How long do you think tf2 will last? - Games

I dont think it will ever really die, but how long do you guys think before it becomes a true legacy game like unreal?

I assume its servers will be kept up for a while longer but I fully expect valve to flat out quit updating the game at all within the next year or two.

It's still alive, but it's slowly dying. Community is going down in terms of quality, game changes are alienating a lot of people. Valve has thus far shown they have no idea where they want to take the game.

[QUOTE=Limed00d;51290351]It's still alive, but it's slowly dying. Community is going down in terms of quality, game changes are alienating a lot of people. Valve has thus far shown they have no idea where they want to take the game.[/QUOTE] I think they want to take it to the bargain bin. Or at least they are doing so inadvertently.

It would be nice if the team put effort into updates, However I'm beginning to think it may not be the teams creativity at question but rather restrictions placed on updates as given the more recent updates they've released including the dreaded End of Line seems to be very limited in what they are able to introduce.

If the game maintains relevancy past 2018 I would be whole-heartedly surprised. I'd love to be proven wrong, but valve has shown time after time they're not qualified to keep this game afloat any longer.

it has the allure and mechanics to stay afloat and another decade or so. it's such an epitome of its video game archetype in a way that quake and doom were of their own. Eventually the game will lose official developer support and the casual crowd will move on but core dedicated players will always do their best to keep it alive, as has been done for games of past a la Doom, Quake, RCT, and numerous other cult classics.

I don't see how anyone could conceive this game lasting another decade

It'd end up like Alien Swarm. Its just there,everyone can take it for free but it just lies on the floor sitting at the end of Valve crowd.

Probably until cosmetics are no longer wanted I guess.

4 years

[QUOTE=ThatSwordGuy;51290593]I don't see how anyone could conceive this game lasting another decade[/QUOTE] no matter what dumb move valve does, everyone eventually gets over it or pretends nothing happened. it's been the same cycle over and over for years. valve has never ever directly announced the end of support of a product... and they certainly won't start doing it now. I suppose they would consider that as a weakness or failure in a way since valve isn't known to be lacking ego. the only way I see tf2 truly dying is when valve makes a new MP game superior to it. and yeah we know how that's working out so far

If Valve actually cared? Years and years. The way they're going right now? 2-3 years, tops.

I would say that TF2 will last quite a lot of time still. I think so because: 1. Its core game play holds up today 2. It still is the 3rd most played game on steam (whenever a respected video game company doesn't release a new game and even then it's temporary) 3. It has a community that actively makes maps, cosmetics, fan art, tournaments etc. 3.5 Valve has shown support for these kind of things, offering promotion, in-game items or sometimes even cash. 4. Valve is still patching and updating it with new things.

It'll last until a new Team Fortress comes out, and even then there'll probably be a small community surrounding it since it was such a massive game (and still is).

When the community stops supporting the game, because Valve doesn't do enough to keep it alive I feel like another 5-7 years TF2 will be done

I think it would be more practical just for valve to work on producing team fortress 3 and then get the community workshop to focus on remaking the items and weapons from team fortress 2 for team fortress 3 while the development team focus's on the programming side of things.

I give it 3 years, tops.

It'll probably never outright die because it's a classic by this point; like doom and quake which still has a dedicated community. It also helps that it's free, so a community will never be at a loss for players. However, talking about valve support, at the rate it's going it may happen in a couple of years. I'd expect to see TF2's 15th birthday, but not much after that.

As long as the community keeps spending money on the in game economy Valve is going to have to keep supporting TF2, since the economies of all three of their games are linked and Valve dropping support for TF2 while it's still popular would shake the faith of anyone who's involved in the economies in the other games. How long will the community stay as big/popular as it is now? I honestly don't know. I would love to see the game grow but I'm not sure if that's going to happen (unless maybe Valve supporting comp TF2 in a big way causes a big increase in the size of the TF2 community, which could very well happen).

[QUOTE=Firetornado;51290234]I dont think it will ever really die, but how long do you guys think before it becomes a true legacy game like unreal?[/QUOTE] It wont. It could've, but unlike unreal tournament or quake 3 the game people knew and loved no longer really exists anymore. Valve ignored their competitive community for years and years, and only started to half-assedly implement their ideas when they saw the game dying. The larger tf2 community has kept decent until roughly now, due to the abysmal decision to force people into a half-baked "casual" matchmaking service, adding a pointless xp system that has no real reward while destroying the drop-and-play aspect of community servers. Speaking of community servers, valve's original addition of matchmaking and official valve servers absolutely fucking killed the population and playerbase of old custom community servers. When they were first made, you weren't eligible to be connected via quickplay unless you were essentially a vanilla server, no sourcemod, no custom gamemodes, enabled damage spread, enabled hitscan spread, random crits on, etc. Any new or casual player that had to sit and work out a server browser and start to learn and [i]discover[/i] what existed and who played where no longer had to, they just press a button and get shoved into the nearest valve server. No more exposure to pyro dodgeball, no chance of ever clicking on a random ass map they've never heard of and entering groups of friends interacting with each other. This meant that the playerbases of those communities (and i say communities) no longer really had any stream of fresh meat entering the system, anytime a regular stopped connecting, no-one took their place. That, imo was the first death kneel of tf2. You don't log on anymore expecting to join your favourite server and see 3 of your friends already in there. You try to seriously justify why the fuck you'd queue and queue for terrible gamemodes that you know will either be stomped or stomp them, while overwatch simply exists in a deliciously clean package that blizzard so very much loves. I started on a custom maps community called clown kettle gaming. I made friends, became an moderator, spent a huge amount of my high school days learning and playing and talking to people. That can't exist anymore. I slowly made the transition to competitive, joined a 6's team last minute and participated in a league, placing badly but finding a nuanced system I thirsted to master and saw a future in. That was in 2012. I've played so much, done so much, been to a bunch of lans and known so many people, seen so many people come and go. So many amazing intelligent people who have moved onto to better things, because honestly that's life. But those sorts of people don't come into the community anymore. Because they can see the writing on the wall. I don't see the point anymore. Valve doesn't care. All they really do is keep up a charade of updates, so you can feel justified in buying keys and passes and drip-feeding them the money they've become so thirsty for. And for the game itself, there are now simply better alternatives, and tf2 no longer has anything it used to that kept it above the competition.

