given the amount of pedos in this game it surely caters to older people to come back

On a more serious note i think tf2 is just fairly easy to get back into at a somewhat decent level without having to grind 50h a week

As a fossil myself i can say i regret about 70% of the playtime i have in this game, mostly because
there was/is next to no turnout for being 'good" at it

is being a mailman really chill or does it suck. or both

I'm about your age too, Buick so I think we always skewed at least a little older than average. I played regularly until my mid-twenties and at that point I was never going to put as much time into a new game as I had with TF2. The good thing about TF2 is that the core game is mostly still there without major changes. That, along with playing the easiest class in the game, got me to come back for a season at a time before I stopped altogether.

Newer games seem to have more regular and drastic changes to support a service model that make it real hard to keep up with if you're not playing constantly.

https://youtu.be/LL6ubXD9ZjY?t=22

sup BUICK!

I feel ya. Am 27, so maybe even still in the range of some of the people still here. Every now and then, want some good old fashioned 6v6 stimulus with the lads. I tried MGEing and a DM not too long ago, got my shit kicked in. I was even warmed up off some OW comp queue too. Still couldn't even come close to beating my opponents in the MGE server. It feels so different now in every regard for some reason even though not much has changed. There's a certain clunk to the game that didn't feel was there before. Maybe config related, idk. All I remember having for a config was cl_interp 0 in my autoexec. Even that feels off now after trying to match what I had before.

I think it's still as crack-shot. At least, if you were not hitting 95% acc on scout in MGE you were going to lose. Duels were only 'competitive' or close, if both players were touching that mid-nineties for hitscan accuracy. I think this still mostly translates in an actual game though. Imo this doesn't feel any less true today than it was in the previous decade.

Would totally tune in to more games if you casted BUICK.

gone postal

the main thing to me is that it’s easier to be reasonably good friends with a lot of people in a game with a community this small and tight. which means when someone comes back they’ll probably be able to just start playing with whichever of their friends are still playing or also came back instead of starting over playing with random kids again.

Keith, I won't lie. I still to this day often think back on the golden days, and playing with you and others in pugna and elsewhere. As silly as it might sound those were some of the funnest times of my life. Yet at the same time I regret "wasting" so much of my life playing tf2.

Although I have basically no desire to play competitive these days, I still play the game and feel compelled to play it on the reg.

tf2 is mechanically complex enough to entice, not physically demanding/time consuming enough to push away is the answer ive been told by oldheads.

that being said i think its less to do with tf2 itself and just... happenstance? you happen to have the ability to grind something out for a fair amount of time and it just so happened to be this game, this community thats been around figuratively forever. you dont play comp without being competitive in some nature, and that team environment of 6+ people trying to actively grind/better/whatever gatekeeps most people who'll drop the game when school starts up or work schedule changes or whatever. like fucking carnage came back and basically it was a rotating door of talking to people in pugs or steam and just "fuck i have to play carnage" that whole season, even if the rust was showing after the initial few weeks.

rip #tf2.pug.na