Alright so hi hows everyone doing today, I hope youre doing well. I came here to write a mile-long post bitching about the state of Team Fortress 2, its design, and how commentary around its design has rapidly changed over the past few months.
To introduce people who don't know a shit about TF2; it's basically the game that set in stone the genre of "hero shooter" [Class Shooter] and how it should generally work. Prequels to Team Fortress 2, such as Team Fortress Classic, or Team Fortress [Quake Mod] do exist and show more barebones gameplay, but Team Fortress 2 did the concept so well that it's been solidified as the OG of the genre. The game has been subject to 9 years of pre-release closed-house development [1998 to 2007], 9 years of post-release open-house development in the form of regular updates [2008 to 2017], and then a further 8 going on 9 years of ignorance where there was basically no development and no novel… anything… in the TF2 community [2018 to present].
The biggest implication for (You), random passerby, is that TF2 is a game witha whole bunch of concepts and jargon that are thrown around within the community of TF2 that means something far more specific than what it does outside the TF2 community. For example, when discussing the game's design, "Competitive" is used not just to describe a moment in TF2 where player-versus-player competition is generally increased; be it the Valve-designed mechanic of Dominations [getting 4 kills on a player without said player killing you back, which puts a literal target over your head plus other aesthetics to encourage that player to target you and vice-versa], or the outright existence of organized competitive leagues. In TF2, "Competitive" is used as a shorthand for the rulesets generally used by competitive TF2 leagues. "Valve Competitive" is used as a shorthand for the "competitive TF2 que" that Valve had added in its ill-fated 2016 Meet-Your-Match update. The "Competitive Community" is a semi-existing strata of players who agree that competitive TF2 is good, and its implied at least some of them want "Competitive" to be TF2's main ruleset.
I'm not going to write the whole history, so if you ever have four fucking hours to yourself, I'd recommend watching this video by a local chud of the TF2 community:
https://youtu.be/JNxg5stxlhkThis video was announced months hitherto its
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