I feel like most of the community has come to the realization that tf2 doesn't have a chance at becoming much or any bigger, and that's fine. Personally I've enjoyed the smaller community and to be completely honest I probably wouldn't have stuck around at all if it wasn't for that. I've played competitive cs and overwatch and the huge competitive player bases wrecked it for me. Every time I see this thread it seems more and more hopeless. I'd rather play our small game until dies than give it to valve to fuck up because at this point it's clear they don't have the slightest idea of what to do.

I don't understand why you guys are writing off a sequel to Team Fortress 2 as an impossibility. It's almost certainly going to happen, don't you think? If you go back and look at my writing I referred to specific moments as "Team Fortress" and not "TF2". This is what I mean when I say that some people may not have the patience to wait for Valve to figure things out and why I refer to future generations of Team Fortress players, not TF2 players.

What do we know about Valve?

• They're game makers. They like making games.
  
• They like their franchises. They like making sequels to said franchises.
  
• They like Team Fortress. They don't want to see Team Fortress die.

If you take all of these things into account then it makes perfect sense that:

• They're not super interactive with the community and they spend a lot of time making games.
  
• There's a sequel to Team Fortress 2, an incredibly popular game of theirs.
  
• They're taking this whole process very seriously and carefully, making sure that they don't ruin their game.

Also I'd argue that Team Fortress 2 was just as popular as Dota. Maybe not as an esport but definitely as a video game.

Well they also spent a majority of that time fixing the broken matchmaking system. People complained about how they were getting placed in servers really far away and dealing with abandonment and griefing. They spent a large portion of this time fixing that and making various adjustments to matchmaking in general, as well as class/weapon balances.

Also, I think the community can agree to "hand over the reins" to valve if they demonstrate that they have any idea how to balance the game. In almost every case, they've proved to be incompetent.

Let me just remind everyone that the atomizer has not been changed since it has been released. That weapon has been in the game for 5 fucking years. I don't think who actually understands how this game works would let that slide. This demonstrates that valve has a fundamental misunderstanding of how tf2 works at a high level.

Either you know something we don't or your optimism is borderline delusional.

This is probably my largest post yet, and I hope it's my last. Unfortunately I didn't even get to express everything I wanted.
In many of these threads I've usually stated one important thing that is important to us.

A bit outdated since I last posted it, but it still holds the value. We play this game still because we love it, don't we? By "this game" I mean OUR competitive format with the weapon bans and class limits. We've played it for years and kept playing it for a reason. So keep this in mind.

The Reality
Now, the dream would be Valve just accepting that the compTF2 community is right and they give all the CompMM that we wanted(literally copy paste our shit into MM and not restrict the damn settings) as they help promote competitive and support us with TF2 tournaments. Well unfortunately not all dreams come true, we will have to accept that Valve is a company that has to make careful decisions and think about what they're getting into and what each change might do to the game(if anything, many developers rush into things and make horrible changes without thinking which makes the game worse, apparently Reflex is in that state).

Conflict and growth
What truly is the source of our conflict? How did this conflict start? It really depends and changes from everyone's perspective and some may not deem myself correct or others correct. But generally US as the community wants Valve support into competitive TF2 right? Well then it begins from there, we could either have it:
1. Completely our way and Valve accepts(HL3 is more believable than this)
2. We abide to the full control of Valve and let them handle things(maybe if this was the Valve from many years ago when they were a great company but definitely not now)
3. We have to have to come to a point where both sides are satisfied so that they can have their wants and we have our wants.

