how to save tf2 like getting rid of the bots (rightfully so), but if you really want tf2 saved, we really need valve to revert casual back to quickplay that alone would do so much to help to make the game playable
Bots are a byproduct of MYM and casual mode. getting Quickplay will breathe so much life back to tf2. as also actually make it more enjoyable overall (we will just need to revert the bad nerfs of MYM and JI and everything will be perfect)
It's amazing how from 2007 to early 2016, cheaters in TF2 were almost nonexistent until MYM, then they started appearing in droves.
@@ehwa6780
Did you notice how I said "almost nonexistent"? That's because even though their presence was small back in the day, they did still exist to a degree because of course they would. The difference between then and now is that in my experience, and everyone I've talked to that played early-TF2, one could go 100 rounds before encountering the lone lmaobox sniper that would usually disappear for another hundred games. I'm sorry that your games were infested above the average for the time but for the vast majority of people, cheaters were a negligible issue for years.
I mean the fact it took this long until the "community" started to actually care meant that things were objectively fine until 2016 and even then did it take another year or two for the spinbots to ramp up production.
Just because car crashes exist in 1925, doesn't mean they were happening in the same amount as they were in 2024.
I'm also gonna have to agree, I didn't start noticing cheaters until about 2016-2017. When I did find cheaters it used to be a rare occurrence. Looking back, that's almost weird to say considering the current climate.
@@ehwa6780They were not "everywhere" it was just a normal amount like any other game.
If there is one more thing I think we can all agree to change about casual is that re-enable the GOD,DAMN,VOICE COMMAND FOR F2P. What were they thinking when doing this ???? It barely worked to prevent bots spam voice chat,like at all,and only caused problem to TF2 players as a whole
God I wish I could've been around when you could freely spectate, switch teams, and more importantly, call for team scrambles. Casual is so often a miserable experience where there's a massive disparity of skill levels between teams, leading to one completely stomping the other, and it's not fun regardless of which side of the stomp you're on. It's a diet competitive mode where nobody is incentivized to stick around as soon as things don't look to be going your way. These days I don't even bother sticking around if the game's unbalanced, everyone's gonna leave at the end anyways.
uncletopia lets you switch teams & scramble
@@artifactU It's also full of sweats with thousands of hours on their class and regularly ends in stomps anyways. No thanks
@@MoistMarsupial id rather play against good players than deal with bots random crits & other annoyances of casual but to each their own i guess
We just want to play a game where we are not being smushed either by pros or basement dwellers we just wanna play a fun and nice little game
@@MoistMarsupial this shit is so overblown, i swear people who say this played uncletopia once and now just have this exact sentence in their copy and paste clipboard
Queueing in casual is pretty much a gamble, like in mvm, you're more likely to be put on a losing team, since the losing players there are rage quitting, giving you their spot.
I just end up queueing and leaving the in progress games until I get a fresh one. Takes a few minutes, but at least Im not wasting my time fighting hard just to lose because people keep leaving a game they are slightly behind in
not even necessarily ragequitting, it's just more likely that someone gets bored on the losing side as they are probably not getting to play as they really would like to
Ftp players violently nodding to indicate danger
f2ps not being able to call medic was such a good change!!!
I was on Snakewater and we had unbalanced teams (Snakewater moment) and a sniper asked me how bad it was on the second point and i had to do the soldier shovel taunt to communicate :( he didnt take me seriously and died to an uber push with a soldier
Finally, someone who agrees that you shouldn't be able to party with six players in Casual Mode. Team stacking is super lame. Unfortunately, you can't really do much to stop it, even in community servers where you can freely switch teams and scramble. But Valve's matchmaking system seems to encourage it.
#savetf2 #fixtf2
Well well, look who is here, the biggest Meet your match and casual mode defender. what, it's ok now to call it bad ? where were you when we needed you the most to help Quickplay restored. Also aren't you the same guy who said that people in 5 years will look back and see that tf2 got better or something because of it ? IT BEEN MORE THAN 8 YEARS. and tf2 is not better with it.
Also nice leaks. maybe you should patch it or something.