It's a Legacy game, it will never die. People that call the game dead are mostly people that got burned out on it, and afterall, if you dont enjoy the game anymore, how can anyone else?

[QUOTE=Fluury;51296044]It's a Legacy game, it will never die. People that call the game dead are mostly people that got burned out on it, and afterall, if you dont enjoy the game anymore, how can anyone else?[/QUOTE] No I think people who say it are more bitter at valve for letting a game that still has a pretty reasonable player base fall into such an abysmal state. I don't think anyone really actively wants tf2 to be dead.

[QUOTE=Fluury;51296044]It's a Legacy game, it will never die. People that call the game dead are mostly people that got burned out on it, and afterall, if you dont enjoy the game anymore, how can anyone else?[/QUOTE] Honestly, the past few updates have been so disappointing that it's hard to stay optimistic about the future of the game. I have never seen such a unanimous feeling of bitterness from all of my friends who play TF2 and every TF2 community I frequent. Until MYM, I wasn't burned out on TF2 at all. I still played it for an hour or so every day, and got as much enjoyment out of it as I did 5 years ago. That update made me realise how little effort Valve was putting into the game. The competitive matchmaking we had been waiting years for was awful, none of the problems brought up in the beta had been fixed, quickplay had been replaced with a new system that was worse in most respects and their continued lack of communication, despite promising to address it, is as infuriating as ever. TF2 still has a lot of potential, seeing the way it's treated by Valve is depressing. Overwatch has taken a lot of the more dedicated veteran players away, not because it's a better game (TF2's core mechanics and weapons are all leagues higher,) but because the team behind it cares more.

MYM made me stop playing pvp altogether and just do nothing but mvm up until halloween came out. Casual is just such a stupid addition.

casual mode IMHO is a better method of entering valve servers than quickplay. Especially considering if I want to play, say, Hydro, Nightfall, or Kong King, I can queue for any of those three at once without having to make a lick of a decision. it's also easier for queueing with friends and prevents the old issue of friends being unable to join due to a full server. all we need is a community matchmaking service a la Garry's mod's server browser, that shows custom and stock gamemodes (such as Versus Saxton Hale or Deathrun, alongside CP and Payload) that would pretty much solve the whole community problem as well as allowing casual quickplay to flourish once that's done, TF2 would have such high energy flowing through its veins. Make TF2 Great Again!

As a server owner it was incredibly easy to deal with cheating in the early years. You'd ban the hacker manually and the problem was solved. But with throw away accounts and a valve server needing a majority vote from the hackers own team the problem became compounded. I managed to convince some of my mates to reinstall and celebrate Halloween and in our first game they got aimbotted to death by a spinning ambassador spy. And while my mates and I were always excited for tf2 media that ship seems to have sailed. There's not much point in staying a committed fan of the game. [edit] If they updated mvm with new content we'd be back on board.

[QUOTE=Dubious George;51295877]Long post.[/QUOTE] I agree with everything you've said save for there being better alternatives.

[QUOTE=ikes;51298527]casual mode IMHO is a better method of entering valve servers than quickplay. Especially considering if I want to play, say, Hydro, Nightfall, or Kong King, I can queue for any of those three at once without having to make a lick of a decision. it's also easier for queueing with friends and prevents the old issue of friends being unable to join due to a full server. all we need is a community matchmaking service a la Garry's mod's server browser, that shows custom and stock gamemodes (such as Versus Saxton Hale or Deathrun, alongside CP and Payload) that would pretty much solve the whole community problem as well as allowing casual quickplay to flourish once that's done, TF2 would have such high energy flowing through its veins. Make TF2 Great Again![/QUOTE] I would pretty much say this, but re-add quickplay and have it co-exist alongside casual. Quickplay was better for playing a quick game by oneself (contracts worked better under this system), and casual is better for playing with a group of people.

As long as Valve doesn't do anything stupid and keeps the servers up, I strongly believe TF2 can survive several more years. TF2 has stood the test of time and while the playerbase will keep decreasing it'll still be talked about in gaming culture for years to come, so the only thing that can really kill TF2 is Valve (which they were very close with Meet your Match).