Barriers/Current problems
Obviously for the last few years now, it's been the third choice because it's the most reasonable and logical choice. Unfortunately things are not going well with this as we can see with the current compMM. Valve cannot and will not introduce sponsored tournaments because compMM does not match our competitive format so there is a conflict. But what we have come to an agreement on is having the player format be 6v6, which is actually great for us. Now we have to fight through 3 last barriers(one being kind of minor).
1. Weapon bans. As a community that has played the game for years and learning things as we go on, we have formulated what we deem as a perfect of near perfect banlist when it comes to TF2 unlocks. The great thing about weapon bans is that it helps creates stability and prevents too much chaos(TF2 Pubs) so that the "skill" aspect is much more highlighted and is what we like about "competitive" TF2. Valve of course does not believe in weapon bans cause it's a way of saying that they think their weapons are not well balanced or some other reason. They wouldn't support us banning weapons that THEY made. So to get through this barrier there has come to two solutions that this community has talked about. One is where Valve balances TF2 unlocks to the point that they are not as "problematic" as we found them while the other is Valve does make a banlist(although it being short) and we as a community can slowly negotiate and pitch in why we think some weapons should be unbanned or banned over time.
2. Class limits. TF2 first started as a game with no class limits(afaik) and over time we as the community discovered class limits were needed in the first place to have more control and not having to deal with OP or un-funnish gameplay. We enjoy our class limits cause we know that it is essential for a class-based shooter to have this restriction. Valve doesn't see this quite yet unfortunately as shown in compMM and as Slin said they want to see more results and test things out. Overwatch as of recent have implemented a class limit of 1 if I recall and I think it's great that they did that so Valve may see that maybe in a class-based shooter it is needed for competitive. We may not get our "exact" class limits, but hopefully we can negotiate to have each class limited to "2" at the least to start out.
3. Not much of a barrier but in compMM there is the console command restrictions AKA the graphical command restrictions. TF2 is hard as fuck to run, unoptimized, yada yada and we are lucky to have come across upon legends that have formed FPS configs for us to run the game. But now Valve restricts many of the commands in our FPS configs when we play compMM. This is a bit of a shitty point of view, but in my opinion, you can only have as many players playing your game that can "run" your game. This means that the graphical restrictions is actually having an impact on player numbers for compMM, so how do they expect us to "give them more results" if we can't even play? Their argument or so I have seen or heard is that they want the game to look the "same" to everybody and for skins/etc, but why care NOW? I just see it as ridiculous and it's a minor inconvenience to most if not all of us.

Something to remember and think about
Although it is important to respect that they are a SMALL team and they could be limited in what they can do or they do have plans for what they want to do. From a company/developer standpoint, I can respect that they want to not make drastic changes and move things slowly so they don't invest too much into something that might not be productive/profitable. So another conflict is the "pace", they seem to be willing to wait a long amount of time to do what they want. As for us, we have waited YEARS for things to get set into motion, we have been asking for years and are growing more impatient each time. Unfortunately we will have to probably wait until a change can happen and we hope that it is a great change, but the question is, will it be too late by then?

What we can do
There definitely are still a couple of things we can do now that might help push Valve forward to supporting us. One important thing is to still keep playing the game in the format we play because it's what we love, and we still need to at least maintain our player count for that while also hoping that new players join in, cause if we start losing players drastically and the activity is going down, then Valve might actually just not move forward for us at all. Another thing is more competitive TF2 promotion/advertising such as adding those PlayComp.TF or tf.gg tags that we always talk about but only a certain portion of us actually do. Finally, one that seems so simple yet possibly unrealistic to us, is to be a positive community. Even the slightest of negativity can push new players interested away and we can't afford that.

Conclusion
As for the last thing I'm going to say, I will remind you about the "We love our game" value. CPMA, Melee, L4D1/2 Versus, and other games of the sort with competitive communities that are still active, whether they had a lack of developer support or not they still played the game they loved. We love playing our competitive for a good reason, and we must never forget that value, it's what gotten us through all these years. So if and when things do change for Valve to support us or we start to accept Valve's modifications of competitive, we don't lose too much of the things we love and can still see the game as something we would still like to play.

B4nny has his own biases. When we were discussing the global whitelist changes, some people objected to the changes that B4nny wanted to make. It makes sense to gather information from the entire community instead of just one person. In fact, people on these exact forums have complained about this MANY times, upset that Valve was talking to one person instead of gathering feedback from the masses. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

yeah but gaben cant count to 3!!!!!!

No tbh

I agree with you that some weapons are still broken but please look at the last four months of patch notes and tell me that they're fucking up: http://www.teamfortress.com/?tab=updates

Big changes that were positive:

• HUGE updates to matchmaking, making it much more playable
  
• Adding in MANY updated, competitive maps into the matchmaking rotation.
  
• Class balances to Spy, Medic, Engineer, and more to encourage diversity in competitive classes.
  
• Classes that couldn't be easily balanced (Pyro/Heavy) are promised to be reworked.