Is it also a frequent problem on uncletopia?
@@CoolSs COOK THAT FRAUD!!!!!!! 🗣🗣🗣🗣🗣🗣🗣
I have fond memories of stomping entire casual servers when me & my friends shitty comp team lost we’d just go to casual to take our anger out on random players. Now we’re more civilized & take our anger out on MvM instead.
looks like you forgot to mention that the match only lets people join in batches and sometimes you can sit alone in a server for hours before it decides to let 23 people in at once
I've use it to get contracts done with one or four players.
Me and my friend had an instance where after the map was changed, there was like 4 players in server and no new players were joining. The other two players left eventually, and me and my friend remained completely alone on that server for quite a while.
@@cheezeeshoo7373 It's great for doing contracts if someone has one.
@@wyslanniknewworldorder9525 i’ve used it for contracts and achievements across several accounts
This is why everybody leaves at the map vote. Nobody wants to stay in the server for 10 minutes before Valve graciously puts players in.
I'm glad someone mentioned that "fixing" TF2 shouldn't only be about bots. Removing bots won't "fix" the game, without them it's still a fundamentally broken game.
I'm not sure how much 64-bit TF2 actually helped the performance, but it's still absurd that things like bogus collision (mainly facestabs) are still a thing.
Also autobalance should be disabled if the match is likely to end soon. Like if there's a minute or less on the clock, no autobalance. If BLU is pushing the last point on Payload, no autobalance. If it's 5-Cap and either team has 4/5 points, no autobalance. CTF, if one of the teams is one point away from winning and currently has the Intelligence, no autobalance. Autobalance is fine when the match is still ongoing and there's a realistic chance of it actually evening things out, but there are jokes about getting autobalanced to the losing team five seconds before they lose for a reason.
I don't understand the full scope of casual's problems, but it has been repeatedly mentioned that the fixtf2 protests have to focus on the bots so the message doesn't get diluted with other things.
The idea is we focus entirely on this so as to get SOMETHING and other issues can be SEPARATE movements.
Hone in on tasks instead of multitask.
13:33
It's extremely hilarious that the aimbotting guy (the one being spectated) is wearing the Cheater's Lament.
how tf valve gave a cheater a cheaters lament even though the guy cheated
@@demomantf2999 most likely an account that got hacked into, it was quite often back then for people with rare items to get their accounts compromised
"Casual" with 10 minutes cooldown when u leave :skull:
7:25 This does even more harm by allowing bots and cheaters to que 6 players in a server at once so they don't get kicked. Cheaters especially use this method to gaslight anyone who points out the fact that they are cheating and to kick the ones who try to kick them.
Bots rarely queue together (usually it's a bot hoster and a bunch of medic bots or something), usually it's a cheater stack and you can more easily dodge lobbies with them if they're stacked in. For one reason the matchmaking system will try to pair them with another stack, and for two you're not stuck there trying to convince the other team to kick the cheater they have and ignore them all match making you deal with an unfair game situation. When it's a stack, you know precisely that they can't be kicked so you know to leave the lobby rather than trying to tough it out or convince the casual playerbase that someone's cheating.
There is actually a button in the top left that you can select to make your party not stack together on the same team. But the button has said feature coming later since meet your match…
Learning about the “silent sbmm” does so much to explain why I have several great games, and then despite usually hanging around the top of the leaderboard I then have 3-4 games on different servers that are complete slogfests, finally ending with a decently balanced match only to start the whole process over again
valve loves doing this. same in counter strike. if i have a few games in a row where i get a good score, instead of giving me a rankup, and stronger opponents, the matchmaker just gives me a worse team, several ranks below me, so i have to either try even harder to win or lose, to keep me close to 50% winrate.
and if you lose that game you lose massive amounts of matchmaking rating because the average rating of the match was lower.
I used to wonder, why "switch teams" key doesn't friggin work. Now I know why
Thanks lister
Bro... PLLEEAAAASEEEE!!
Attack Defend / Payload / any asymmetrical gamemode where Red defends and Blu attacks is NOT "stalematey". If an asymmetrical gamemode "stalemates" that just means Red is winning.
