Okay, new update for Team Fortress 2 and everyone already ran the "ruined forever" alarm before the 24 hours mark. Nothing new there.

But wait, what if this time the "ruined forever" alarm wasn't just TF2's community usual gag for update? In fact, the Team Fortress 2 team actually screwed the game this time. How? By eliminating the public servers, or pubs and pretty much alienating the biggest chunk of their fanbase.

To be honest, I'm done. Not because of the gameplay changes, I actually liked most of those, but because it's became all but impossible to play TF2 anymore. Hell, my last game was in a Luxembourg server. Luxem -fvcking- bourg. I live in Chile, practically at the other side of the map. I was blind with lag! The matchmaker is crap and I can't even choose a gamemode or map I like!

Let's be honest here, the TF2's majority are the quickplay gamers. Log in, search for a gamemode/map, play as long as you may and get out. No long waiting for competitive playing or somehow even longer waiting for "casual" playing. In the last years, I've stayed mostly on Valve servers because the community ones are either mods or plagued to the brim with trolls. There's no middle ground there. Valve servers are were the only ones where most of us could join an actual game of Team Fortress 2 without a tonload of friendlies or trollclasses or a constant flow of 4chan levels of stupidity going on. I know we were a majority because each time I joined the servers were full.

Look, here's someone at reddit who put it better:

What's your main playerbase, Valve? Quickplay pubbers. That's right. Not redditors, not active TF2 community members, not competitive maniacs, not idle/fun/trade scrubs, but quickplay pubbers.

Here's a list of things you could do in quickplay pubs:

Choose the map you play on
Kick annoying people
Kick hackers
Play multiple matches with and against roughly the same set of people
Play multiple matches without having to rejoin all the time
Play multiple matches on the same map
Make friends and short-term acquaintances
Switch teams to level the playing field
Switch teams to teamstack or continue playing with your friends and short-term acquaintances
(optional, with high skill and/or friends) Pubstomp
Leave the server when you are interrupted in meatspace or by something else
Switch servers when it has a map you don't like
Leave the server when you are not enjoying the match anymore
Join a pub without any feeling of commitment
Join a pub without being expected to contribute
Since community servers are mostly horrible nowadays (looking at you here, Valve) and many quickplay pubbers don't even know how to use the server browser and have never seen it before, all these bullet points have been essentially REMOVED from the game now. These things were the things that made TF2 fun for truly casual play. Your "casual" matches are a horrible and twisted imitation of this, with regards to the word "casual". Not saying "casual" matches are bad, in fact I really really like the idea, but I wouldn't want to have to do that ALL THE TIME. I see the "casual" matches as an intermediate level in between mindless pub fun and committing to an all-out srs bsns ranked match, and I would surely play "casual" often alongside pubs, but we need the pubs too, because the pubs are pretty much the only way to enjoy the game without commitment or prolonged frustration.

For me, and for many others, losing quickplay pubs is a huge deal, way bigger than gaining casual play or matchmaking. Please, just let us have all three.

I see absolutely no reason you had to remove quickplay and Valve pubs, and I see no reason you can't just immediately add them again.

Please, Valve, if you don't readd quickplay as fast as possible (at the very top of the "Find a game" menu), it'll really really hurt TF2 in the long run. We don't want that to happen. Please just do it. It's not much effort, and your playerbase would appreciate it so much.

EDIT: Autobalance! Oh god I actually miss autobalance.

Removing pubs Wasn't a good idea. I waited 4 hours and didn't play while I could have played 5 pub games In the same amount of Time.

For the people worried that Overwatch could kill Team Fortress2, don't worry. Valve killed it themselves.

EDIT: Autobalance! Oh god I actually miss autobalance.

Autobalance is something I will never miss.

5346473 Pretty much. I loved TF2 for how quick and accessible it was, along with the random, fun bullshit you never saw in other games. I loved Spycrabs, Hoovies, and Dance Servers. Now? None of those are allowed to exist because of this bullshit.
I'll always love TF2 for the fond memories it gave me, and the fantastic characters. But the game itself is dead. I'll still keep my items though, I'm too proud of some of them to simply sell them off on the market.