Seriously. Look at these patch notes specifically from July 7th and September 27th:
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=22759
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=24510

I agree with you guys that the previous 8 years of balancing sucked, but this is a different Valve that we're dealing with nowadays. It'll take time to undo the terrible balancing that took place previously. In fact, these balance changes that have been slowly creeping into the game is what allowed us to unban 40 weapons from ESEA this season.

Valve has stated previously that they're not working on a new game in the franchise, and the release of matchmaking indicates that hasn't really changed. It's a bit hard to believe it's a priority for them given the extreme success of the microtransaction model.

Even if they did decide to at some point, a sequel is most likely several years down the road if not more.

Right, which is congruent with what I'm saying. Valve is more interested in creating the perfect game for the long term than they are in satisfying the vocal minority for the short term. They're more interested in rolling back competitive TF2 to it's early roots (6v6, no class limits, no weapon bans) and starting over from scratch than they are in quickly recreating the existing competitive game mode and dumping a ton of money into a potentially broken game. In order to do this they needed to create matchmaking, gather player data, and slowly rework the competitive ruleset. Rushing them through this process will not have a huge effect during this time (although Sigafoo will try to help push them along :D).

They're just going to keep slowly making changes and gauging community sentiment at each step of the way. The biggest, most crushing feedback that Valve got happened when they created matchmaking. The community was furious! Then they fixed a few things and people settled back down. I don't think you'll see people in an uproar that big again for a long time.

I mean, I'm not sure how you're expecting people to abandon a format they enjoy and have played for years in order to help Valve tweak a completely new format until they think it's perfect, all for the potential (not even certainty) of support several years down the line.

I perused your article when you first posted it, and I more-or-less agreed with everything you were saying. It seemed pretty rational, even though most of it was history that the majority already knows. I was even pleased by the actual content. You wrote:

"I’d encourage all of you to think about why you play this game. Hope for the best -- hope that TF2 can grow into an esport, hope that TF2 has a future in this space. At the same time, plan for the worst. It’s quite possible that competitive TF2 will never grow out of this phase of its life and that it will die in its infancy. if you’re still committed to TF2, read on."

It was refreshing to see that blind faith wasn't taking precedence over anything else. However, judging from your responses, it seems to be going in the opposite direction. Even if you aren't explicitly saying that TF2 has a high chance to succeed within eSports, you're potentially giving people misplaced faith by comparing TF2 to other successful video games and regaling the possibilities of TF2 as an eSport, with Valve at the reins, as if this is all a matter of patience rather than pragmatism.

You've already said this in your article, but I will say it again. I IMPLORE any young person in this community with dreams of eSports, who is holding on to TF2 for the wrong reasons, to not pass up great opportunity. Don't get baited like so many already have. If you play TF2 merely for fun, juggling it with your full-time school or career, go nuts. If you're waiting for something substantial, you're probably making a mistake.

I'm not asking anyone to abandon the format. In fact, I told people that we probably shouldn't continue unbanning all of the weapons in competitive because it doesn't make any sense. What I'm saying is, Valve will continue developing their game and pushing competitive TF2 forward. This is the future of our game, and I don't think that pushing TF2 forward as a huge grassroots effort is the best move for us, especially since developer support is so valuable. Let's let them figure things out. If people want to help contribute, they can either put on events like Sigafoo or simply play the matchmaking game mode and have open discussions about it on the forums. I personally am a huge fan of the work that you've done on PugChamp, TSC, and I think that it's been huge for the competitive community.

Completely agree. As you mention, I acknowledge that there's a good reason why people are leaving the scene, and I also acknowledge that my future is not dependent on the success of this game as I have a job in the industry as well. Anyone reading my posts should consider that TF2 has been a "dead game" for a very long time.

Still, it's comforting to know that the developers care as deeply about the competitive game as I do. Times are changing. You may not believe it (and you don't have to believe it), but they care. I can tell you about all the times I've talked to them, in person or otherwise. I can show you patch notes. I can talk to you about how much time they've spent developing the competitive game. All I'm trying to do is comfort the community by telling them about the state of the game, telling them about the various trips that have been made to Valve, and telling them about what I think is the future of the competitive scene. You don't have to believe in it, and you don't have to invest in it. In fact, your belief and your investment aren't really key to the success of the scene anyways lol. Plenty of top players have quit TF2 and the game still moves onward. Valve is going to keep on chugging along, and I'm just trying to open your eyes to the whole situation as best I can.

