Hi dramafrens!!

Have any of you heard of this obscure little indie game company called Valve? You may have heard of them from niche titles such as:

Half-Life

Portal

Only the biggest gaming platform of all time, Steam

But today we're talking about a game very close to my heart: Team Fortress 2! Valve's hit first person class-based team shooter is an iconic game, earning it a place of glory amongst all vidya and entrenching it in internet and meme culture, and even a somewhat recent meme trend depicting the TF2 characters as buff, totally heterosexual Wagnerite Ziggers has produced some of the shiniest gemeralds of all time

(video courtesy of @CREAMY_DOG_ORGASM_fan17)

It's really close to my all time favorite game and definitely my most played. Countless hours were sucked from my childhood as baby me learned to use my first slurs whenever I came across a particularly annoying enemy Demoman

Which is why it's all the sadder that I'm now talking about its spectacular fall from grace.

The Beginning of the End

Meet Your Match

TF2 had a reputation of being a quite regularly updated game, with a major content release happening around 3-5 times a year. Besides usual gripes from boomers these updates were pretty well received, and I certainly have held a positive view of almost all of them although that could just be me yearning for my teenage years.

However, on July 7th of 2016 the most controversial TF2 update to date released: Meet Your Match.

Before this update all TF2 players would play the game through a generic server browser. Valve ran their own public servers right alongside all the community made ones, and filtering for a server you wanted was incredibly easy and streamlined. You could filter by player count, full/empty, whether or not the server used the shitty Valve Anti-Cheat, whether custom decals were allowed, you name it. Everything was hosted on the server browser, it held everything from official Valve servers to servers run by the dregs of society. I fondly remember joining a server when I was about 11 running a map that had furry porn plastered all over the walls you never forget your first time, !furries.

So what did Meet Your Match change? Well, it didn't remove the server browser. Not outright. But it did take all official Valve-ran servers off the browser and move them into a shitty matchmaking system No longer could you filter for a specific Valve server running your favorite map, you now have to queue up for matchmaking in a party with up to five friends (no more just joining your friends through Steam or the server browser!), have a certain list of maps selected, and pray to god it lands you in a game within the next 15 minutes. Even worse, since the matchmaking system's job is to get you into a game by any means necessary, it could land you in a game with no players or a game about to end and switch maps to a shitty one you don't like. Additionally those official Valve servers got way shittier, due to the removal of the ability to switch teams, removal of sprays (basically the ability to plaster a custom image onto any surface you want ), and the increasingly outdated Valve Anti-Cheat system being easier to exploit by cheaters. Oh, and those five friends you get to party up with? They will only be on your team, meaning you can only have friendly competition with these friends if somebody gets auto-balanced (which remember is a necessity since you can't change teams manually to even the balance )

That server browser still exists, but it's been relegated to its own separate tab and no longer has any Valve-ran games on it. That would be fine if you don't like Valve servers, (and who would? ) but the average TF2 player is just going to hit “find game” and not bother with the server browser, leaving a bunch of half-empty, struggling community servers—not to mention that most of the community servers are shit themselves, but for other reasons; no way in heck am I downloading 13 trillion Touhou reskin mods just to play on a shitty weeb server!

The update understandably made a lot of people upset, me included! But we had no idea how much worse it was going to get.

Jungle Inferno, or, Pain of Neglect

Released on October 20th of 2017, Jungle Inferno was a pretty bog-standard update, as far as things go. A few new weapons, some balances, a few new maps which were mostly shitty, we've all heard it before. The problem? It was the last time Valve would do anything significant with the game. Any updates past Jungle Inferno were repeating seasonal events, and the last Saxxy Awards (the TF2 community's version of the Oscars, where people would create kino animations using Valve's Source Filmmaker) ever to be held to this date

“But Shelly,” you might ask, “you said there were still seasonal event updates! Surely stuff was being added then, right? ” Well, yes. But it wasn't Valve. Every Halloween and Christmas Valve would have some intern scour the top rated maps, cosmetics, weapon skins, and taunts from the community workshop. So surely game's health is in the community's hands, and doing alright, yes? Well…

All of this shit was just bad, frankly. Often times the skins had missing textures, the cosmetics were r-slurred and unwanted or even outright broken, the taunts didn't work, all things that could go weeks without being fixed. Besides, hats and skins don't affect the gameplay!

Well maps do affect the gameplay. But they were all shittier even than the skins! A prime example is Wutville, a community made Christmas map. I think I'll let this image of the first attacker spawn and the known bugs list speak for themselves.

So we have a map that is basically a long, sniper-heaven corridor with no flank routes, tons of bugs, and is a visual fricking mess to boot! And this is just one extreme example of many broken community maps; don't even get me started on Bread Space, which started the defending team out facing the wrong way, so half the team would obliviously walk the entire way back to their last point in the setup phase! It was obvious that Valve was not bothering to playtest anything they were putting into the game, let alone make it themselves.

Why was Valve refusing to work on such an influential title? Despite all their decisions the TF2 player counts were continuing to grow, almost suspiciously so… (more on that later ) surely if Valve put in the effort they could bring ever more players in and just get that much more money from anyone participating in its famous economy. It has a lot to do with their company work philosophy: on the outside, they claim to avoid “treadmill work” and prioritize employee freedom by letting them work on any projects they had passion for. Beneath this stupid pseudo-commie work structure however everyone knew Valve operated on the principle of “Do nothing and let Steam make us infinite money.” They didn't need to work on TF2 because it made them zero billions of dollars.

