hey so uuuhhhhh teensy little correction you can disregard the final chapter because as it turns out, TF2's player counts have remained stagnant since 2018 and the "player growth" was pretty much entirely bots. i'd thought that was only part of it and didn't know of the truly absurd scale of these bot farms, but zesty jesus' "TF2: Nobody's Home" video (watch that if you haven't already) proves pretty conclusively that every new peak player count was 100% from new bots with that being said i still am glad to see that TF2's real player counts haven't decreased despite years of no major updates, but this is still a certified oof moment

People don't realize that official servers were flooded with spinbots from the very first day casual rolled out. What an atrocity this update was.

MvM players queuing up for a simple tower defense gamemode only to end up in a competitive match sounds hilarious.

I like that they kept adding Turbine into Comp mode, it’s like a kid trying to sneak in a candy bar into the cart multiple times after mom said “no”

"Meet Your Match and it's consequences have been a disaster for the TF2 playerbase." - Heavy Kaczynski

One of the best videos you've put out. I think people really underestimate the damage that removing the "Quickplay" button did.

I think a lot of the increased player counts are not only due to the pandemic, but more specifically because Overwatch fell off a cliff in terms of enjoyability and reputation. A lot of long-time TF2 players, including myself, moved to OW in 2016 and after how horrific MYM was there wasn't ever really a reason to go back. If the mistakes here seem egregious, you could make a 4 hour video analyzing just how badly Blizzard failed Overwatch in every conceivable way. I know I definitely was a player that came back during that 2021-ish period of time. It was refreshing! Great video, and really well put together. I'm glad this game did not die off completely.

it's so surreal to remember a time where valve cared about tf2

As someone that started playing during the backend of updates (August 2014), I lived through that decline but didn’t really know what was going on. This video shed light on that and it was incredibly well made, thank you!

As someone that quit after MYM but started playing again recently and is having a blast, TF2 will truly never die. The community won't let it. I think TF2 is mostly a victim of valve's company structure, which isn't well suited for supporting a game long term. This is unlikely to change, but I hope valve realizes how much life TF2 still has. The best outcome in my opinion would be for them to pass it on to a dedicated third party team.

I miss the golden era of TF2.

I still can't get over the fact that they forced matchmaking on casual players. I hate playing casual so much now that I've only reached level 52 in 7 years, and my review is negative since then.

This update was truly a terrible mess, and I'm glad a lot have not experienced this mess of a time.

I miss the server browser so much. Also worth noting that Valve servers not showing up in the browser effectively kills all niche gamemodes. Imagine being able to instantly hop into the most populated Mannpower, Pass time, Doomsday or Degroot Keep server if you love those gamemodes or just want to try them out. Instead you can either sit in the lobby for hours waiting to get put into one of these modes if you queue for them exclusively or you can get put in them once in a blue moon by chance if you add them to your list of other maps. What a travesty.

Knowing how many bots there are in TF2 makes the player count celebration in this video come off as horribly misinformed.

Ah, yes, the update that made me QUIT the game, infamous MYM. How could I forget it. For real, I LEFT TF2 for Overwatch wholeheartedly back then. The only time that I willingly uninstalled TF2. (I came back few months later when Valve cleaned up casual, due to how fast OW community became toxic because of comp, though) It's honestly mind blowing how TF2 survived it and started to flourish in the aftermath. Maybe, sometimes, trying to follow the hot trend like going competitive isn't an answer. Anyway, thank you so much for reminding me of it. Salute to your persistent of digital-mining those reference videos, too! Made me real nostalgic ngl

1:12:40 Yeah, about that...

Shoutout to everyone who played on the hungry hoovy community and trade server. I don’t know where you all are now but I hope you’re all doing well

I will never forgive Valve for doubling down on matchmaking. It is, and was, the biggest mistake they ever made.

11:12 That's literally what Left 4 Dead 2 and Warhammer: Vermintide 2 does now. You select Quickplay and the game looks for a player-made lobby for you, this includes community servers for L4D2.