Look around -- I think the evidence is there; I think there's enough evidence out there that Valve cares about the competitive scene without them having to put up a blog post explicitly saying that they'll create a TI for TF2. If the evidence is not there, I'd encourage you to continue asking questions in this thread and having an open discussion about it. An open discussion is key to the success of the community, even if it's not Valve that is directly driving the conversation.

I want to make sure that I'm super clear about this -- my posts have been about the state of the game, not the state of any one person's future. The competitive game itself is in a better place now than ever before. We finally have developer support! They're building matchmaking, they're actively working on the game, and I'm very hopeful for the future.

If you're looking to TF2 as the start of your big esports career, it's probably not the right game for you. But then again TF2 has never been about growing your huge esports future. It's been a passion project of all of ours since the beginning. The fact that some people have used TF2 to get places is just icing on the cake. The game isn't in a perfect state but it's playable, and it's being actively worked on. That's all that we can hope for at this time.

Money, esports fame, and huge streaming numbers can come later. Let's just focus on enjoying the present and growing our game as best we can. If you're interested in directly talking to Valve, just do what the redditors do:

http://puu.sh/rGdg8/61740e4c45.png

http://puu.sh/rGd8Q/8c16f157ca.png

Make posts on reddit and address the developers, then discuss your issues with the larger community.

seems like for most people their patience has run out, understandably. we've tried for years to hold ourselves up, but we haven't seen the growth needed to make anything resembling a real esport.

last year Valve finally acknowledged our existence, but I'd argue that it's too late and that like clockwork said, they've pushed us back 6 years by being very out of touch with what makes 6s tf2 doable.

the map pool, lack of class limits, and lack of much needed weapon changes that came with the mym update is concerning.

I think any invite player can look at a map pool and pick out those that don't belong.(we moved on from old viaduct 4 years ago but here it is with matchmaking). That same invite player can look at a weapon and say why it's "downside" is not actually a downside(hello atomizer). class limits are going to be something that might require experimentation, but again it's concerning that valve still thinks they are unnecessary for a competitive format.

I think what it comes down to is that Valve needs to move quicker. The proposed "I take a step, you take a step" and meeting in the middle seems like a nice idea, if it had started 6 years ago. Now, since Valve has thrown out a lot of our ideas, Valve needs to take 3 steps. We need to see that changes are happening.

BUT I think that at this point, maybe hope and patience are all we have left. let's face it if we're still playing tf2 competitive in 2016 we love it enough that clinging to it and hoping for changes are probably what we were going to do anyways.

I think you misunderstand. I realize my personal investment in this game is irrelevant, and it's almost insulting that you're implying that I think I hold any power over this game. I care more about the effect blind faith has on the players, rather than the game.

You have to define what you mean by the word "cares." Is caring creating a ridiculously primitive matchmaking client and endangering its success by barely using the beta for anything substantial? Maybe if your justification is, "they put it in the game, didn't they?" For many, I don't think that definition would suffice. Even your phrasing for this paragraph is ridiculous. Why are you comparing the wishes of players for open communication to an explicit promise for a TI? Are you placing a "TI for TF2" in the realm of possibility? If that's the case, you have a lot of explaining to do. The only thing people really wish for in terms of open communication is acknowledgement of the "work" you say the TF2 community is doing by bashing their heads into a wall a thousand times in their average mm game of the day.

Then they're fucking idiots.

Listening to /r/tf2 won't get you a well balanced competitive mode, it will get you a broken mess of a game. Oh wait...

Cares to me is spending a majority of their day developing the game for us. Looking at the patch notes for the last 4 months, I can confidently say that the developers are making changes that are moving the game in the right direction. They're spending their time making the game that I want to see. They're putting in casual matchmaking with a leveling system. I love it and use it all the time. They're putting in competitive matchmaking and balancing the game. Needs work but hey it's progress. They haven't done one thing that I disagree with except very specific balance changes and even then that's nitpicking. That's caring to me. Maybe they're not working at the pace that some people want but they're doing the best they can with the resources and the size of the team that they have and that's all I can ask of them.

