Back in 2009 I used to play on a community server that was run by a bunch of cockney guys in their 30s and 40s with aliases like "Crazy Tony" who used to get on the mic and shittalk each other (and random other players in the server). It was one of those servers that had a load of sound downloads and they'd just constantly be playing shit like vengabus loudly to everyone. Also if any player started complaining about this or doing the pubber thing of typing every time they died the admins would just play the sound clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger from kindergarten cop saying "stop whining" repeatedly which would cause people to lose their fucking minds. You just don't get community like that any more.

I'm pretty sure when I was playing those old pubs my life was just better and I'm nostalgic for that.

Having a single dedicated place where a pool of like ~40 people always join and inevitably grow familiar with one another over time and maybe make friends to me is much preferred to the casual matchmaking experience of a game being over and then it's onto the next from a large pool of different servers where you may never see whomever you were playing with again after your current session. I thought I wanted casual matchmaking... I was so excited when I got meet your match... I didn't know what I had..... I didn't know what I would lose....

i used to play on a community server called uberforce that played in mumble basically every day with like 12 regulars and then the rest of the server would usually be randoms. we used to have mumble activities like playing mge or joining lobbies together and shit. the guy who ran it was this raging alcoholic canadian guy and he just disappeared off the internet after a while, but the friends i made in that mumble got me into highlander which later got me into competitive tf2 at all

Best pubs had an ecosystem with a perfect balance of school kid tryhards and beer dad gamers. Some 40 year old factory workers would always come after 8 hours of smelting steel to play engineer on dustbowl and build dispensers in the same spot over and over again, while getting destroyed by enemy soldier with optimal loadout and kritz medic gf. Alltalk was on so naturally they would also be sharing their wealth of life experiences and past relationships in vc with their shitty mics and random tv noises in the background while playing on autopilot. Even comp players were joining regularly before scrims, it was the only place where they could show off their etf2l medals or assemble a team for hl open.

It felt rewarding to both play to win and do stupid funny stuff in an environment like this, unfortunately it stopped sustaining itself after quickplay got cut and new players lost an easy way to discover and become regulars on these servers. I saw no other game that could provice a similar experience since then, maybe some obscure garrys mod rp servers come the closest.

I remember playing on the TF2PublicFerret server back in 2014 where a guy named Ferret would spec the pub game and basically cast whatever he saw with alltalk on, super laidback, basically felt like a budget cast where you can hear the caster as you're playing. The regulars were also super chill and fun to play against, it had a solid map rotation with some custom maps here and there and whenever something whacky happened, you'd know

This is insane that the first post of a thread like this was MY old clan pub sever back in 2008. It was exactly as you described. We'd have fun drinking nights, opt to auto balance the sever ourselves by asking because ingame balance sucked, everyone was known for spamming certain mains and favorite classes.

All these guys and gals even went to the insomnia lans (most still do and stop by so see how im getting on)

Youve even reminded me that i still have shitty killcam images from the regulars from 17 years ago.

https://i.imgur.com/v0bKTOp.jpeg

Those 30 year olds had hearts of gold and left a good, fun and kind impression on me at an impressionable age.

If im honest, i wouldn't say these things have disappeared, you get a tiny bit of it in uncletopia severs, but we're just all older now.

I haven't played tf2 pre MyM, but I did see lots of old videos on YT where people on pubs were actively using microphone with alltalk enabled. These days, almost nobody uses voice chat here in europe. I'm lucky to see just 1 or 2 dudes a day using it. Without voice chat, the server always feels a bit emptier to me.