You really hit the nail on the head on how bad MYM devastated TF2 community and led Valve to abandon the game. TF2 is the kind of game you can goof off and have fun any which way you want depending on what type of player you are and Valve almost completely destroyed that with Competitive and Causal matchmaking (and poor UI design :P). Casual is okay now but it is extremely painful when you keep getting matched with bots, especially now with Scream Fortress XV. I still try to play on community servers that aren't 24/7 2fort or dustbowl classwars whenever I can.

lister is like if ricther overtime actually played the game

Oh god, I remember pressing "Random" in Quickplay and jumping of joy when being put into a freak fortress server. Me and my brother had not figured out how the server browser worked until much much later. So getting this seemingly 1 in a million chance felt so nice. Wonderful nostalgia

Glad to see people are finally recognizing how devastating the removal of quickplay to community servers and how matchmaking actually facilitated the rise of bots. Whenever I mention MyM and how bad it was people always seem to either have no negative opinion on it or deny it's awful repercussions. I see people are finally connecting the dots. The system really should be removed.

The bit at the end about TF2 being the last bastion of old-school multiplayer gaming is absolutely true. I began playing TF2 in late 2021 after getting a laptop for Christmas to use for college the next year, I decided to give TF2 a shot. I had been interested in TF2 because I'd heard about it in passing and also I had watched LazyPurple's "How It FEELS" series, but no other reason other then that. But after I played it, even being a stupid fresh-install who maybe got 1 kill a game if I was lucky, I was completely and totally hooked. TF2 (the game itself, not Valve) respects it's players. While it has all those microtransactions, they're all totally optional, and while they _are_ a bit predatory, I think MTX are always going to be a bit predatory no matter what. And the community, while it has many, MANY blemishes, I love it. The memes, the inside jokes, the KZfaq content, all of it- It's what keeps this game going. Without this community, it would have died. I've long given up any hopes of a new major update. I really wish Valve would do something new already, and I suppose it hasn't been long enough to tell yet, but if Summer 2023 doesn't get Valve back to making content for TF2 I truly don't think anything else will. But Summer 2023 also proved that that's OK. The maps added in Summer 2023 were all bangers, even if some like Venice weren't amazing, maps like Selbyian and the VSH maps are awesome, and despite its problems I'm glad Valve seems OK with adding more community-made gamemodes like we saw with Zombie Infection in Scream Fortress XV. TF2 is the single most resilient game I have ever seen, and after everything that's happened and continues to happen with it, I truly believe TF2 will be around for many many more years to come. The community refuses to go down without a fight.

there have been people who have gotten hooked on the most addictive drugs known to humanity and still managed to overcome their addiction before a TF2 player truly stopped playing.

As someone who played TF2 Back in June 2008 thanks to the Orange Box I got as a birthday present, All I can say to those who first played the game after Jungle Inferno is that I SERIOUSLY feel sorry for you! You missed out on the GOLDEN AGE when Valve put SO MUCH dedication to TF2! So many updates, comic lore, merchandise, and other games on Steam wanted to promote their content in the form of TF2 weapons and cosmetics and the game was at the top of the world. Playing TF2 after Jungle Inferno for the first time is best described as going to a friends party after hearing how amazing and wild it is and by the time you showed up, the party was over hours ago and the only people left are a handful of passed out people, trash everywhere, and the house being a mess where YOU have to make the best of it. It is a never ending purgatory until Valve does something about it and the best this year is the new official VSH and ZI modes and the 100 man servers.

I still maintain the position that this is one of, if not the worst, updates a game has ever received.

fun fact: casual matchmaking actually has a mmr/elo system, but its so bad that its been practically non functional for several years my elo is still only in the 1300s

I've been playing since a month before the Scout update. You hit the nail on the head here. I don't need new weapons, new maps, or new hats. As much as I'd like them, I don't even *need* good balance changes, or bug fixes. I just need to join a server, and have a good time. And the easier that is for everyone, the better the game will do.

my god you are genuinely on of the best people in the community like your content is awesome keep it up

IT DID DIE. The soul part. MYM did and irreparable damage to how tf2 play fundamentally and killed the micro community that build up when you keep playing on the same server for 3h. With many many other things.

>valve makes TF2 f2p and has community servers on quickplay >"NOOO NOW OUR COMMUNITY SERVERS WILL BE OVERRUN WITH BAD NEW PLAYERS" >valve makes quickplay only search official servers by default >"NOOO NOW OUR COMMUNITY SERVERS WILL DIE FROM A LACK OF NEW PLAYERS" Hysterical.

