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[Parham]

Guess I need to post this again since there are some people who seem to have already forgotten after 2 page. Wow, how the mind slips!

"Allegedly"

Opening admitting to sexually assaulting someone(then banning anyone who called him out for it)

Posting revenge porn with their real full names then another admin(a now jailed pedophile) printed the photos and jacked off over them and sent it to the boyfriend.

You're right, how can we even know if he's guilty or not? HMMMM

Also:

 

[Msyjsm]

I've seen the argument that unlocks complicate the game (they don't) and that they're unbalanced (kinda).

I agree with most of your points, but you can't just bullshit your way past this one with a few parenthetical statements stating your opinion with no evidence. Just taking one new weapon as an example, the Dead Ringer completely changed how opponents react to a Spy "dying", which, like it or not, is a "complication". Yes, a lot of the new weapons aren't drastically gameplay-changing, but I'm using this to refute your argument.

Even so, I do feel that the balance kept getting more and more out of whack with each new round of weapons (remember the original Backburner?), not necessarily on a team vs. team basis, but more so on the 1v1 level. I realize TF2 is a TEAM-based game (hell, it's in the title...), but we'd be lying if we didn't admit that a lot of matches end up being team deathmatch, and when a Scout with a bunch of shit (can't remember the specific items right now) is able to one-shot me, it gets annoying, regardless of how weakened he is for 30 seconds after killing me. Hell, the most recent update changing a whole bunch of weapons admitted to the horrible inbalance of some of them, so you're also at odds with the devs on this point....

And one final note...on hats. Yes, they don't affect the gameplay, even considering silhouettes, because those are still distinguishable from the bodies alone, but honestly...I just really fucking hate them. They look terrible, they take me out of the game (not that immersion is that important in a game like this, but it certainly is nice), and their primary purpose in the hands of most idiots seems to be to subject me to the most garish, unappealing visuals possible (this got a lot worse once painting items became a thing). I mean, kudos to Valve for making cosmetics in a FIRST-PERSON shooter a thing, but unfortunately that only results in trolls subjecting everyone but themselves to horrid color schemes.

I did see a mod to disable all cosmetics recently, though, so if I ever jump back in (it's been a few years) I'll definitely be trying that out.

 

[QuantumSquid]

The cosmetics did actually impact my enjoyment of the game because it fucking destroyed my framerate and made the game basically unplayable.

 

[KDC720]

Loved the hell out of TF2, probably one of my favorite games ever. I'll admit I've played it only a handful of times in the past few years though. Not because of the influx of new weapons and cosmetics, but a lot of my friends lost interest and moved on. Most of my favorite community servers died as well.

I still think the game has its niche and a lot of staying power though, even with Overwatch kind of being the next TF2 for a lot of people.

 

[fluffydelusions]

Is there a reason TF2 is so newsworthy all of a sudden? Is it just cause of that 2007 vs. 2017 video?

 

[GrinningColossus]

This is a good counterpoint to the Crowbcat thing that sprung up recently, but only the first two points really apply in my opinion. Better map design and balance are genuine improvements. The rest aren't exactly objectively better.

This stuff is just my opinion, but I don't play the game any more so I don't really have a dog in this fight. I'm not trying to argue or anything.

3) New Weapons
New weapons = new content = more fun

New content isn't equivalent to more fun. Simplicity was a positive TF2 had going for it. The new content has muddled the core gameplay.

4) New game modes

Mann vs Machine is an FPS version of a MOBA, which while it doesn't detract from the other modes, doesn't add anything for people who don't care for MOBAs. There were plenty of competitive servers without Competitive mode already.

5) Hat Fortress 2
ultimately it has 0 effect on the actual gameplay. 0%. Nadda. None
you can safely ignore it

It increases the learning curve of getting used to the class hitboxes. It can't really be ignored, as there's no option to disable cosmetics.

Again, this isn't a fully formed argument, just some ideas that I can't get past. I don't have any interest in playing the game again after all this time. There are plenty of well balanced games out there with good gameplay, but that isn't enough to catch my attention anymore

 

[TaterTots]

I've sank over 2k hours into TF2 and the OP is correct on all fronts. EXCEPT that new maps are better.....Dustbowl, 2 fort, Well, etc. are still the best maps imo.

 

[Snacks the sober sea lion]

Matchmaking killed what little was left. I play TF2 to mess around and maybe practice a bit. Then Valve thinks I want matchmaking rather than being able to join and leave on a whim. Anybody who says you can just use community servers, have you actually checked the server browser? There are maybe 2-5 servers actually running 24 player vanilla rules, at best.