Can people PLEASE learn this? Please? I don't even know where people get the notion from.
Rest of the video is good tho
Very true. Red team has to extend the playtime for as long as possible to win.
well guess what, that only happens if both teams are equally competent, and if you took those same teams and did put them in a symmetrical gamemode they would be at a stalemate
“Well, uh, you see, asymmetrical gamemodes are stalematey because if you put the teams in a different gamemode, they’ll stalemate! Uhhhh gotcha!”
Its stale, matey, yarr, if the last point is so much more difficult to capture than the others. Nearly every game on payload, the blue team spends at least ten minutes trying to push it after easily getting through all the other points, and finally either wins or doesnt. The points should be more balanced so that that doesnt happen every time. We both know most payload maps are designed to work like this and it kind of sucks. If Blue can get out of their spawn, the first point is free, and then it doesnt get hard until the last one.
@@TheSuperappelflap ...That's the point, the points are supposed to get harder to take the further along you are.
Imagine waiting 5 hours for casual just to have a server filled with bots
That is possible. If you pick a dead gamemode/map.
I’ve waited over an hour to find a doomsday just for it to be filled with bots. I desperately want to get all the achievements in this game but doomsday is the biggest issue. Every other achievement is doable (except the replay ones) but there is not a single doomsday game in the entire world consistently enough to get the achievements.
@@BoP0eyou don't even need that, you just need to play outside peak hours and you can have upward with 4 bota
@@leonardo9259 true xd
@@BoP0e Dead gamemodes are artificial because of Casual when you think about it. Nobody plays on pipeline or other PLR maps not because they're not popular, but because they're buried in the "alternative gamemodes" section of Casual. And because they're obscure, the effect is further amplified by long queue times and the abysmal 2 match limit of casual mode.
I miss the 24hr map specific servers. I will always consider those times as tf2’s golden years. I spent many hours playing double cross and goofing around with everyone
With the bots gone (for now) these issues are much, much more blatant, and have solidified my and many others' decision to stick to community servers with large map rotations.
ptsd back when people weren't forced to autobalance, so itd be 2 v 12
to be honest it would get fixed pretty quick and it was also really funny
Axe casual altogether, bring back the era of dedicated servers with map voting and time limits.
This game has spent over third of it's life in this state and I am glad you have made this in the wake of FixTF2. It's not only about bots, but there are a lot of deep-seated, unresolved, retroactively forced design problems that caused TF2's decline.
12:48 OMG you actually know the source leak as the reason for bots was debunked years ago. This is the best informed FixTF2 thing ever and it's not even associated with it.
In short: Quickplay was better. Not perfect but much better
Quick Play was a 9/10 system. fixed casual mode is 4/10. also it's no coincidence that most of the vet tf2 team left around 2013 and most of the guys who worked on MYM where new to tf2 (they understood nothing about what made tf2 good)
2016s competitive esport climate was cool at the time but its had long lasting negative effects on multiplayer video games. None of them are like, "fun" anymore, like they can be enjoyable, but its all about being tryhard.
It’s really heartbreaking to see a beloved game like this be neglected so badly, played this first on the orange box for Xbox when it came out back in 2007, then switched to pc play it fully in 2010 right after I graduated high school. Had many fond memories of this game and all the updates I’ve played through most of my 20s. It was until MYM came out that the game started to become less enjoyable and that Valve literally just fucked up the entire game to try and accommodate competitive matchmaking, which wasn’t even needed and was a piss poor mode to, I was hopeful for the jungle update help the game, but that update was very lackluster. It wasn’t until wow classic came out that I decided to stop playing the game anymore, and never looked back since, and I co
me to realize that Valve can’t even make any good updates or games anymore, and I won’t touch TF2 till they undo that shitty MYM update and fix damn game already.
In the old system, playing with friends worked just fine. If you're just 2 or 3 friends, you can switch teams over the course of a match. When there are more, you just get split up into two groups meaning you are simultaneously playing with and against your friends, which is the best of both worlds. So yeah, don't reserve slots for friends in the same team, just let people switch teams on the fly. This works fine for Uncletopia, which is basically the only way to normally play TF2 at the moment by the way.