This has become one of the hardest videos to watch for me. it took me 3 sittings to fully watch the video without feeling actual pain, the fact that TF2 could have remained such an amazing game if only VALVe didn't rush the MYM update because of the entire internet hyping for overwatch, and then dropping the game on life support after another update without fixing anything. and now we just get the same boring updates with the same boring, saturated and not-fitting cosmetics and warpaints AND maps on the queue that doesn't feel like it should be on TF2, and it hurts me so much that it will remains like this forever. YES the game is not dead, it's more alive than ever, but it hurts so much that it's in this state, and for me the TF2 i know it's dead.

its really funny that valve included turbine three separate times in comp, why do they love that map so much? lol

I love that you put in a lot of effort into explaining and exploring Valve’s thought process on all of these changes, but when it comes to Turbine staying in the comp maps, you’re just like “ok guys, wtf?”

You know that feeling when your nose is stuffed but then gets clear and you can breathe well once again? Damn, this video has really clear a lot of things to me, or at least a very good summary.

Fun EFT2L fact: from 2007-2008 the class limit on Demomen was TWO!! (2) LOL

Honestly, probably the biggest issue I have with Auto-balance is that it happens at some of the worst times. I can understand if the game is halfway done and they need to balance the teams, but it really sucks when I'm switched teams right before I'm about to win. Perhaps they could do some tweaking so that if one team is on the verge of winning the auto balance won't occur until the start of the next round.

"Fuck f2ps! Get em out of our servers! >:(" "ok" "wait no come back ; ;" I like how they did 11 major stress tests to do nothing but fix lobby bugs from them reusing the mvm lobby

MYM sounds similar to meme, which means valve made that update as a joke

I have had a vendetta against the concept of matchmaking since it (mostly) ruined this game, and god damn do I appreciate this video, especially the point that the outdated level of player freedom that tf2 still provides is exactly the thing that has kept it alive, it blows my mind how many modern games don't even let you pick what map you want to play on

I'm glad you're here and putting to words, exactly the sort of series of missteps that caused TF2 to fall from grace. I've often had this conversation with people and it's exhausting because it was a series of decisions and not so much one singular event, so I'm glad that I have a single video I can point to that lays out everything so well. Though I'm baffled at your endorsement of the spy speed buff which was probably the second-worst change made to the game after the Meat Your Match update. But I have to comment on this here at 53:42 . The idea that matchmaking "regularly surpassed 15 minutes" is an incredible understatement. Matchmaking at this time regularly hit more than /2 hours/. I'm a North America player, East coast for anyone wanting context and thinking this is about an unpopulated region. When the update launched I would not be able to find a game /for hours/ before I gave up trying. I watched movies on my TV while idly checking to see if it had connected me to a match yet. The day I was able to watch LOTR: Return of the King and the matchmaker still hadn't connected me to a match, I gave up and uninstalled. I didn't want to use the matchmaker at all, but as you so rightly pointed out, Valve choked the life out of the community servers that kept the game alive up until that point in time. I felt I really had no choice but to leave the game, as it was quite literally unplayable. Imagine being an old school TF2 player, spent years casually going from server to server, able to avoid obvious cheaters with ease, to being forced into a match where you knew if you left you wouldn't be able to get another match that day. That's what really killed it for me. Meat Your Match, amongst many other horrors, basically forced you to stay in a match with cheaters because it was unlikely you'd be able to get into another match that day. So it's either play with cheaters and/or bots, or don't play at all. Or, exactly as you put it at 1:15:30 . Couldn't spectate sus players to make a better determination if they were cheating, couldn't switch teams after an autobalance and teams got even again so you could go back to playing with your friends (autobalance back then wasn't so big of a problem because you could switch back after teams balanced out again, so autobalance was an inconvenience at best and didn't ruin matches back then). The match was ruined and there was nothing you could do about it except suffer for even longer because the alternative was another attempt at matchmaking which would take hours. What a godawful update. I honestly don't know how the game survived for the weeks where people could literally not play it. But I suppose there's something to be said for player loyalty. 1:06:20 worth noting that this feature still doesn't work most of the time. As someone who still gets dragged into playing, my friend can in be in a server that is half-empty for over five minutes and the game still won't let me join. Out of dozens of times we tried to connect to one-another to start playing immediately, this has only worked twice to get me into a match with a friend. We've given up on it as a feature and instead of us joining into each other's games, we just immediately quit our match and re-queue so we can actually start playing together.