Having started in 2008, what hurts the most has been Valve progressing from questionable monetization to straight-up not giving a damn. It makes me not want to support the game, and I know a number of other long time players feel ire towards Valve and modern TF2, to put it lightly.

I've sank over 2k hours into TF2 and the OP is correct on all fronts. EXCEPT that new maps are better.....Dustbowl, 2 fort, Well, etc. are still the best maps imo.

Dustbowl is shit, and always has been. Nothing but spam and choke points.

 

[SoundPulse]

For what it's worth, the biggest problem with the launch maps is that they were designed around a much, much, much weaker Engineer than the one that we have today. Dustbowl was created well before the Rescue Ranger and Wrangler were even a twinkle in Gabe's eye. It was still a spam-fest, but it's only gotten worse over time.

 

[Guess Who]

More than anything Valve has done to the game directly (though they are at least in part responsible in other ways), the biggest problem with modern TF2 is the playerbase.

 

[TaterTots]

Matchmaking killed what little was left. I play TF2 to mess around and maybe practice a bit. Then Valve thinks I want matchmaking rather than being able to join and leave on a whim. Anybody who says you can just use community servers, have you actually checked the server browser? There are maybe 2-5 servers actually running 24 player vanilla rules, at best.

Having started in 2008, what hurts the most has been Valve progressing from questionable monetization to straight-up not giving a damn. It makes me not want to support the game, and I know a number of other long time players feel ire towards Valve and modern TF2, to put it lightly.



Dustbowl is shit, and always has been. Nothing but spam and choke points.

The reasons you call it shit is exactly why a lot of people love it.

 

[Nzyme32]

TF2 has always been a mix of wonderful and annoying or outright hated things. All the updates have done the same thing. So to me at least the game is roughly in the same position. IMO it is better than it has been in quite a while, but still somewhat stale after so many years.

In large part though, that is down to me playing the game to the point where I've practically burnt it to the ground

 

[old manatee]

Modern Team Fortress 2 isn't good. If it seems like it's good it is only because every other game is now crammed with hats and bad game design too.

 

[torre_avenue]

I've sank over 2k hours into TF2 and the OP is correct on all fronts. EXCEPT that new maps are better.....Dustbowl, 2 fort, Well, etc. are still the best maps imo.

If you edit Borneo's last point, its a fantastic map. But, that last point is aggravating for the same reasons as Dustbowl Stage 3; its just one massive choke point.

 

[Vegetable Lasagna]

Team Fortress 2 is pretty awful and wishes it was 1% as good as Quakeworld Team Fortress. Never have liked it and was a huge disappointment after all of those years waiting for the sequel.

Dustbowl, 2 fort, Well, etc. are still the best maps imo.

My point stands.

 

[Rickenslacker]

Modern TF2 is as bad as I know it is, because they've effectively killed off community servers in chasing after Overwatch-like matchmaking, and there always was a an innocence to it before all the customization came into play -- I mean, the person on the other end might have been an abhorrent human being, but at least the game had things locked down to where they couldn't just flagrantly put that on display. It's pretty shitty when the game straight up allows the likes of you to be killed by someone and then getting a zoom in of them and showing that their Black Box rocket launcher is renamed "N***** Box".

It's especially bad when people like this get the accolades of having a special community weapon granted to them by Valve.

And TF2 also provided me the uniquely shitty experience of having a cosmetic creator that happened to be in the same server with me insult me without provocation for wearing an item they created.

 

[Zombegoast]

Here's where your wrong OP.

Map design while interesting, is poorly balance with choke points being the main cause of the offensive team loosing,

Weapon balance are all over the place. Around 2012-2013 is what killed the game. Valve started listening to the wrong community that complained about stupid things like the Equalizer. And now it's "Hey lets kill the Ambassador because Spy players are good at aiming"

Mann Vs Machine was the last good thing from TF2.

Hats killed the game's performance. There was a period when TF2 crashed every time while playing and crash just from exiting form the game.

 

[Shengar]

OP you might think the game is a better game now, and that is your prerogative, but it's also a very different game compared to years ago. Some people prefer a simpler TF2 and that's valid too. You can't just say they're wrong and act like that's the end of it.

The thread is an answer to Crowbcat video a while ago, not strictly a comparison between old and new TF2.



All in all, the recent Crowbcat TF2 and Swich video got me think that his contextless videos have become a lot more disingenuous by each passing time. Sure his old viewer knows that it was all just for laughs, but clueless folks who only watched his video for a few times actually take it seriously.

 

[Nessus]

Eh, the video you referenced has a point.

