now that tf2 is legal, will all the pedos finally stop playing it?

I'm not very old, but I feel otherwise. I'm 29 now. When I started playing TF2 it was the 25th of November in 2012 which meant I would have been sixteen. It was almost definitely the reason I failed a lot of exams and dropped out of school. Now I'm 29 years old. I don't mind strangers knowing that. I'm 29 years old and I never made the leap to playing serious competitive Team Fortress 2. I knew some people who played it and reasoned that that and UGC was enough. It isn't and every day I regret not playing when I could have. I mge'd and lobbied, and pugged sometimes, in house. Now my only escape from casual matchmaking is Australian "noob pugs" and the other guys are really young and way better than me. I once made a joke about a player being born after TF2 came out and everyone else said that didn't mean much. That's a difficult thing to get over, though I'm sure it's a universal experience.

My favourite ever memory from TF2 will always be watching Crowns win i58 at the NEC. LANs are the best and I think in the future to avoid having to play with incredible young people I will just go to australian LANs and feel like part of the scene without having to play.

I used to be a big Twitch head and pugchamp era b4nny streams could sometimes be an incredible orchestra hit of all the funniest or best American players bouncing off each other. I will remember the late 2010s with fondness forever—everything around the reaction to matchmaking and the pyro update, the schism of implacable optimism and vigorous pessimism, the death of ESEA and scramble for a way forward. I think I'll always F.W. b4nny too.

TFTV has led an onerous trundling life along the way and while it's now I suspect little more than a habitual bookmark-check for relics of the 2010s I for one will remember it as fondly as anything and I'm glad it was never subjected to a redesign or ignominious shutdown. There used to be some really funny guys posting here. World-class posters, and sometimes they were kind of nice at the game as well. The happenings threads around which the site seemed to revolve seem to have been, like a lot of the internet, subsumed by discords. It would be nice if that was not so, or somehow reversed, but people will post where the activity is and they are fond of convenience (of access rather than layout). Let's just hope everyone remembers to check that their posts follow the forum rules and guidelines or gets formatting help. PLEASE EMBED YOUR IMAGES or at least upload to imgur or your own personal website. Nobody wants to click on your (often short-lived) image URLs, I reckon, let alone be reminded of how much private discussion is going on in Discords out of the "public square"!

Speaking of voting in elections, if you guys live in democracies, I recommend voting for a party when those things come up. If you live in an authoritarian kind of place, find some place else you can vote, like a poll or just kicking somebody from a pub. It's a great way to feel powerful—especially if you are, or turning, an obscene age (27+), and the consequences of things like staying up late or having too much of a good thing are, or are starting to become, unbearable. I've had four little beers and one big one tonight and I'm expecting to suffer like a killer in Hell all tomorrow. Just how she goes these days. And I can't even say at least I had a good time fragging out in my twenties. Fuck it all. Just kidding. I invite my fellow "uncs" to add me and we can talk about our favourite shotgun pockets or YouTube Poops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0i6d6zjnG4

I pre-ordered the Orange Box so was able to play in Beta in September 2007. I was 30 years old then, about to get married, two years before my daughter was even born.

I was vaguely aware there was a competitive scene for TF2 but it didn't exist as far as I was concerned. Found a community server pretty quickly and had a lot of fun there playing with a big group of regulars for a long while - seeding servers and playing custom maps - spent way way too much time on 24/7 Warpath2.

The way the game was then definitely holds an outsized spot in my head canon. I still think of every unlock or gameplay change as "new tech" - as in airblast seems like it was added after 5 years instead of 10 months. I remember people getting their first hat drops in the game and making big deals about them the way people would today about getting a top tier unsual effect all-class hat. It was months before I got my first one - a Vintage Tyrolean I still have.

I still find the game a lot of fun to play, though I finally realized I can't keep committing the time to play seasons anymore (and am ~6 years into knowing I'll ever be able to be good at the game) - still love it and appreciate the many interesting folks I've met playing it over the years.

there was a lot of silly bullshit back in the day. stuff i remember:
- badlands getting released and 6s finally having a map everyone thought was good
- damage spread used to sometimes allow a pipe to 1shot a scout
- stickies were bullshit to a degree you can't even imagine. couldn't even break them for a while
- seagull explaining to our team how bombing created a damage differential
- running backburner pyro on cp_well mids because it gave you +50 health
- grinding 39/39 achievements on an empty server whenever a class update dropped
- a hundred leagues popping up and getting abandoned
- dealing with double sandman on cp_fastlane when it could fully stun ubers
- natascha in 6s
- f5ing the soldier update page to get a service medal
- having to use binds for autoreload and rapid fire pistol
- most of all booting up the game for the first time on xmas and realizing it was the best game i had ever played

natf2 pugs on IRC. The first few seasons of ESEA and how much hype there was around LAN. Those days were magic. I'll never forget.