I started playing TF2 back in 2010 and never really stopped. With that perspective in mind, this is among the best recounts of these events I’ve seen. I often see the old heads blame the Uber update for the game’s decline while jungle inferno newcomers blame bots for it and it’s honestly a series of unfortunate events which led us here. I do regularly think back to the events of ~2016 and how the air was electric with anticipation in the community. With things like the global whitelist, competitive letters, and even casual KZfaqrs hyping the release of MYM it felt like all hands were on deck and that something amazing was about to happen, a golden age was on the way. Sadly, the crushing arrival of MYM really scarred the player base. In hindsight, MYM was likely my single largest let down in gaming simply because I’m still playing TF2 today and feeling it’s effects (or lack-thereof).

To me, what made TF2 so enduring was the entire franchise of software and content built into it. GMOD pulls in custom models as well as allow content creators to create new ideas relatively easily. Source Film Maker, while incredibly outdated, still enables new film makers to experiment on a well researched and tested piece of software. TF2 pluggins and now Code enables a wide variety of games and other ideas to be made a reality, with the most popular one being VSH. Finally, the community content creators who develop different communities to mess around in. For me, that means Uncle Dane for super serious, and Shoenic and Solarlight for goofing off. Skial is awful to deal with.

The stickyjumper was apparently nerfed because normally you can only stickyjump with two stickies or you die

A fantastic, fantastic video. I truly believe you're one of the best tf2 content creators on this entire platform. This is by far one of the best, nuanced takes I've seen on the history of the game and why it's in its current state, and as someone who only joined well after jungle inferno it's suddenly starkly apparent what happened.

I seriously wish Valve reverted the meet your match changes honestly. Being able to just get on a server with the map you wanted, the amount of player you wanted and on the team you wanted was great.

It may have not died in player count, but it did die for many players leaving the game. Many of my friends who were into competitive left the game because of that update, and because of the decline in quality Valve have been ignoring even many years before that. If they wanna pump more life into TF2 they got to bring back Quickplay that was for community servers, and add options to filter certain servers.

At least Valve has accuratedly recreated the match making experience. Wasting. Your. Time. 5 cancels, 10 dodged just to get placed into a match with an AFK and 3 account buyers.

my happiness lasted 157 days, the time in between valve opening official servers in Brazil and the release of Meet your Match

That's crazy I spent my entire childhood playing this game completely unaware of this history.

As someone who started playing tf2 somewhere around 2021 and is still learning many playstyles and unlocks. It's really interesting to hear about the better (and uh worse) days this game I love has seen.

As someone who missed the golden age, of tf2 by literally 5 years. This video is amazing, and helps me understand why this update was so hated. Amazing video

Thanks for covering the f2p change and how annoying older players found it. Ive just recently gotten back into tf2 casually but it seems like alot of tf2 youtubers dont really cover this part in detail when almost everyone i knew quit and was the day tf2 died for us.

All of the unfettered hate that TF2 community gives to Overwatch is now 100% justified.

I discovered tf2 in mid 2020, and it is weird to imagine the game was once so different. I never experienced big events made by Valve, and never logged on a community server other than jump academy. I can still say I enjoyed my pub time with 300 hours, and a lot of bad spy main frustration too, but I wish I could play and enjoy the quick play experience, which I didn't even know had once existed before today.

Dude, absolutely magnificent video. TF2 has always been my favorite game since 2014 and there are so many things in this vid that I had no idea were a part of TF2. I took a year long break from the game when the botpocolypse occurred and slowly got back into it and I am very happy that the community is still trying to keep the ship afloat. The halloween maps this year like crasher and sanitarium have been so much fun. Also the ever classic Carnival of Carnage.

Its so sad that a _youtuber_ managed to make an incredibly popular server just by adding a class limit and removing random crits. It hurts to think what competitive would have been if valve had just listened to the community

I'm still only about halfway through the video but it's so incredibly thorough and well-edited that I felt the need to comment. Great work!

