• TF2 General Chat and Speculation Station V14 - The Bargaining Stage
    999 replies, posted
Meet your Match happened.
meet your match had a positive intention and generated a lot of things to talk about eotl had so little content + an actually pointless minigame that it was a wet fart
It would probably be invasion for me then. Yeah update was great, but all the incidents around it, was probably what made tf team change their guidelines regarding community made projects, where now they announce theme and anyone can join. Sure it's great to give everyone an equal chance of joining (instead of being money driven). But also means community can no longer decide for which part of the game the content is for. Gamemodes like erm mvm really need love.
The duck minigame was downright insulting. "Pay us to play a minigame where your score is determined by how much you pay us afterwards, and there's no rewards. Just give us money, you morons will buy fucking anything"
Yeah Meet Your Match shipped in a really bad state but it indicated to me that Valve was still interested in TF2. It would have been far easier to keep the current quickplay system in the game then to modernize it with matchmaking that most modern players expect as well and pushing comp TF2 in game (again despite how bad of shape comp matchmaking shipped in). The work they put into it is impressive even if it's still not perfect. This year makes me feel like Valve may be dropping support for the game. I haven't felt that way since 2014 (when I was proven wrong in 2015 by Gun Mettle and Tough Break) though it does feel much worse this year than 2014. I'm not sure why the team doesn't bother to communicate anymore, they were doing such a good job of it in 2017. Seems like everything just got worse this year.
im starting to wonder if they just werent working on it this year. My understanding is the "tf team" is a group of people who will work on tf2, but overall they are not ALWAYS working on tf2, just a group of people who put themselves in charge of taking care of it. I would imagine with CS:GO battle royal and Artifact, 2 really big things for this year, they had to put tf2 on the backburner. i think they have big plans on fixing things, but i dont think they really had anything to communicate on. I dont think it would boil over well to say "yeah we havent started or done much this year, things have been busy with other stuff, sorry"
What about 2014 indicated to you that Valve stopped caring?
there was a time when TFTEAM would just whip out random sketches of maps and weapons and explain them on the blog. Other times they would do some roleplay. Or explain planned things that went down the shitter. Or put up tips and feedback for community work. This had nothing to do with active development and they still had plenty to say.
I definately think the outrage was more visible though. EoTL was "thats fucking it?" MyM was "they fucking ruined everything"
Hell, 2 years ago they did that huge blogpost about potential balance ideas for the then-upcoming Jungle Inferno update. They literally have to say anything. Communication with consumers is insanely important, especially for video games. If you don't say anything, your consumer-base has to assume that you're not doing anything.
In the time I've been playing, Love & War had the best animation, but the worst mechanical changes. To this day, Heavy remains an overly nerfed butterball. What if Valve had applied a similar nerf to Sniper instead of Heavy? Something on the order of "All sniper rifles can't headshot until at least half charged." Pubs would be less shit. Highlander would develop a slightly different meta. Hackers would be marginally less of an issue. Paradoxically, the Machina would be buffed. Stock Demoman in his current state is the most balanced class in the game. All but god tier Demos kind of suck in 1v1s, but with the support of the team, they are mushroom cloud laying MFers. This not to say that there haven't been other amazingly bad changes to game mechanics. The boost to spy's base movement speed coupled with the un-nerfed Dead Ringer made that weapon misery to fight against for over a fucking year. Meet Your Match was the worst update in the history of TF2, full stop. The core problems with it remain to this day and probably will for the rest of the life of the game. Killing off all community servers not named Skial or ones running 24/7 2Fort/Turbine/Harvest/Hightower was the single most damaging blow Valve ever dealt to the TF2 community. In the months after MyM I saw more community servers shut down than at any other time in the history of the game. The introduction of QuickPlay itself did not kill off the quality community servers, nor did the Jan 2014 update that made community servers opt-in in the QuickPlay menu. While seldom discussed, the Jan 2014 update was actually more of a blow to non-shit (no ads/no bots/no p2w plugins) community servers than QuickPlay itself. In spite of it, good community servers could maintain stable population for much of the day as long as there were sufficient regulars playing to attract random pubbies joining. What MyM did was kill the "community" aspect of the TF2. What's left when one peers at the bleak hellscape that is the Server Browsier is not pretty. Endless shit custom game modes. The same four maps on instant respawn. Skial (and I don't even mind Skial, I actually respect how efficiently they run their organization.) In my observance, MyM caused a bigger exodus of casual "regular" players than any other factor. Players who had one or two community servers that they frequented and never touched Valve servers at all. When one's favorite TF2 hangout becomes a ghost town, there's not much impetus to keep playing the game. I've seen several very deep pocket collectors cash out recently for just this reason. While their financial impact on the game might be small, it's just these kind of "whales" that keep the TF2 economy moving. It seems to me that this exactly the kind of phenomenon that Valve would notice, since it effects the one thing the company truly cares about. Unfortunately, based on what I've seen with Artifact, Valve will continue to move in a direction precisely opposite of what is necessary to keep a healthy TF2 community.
Valve has simply moved on from community run servers, they're not interested anymore. Dota 2 and Artifact don't have player run servers at all.
This is so ridiculously wrong it's not even funny. Community severs were dead years and years before mym. Finding a populated community server in 2015 was fucking impossible.
