Team Fortress 2

I can only hope Valve gets it together and lets people wishing to matchmake attend the matchmaking while people who wish to pub be given pubs.

In its current state, it's a road to ruin.

Ten minutes minimum wait for every freaking match >.<

The tf2 reddit (which is usually pretty balanced and moderated) is absolutely on fire right now. Pretty sure when everyone heard about the "casual" changes they thought that it meant that a casual matchmaking mode would be implemented alongside pubs, not replacing them.

On a lesser note, they nerfed the Bison. Of all the weapons, WHY THAT ONE. Damage nerf, no longer lands multiple hits, projectile goes slower, and no longer assists in igniting huntsman arrows. Went from a weapon you already only saw on pubs as a "fun" sidegrade/joke to one tier above the volcano axe in terms of uselessness.

edited 8th Jul '16 12:22:59 PM by carbon-mantis

Does valve usually listen to the playerbase? Maybe they'll re-add the old system.

I mean damnit, I want to contribute to the war, but I don't want to spend more time waiting than playing.

Yep, TF 2 is totally dead because you have to play on community servers to get into pubs. Removing the official ones was a completely bizarre decision, though.

The load times for that new matchmaking system is too long. I think it's because the servers are being hit by a wave of update-hungry players.

I'll go wait it off until things die down. At least the old server browser is still up.

The Pyro is in the lead, if only just.

C'mon people! We can do it! We can get the Pyro something THAT ISN'T USELESS!

Do all points count or just the ones from the matchmaking?

Watch it be a reskin of Fire Axe or a cosmetic.

edited 8th Jul '16 2:13:46 PM by FergardStratoavis

They said that all points in competitive and casual count.

If they did that I would genuinely cry.

I sure love how the game's telling me there's over 500 compatible people searching and over 500 empty servers and yet it seems to take years to actually put me in one of them.

Waited almost 30 minutes to join my first game after the update, and then the whole game lasted 5 minutes. And when the rounds are over you're booted back to the queue screen.

It plays a little *ding* sound when you are finally matched into a game so you can alt-tab out and do your taxes or whatever while you're waiting.

Yeah, this sucks. Why did they break casual gameplay? They should have implemented Competitive mode like this, and left Casual alone.

I'll take imbalanced teams and occasional autobalancing over century-long wait times, penalization for leaving/being disconnected, and everyone playing to earn points for themself any day.

A good tip for those of you who have a favorite community server, but want to play casual matchmaking. Get the IP of that server and write it down. Once you are in the wait queue for a game, open your console and type "connect <IP HERE>". This will allow you to play on a community server while you wait.

Nope, not gonna play tf2 until there's an actual newbie friendly place to play which can be accessed easily. My steam-running computer barely meets the minimum requirements anyway.

I think the current pubs could work, if they removed the penalties for leaving and have the end of round screen have a 'next match' button or something, so that you're not forced into another loading screen.

Oh, and cut the loading times too.

What would you say if they took the Volcano Fragment and the Sun-on-a-Stick and swapped their primary properties?

The Fragment deals more to burning players, and the Sun ignites players?

So the Fragment would become the old Axtinguisher?

Valve made a statement about casual play.

In short:

- Choosing individual maps and gamemodes will be, or is already with a new patch, possible again.

- Queue times are a major bug and they are working hard on fixing them.

- There is a system for connecting searching players to existing games if someone abadoned them, but it is not working properly yet.

- Abadonment penalties have been removed.

- Casual mode levels cannot be lost and they do not actually affect matchmaking.

No sign of quickplay returning. We can either whine enough about it, or make good community servers again.

Well, my dip into community servers was 24/7 2-Fort with 6 Snipers on our team huddled together in one spot.

Then I got into matchmaking, waited just a few minutes and rolled the heck out of the enemy team on Dustbowl.

I still dislike the formula. The team first to Attack sets up a pace for Attack later, so if Team A won Dustbowl after, say, 12 minutes total, then Team B has only 12 minutes to get back at them. Even with extra time gathered from capturing points it feels a little restrictive. Can't do last minute overtime clutch pushes no more. :c

@Valve: Glad they put some adjustments, though quickplay is sitll gonna be missed if they decide not to add it back. Like, all I want is to play some map I fancy with no mods, skials, ponies or whatever is hot on the server in question. >.>

Tried a round of casual matchmaking yesterday. Took longer to find a match than it took finding a server through quickplay, and it ended with a 8v11 match. Since this new gamemode does not allow for replacements, I feel like it is very out of place in TF 2. Was this only made to let people avoid Auto-balance? To me, it was never really an issue. It tried balancing out a round if one side had leavers. That is not a bad thing to me.

As for the class-/weapon- balance, I find some stuff to be good and interesting, while others is a bit weird to me. But why nerf my Bison? WHY? WHYYYYYY?

Abandonment penalties are one of the few ideas I actually liked, but IMO they were just too long (may have been a bug, but some people reported getting 1-hour penalties after dropping one game). Another game I play gives you a free pass the first time and then starts racking up penalties (starting at like 3-5 min)after subsequent drops so you don't get slapped for the occasional accidental disconnect, which I think is a pretty passable system.

One side effect of the update as well is that all of my frequented community servers are always at full capacity now since someone posted all of the I Ps of the decent ones on reddit.

That's the system the competitive/UGC matches have used forever. Perfectly passable in competitive but to me again seems out of place in public servers, especially for newbies who first join (doesn't give much opportunity to explore the maps). They seem to be responding unusually quickly (for Valve) to the massive amounts of negativity being thrown at the update so hopefully they'll throw a bone to community servers, or at least include some how-to tooltips for newbies so they can figure out how to work the search(or, God willing, rework the search to be more user friendly).

edited 9th Jul '16 8:35:50 AM by carbon-mantis

Wow, I was just about to plat TF2 and I get this.

Nope, not going back from this bullshit.

Long speech. Looking from which, I can tell Valve is losing their greatness. I feel like Valve sold us out. When they announced competitive, I was actually ready and proud as a Medic main. The result after the update? Bullshit. So much fucking bullshit, that I ask "is valve blind with their update?" Low server connections, that one weapon with an unnecessary nerf and a doubtful update regarding Pyro and Heavy weapon sets (because I know they will make it skins instead). Plus, competitive is a fucking mess, even worse than Overwatch competitive for fucks sake.

Because of this, I'm salty for their treatment of the game as a whole. Where is the Valve that used TF2 as a revolutionary MP game? The Valve that added new weapons? The ones that delved more into the comics and the merc's personalities? The ones that improved the game? And this is getting worse with the CSGO controversy, I fear TF will get the same because of the skins/cosmetics being treated as such.

I'm glad I downloaded 2 other F2P just to clear my mind out but still, I have those doubts that Valve just doesn't care anymore. If so, then I'm siding with Blizzard.

edited 9th Jul '16 10:03:32 AM by MeeMaggot

It's definitely not as bad as you say, that they reacted so quickly to the outrage is a proof of that.

That said, there's something very wrong when you get 9v9 and then suddenly four people are "automatically assigned" to one team rather than, you know, do the sensible thing and keep the numbers even.

There's word out that an unidentified/unaddressed bug is currently causing the entire game to brick and become unloadable if you play Competitive mode. Players are speculating that its a corrupt file on Valve's cloud end, so even reinstalling the game won't fix it if you're one of the unlucky few to get it.