i was one of those dirty F2Ps that began playing the game for the first time in June 2012. i remember having a small group of irl friends with whom a highlander team that never took off was formed in that era. i very vividly remember that from 2013 on my home server was often the now defunct 24/7 Alzephur Surf, a place that would have never been allowed in the old quickplay rotation and i would have never found if old friends at the time didn't lead me to it. the only reason i stopped playing the game in very early 2015 was that i became homeless, and essentially stayed that way for 5 years. kind of hard to keep playing when you don't even have a place to have a computer. when i became housed again and began playing the game regularly again in spring-summer 2021, i remember being quite overwhelmed at how much everything had transformed about the game. this was in the deep heat of the bot crisis, when it seemed like only casual payload was the sole safe haven (sometime) of casual. watching this, its pretty clear that i was absent for some Pretty Fucked Up Shit. i doubt that i would even be here today if i was playing the game in 2016. what a painful year that appears to have been. i will say this, partially because i think it would get some pretty funny comments: the big secret reason why valve comp matchmaking/meet your match was so heavily bungled? 🎉Capitalism🎉 why did I return when i did? the humor. nothing on earth in the world of gaming makes me laugh like TF2 does. no first person shooter for that matter; this remains the only first person shooter i dedicate myself to playing Because of the humor. ive often called overwatch "TF2 if it was made by the Tiktok voice" because i have observed that it tries way too hard to inflexibly pander to The Hardcore Gamer Who Enjoys Colorful Visuals without investing even the smallest degree in the intricacies of its character (more funny comments ill probably get lol). You will never get the demoman walking up to people, calling them "a bloody sentry", pointing at them laughing and promptly collapsing dead in overwatch. overwatch is not a game you ever hear about people laughing at. TF2 survives because of that humor, and the way it can manifest multifacetedly. the a-posing. the endless funny ways people can die. the way 2fort has practically become a simulation of an insane asylum. the username and cosmetic roleplays. the comms and micspamming. the voicelines and what you can make happen with them. the surviving voice actors themselves, most now in their 70s, using people's love of the voice lines to endlessly bless them with homemade collaborative content. TF2 lifts my spirits and that in turn makes me feel good enough to invent time into playing it the way it was originally intended as well. I'm not The Best player, but i still immensely enjoy myself in a totally unique way, bots be damned. TF2 has so much going for it that in the grand scheme make the bots feel today like a minor obstacle. I want to stick with this game and keep making videos of this game until i become too senile to even do the conga taunt. Valve will one day pull the plug completely on the game, but you and i both know the community will keep the game running on their own for as long as we can, possibly even with valve's blessing. blizzard dumped overwatch 1 after not even a third of TF2's lifespan. TF2 is practically a small secret international treasure at this stage of its life, one of the great little jewels of our planet that alien life will discover and marvel at eons from now

Been playing tf2 for 13 years now, no update got me closer to quitting permanently, the death of the valve servers was awful, no switching teams, no joining from the browser, endless queues to join a friend's game that was in progress.. also the SLOW BUGGY death of the Join Game button through steam for some reason (?), i dont even think its possible any more, if im playing a community server I just have to send the ip and explain to my friends how to use that.. sigh, i wish we could just UNDO casual and bring it back to post 2014 quickplay

i remember quickplay, it was such a better system, it takes me like 5-10 minutes to join a server that I know has a lot of people, like the perks map or the zombie survival one. It's so annoying

No it’s Rome wasn’t built in a day but it did burn in one.

Finally, someone rightfully calls out valve killing community servers as being the root of the death of this once great game

Honestly, even if the launch of MyM went smoother and Valve's comp more were more in line with community standards, the lack of something like CSGO's Overwatch system would've been a serious threat to any longevity the mode could have. What would be the point of trying to grind through the ranks when squads of cheaters could just queue together and run wild with virtually no recourse for legitimate players other than hoping Valve would do manual banning sprees?

Your videos are genuinely a blessing to the TF2 community. I hope this gets more people to realize that comp players have never been the problem.

I miss the days of hanging out on "my community server", hopping on and to see the same people playing everyday, and just hanging out Made it feel like an actual community to be a part of

I first opened the game on October 5th, 2015; the day before the Invasion community update. I didn't start really playing the game until AFTER Meet Your Match. To know that I was only into the game after the good times were over... stings on a level that can't be described.

this video killed all of my hope for a major update I strated playing this game in 2016. my computer died and this why I could play seriously only in 2017 and exactly in 2017 the updates just stoped

I was expecting a video just about Meet Your Match, but this is probably the best history recap of this game I've seen. Great Job!

