Following @acstriker's first time playing Team Fortress 2, I decided to have a wee think about my adventures playing this game. I started out a long time ago, by modern internet standards, in the great old times of 2012. A couple of months before Gangnam Style dropped on YouTube and quite some time before the world met its demise due to the ending of a cyclical calendar made so long ago the Mayans didn't bother (or have any reason to) making cycles so long into the future.
Back then, the internet and the world in general were very different places. Of course a lot of this is my own personal perspective, but things did seem a lot calmer back then. When I could happily ignore the lunatics online fighting over politics, when I could change the channel from news about wars in far away lands to watching cartoons or anime.
It's a lot harder to do those things nowadays, I'm no longer a kid. But one thing hasn't changed. I haven't stopped playing TF2.
It was back then when I was starting to fall in love with Valve's titles. Having played Half-Life 1 on the PS2, Half-Life 2, most Counter Strike titles, Day of Defeat, Portal, etc etc.
TF2 was just something natural to get myself into, it was still a pretty hot game back then, having come out just in 2007 for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, having rough sales and then eventually going free to play in the middle of 2011.
I didn't get in at the start of the party, but I guess I'm the life of it too, and soon it'll become part of most of my life, as I don't have any intentions on stopping.
I didn't gather here today to make a simple review, enough has already been said and @acstriker's POV as a new player is refreshing to read. I'm here because of how much this game manages to be such a huge cultural phenomenon so many years later. Games do sometimes last a long long time, such as Counter Strike 1.6 still having thousands of daily players and enough active servers to make it more playable than Battlefield 2042.
But TF2 wasn't just a case of being a cult classic. It is one, but it's not relegated to just "classic" status, wherein people will boot it up out of curiosity, play a couple of matches and maybe get really into the small community.
No, no, no; TF2 isn't small. As much as some people like to believe. It's big, and the recent #SaveTF2 movement only proves that. It's been through its ups and downs, some players leaving after hats were introduced in 2013 (and some of those coming back now such as a great friend of mine). During the mid 2010's, from I'd say 2015 to 2018 the game was a downwards trend already. Not because it was bad, but because it was just old. People were moving on, Overwatch had recently come out and that seemed like it could take TF2's throne, it was fun and had a great set of characters too, why not?
Alas, Overwatch couldn't handle the pressure and Blizzard isn't Valve. TF2 was still getting updates throughout that time, with me playing it tons during 2019 and then 2020 after I got a knee surgery and had to stay home for some weeks.
But to say the game was in a state of disrepair is to take it lightly.
TF2 was now infested by bots, who were there to abuse the game's economy, turning it into nothing more than a speculative market for hat sellers, forcing all the real players to play on specific well moderated non-official servers and just making things a little too obscure for anyone getting in. I know the frustration as I tried to get people in whilst Overwatch was going down (which I also still play), they just moved to Paladins instead.
And for years that has been the case. TF2 has just sort of been left alone. With very rare seasonal updates, like a Halloween event here or there, and nothing else. I stopped playing in 2021 because the botting situation was unbearable. Now the bots weren't just hanging around at spawn waiting to be kicked, they were running aimbot and cheats, and that stuff was turning the community into a warzone. I couldn't take it, the private servers I liked also died around that time. So I just gave up on it.
But sometimes, things just refuse to die. TF2 is way too good to be left alone, to rot, people came back. They always come back, and when I came back this year, I was surprised. It has been years since I've seen so much activity. So many people upgrading their copies so they can use matchmaking or just talk to others, it's been incredibly fun.
And whenever a bot or hacker gets in? Kicked. Like, instant, most times.
I'm not really a matchmaking type of guy, so I can't comment about that part of the game, after all, it was Blizzard's focus on competitive play that ruined Overwatch (with casual having role queue), but I can say that 2022 TF2 is likely more popular than Overwatch has been for years now. Finding an Overwatch match is now a little faster than it used to be, but 45 seconds to a minute is just not enjoyable.
TF2 on the other hand? 10 to 20 seconds for me.
Sure, people tend to play a lot of the same maps like 2fort, but you can avoid that, and a lot of people like change. Unfortunately it seems that Valve doesn't - or at least it's like they couldn't change. TF2 had become such a mess that touching it by now would only bring you suffering. You either fixed everything, or you got shamed for whatever you did.
But the people kept pushing and pushing and pushing - and look where we are.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/27/23144061/valve-team-fortress-2-bot-problem-savetf2-spam
Sure, for most games something like would be downright shameful. For TF2 though? This is for me what proves it. What makes it clear that some communities are practically immortal and are able to do the impossible. Valve working on this now, a game that's older than a good deal of their userbase and that likely hasn't made them a cent for years - this is crazy.
Valve has always been about the community, but so far it had seemed as if they forgot their roots. Not saying this fixes the years of neglect, but hey, it could be the start of something.
There's a saying here in Brazil
"A Brazilian never gives up" - it illustrates how we keep going and trying however bad things get.
So in a way, I guess Valve fans are Brazilians. We make mods, we make servers, we form communities around 20+ year old games that were never too successful (DoD, nevermind Ricochet), we make movements, we make stuff happen.
And as long as we can, we'll keep on going. As long as I'm alive, I'll keep on playing these old ass games.
Long Live TF2, #SaveTF2.