The game looks objectively worse now than it did when it came out a decade ago. That's absolutely ridiculous.

There should at least be an option for people with higher end systems to reinstate those superior animations and high poly models at the very least.

As someone who has put hundreds of hours into TF2, I don't mind the gameplay changes and additions they've made. I really like the alternate weapons for every class that change up how you play. But yeah, the graphics downgrade is inexcusable.

 

[Currygan]

Dustbowl fast respawn was still lots of fun, we were always the same faces playing, same tactics, same outcome, like watching a movie you love for the 30th time,, just total freedom, which is something not many online games can give

Online community is abhorrent though. Antisemitic, racist, all around ignorant assholes

 

[Garou]

I would really like to go back and visit old threads and see who was against the Mannconony and the cosmetics and match it against Overwatch event-threads and claims on how many loot boxes were bought. TF2 still gets shit on for some of the stuff Overwatch gets praised for now.

 

[Rickenslacker]

I would really like to go back and visit old threads and see who was against the Mannconony and the cosmetics and match it against Overwatch event-threads and claims on how many loot boxes were bought. TF2 still gets shit on for some of the stuff Overwatch gets praised for now.

Overwatch gets overly criticized for things it does significantly better than TF2. Come back to me when Overwatch gives you crates that you can only open by paying $2.50 each (and often ends up giving you things worth a few cents) and putting incentive to do so with having paid crate exclusive items.

 

[CountAntonius]

The game is ten years old. If Valve never added loadouts or cosmetics items it would have been dead in a matter of years. They went about it sloppily basically treating TF2 as a test bed for everything but they eventually went and remedied most of the complaints. The game is OLD the people who are complaining wouldn't be playing it anyway if all the things they hated about it were fixed most likely. I've been guilty of complaining about this as well but pretty much nothing they could have done would make me play still after all this time.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

I think modern TF2 was the best until MYM.

For real, what a mess of an update. I don't understand why they haven't rolled it back yet. I've actually cooled down on the game a bit because of how rare it is to get matched into my favorite maps.

Map design while interesting, is poorly balance with choke points being the main cause of the offensive team loosing,

Maps like Hightower, Snakewater, Steel, Borneo, etc. are way more open than Dustbowl and the like. The only good launch map was Gravelpit.

 

[Vanillalite]

Heavy Medic combo used to wreck in early TF2. Idk what you are talking about. It was essential if you played on a team of people you knew against another premade team.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

Also, I'm not sure why people keep saying the pyro was useless at launch. I played a decent amount of pyro at launch, and there were pros and cons same as most other classes. Open spaces were a bad place for a pyro to be, but tight levels with lots of corners provided ample ambush opportunities, and there was the all-important spy-check duty. I would agree that the soldier was maybe a bit OP just because the class is relatively well-rounded, but I really don't remember the balance of launch TF2 being so bad.

Launch Pyro was absolutely trash. Any half-decent player could easily counter Pyro (because everything countered him) by simply being aware of ambushes, having an 'S' key, and knowing how to aim.

At least now he has kind of a niche.

 

[meerak]

As an outsider looking in, I really appreciated that run down.

 

[Vanillalite]

Launch Pyro was absolutely trash. Any half-decent player could easily counter Pyro (because everything countered him) by simply being aware of ambushes, having an 'S' key, and knowing how to aim.

At least now he has kind of a niche.

Pyro worked great as a spy check around your defenses, and in tight choke points on the map.

Part of the thing I hate about the OP is the idea that it takes everything separately vs how it all worked together if you had a competent group.

Where da fuq is SFLUFan when I need him for this thread. He's the OG TF2 homie!

 

[TheRedSnifit]

Pyro worked great as a spy check around your defenses, and in tight choke points on the map.

Part of the thing I hate about the OP is the idea that it takes everything separately vs how it all worked together if you had a competent group.

Where da fuq is SFLUFan when I need him for this thread. He's the OG TF2 homie!

This is also not an issue, because Spy is easily countered by turning around and communicating. ♫Everything Spy can do, Sniper does betterrrr. Everything Spy can do, Sniper does toooo.♫

Really though. Pyro's class design made him so that he was only effective in situations where mistakes were being made. Mistakes in positioning, poor awareness, bad aim, brainless run-around-like-a-headless-chicken "strategy" - he's good at countering that, because it's the only time anyone actually enters his awful range and stays there for long enough to die. Even if he ran into someone in a corridor, he'd still probably die because literally every primary weapon (except W+M1 Sniper, I guess) did more damage than the launch flamethrower.