Attack of the Machines

The Sniperbots

In 2020, there was a source code leak, leading many people to fear the worst. A lot of rumors were in the air at this time, everything from exploits in the code being used to hack accounts to even in-game doxxing. While none of these ever really came true, there was certainly an opportunity for cheaters to exploit a vulnerability in the game. And exploit they did!

A bit of background is needed. Basically there are nine classes in TF2, but out of all of them none is more powerful than the Sniper. With two clicks he can instantly kill 5 out of those 9. In a game played by humans, the main barrier to playing Sniper is the human player's skill and ability to quickly land those instakill headshots. A good player can theoretically steamroll the entire enemy team only by playing Sniper, but nobody but the most turbovirgin autists could ever hope to reach the skill level needed.

A robot though…

With the game's guts on display for the world to see, people naturally quickly made programs that could run an account on TF2 playing sniper, which would proceed to walk straight into combat and land every headshot, wiping the entire enemy team but it wouldn't just be one, it would be five, ten, fifteen sniperbots with absolutely zero counterplay pooping up entire game servers. As expected, these bots were also equipped with the latest in slur technology and would frequently call votekicks on human players

It was a dark time, and still is. These bots are still running around, and the game is absolutely unplayable outside of peak hours. The bots don't stray outside of casual matchmaking so community servers are fine, but the same problems I already highlighted with those servers still exist today

Valve managed to “fix” the slur-spamming problem by removing chat permissions for all free to play players. I don't think I need to mention why this is a bad idea. In addition to that the bots aren't really fixed, they still flood casual servers and kick every human player out. To this day, it seems Valve has no intention of actually fixing this issue.

#SaveTF2

The problem eventually became Reddit's problem. /r/tf2 is the epitome of a modern day vidya subreddit, astroturfed to heck, filled with shitty memes and r-slurred redditors who think they can accomplish anything by making smug comments. Their solution to the bots, the content drought, and the general decline of the game? Be heckin' wholesome 100 about it, and start a hashtag

The SaveTF2 movement started with the general goal of getting Valve to fix their darn game. Get rid of the bots was the first priority, and after that people generally thought that Valve would notice TF2 as profitable with the surge of new players coming into a fresh, shiny, bot-free classic game! After all, TF2 was still reaching record numbers of concurrent player counts, () imagine what new heights it could reach from there!

It became fully Redditized incredibly quickly. Constant mentions of Valve and Valve developers on Xwitter, r-slurred “spread the word” posts all over reddit in unrelated subs, and getting the voice actors to go along with their shitty memes are just a few of the regular Keanu Chungus redditor actions you would expect from such a movement.

The Valve Response

In May of 2022, the TF2 Twitter account posted this:

https://twitter.com/TeamFortress/status/1529970640224018433

This lead many to rejoice in the triumph of the SaveTF2 movement. Honestly things were looking pretty… hopeful? Maybe the Reddit activism got to them? After years and years of total radio silence it looked like Valve might actually care about this ‘dead game' that continued to grow.

An update was promised and actually… delivered? In July of 2023, TF2 players got the Summer Update! What was in this update, you ask?

• Community-made cosmetics

• Community-made skins

• Community-made maps

Sound familiar? But hey, at least the wholesome reddit seal was added into the game! (No, I'm not joking)

This satisfied the redditors though, and the SaveTF2 movement gradually lost momentum, sputtered, and died. All the while, the bots still ran free.

The Coming of the VLTIMATE TRVTH NVKE

On April 30th of this year, a long time TF2 YouTuber by the name of ZestyJesus woke up and dropped the fattest trvthnvke ever made on the TF2 community:

For those of you who don't want to watch an hour long video, the TL;DR is that after scraping years of data from third party sites and even neurodivergentally collecting his own information, this guy came to a frightening conclusion… You know how I said that despite everything, in spite of the bots, the content drought, the shitty community made updates, in spite of all of it, TF2's player count continued to grow?

In the video, this guy provides pretty darning evidence that over 70% of TF2's reported players… are bots. But not those sniper bots I've been talking about previously! No, these bots exist specifically to sit in private servers with TF2 running in text-mode (no graphics to reduce RAM usage) and periodically receive item drops, courtesy of Valve's age old gacha system. These bots then sell these items for irl money, inflating both the in-game economy and the reported player counts. The actual player counts? Declining, and had been since Meet Your Match.

ZestyJesus took aim at the Redditors in his closing statements in the video, highlighting how much of a massive failure SaveTF2 was and what an embarrassment it was that the movement lost steam as soon as Valve threw them a bone that looked and tasted exactly like all the other bones they had been thrown for seven years.

So naturally, the redditors crawled out of the woodwork.

#FixTF2: The Redditor Strikes Back

Not taking any hints as to the actual point of the ZestyJesus, some clown by the name of WeezyTF2 releases this video:

Basically he's just saying the movement needs to start again with a different name. TF2 players, still stunned from the TRVTHNVKE fallout, have begun clinging onto this new movement as of late. It basically just involves a lot more whining, which at least does more than the reddit activism they were doing before.

Another YouTuber by the name of shounic, who mostly does explanations of the game's mechanics and code released this video a mere day ago, highlighting all the barriers to actually fixing the game and all the pitfalls this new movement could fall into:

And at around this time TF2 starts getting massively review bombed!!

At least reviews are an actual form of protest. But what about other Valve games? It appears that Half-Life 2 has also been the target of a few stinkers!

Surely this will go well.

Conclusion

Redditors suck and I hate them all. I hope Valve does something with my favorite childhood game but honestly I'm not holding my breath. I think Valve realizes they're probably going to make more money from their newest Overwatch-clone slop than they could ever make from fixing TF2.

And if they don't? They have the money. Steam will bail them out.