5346480
I can't even get into a "casual" match. It's just not happening. And if "competitive" is going to throw me in a server at the other side of the globe so I'm paralyzed with lag, then we're done here.

5346681
I do. In the Luxembourg game, most of the other team ragequit and it ended up being a 3 vs 1 match. In a pub or com server, it would have been solved very quickly with anyone changing teams r with autobalance. But since both of those can't be anymore, it stayed as a 3 vs 1, rendering the match as pathetic for everyone involved.

5346740
Yeah, me too. All the metal I never used, all the extra weapons I could turn into metal and the six or eight hats I got. Hell, even the simpler ones like my Gibbus or the untradable Huntsman have a lot of memories attached to them. My one real regret in all of this is that the bot's AI isn't that good to stick with single player.

5346473 I want to hold out hope that this update will not be permanent, but a part of me fears it will be. If so, all I can say is this:

5347049
I said that I won't miss autobalance, it's false. I miss it because it was able to quickly fix team composition problems. I will never miss being randomly switched from the winning team to the losing team 5secs before we win.

5347208 That much I hated about the autobalance, but for the most part it was fair and unbiased. It seems to me like Valve tried to fix problems that weren't even there.

5347116
I do want to be as hopeful, but in all honesty, I want to track down whoever thought this was a good idea and kick him/her in the gut until my shoe disintegrates. Then change foot and keep on kicking.

5347208
Okay, the last-second-fvck-you autobalance was annoying, but all in all, it was way more bearable than being randomly tossed into a server without knowing the gamemode or map.

5347239
Valve's way of "solving" a very problem i creating a new one so big that the original one looks lesser in comparison.

Should we tell them that Mann Co. and Aperture's business practices are actually bad ideas in the read world?

5347348 Well, there's a petition circulating the Steam Community to bring back everything that the update took away, and I've posted a rant there and on my Deviant Art page. It seems the only way to hold any major company responsible in this online world, is to make a big stink and embarass them until they undo what they did. It shouldn't have to be like this, but it seems we may have no choice. It's a shame because, until now, Valve seemed like a good company. This was an update no-one wanted OR asked for.

5347380
The one and only thing everyone and their grannies want and have been asking from Valve for Team Fortress 2 is new weapons. No more cosmetics. No more cases. Definitely NOT more reskins.

Just new. Fvcking. Weapons.

5347499 Indeed. Instead it seems we've got yet more game modes even though "Special Delivery" and "Team Extermination" were confined to only one map, and even then no-one seemed to be playing "Special Delivery" anymore. Meanwhile, "Mannpower", which actually seemed promising, seems to have gotten the shaft treatment.

5347499
We also wants new maps. At least I do.

Valve is listening, they're issuing patches to remove the cool down penalty for leaving, and will later offer you the chance to select the map you want. Let's hope they're sincere, then we can all breath a sigh of relief and go back to playing the game and laugh about the whole thing.

5346473 If Infinite Warfare is better than this update, I will lose the microscopic shred of hope In Humanity I have left.

5347890
And there's the main problem. If it was a good system with some problems, then patching is the logical step. But when it's a system everyone is hating and the patches aim to making it like the previous one, it's pointless to not just avoid all the trouble and go back to the previous one. Valve i s being amazingly childish to not just admit the mistake and keep on trying to force it. It's a colossal lose of time, resources and the patience of users, because each day the matchmaker is there and the quickplay isn't, it means another drop of users who are quitting.

5348439
Let's put it this way: The update actively prevents players to joining matches. If CoD's players can join a game in less than half an hour, it's already four times quicker than TF2's matchmaker, therefore more efficient and subjectively better.

5349637 They should just put "Meet your match" into competitive, scrap this update, and put things back to how they were. Still, at least now they're going to patch it, and hopefully within time the wait times will drop. If they can't at least fix that, no one's going to be able to play the game.

5350115 They did fix some parts, though not entirely.

The first match I joined ended in a team count of 2 vs. 10. To find that match a lot less time that before.

5349637 If getting on an A:SE sever is faster, that shows a huge issue.

A:SE is Ark: Survival Evloved btw.