Everyone who says that you can still play pubs now is a filthy liar. I have tried the following many times at prime times for all zones:
-saigns, -pony, -trade, -idle, -achievement, -orange, -instaspawn
Filter maps for cp-*
<200 ping

0 results every time. With luck, 2-5 playable results on upward or badwater under 150 ping.

There are no community servers.

when i searched for skial i found like 20+ servers with active players?

oops

In that case, I guess my long-harbored suspicion has been proven true: My server browser is completely fucked

a lot of people actually quit after the 6.83 patch it was really cancer

I think I just realised why queues are so long.
The TF2 community in my country is tiny and we found 2 games in a row where everyone or 90% of the people where Greek.
Same thing for casual. This worries me as from what it seems the game not only prioritizes finding people close to you, it just freezes until it finds somebody from my country.

i had to wait ~2 minutes for a game when there were sub-50 people searching for a game.

now with 4000, it takes me anywhere from 5-10 minutes to only have someone abandon.

Like 80% of the euro pub community are non English speaking 11 year olds with pyrovision. Good luck explaining to them how the new pubs work and that they're not supposed to abandon them mid game

Honestly, before fundamentally changing how the game works after nearly a decade, Valve should have considered that most of their playerbase are brain damaged preteens that can't adapt quickly to changes as fundamental as this one

at least now TF2 detects if you have PREC and blocks you from joining MM so you dont get unexpected, unexplained crashes

"Any option that isn't in TF2 menus has been disabled for matchmaking"
Undocumented change: Removed viewmodel_fov slider and "hide viewmodel" from Adv. Options
Now everyone is locked at viewmodel_fov 54
Shaking My Head TBQHWY

I still have both those options. I noticed that there's a difference between the menus if you click advanced options directly as opposed to going to options>multiplayer>advanced. Check the second one and see if you can find the fov slider and use viewmodels options there

ayyy guys, havent went through 9 pages of this thread yet, but i remember myself using net_graph in matchmaking with a "+graph" command, in an actual usage its a net_graph 1 with a net_graph 3 colour graphs

just bind a key for +graph

Holy shit. This so-called casual MM is horrible. It's literally everything wrong with gaming today.

TF2 became popular because it's an easy-going shooter with room to fuck around. It's the straight opposite of CS:GO and other matchmaking games. You try so hard to win you either taunt or ignore people, and gain more from winning than not. You have 15 minutes to socialize with people you'll never meet again.

It's gonna be entertaining to see how Valve rolls all this back.

yes. it's far far too late in the game to monkey overwatch or csgo (the latter being the more likely case). it's an admirable endeavor i guess, but do they really think that a game that's been a casual shooter for 9 years and a free one for 5 (tfw you realize tf2 has been f2p for >50% of its lifetime now) is sufficiently bolstered by a playerbase of enough hardcore relateable gamers for such a radical change to the most fundamental part of multiplayer game to work?

i just feel like they're misreading the game's target audience. the matchmaking and competitive mindset should be optional for those who want to try it, not forced. people buy csgo and overwatch knowing they're competitively oriented from the ground up, so it works. i'd wager the vast majority of this game's playerbase have been playing tf2 only since it's been free and have never taken it seriously, you can't just spring this on them :\

at this time it feels very dirty to bite the hand, but it's difficult to resist the urge.

e: after a quick visit to the cesspool that is /r/tf2 it seems that valve are likely to revert this. if they don't i think they're in grave danger of actually losing a sizable amount of players.

e2:

yes

DID THESE ROPE BRIDGES ALWAYS MAKE THIS SOUND

http://i.imgur.com/VBxvTVS.png

yes

Interesting, I don't have them in either of my menus.

Gotta record pre-match frags...

You guys in need of a good community server? Might wanna try one of these!

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/4rut9x/some_good_community_servers_for_different_regions/

It seems like Valve's strategy with this update was to make casual mode so shit that everyone decides to play competitive instead.

Casual would be pretty good actually if the game wasn't void if someone quit. It's so dumb how the whole server gets punished for playing through a whole game 11v12, but if we quit we still get put on cooldown....

The only other big problem I'm having is the damn locked viewmodel FOV in ranked

oh boy pubbing > roaming now

also, I'm kinda surprised nobody mentioned the pyro buff from this update

that grape pocket-pyro-on-gullywash idea seems a lot more viable when your lower DPM can potentially be offset by ruining your opponent's healing

You're still better off using basically any other class to do more damage quicker.

Valve still has no idea what to do with pyro. Tough Break and now this have literally just been minor buffs to running at people with your flamethrower.

That's very odd, they disappeared after I restarted my game. The viewmodel on/off one was previously bugged and the text read something like #ShowWeaponViewmodel or w/e and now it's completely gone

This update is reminding me of this an update to CS:S back in like 2011 where the next day all the servers were dead, What happened there and what changed to un-dead the game at that time? Was it just time, or did CS:GO happen (eventually, I hear it wasn't a smooth start)?

You can't votekick people in pub mm so I got a cooldown for leaving for not wanting to play against a aimbotter... Wtf

I have a friend who wanted to try matchmaking, but he's not premium and he wouldn't pay for the pass.

And like that I expect a lot of new players that install the game and when they click on competitive and see they need to pay for it they'll go straight back to CS:GO / OW / LoL

I mean, if that was done to keep away noobies... why do we even have the lower ranks?

its not done to keep away newbies its done to keep away cheaters

also I hope that everyone knows you don't need to pay for the pass, all you need is premium (which you could give with with $2.50 if he doesn't wanna spend money) and a phone to link to your steam account

Why would they want to keep noobies away? That is the whole point of Valve MM to bring more and more people to it. The point of the paywall (premium+phone or the $10 pass) is to prevent hackers and smurfs.