Although I firmly believe TF2 is a casual game at heart, I still think competitive has a place as an official thing, but it needs to be treated as a fundamentally different game mode from casual.
Most games with a competitive scene have casual as basically a diet version of Comp but TF2 isn't like that, Casual and Competitive are so inherently different from one another that creating an environment where they are interchangeable is virtually impossible without ruining what makes TF2 so good in the first place. What I mean with this is that Comp in TF2 should be treated the same way as MVM, a different game mode that changes how things are played without affecting the main game, because otherwise is like adding Upgrade Stations, Tanks and Sentry Busters to Casual.
12 v 12 with no random crits or bullet spread. also stopwatch mode. that how tf2 comp should be.
@@CoolSsHighlander with wepon bans sems like bether option.I feal like 12 v 12 wud be to much.
@@tomas6621 Community comp is not tf2. that being said. tf2 should offer more serious option that resemble the base game. I played back in the day and when casual had Stopwatch mode. people actually did tryhard. stopwatch mod is basically the best way to make tf2 match more serious.
community comp will still exist because they offer different thing and more power to them. but tf2 should not be rebalanced for 2% of the community who don't engage what the normal game.
@@CoolSsI did not nent it like that i stil ment that competetive shud be treaded as side mode like mvm.
@@tomas6621 no disagreement there
i think not being able to switch teams is one of the biggest reasons stomps happen so often, it used to be that if you were a bad player on a losing team you'd try to switch to the winning team and if you were a good player who wanted to try to help the losing team for a challenge you'd swap and overall it would balance out, but now if the good players are paired there's no dynamic flow of skill between teams
Worst is that veterans and competitive players then joins the server and matchmaking puts you up against them . I get they don’t have place to play casual but unfortunately that is sacrifice for begin best you just can’t play casual anymore since you ruin it. It’s like when a champion fights against local players and is surprised that they hate it
This video has been a long time coming. I think acknowledging just how flawed the current layout shows that the rose tinted glasses have fully come off, and that people are done giving Valve the benefit of the doubt.
Matchmaking has had a couple changes as of November 14th, 2024.
Matchmaking performances were increased overall and the thing that happens where it abruptly stops queuing with no warning now notifies you, and fixed certain cases of servers losing connection to steam (so new players joining are more common)
This is a VERY small start but i believe these simple changes can go a long way, people can join quickly/easily and balance out the teams sooner making one sided stomps slightly less common, and when they are less common many people are less likely to leave, making full games more common, which means everyone is having fun more often than not.
Literally any minor change to casual can SERIOUSLY make the experience so much more enjoyable, heck some changes that are even EASIER to fix would do an even better job than these like letting us pick the teams
This ONE change alone is super slept on because it would literally GET RID OF NEARLY ALL OF CASUAL’S FLAWS, you would need NO pre round timer since you won’t have 3+ more people on one team but not the other, autobalance would actually fucking work as intended, and it just gives you more freedom, like the fact it predetermines them for solo queuers is fucking stupid and completely DESTROYS casual as a whole and amplifies the rest of casual’s flaws dramatically.
Oh and random crits and random bullet spread can go too lol
Valve broke the matchmaking, got mad, and then left the game to rot.
Modern Valve deserves its hatred.
Botting is quite literally only possible because of casual. If we reverted back to quickplay, the botting crisis would be done for overnight.
God I miss manual team switch. Never realized how bad Meet Your Match damaged this game.
Casual mode killed 85-95% of tf2 maps. if you don't have the five most played maps selected. you will never play on anything else. At Least Quickplay allowed least played maps to actually have players. i remember playing on hydro and nightfall years ago. it been so long since i got one of those maps.
you can like play uncletopia or something
@@artifactUhow about you recommend an actual good community server(s) so people can agree with you?
@@artifactU I HATE playing on that. also there Asian servers don't have a lot of players on maps i like.
also THAT IS NOT TF2. that compcasual.