The rate of growth is slow and sometimes even negative but at least they're trying. Plus, what other choice do we have? The only other choice is to switch games / do something else.

I mean... they're giving us badges right? :D I've played over 300 games and mine is rank 18.

I agree that they were out of touch with our community, but they weren't going to pretend like they knew what was going on with our competitive game either. At the same time, they couldn't blindly follow the voice of a small community and trust their valuable IP with us. They had to instead test it on their own and find out what works for themselves, which is why you see them experimenting with maps like swiftwater and unlocking the class limits. While I'm a little upset that they didn't trust us, I can't blame them for doing things their own way.

Also, keep in mind that Enigma acknowledged that they had already started on matchmaking in 2014 and they were going to make that game mode whether Enigma and crew had visited or not. The only thing that the April 2015 visit did was confirm the existence of matchmaking for the community, and that update took an additional year to release. In other words, Valve works slowly.

Hm... it's tough to say. Do they really need to move quicker? Will their game die if they don't?

My guess is that they don't need to move quicker. The game has lasted this long with only a few major patches each year, and the people who play TF2 as such diehard fans that they can avoid patching the game for MONTHS and the game still won't die. In addition, they can experiment with random things like mann vs machine, contracts, and killing off community servers with matchmaking and the game STILL won't die. To top it all off, they're rich. It's not like they're going to run out of money and will be unable to pay their developers. My best guess is that they can afford to wait.

Given that knowledge, I think it's safe to say that we won't be seeing the rapid changes that many competitive players are hoping for. Instead we'll see slow improvements made over the course of 1-2 years.

Competitive players have waited long enough. Hell, it hasn't even been three years since I first started playing tf2 and I'm getting to the point where it just isn't worth it for me to spend time getting good at a game where the higher level players all leave every year and there are no actual tournaments to speak of. I dislike the casual aspects of overwatch but at least there's a chance that I could get some actual competition where people don't spout shit like 'oh we don't scrim much/are offclassing/don't care about the game' whenever they lose if I switch over.

The competitive scene is dying because of overwatch, and the casual scene is dying because valve is trying to make the game competitive. By the time they finish testing all their stupid ideas regarding matchmaking and either come up with our format or a shittier one where the casuals can play perma spy, they'll have no players anyway.

You're right in that the only chance we have is in TF3 but that's going to take even longer than a fixed matchmaking system and might never happen (also like a fixed matchmaking system) so it's getting to the point where it doesn't really make sense for anyone to keep wasting their time on this game anymore.

I'm pretty sure clockwork cares a lot more about this game than most people and even he's gone to play overwatch because it just doesn't make sense not to, even if it is a much worse game in many respects.

Because it has.
Every possible format has been extensively play tested with multiple seasons.

5v5 is to sparse
4v4 even more so to the point it that ruins basic class balance
8v8 is to many to organize, impossible to lan, and difficult to schedule
9v9 even more so than 8v8 and impossible to make a MM system for as wait times would be horrendous

Class limits are a absolute necessity in a class based game. Even Overcuck has them.

Valve needs to get there head out of there ass and actually take a good long look at what the competitive TF2 community has created. There silent communication style DOES NOT WORK for TF2 because none of the devs are even competent at this game. It would help a bunch if at least one of the devs took the time to play competitive TF2 at a reasonable level (IM/High). Hell i am certain the TF2 community would be more than willing to help in such matters. That fact of the matter is if you are not familiar with the game then you are not qualified to be developing it.

They've already introduced many, many stupid ideas into the game since it first came out lol (bumper cars, pass time, that thing with the UFO), and the game is goofy as hell. You'd be hard pressed to argue that stupid ideas are killing off TF2's playerbase. And when you say that "they'll have no players anyway" I assume you mean that competitive players will have up and quit the game, but we've already seen that happen a million times before. Legends like Reptile, Platinum, and Yz50 have quit. Community figures like CB (founder of MGE), Graham (founder of CommFT), Enigma (founder of TFTV), and Lange have quit. The game isn't reliant on any single community individual, and that's why I'm convinced that it won't die.