I connected with some of my greatest friends by finding them in the pre-MyM 5CP Valve servers. We would stay in servers for sometimes hours, following the servers through many map changes and many time extensions. Sometimes we'd hunt each other down on opposite teams with Cabers and taunt after killing, sometimes we'd encourage the entire team to do class wars, most of the time we'd just mess around in a Steam or Mumble call and trash talk each other through the many team scrambles. Eventually we formed our own comp TF2 teams, and even though it's been years since we last loaded into a comp setting together, we still rock out in the same Discord and always have a conversation flowing throughout the day. I remember the day MyM dropped, we did a 6 stack that ended up in Powerhouse and got pretty bored of the experience and wanted to throw gamers on opposite teams to keep games from being back-to-back rolls. Imagine our surprise when not only could we not switch teams, but we couldn't drop into Valve servers like before. Gone forever because, and I totally agree with lister on this, Valve was chasing Overwatch clout and didn't have any confidence in the **9 years** of precedent the game already had. What kills me the most is the promise of a Heavy update and the continuous teasing Valve makes that they're aware of TF2's base existence, but have repeatedly proven unwilling or incapable to do anything. Whether it be the Rick May memorials, the official Twitter account acknowledging #saveTF2, Gabe Newell saying there was a bot response in the pipeline (spoiler: there wasn't), or the fiasco when the official TF2 blog wanting to create another major update for Summer 2023 before immediately backtracking to "update-sized update" and releasing another entirely community fueled Steam Workshop shlop. Valve refuses to say they're done for good on TF2, and I think that's almost entirely because it generates too much money for them, and any sign that the party's over would see a significant drop in revenue. Me, and I think a lot of people, have only a few requests for Valve. Release the Heavy update, remove Casual Mode and restore the system that existed before MyM, and release the final blog post that ends with "we're done for good, signed the TF2 team." The dumb bastards who pushed Casual Mode and Competitive are either gone from the company or come to terms that it was a complete and abject failure by now, for sure. Right? Keep the stupid annual Steam Workshop-fueled updates if you want, push in-game notifications for tournaments and give out medals even, but you're done. Don't tease a Spy vs Engineer update in the works, full stop. Stop waving a potential major update, for the millions of active players to get hyped over, then completely get deflated on when months of radio silence follow for the twentieth time. LEFT 4 DEAD 2 HAS HAD MORE MAJOR UPDATES IN THE LAST 5 YEARS.

I miss community servers so badly. I haven't played TF2 since Meet your Match, it's just not the same man.

casual games are so awful compared to what it was like playing on a valve server. back then people would stay on the server between maps, but now in casual it takes so long between the end of a match, to map switching, to pre-game (which is a thing now for some reason?), to the next map actually starting that everyone leaves games the second they finish to re-queue. Meaning that you never can just sit on a valve server for an hour, getting to know the people on it and making friends haven't even mentioned the removal of joining friends via ad-hoc connections on steam, in casual now you can only play with up to 5 friends whereas before you could all join the same valve server and just make it basically your own for a few hours

Dude's even using Chiptunes from back in that time too... How awesome. That gave me goosebumps 3:00

Can’t emphasise how much I love these video essays man, keep them coming

That fucking shibby2142 opening was an incredible unexpacted slap of nostalgia holy.

I still can't get over my own "golden era" in TF2, 2012-2014, especially around the Love and War update. I had a couple servers I would frequent, one that was vanilla KOTH 24/7 and another that was also vanilla maps but had some really crazy and zany plugins. The people I met there and the laughs I had really do still echo through my mind whenever somebody asks me "What's your favorite game?" and really it was never the mechanics that made me love TF2 so much but like many other people it was the social aspect of the game. It's so sad that there's very few other experiences like it, especially in modern gaming. Cool video dude.

Thank you for making this. TF2 was one of the first games I ever played on PC, over ten years ago. I joined about a year after the game went F2P. I have so many fond memories of various iterations of trade_minecraft and mariokart, of pubbing with my friends after school, of taunt kills, painted gibuses, silly sprays and conga lines. Over ten years later, in no small part due to my frustration with Valve’s mistreatment of this game and my want to do better, I have become a game designer and a Master’s level game scholar. Every now and then I’ll bring up TF2 in front of new students, starry-eyed and eager to share their own interests, and after inevitably clarifying that I’m not talking about Titanfall I heave a big sigh and tell them this very tale. It’s cathartic to look back and remember that I wasn’t the only one who saw the writing on the wall. Hopefully things continue to get better.

Really well made video, the old start menu feels so nostalgic to me :)

Will you ever cover the End of the Line update? I’ve always wondered why the update was a mess and given your dedication of being thorough with all the facts and history moments, it would be a nice other video to watch

2:32 my mom got cancer in 2007. She is still recovering from that day.

still patiently waiting for the server browser to be used commonly again so I can play the fun servers with regulars and allchat and whatever crazy map that shows up.