@@BoP0e i dont care about people agreeing with me
@@artifactU It's not about agreeing with you. god forbid someone have common sense. Also some regions don't have a lot of active normal community servers, just like here in Asia. So don't judge us with your bubble. like do you honestly think most of people who play tf2 don't know about community servers ? we do know about them. do you think it's good use of my time to stay on empty server waiting 20-30m until someone join me ??? Or maybe just give us Quick Play so the other peoples who also want to play but don't know others also want to play. can be put together on a server with others.
Replacing Quick Play with Casual was the very first thing that allowed for the problems TF2 deals with today.
The only solution is to retvrn to quickplay.
Which Valve will never do, because Valve will never admit to such a mistake, much less revert it, and especially not this late into the game's lifespan.
they are so stubborn to reverting things that THEY liked
I think quickplay could be reimplemented as a simpler way for new players to find community servers, like another option instead of the complicated and outdated server browser
Ey Hivemind, was working on a video with similar points.
Another problem I have with Casual is if you go from a Casual game to a Community one, the Casual Match Maker will pull you back to the Casual game with no way to get out! Back in the day of Ad Hoc Connections, you could pub stomp on a Valve server for a few minutes while waiting for a slot in your favourite Community server. I think if this bug ever gets fixed it would be a massive boon for community servers.
I started playing in 2014 right after the love and war update, so I did get a few years of quickplay in. Anyway, I think you are spot on about how casual is fundamentally flawed, and the best solution seems to be to return to quickplay! Though with a few minor changes like changing autobalance like you suggested. I think that what casual tries to implement is useless and doesn't make any sense. The ranks you get are useless because they don't mean anything. I play pubs most of the time and I think I am pretty good at the game, but I am only tier 3 in casual because I mainly play on Uncletopia or Skail, or other vanilla (or similar) pub servers. For those who don't like casual, I can recommend to look at the community server browser even if you don't like uncletopia. There are a bunch of random servers that get filled up at peak hours that play just like normal tf2 or have normal custom maps or 32 players. They are a lot of fun and feel like quickplay with how the fun keeps going on if you stay in the server. Also, the bot problem portion is spot on, because bots can't take hold if there is a server that is constantly full or nearly full. Great video.
This is by far the best video I've ever seen regarding the technical problems with Casual. Personally, I retain the same opinion I've had since July 7th, 2016: remove matchmaking entirely. The system does not work, has never worked, and will never work as well as what we had back in the day. You can add in features from the old system to matchmaking, but it doesn't matter because the design doesn't work for TF2 in the first place. The fact that nu-Valve never undid that damage is testament to their elitism and incompetence.
Here's my pitch to solve casuals problems:
- First off, quick play needs to come back.
This is to mainly mitigate the need to turn casual into this sort of Frankenstein hybrid of old and new. With quick playback, we can fully focus on helping casual cater to a more coordinated environment, which is what the point of casual was in the first place.
- I agree with lowering the pre match timer to 30 seconds, as you said. It helps tone down with the amount of waiting.
- Ditto with reloading the same map again. Instead, simply reloading the game modes logic and starting again would do wonders to save time and make players stay. (Like what happens on a per round basis).
- I also want to add that matches can start when there are a minimum of 4 players on each individual team so that matches start sooner, and latecomers are easier to add to that match.
- While I agree that team stacks can be problematic, automatically splitting them might not be the ideal way to do things. There is an option to do so in the main menu (still labeled as coming soon, lol), but I would rather propose that starting a vote against a person in a party will simply not take the party members vote into consideration only the other members of the same team. That helps with dealing with cheaters while also helping people play together on a team if they so choose
- (Again, assuming quickplay is back) I don't think giving people the option to freely change teams would be a good idea for casual. However, I fully agree with the return of spectating.
I hope these are at least somewhat decent changes, but I'd love to hear other ideas. (Or if mine are flawed in some way)
The option to switch teams and spectate are my #1 wish changes, I enjoy switching teams to help balance games, winning isn't inherently fun and I don't like stomping teams. And one of my favourite things is getting auto balanced to the other team and get separated from my friends because then the game turns into a hunting game where we're trying to kill each other. Those are easily one of my fondest memories of TF2.