 

[Captain Fun]

TF2 is a brilliant game under many years of bloat as a result of becoming Valve's guinea pig. Some experiments are great though- MVM is really fleshed out, and Gun Mettle was the most fun I've ever had in multiplayer. It's my favorite FPS experience and it still has a great community.

Also hat jokes are... well, old hat.

 

[Bluth54]

I think modern TF2 was the best until MYM.

For real, what a mess of an update. I don't understand why they haven't rolled it back yet. I've actually cooled down on the game a bit because of how rare it is to get matched into my favorite maps.

I think their are numerous reasons Valve hasn't changed back to quickplay/regular servers (and at this point never will) aside from the fact it was clearly a ton of work for them and I don't see them throwing away all that effort.

The first is they want to keep the game modern. Most modern FPS games use a matchmaking. You may like it or hate it but most modern games use it and many modern players expect it. CSGO and DOTA2 both use matchmaking as well.

MyM also made server management much easier for Valve. As I'm sure you know pre-MyM they ran map rotations on servers (payload rotation, KotH rotation, special 32 player MVM servers, Halloween servers during the Halloween event etc). With MyM Valve changed it so all servers can technically support 32 players (since MVM requires 26 bots) and can play any official map and mode Valve runs though matchmaking. I'm sure this made server management much easier for them, especially during the Halloween event.

There was actually some talk from Valve to community map makers about not keeping campaign maps in the game forever (since they didn't technically buy them the same way that they bought other maps) since they didn't know if they would be able to run enough servers for every map, but that's not really any issue anymore.

 

[Springy]

I miss launch TF2 so bad.

Not denying they've done fantastic things since, but I loved 2007 TF2.

 

[Ricerocket]

The best thing about TF2 is jumping into a server through server list and just fragging whatever in 2fort or Well or whatever, you just you logged in to kill and fuck around and the servers were never timed or completed on objectives. That's what I miss about TF but the recent patches are pushing towards matchmaking and competitive... it's just wrong for this game.

Oh and TF2 launched with poor reception as it was anyways, I know coming from playing Quake TF which is the origin of this game.

 

[Jarate]

Vanilla TF2 is best TF2

 

[Bluth54]

Vanilla TF2 is best TF2

Vanilla TF2 had awful maps and awful balancing.

 

[Random Human]

.

 

[Jarate]

Vanilla TF2 had awful maps and awful balancing.

Gravel Pit, Granary, Dustbowl are all fairly good maps. I like well, 2fort is still one of the most played maps and Hydro was brought outside and shit

Only comp was unbalanced, casual play TF2 was balanced fine outside of Demoman, who basically still has the same problem

None of the vanilla maps are as bad as Egypt and other bad fan maps they added.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

Gravel Pit, Granary, Dustbowl are all fairly good maps. I like well, 2fort is still one of the most played maps and Hydro was brought outside and shit

Only comp was unbalanced, casual play TF2 was balanced fine outside of Demoman, who basically still has the same problem

None of the vanilla maps are as bad as Egypt and other bad fan maps they added.

Dustbowl sucks, it's the epitome of shitty spamtube design. 2fort sucked in TFC and sucks here, it should've just been left in Quakeworld TF. Hydro and Well also suck.

Gravelpit was amazing though. Granary is . . . okay, I guess. Probably my least favorite 5CP map outside of Metalworks.

At any rate, all of the best maps - Steel, Upwards, Badwater, etc. came later. I don't know how you can think Dustbowl is one of the better maps but not Egypt, they're basically identical and have the same problems.

I think their are numerous reasons Valve hasn't changed back to quickplay/regular servers (and at this point never will) aside from the fact it was clearly a ton of work for them and I don't see them throwing away all that effort.

The first is they want to keep the game modern. Most modern FPS games use a matchmaking. You may like it or hate it but most modern games use it and many modern players expect it. CSGO and DOTA2 both use matchmaking as well.

MyM also made server management much easier for Valve. As I'm sure you know pre-MyM they ran map rotations on servers (payload rotation, KotH rotation, special 32 player MVM servers, Halloween servers during the Halloween event etc). With MyM Valve changed it so all servers can technically support 32 players (since MVM requires 26 bots) and can play any official map and mode Valve runs though matchmaking. I'm sure this made server management much easier for them, especially during the Halloween event.

There was actually some talk from Valve to community map makers about not keeping campaign maps in the game forever (since they didn't technically buy them the same way that they bought other maps) since they didn't know if they would be able to run enough servers for every map, but that's not really any issue anymore.

Thanks for the explanation.

I guess I can see why, but I still don't like it. It's basically the reason half the maps are dead.