I've been playing since August 2017 and i guess this makes sense Years of hearing complaints and accusation from both sides of the argument and finally something that eloquently untangles this mess of opinions and events It always fascinated me how this game lives in a constant paradox where its problems, new and old, also reinforce just how great this game is, and it shows: people still make content related to it, the reputation it gained over time and just the sheer amount of players, and it's incredible how this game is really the last great bastion of a game philosopy long gone(although general opinion on esport and competitive focus is slowly changing). I may have missed the golden age, but i was still able to enjoy an experience now almost nonexistant(i'd say Minecraft still has dedicated servers tho), and i'm glad i did As for Valve now, what pains me the most is that i think Blue Moon-sized updates would honestly be fine, but it's kept alive by just one guy that i guess doesn't even have much of a connection with this game(the content of recent updates is mostly not great) and i really don't have that much hope left I truly wish for a reinassance to happen, but until then all i can say is great video, thank you for your job

Not to be that guy but valve servers were already in service prior to the uber update. They just became more popular and the only servers used by quick play around then. (Quickplay used to pull from both community and official servers prior to that.) The real loss for them was when they converted the official servers to the casual servers and no longer allowed direct connection to them through the server browser.

Imagine the timeline if valve kept quickplay but made comp its own seperate mode and adheared to what the comp players wanted, the game coudve thrived as well as having a fun comp mode/scene

Hearing FearofDark music in the background almost gave me whiplash. Awesome music choice. Great video as always!

One major issue with the MYM update and removal of QP that gets overlooked, even in this video, is that even when QP was added you could still manually bring up and join Valve servers on the server list and join them immediately. This meant that even if you were running into bot issues or any other issues on whatever server you joined, you could still easily go somewhere else and continue to play. With MYM, all Valve servers were then utilized to exclusively playing Casual or Competitive matches, which meant you were stuck on whatever server you found with no reliable backup. This also *helps* bots become more effective, because the matchmaking algorithm will regularly favor certain servers, and regularly put you right back into the same match with the same bots that you just left. And, like this video did go over, the tools to fight the bots were also significantly gimped. I don't think anyone looking at the future of TF2 realized this would be the consequence - there was an unspoken belief that Valve would invest in new servers for the competitive scene and that the old Valve servers would still be around. And I think that's what really killed the game for a lot of people - because at least if Valve servers were still around then it wouldn't matter that comp and casual had a bot plague, you could still enjoy the game elsewhere. Now I don't even bother using the match making system at all. I just go straight to the community servers to play.

I'm sorry that my 11th birthday almost killed tf2

At 6:46 is footage from the PS3 version, honestly it's impressive you could even pull that off in it.

Woah! Sat down to watch a good TF2 breakdown and ended up seeing my own vid used as b-roll! Trippy!

So we’ve got at demo knight and combo pyro history video but will be an getting other subclass like battle engine or fat scout

I wish they supported server browser more and encouraged people to use it. Nowadays people get scared at a ton of text on their screen and don't bother to use it because it looks old or is "too complicated". People getting used to modern matchmaking and it's limitations is just sad.

Amazing video as always, lister. I know you mainly blamed Valve's horrendous attempt to implement modern matchmaking into TF2 as the nail in its coffin, but what surprised me the most was the way Valve "gave up" on the game after MYM. In the early 2000's and 2010's, Valve was renowned for their extreme attention to detail and emphasis on quality control for their games, especially on the functionality side of them. But they gave up on the game simply by unironically Rage-Quitting and slapping the weakest bandages onto TF2, leaving it to bleed out especially to this day with the Bot crisis. I'm not convinced that MYM was the primary killer of TF2, SOMETHING must have happened within Valve's company for them to abandon their past standards and practices on high-quality gaming experiences.

Despite everything, I think MYM’s casual is a better version of Quickplay. I’ve been playing since 2010, and Quickplay was QUICK, but I’ve had multiple days where I’ve loaded into countless dead servers, no one to PLAY with. Casual at least guarantees a few people every time you queue, now. Even at its best, Quickplay felt like it had a 70% chance of getting into an empty server.

47:05 *PTSD Flashbacks to the ‘Fixing’ of the Bison.*

keep pushing to get quickplay back. I won't rest til I see it return

This video is another gem but the fact you use Roserade is extra based

The worst update tf2 recieved was the one to bring war paints and nerf all unlocks

2:34 lister really used unreal superhero 3 in a 2023 video! I love you lister ❤ your videos are amazing!