They at least got the player numbers right. They obviously have the 6v6 matchmaking, but if you recall, they also hinted at 9v9 in beta before they scrapped it due to the large team sizes not working out in matchmaking. So they've got the team sizes figured out, although Sigafoo is obviously not convinced. The rest of us are so now we need to figure out class limits.

Can you really justify having class limit 2 on some classes and class limit 1 on others? Has anyone tried playing with all of the unlocks and all of the classes unlocked? No? Okay let's try it! Nobody will die, and at least we can cross this format off of our list if it sucks. That's their mentality. And then they talked to competitive players like B4nny, Truktruk, and such just to make sure that it'd be playable. If it sucks, tell them why it sucks. If it really really sucks, run 4 heavies and try to get a high win percentage. That'll show them.

Really broken things like hacking and abandonment have been addressed, 4 heavies I'm not convinced that it has been a major problem thus far. In fact at the highest levels of matchmaking I haven't seen people run more than 2 medics on a team, and generally speaking people are running standard compositions because those are the strongest. 5 scouts on a team is actually not that good, and 5 medics on a team isn't really that good either. Even running something like 3 demos doesn't seem to be that broken when I've played it.

If you're looking for support, you probably can't get it from the hardcore old players. We've been neglected for years and alternatives to TF2 are starting to pop up; people are growing up and losing their time to real life, etc etc. If you want to build the TF2 scene, you're probably better actually starting off from scratch. The "old guard" is for the most part done with the hope of comp TF2 becoming big or important. The people posting have played the game for over 5 years, some like me personally since launch. There's no more optimism that will come from old players. We've accepted its fate. If TF2 is really going to grow, it's going to have to come from something new, not from us.

The closest scene I could ever see TF2 striving for is like smash melee, with 0 developer help, it's fun to spectate, and you've probably played it although never competitively. But considering TF2 hasn't drawn even close to that level of exposure, I have little faith in it growing from the old players.

They could start with 2 on everything.

Yes. TF2 classes are built to be good at different things.Some of those things are fine with 1 but broken with 2. Other classes are perfectly fine with 2 and in fact make the game pace better than if they where limited to one. We have done prolander before. It was garbage.

Yes
If it was viable we would be doing it already.

That is the problem. WE ARE DYING.

It isn't a very good one.

Yeah lets waste entire seasons with MEME formats! That will totally work! It isn't like the NA TF2 scene is sitting on the precipice or anything! That TOTALLY wont chase off 50+ % of our player base.

Yeah that is why i got paired against the same hacker 3 times in a row yesterday and got a 3 day ban from mm for leaving before the game started because i didn't want to play against or with the same hacker again.

People being terrible at the game or not tryharding and doing things that would make the game less fun for them does not mean that such rules are viable for a actual league where people would be willing to do such things to win. Also as it stands rank means less than nothing.

poor phrasing on my part. I mostly meant that Valve needs to take more steps than us towards a successful competitive format.

I get that the article is meant to demonstrate that TF2 will probably grow in one form or another, but right now I just feel worse about giving up decent success in other games to return to TF2.

At least it's fun and there's a lan coming.

I don't have anywhere else to go myself.
Everything is either a genre i have no interest in (MOBA), incredibly shallow (Overwatch), simply don't find fun (CS:GO), or even deader than we are (Reflex).

Yes. Some classes are broken when stacked. Every class is broken when stacked too much. Wow, that was hard.

Yes.

It sucked.

There is no 'highest level of matchmaking' and there's no point using it to prove anything currently because the ranks don't affect who you're matched with or against, so they're essentially meaningless, and any of us can roll pubbers using any stupid strategy you can think of. That doesn't make it viable, it just proves how useless matchmaking currently is.

IF they actually implement a functioning elo system and IF the matchmaker doesn't do stupid shit like prioritise matching group sizes over actual elo/rank/skill level (because the size of the group you're queued in won't make a fucking difference if people are actually matched with and against the correct ranks) then maybe you'll be able to start talking about what strategies actually work in matchmaking. But if you allow everything then it becomes rock paper scissors. If you want to play a rock paper scissors style slow-paced fps, overwatch is over there.

Same. I figured since we're all in the same boat, I might as well share what I know.

I understand where you are coming from but i think you have far to much confidence and optimism for the TF2 team.

The biggest issue with the TF2 devs is that they don't even play there own game.