I first played TF2 on Xbox 360, bought Orange Box with some birthday money around late 2007/early 2008 when I was about 11.

Got into competitive after about 1000 hours of spamming pyro on The Rabbit Hole pubs (not a furry server btw) via some Facepunch thread that some guy wanted to make a CEVO S6/S7 team (original CEVO run, not the reboot). I had played a bit of tf2lobbies.com and seen some Extine casts on CommFT (first one I remember was MuscleMilk v Complexity in S5 of CEVO I think?). Our "tryouts" consisted of playing 3v3 pubs and spamming scout 1v1s on dm_duel2.

Eventually I ended up making my own team with a super edgy team name (again I was like 13~ at this point give me a break). We won our first pre-season game where I played heavy weapons guy the whole time on Ashville. We also eventually lost a game that was 6v5 on Prolane to skyhigh because we accidentally had 2 demomen for a round (thanks Cash50).

After that I ended up trying to make a few teams work and played a few ESEA matches here and there but was never really successful because I was dropping like legit sub-100 dpm games on the regular, but there were no logs outside of ESEA so I could hide it by being a cap points and post-round kills merchant.

My most memorable match was this one because I subbed for the other team previously but they promoted a different player to be their main scout: https://play.esea.net/match/2091646

To be fair, they probably made the right choice since I dropped a fat 13-25 KD, and the player they picked was Tagg, who apparently, ended up being pretty good.

I ended up quitting because Vhalin was offering mentoring on the CommFT forum and he said his only actual advice is to get a 120hz monitor, which I couldn't afford cause I was like 14 still so I gave up until I got my first real post-college job at 22. On one hand, I do kind of wish I had the money and resources to keep playing back when I was 14, but on the other hand since coming back, I'm pretty happy with the experiences I've had, and I'm sure things wouldn't have turned out quite the same if I had kept playing back then.

I'll add also though, I think this is something that the whole time I had still wanted to do, but just never had the chance until I had the money. After I got a good computer and monitor for the first time, this old ass game was the first thing I was excited to play, 8 years later.

Other random thoughts/memories:
-I thought it was cool seeing how many random low to mid level players ended up being great players by the time I returned. Seeing what all had happened since I quit was like I had stepped into a time machine. I remember we rang Starkie for an ESEA open match and I didn't know who he was. I unironically asked our player who suggested we get him to sub for a match, "is he good?". I also remember making fun of remix (aka dflame), mustardoverlord, ninjanick, and marmaduke, who all ended up being good players (also were much better than me at the time already, like I said I was dropping double digit DPMs on the regular). Also, in the same vein, I remember seeing Reckful (RIP) on tf2lobbies occasionally, he was already a top WoW player but he hadn't really gotten gigantic in the streaming world at the time. At first I thought he was just some Complexity fanboy since he had the coL tag but I had never heard of him.
-Funny gotfrag dramas including the dawn of MyGamingEdge, "Smoke a Victory Blunt", the TLR trophy incident, and eventually, the whole site being nuked
-Playing the first ETF2L HL tourney on dog ass ping to get the medal (first one they added to the game I think?)
-Chilling in the old Apocalypse Gaming Mumble server, shoutout Nahanni, meo, and Jeff Walters (athough Jeff ended up being extraordinarily racist, I found out later)
-I offered to make a frag vid for another Open team I subbed for, but my shitty computer couldn't render fast enough so I ended up giving up on it. I put some of the unused clips I managed to render in a frag vid this year though.
-Ehfk's Equalizer frag movie is still my favorite one, it was made back when the Equalizer gave both speed and damage, and had max damage > 150: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAlzSCCTIhs

saving my funny, nostalgic stories for when tf2 turns 25. 18 seems a little arbitrary. sorry guys.

I agree. 18 is arbitrary. In fact the idea that it should be 18 is way more recent of a norm than people realize.