@WaiGee_ That's completely fair, but I was making these changes with the assumption that both quick play and casual coexisted, such that both of these ways to play would be represented. The more relaxed games of quick play could satisfy that fun and loose feeling while keeping casuals' more coordinated vision, if that makes any sense.
hey is there a way to get in contact with you? I like this vid a lot
sure, use my business email and then i can give you my discord from there
at this point, if they reverted nearly all the changes they made in the past two major updates, that would be a major improvement to the game
Trying to give TF2 a standard “competitive-based” matchmaking system is equivalent of jamming a giant octagon into a tiny square-shaped hole.
With a sledgehammer.
People usually call me an old-head when I say that pre meet your match casual was better in multiple ways other than just the Quick Play system. This entire video is what i've thought but couldn't explain for years. The entire vibe of new casual is different, this just opens my eyes a lot lol
I wasn't playing when quickplay existed, but boy does that sound like a direct upgrade to Casual!
I would probably throw my whole life away in 10 seconds to have one 2014 match of upward.
@@sleebywarthunder that sounds great!
I really like modern casual. It's perfect in my eyes. None of the issues you discussed have ever been something that I've experience and disliked (aside from bots of course). Also, I re-queue constantly bc I want to play with different people. I really like the fact that I can re-queue from anywhere in the game, even from in a casual server. Most games don't do this and most games also do not allow you to choose the maps you want to queue for.
"I like waiting in queue and having less choice" The modern TF2 player.
Playing with friends is horrible, before we could queue together, or just join the server through steam, and either play together, or have fun against eachother.
After MyM, we NEED to queue together, which leads to longer searching times, and you MUST be on the same team.
Most annoying thing for me is that playing together, it went from me seeing a friend playing and me just joining them, to needing to ask to leave the game, create a party and queue up again. May be one of the reason why everyone I knew (myself included) drifted away from the game.
Nothing like winning the game by defending the point from the final pub push, dying after killing most of the enemies and winning the game, only to be autobalanced within the last 3 seconds. Then your old teammates come kill you, the administrator tells you"YOU FAIL!" and Gaben forces you into a three minute wait timer for the next round (on the same map!).
And of course that means the teams get scrambled, which completely invalidates the work autobalance did.
It's incredible the main game mode has been this broken for years.
Autobalance should be disabled in the later stages of the game, yeah. Its like kicking your teammate in the last round of a game of counter strike.
@@TheSuperappelflapautobalance works on a checkpoint system and one of those happen to be in the last seconds. it's a mechanic made to punish, not balance.
I fundamentally disagree that casual *can* be fixed. As you explain at the start of the video the whole concept of casual is not only flawed, but fundamentally wrong for the game.
I made a video about how the whole issue with bots could be solved, or at least greatly helped, by returning to quickplay with only community servers with proper moderation. Plugins to ban all known bot accounts, vote bans and an actual human that can unban falsely banned human players.
Quickplay community servers needs to return, valve servers and casual need to go, that's the only realistic way the game can be fixed.
I honestly haven't played too much since 2016, but whenever I hop on and have to see that scoreboard and wait on map select it's like a cold splash of water on my face. Like do people really want to map swap so often (no, obviously)? Why am i waiting for so long? Why is everyone leaving the server? I also really miss being able to swap teams and scramble at any time, as well as face my friends when I wanted to. I really miss the old systems man.
the real question is why do you have to reload if people vote to play the same map again? Server could just reset score, scramble teams, and put everyone in spawn and go again in 3 seconds.
This is actually one of the biggest problems in tf2 right now and for the past few years, if not the biggest problem, but most people seem to ignore it
being reminded of quickplay and how it used to work is such a shame, it literally just worked. you'd think "isn't casual just quickplay renamed?" but, no, it was a straight downgrade and the beginning of the bot problem right there.
Meet Your Match and its consequences have been a disaster for Team Fortress 2.
I think this just might be the best possible answer to dealing with bots and team balance issues
Meat your Match was the 9/11 of TF2.
