They didn't, can you link the config?

https://www.google.com/search?q=joke

*DEAD* FROYO b4nny: !pause

you misunderstand the post

That's the 'low violence' version of the blood particles. If you want you can replace it with the blood particles by enabling all of the violence_ cvars. Not sure if there's any way to get rid of both.

You can try cl_showerror 2 to see if there are prediction errors

cl_disablehtmlmotd in tf2 is enough to prevent that lol, you don't have to disable chromium in steam.

Regardless though, it doesn't solve the problem. The ugc mge server is a laggy mess with its MOTD or without it, there's not too much difference.

You're saying the "-no_texture_stream" launch option affected performance for you by over 25%?

Next time it happens, try to get a screenshot/recording of net_graph 4, whether or not it's a network issue should be readily apparent from that.

It's hard to imagine it being a network issue when chat still works while you're frozen, voice chat still works while you're frozen, and you can connect to other servers fine. It's possible that large packets aren't making it somewhere along the way due to MTU issues or similar, but that point is definitely not at your wireless card.

Nope, certainly not that.

It's most likely an issue with the server you're playing on (perhaps caused by plugins), unless you experience it on all servers.

Of course. I'm really not sure what changed. If you have a specific demo file that should work, send it and I can try playing it back.

Seemingly so, the only things I would have changed was I tried killing steam after starting tf2 to see if demos would play then (they didn't, it crashed), and I also tried replacing steam_api.dll and steamnetworkingsockets.dll in the old version with the versions from the latest release of tf2.

I reverted everything I did, yet somehow demos play back fine now without crashing tf2. The demos I tested were the mastercomfig benchmark_test.dem and benchmark1.dem from the tftv benchmarks thread, as I knew both of those are supposed to be able to play in this version of tf2.

You're right, same for me, yet another crash when trying to actually start playing a demo. Probably also Steam related, no clue how to get around it though.

Edit: demos started to play back fine for me now, I don't know what changed

It seems to work still, but as before you continue to need Steam in offline mode. Steam in online mode -> crashes.
Steam not running at all -> crashes.