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 release, and was desperately awaited by many members of the TF2 community specifically because the consequences of that aforementioned 2016 update [further viewing material:
https://youtu.be/IZpuYF__NUU] that were utterly forgotten by the community. The video stands as a very calmly-worded, neutral, but descriptive deep-dive into TF2's development, TF2's release state, TF2's early updates, the culture within Valve relating to moneymaking practices, the TF2 community's culture, the failings of Meet Your Match, and even a 40-minute shamefest saying "so many TF2 youtubers actively were fine with the game being made worse for a stupid grift" thereafter.
Nowadays the bitching surrounding the game is split into two camps. A seeming minority of almost neoliberal-like individuals who seem to have issues grasping reality - I compare them to neoliberals because trying to explain to them that an MMR-matchmaking system for a game as uncontrolled and loose as TF2 is stupid and time-wasting, is like explaining to your boomer relatives that no you cannot buy a $600k house on your current salary. It's literally impossible, they deny reality at every turn for some reason, and there is for whatever reason institutional bias in their favour. Probably something to do with the Emporium, a literal cartel surrounding the TF2 workshop, because money is the usual motive for bullshit like this.
This camp of people has been coming out with progressively worse and worse takes from the large YouTubers occupying said camp. I'm not going to post the videos, but I recall two particularly bad videos which came out this week that clearly had a script written by someone who wanted to make a point - one of these videos is two fucking hours, and is well-edited throughout. But… these people came out with some of the worst takes imaginable. The TF2 community had been unironically protesting and petitioning Valve to make positive changes to the game. Most of them worked out exactly as the community had wanted. One individual thinks that now the game is barely playable, that players should stop pestering Valve for improvements. Their reasoning? "Valve just won't do it". Another YouTuber wanted to defend the Competitive TF2 community by saying they weren't directly responsible for the Meet Your Match update. Obviously true, if not a little willing to sweep events under the rug here-and-there. But when this person spent literal hours trying to compare Team Fortress 2, a first person shooter from 2007, to fucking Street Fighter II - including a dissertation of a few of its game mechanics, over the span of half an hour out of a 2-hour long video - it's clear that they have very little evidence to go off of.
The other camp is the increasingly populist camp of people who just want Valve to unfuck the game lol. I bring this up because it's vaguely similar to a very burgerpunk-coded concept of class politics.