Its really sad that Valve had about 7 years to revert all of the changes from MyM and they still refuse to do so. People were begging for them to revert the changes during the first WEEK of the update releasing, but if they werent willing to bring Quickplay back back then, they arent ever going to now.
Remember everyone, we are here now because Valve wanted to cash in on the comp shooter trend
This just made me realize why I couldn't bring myself to play this game since 2017. I should've been playing community servers and mods since the start. Thanks for that, Lister!
WHICH WAY WESTERN MAN? :
A) playing casual for the 5% chance of a well balanced lobby but only seeing the 95% chance of bots and closet cheaters ruining the game
B) playing vanilla community servers and getting rolled by comptards
C) playing sourcemods like TF2C and OF but having to deal with tiny server sizes
C is the best way to play the game
@@creeperithinkthen you're not playing tf2
play uncletopia. i have mostly had positive experiences. no bots, very few cheaters who are extremely closeted and still get kicked fast, and enough skill level on both sides to make the game fun to play even if your team is losing slightly
@@TheSuperappelflap every single time I have played uncletopia or even skial vanilla there is a person with 50,000 legitimate kills on a strange removing any morsel of fun I could possibly attain by playing a casual shooter that's designed to fuck around in
@@DannyCheezits skill issue
For some reason I really miss having unlimited rounds an a map. Part of it is just that having the map reset after 2 rounds is really time consuming and it kind of breaks the flow of the game. But it's more that I just miss having those back and forth matches that go on forever. Something about seeing a score of 45-36 was just really satisfying and fun.
The solution is to gut Casual entirely and return to the old quick-play system with map timers, team switching, spectating and AD-HOC connections.
The forced server restart when the map isnt even changed could surely be simply fixed with few lines of code like this:
if ( chosenMap == currentMap)
{ StartNewMatch(); }
Is this guy un ironically using the different scoreboard class icons
Gotta be put on some watchlist for sure
FINALLY Someone is talking about balancing lobbies problem.
I play only 3-5 maps in casual, which I like, and amount of times I put into team of newbies brought me to a thought of some kind of hidden pool in casual mode. In 8 of 10 matches I get into one-sided ownage, where one team consists of experienced players with hundred or thousand hours and they do an objective and my team consists of players, who barely knows how to move.
And guess what is the result: I have to requeue for another match in hope, that this time I will be put into competent team...
If you ever see me in a casual match, that is because I am taking a small break from MvM just to go back and play MvM
regarding the map vote bug there is a fix if you want it
If the vote for the next map is glitched and does not allow you to vote, go into console and type:
next_map_vote #
the number is 0, 1, and 2 depending on which map you want to choose
(for instance: if I wanted to vote for the first map, I would put in 0)
It's so hard to get a good 5cp match with valves matchmaking either your team gets curbstomped or you curbstomp the enemy team
Thank you for taking the time to talk about this problem
15:00 What about, rerolling it all together? We never asked for it.
thank you for this video. I understand the bot crisis is the main problem in casual right now, but a lot of people will just never acknowledge how unsatisfying casual is in it's "fixed" state. I've played this game from 2019, far past the Quickplay days, but within a year or so I started to realize how unfair, short, and frustrating matches are with the current system we have. And yet it always confused me why no one seemed to call out these issues as often, and treated the problems with casual being "part of the experience".
Tbh I feel like your suggested changes to Casual can be summarized with just "Revert back to Quickplay", but I'm afraid Valve (like most gaming companies and developers) are just too proud to admit fault and do so, even to the small capacity of implementing those changes to Casual itself.
Quickplay was also a fucking nightmare, since quickplay I haven't had to wait hours upon hours just for a single match. Now if I want to wait hours I need to queue Degroot Keep or other extra modes.
Quickplay wasn't perfect either.
Please drop the nostalgia glasses if you genuinely wanna improve the matchmaking.
@@The-Lazy-Dane youre lying
At this point I'd honestly suggest that we should just return to the old community based servers instead of relying on the current awful MM-- or whatvs.
Let them run back the good old join whichever team and leave whenever.