The "Golden Age" of community servers has been dead. Around 2012-2013 was that era. That was when there was no real QuickPlay/matchmaking system. You could join Valve pubs from the server browser, and even then the majority of Valve servers were in use for MvM. I remember it being ridiculously hard to find a standard official Valve server for like a year, and that's when I made my home in trade, surf, and friendly servers. Once they stopped allocating so many official servers to MvM, it slowed down community servers a fair amount unless they offered something the core game didn't. "Don't be a fucking idiot" was the rule on community servers while Valve servers were the haven for hackers (notably speedhackers before Valve patched that). QuickPlay in the original incarnation was a hit both to and against community servers. Good if you wanted to find your favorite map, awful if you wanted to avoid Skial/Saigns.de/etc. so people started defaulting to Valve servers unless they came across a community they already liked. The aforementioned "don't be a fucking idiot" rule people enacted on community servers made select communities safe havens for fans of specific maps. Especially nice around Halloween since you could go for your gifts and people only cared about fighting the boss to kill time otherwise. When Valve stripped it down so event items can only be obtained on official Valve servers (due to people writing plugins to farm items for themselves, probably) that was a big hit against communities for events. Valve further stripped it down when introducing Matchmaking, but it was by no means something that was immediate; it was not a gradual process. Meet Your Match was just the final, albeit most drastic, nail in the coffin. Although I do miss community servers a whole ton, I don't miss the boiling toxic environments they created; I hated the whole concept of "let's have dedicated voice channels for the group of team stacking friends" that communities created.
I've run a community server (now a set of five) since just before the Jan 2014 QP change. I've seen player numbers from then onward. I know exactly what types of servers and maps stayed populated pre-Jan 2014/post- Jan 2014, pre MyM/post MyM and to this day. Map rotation servers (not named Skial) were the first to die, but a few did linger on until MyM (mostly in the EU, but we did have a few in the Americas). 24/7 single map servers have always done better (especially with instant respawn.) This not to say it wasn't quite possible to run a populated community server during all parts of the QuickPlay era. During events like Halloween, Gun Mettle, Tough Break etc. there were specific server tags we could run that funneled a not insignificant amount of traffic to community servers. For years, the most successful server I ever ran was Halloween 2014's Ghost Fort. Even before the "truce" mechanic, we had a sever plugin that reduced but did not eliminate PvP damage when Merasmus spawned. This paradigm was handy for weeding out the shitheads looking for easy frags. Similarly, I'd do sm_beacon on camp and dagger spies who liked to sit on the full health kit above the pit. 2015's Ghost Fort did not have Spells because Valve hates fun, but we still managed to do quite running that map 24/7 and also running an "Event Mix" server that ran the rest of the Halloween maps. The most popular server I ever ran was in 2016, actually. 24/7 instant respawn CTF Landfall. It got into the top 50 on game tracker back when that meant something. To this day I occasionally get messages on Reddit or wherever asking if it will "return" (it's still up, but effectively dead.) The Tough Break campaign was the best thing that ever happened to the server group I run. Fitting for Valve, they followed that up with the death blow that was MyM. Not only have I run community servers for years, I've played on them. I remember when MicS was not the only community Doublecross server (remember Team Interrobang?) I had an entire page of favorite servers in my server browser list. At this point, 90% of them were gone. The ones that remain are Skial and a few trade servers. 2015 was not a dead year for community servers. It wasn't even a bad one. If you were having trouble finding a populated community server in 2015 and even early 2016,, I can only assume you were looking for 24/7 Junction Jailbreak DeathRun RTD bots and were sorely disappointed.
Valve doesn't care about what's acceptable or not.
The shift in focus from purely community servers, to quickplay, to matchmaking has dented my enthusiasm for playing TF2 more than anything else. I used to be a daily player, pretty much any free time was TF2 time, but in the past few years I've barely played more than a couple of days a week. I don't consider myself burnt out on TF2, I still enjoy the core gameplay, but it just isn't the game I was super enamoured with when I started playing in 2008. That environment just doesn't exist anymore, mostly due to changes the developers have made.
as much as Id like to be positive the absolutely pathetic performance in 2018 as far as communication and everything goes has really left me feeling incredibly disappointed in the tf team, if there even is one at the current moment Id love to be proven wrong in '19, though
who's flurry
Actually yeah this is fair, there were still those 24/7 instant respawn servers around by the time meet your match came around. To me, single map 24/7 instant rrespawn is such a shitty experience that I really discounted that as even being relevant, but I guess it's not fair to say that community servers were dead in 2015. In my view though, community servers there were actually worth playing, which is to say servers where people were talking over voice chat, with regulars and an actual community, where people were playing the game with reasonable respawn times and an actual variety of maps, were long dead by mym. However, if you're into single map servers then I can see where mym would seem more devestating to you. For me, that ship had sailed long ago.
I had more fun with the game after Meet Your Match then before oddly enough. I wasn't regularly being attacked by friendlies who got mad at me for not catering to their demands on how I should and shouldn't play ( to the point were they would swap teams to try and kick me ). More people started focusing on objectives instead of focusing more on just DMing the entire time and ignoring the objectives and a few other things. Quickplay for years always felt more like a chore and that I played just for the sake of killing time, instead of actually having a fun match.
Probably because literally every update after MyM has been about fixing MyM in some regard.
MyM happened because the management told them to move to matchmaking.
literally who?
According to ex employees there's a group that ensure things are making money and purging employees that don't fit in. One dev likened them to agents from the Matrix in that they're always there, overseeing.
are they the ones responsible for ensuring Artifact made money? HAH
Wasn't there a FP pub server at one point not too long ago? Whatever happened with that?
I believe its still there. activities are organized from time to time.
Valve seemed to focus more on adding cosmetic content to the game and the gameplay content they were adding was lacking, with lots of questionable weapons and new balance changes. The maps and modes they added were few and far between and were mostly just beta stuff I think they added to make people happy due to the lack of content. Though it didn't feel as bad as it did this year it felt like things were going downhill to me. I imagine at least part of the reason they did matchmaking was to support Steam Datagram Relay. I doubt traditional servers support it since you don't directly connect to servers with it.
Was kinda hard to find time for events with my schedule but i will try to host a event a week after new years.
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