Hell no, Quickplay sucked too. Nothing like being dropped into a Pinion server where I get a bunch of ads before I can play and then theres only like 5 people there. Quickplay sucked, no idea why people worship it so heavily post-mortem.
this probably the best video on the issue with casual. and since the bot are gone(for now) I've started to noticed the more intrinsic issue with the system. not having the old 45 timer is massive boon cuz it feels like matches end way to quickly. the whole best 2 out of 3 system should only bee for comp where it fit NOT in casual mode.
we should really be pushing valve to fix casual, which should of been on of the main things on the bucket list with the fix tf2 movement you know that long with actually letting fps call for medic and use voice lines.
Yeah, one-sided matches is something I'm all too familiar with. I have been playing TF2 since 2012, and was solely playing on community servers, so, I never experienced the game during the Quickplay era, so, reverting Casual to be more closer to Quickplay as discussed in this video would be great...but, as it currently stands, I have my doubts.
I WANT to be proven wrong.
It’s really funny too hear the rant about how long it take to get into a match because I’m used to games that take MUCH longer too que like ow and apex legends before I started playing tf2 so too me tf2 que times are a magical experience
reverting to the old way of finding servers would fix MANY problems with tf2, and would aliviate bots. also allow f2p to talk again
One flaw regarding the "don't reload the whole map again if it is voted for" is that it will end up getting preference votes purely to save time, however this might just be me since I like map variety in my day to day TF2 experience.
Badwater is a decent map, sure. But i don't want to repeat it 6 times in a row.
I always thought of those changes back in the day as mildy annoying, never thought about the fact that like 90% of the vot probpem is caused by em
I never realize how problematic the Casual mode it is, but when you talk about it, I now just realize how patience I am, or maybe because every time I wait, I just go watching YT video then come back.
I forgot how much I missed quick play
throughout those 2 years i was able to experience Quick Play, I can confirm it was the best way to play this game as it allowed to experience both official and community servers without hard diviation of players. How many community servers died due to not having enough players all of a sudden?
TF2 was much better with the quickplay system. It wasn't perfect, and there's never going to be any form of matchmaking that is perfect - it's simply impossible. What isn't impossible, however, is to make something infinitely worse, and Valve is a perfect example of doing exactly that. I've ranted about this exact thing since 2016, and I was pampered. I played the game before Quickplay was even introduced, and when it was, it made playing the game 10 times easier, because I didn't have to scrub a server list. I picked what I wanted; no crits? no spread? max player count? Didn't matter what I wanted. I configured it, the game scrubbed the server list for me, and found a server with the lowest ping that checked off all the boxes. I even remember, back in the day, you could call votes on Valve servers to disable things like spread and crits; so as long as everyone agreed, you didn't even need to step outside of official servers to get that more consistent & less random/goofy experience.
I've been pissed since 2016 that Valve simply got bored with TF2, hired a bunch of random people who had no experience with this game to update it, sent them on their way, and effectively haven't touched the game since. I don't care about ban waves, matchmaking bug fixes, rebalances, or anything else. That's not updating the game, that's doing the bare minimum - which they still aren't doing, since MM is extremely buggy and damn near unusable to this day, 8 years later. The only thing that's changed is the number of community servers that are actually fun to play on, and there are hardly any left these days. You can make the argument that, back then, there were also large amounts of community servers that were malicious or ran by badmins, but it truly was a fraction of the whole, and easily avoidable by leaving and blacklisting. Most players who didn't play the game before 2016 won't get it, and it's a shame they never got to experience it, because despite its older and arguably horrendous balancing, it was still, at its core, a much more fun game, and a game that was much easier to pick up, play, and use to connect with other people.
I still play TF2 today, but the TF2 I once knew died when MYM was released. It sucks, because I love this game, and always will, but the quality of the game has dropped significantly since 2016, and ironically, despite MYM's intention, hasn't even improved much in the competitive scene - there were more leagues and divisions back in the day, and most of the leagues were ran professionally, while the only available NA league, RGL, is quite literally infested with badmins, drama, and even more terrible egos than ever before. I'm not even going to throw the in-house competitive mode into the mix, because it's been a waste of time since day 1.
well said