Valve doesn't care for the game and neither should you, the state of this now 16 year old title is the worst I have had the displeasure of experiencing it was once a good game and there's is little scrap pieces of it's former self. Being such a broken spaghetti code mess with the worst case of content bloat in video games, it's all so poorly implemented and sticky taped and glued onto the game. But that isn't even the worst of it, the game has it's servers clogged up with bots and cheaters that have been able to mess with honest players for years now and Valve has done next to nothing to elevate the problem except for just outright ignore it. But why should they? people still pour money into this game for incredibly ugly cosmetics and skins that have ruined the gameplay visibility and fun artstyle of the game.

The game's config defaults are completely out of date requires heavy tweaking with something akin to mastercomfig necessary to have a smooth and intuitive experience at the cost of making the game incredibly ugly to disable as much of it's unoptimised graphics as much as it can but does come at the price of introducing more bugs and visibility issues. Going this route isn't able to completely fix the poor framerate regardless of PC due to how single CPU threaded the game is and how it doesn't properly utilise modern GPUs. There is also the incredibly awful matchmaking that adds so much more downtime and results with really poor match quality with onesided matches, for years now every server I queue up in I am stuck with absolutely new or bad players whilst the other team is completely comprised of players just underneath my matchmaking rank resulting in one-sided stomps that are simply not fun to play. I miss the days of joining a dedicated server and instantly playing with no fuss and whilst community servers are present they all exploit faking connection latency to fool unknowing players to keep their servers populated despite making it a poor experience for everyone, nor are any servers close to a vanilla experience.

I could keep going but you get the picture by this point surely, this game is literally a corpse of it's former self with most sensible players having moved on ages ago with nothing but the filth remaining and the few jaded vets that want to get a glimmer of fun that you used to get from this once great multiplayer class based shooter years ago. This game only has value in being installed for the sake of running the fantastic Open Fortress mod which again Valve screwed over and messed with the talented folks behind that project cancelling the excellent reverse engineering project Open Fortress Base for greedy profit reasons solely and giving them silence in discussions of releasing the mod on steam along with Team Fortress 2 Classic. Those mods are far far far superior to Valve/Live Service TF2 with passionate teams of developers that genuinely care about what they're creating, do play those instead for a far better time along with the fantastic and bizarre beta inspired Pre-Fortress 2.

Valve doesn't care for the game and neither should you, the state of this now 16 year old title is the worst I have had the displeasure of experiencing it was once a good game and there's is little scrap pieces of it's former self. Being such a broken spaghetti code mess with the worst case of content bloat in video games, it's all so poorly implemented and sticky taped and glued onto the game. But that isn't even the worst of it, the game has it's servers clogged up with bots and cheaters that have been able to mess with honest players for years now and Valve has done next to nothing to elevate the problem except for just outright ignore it. But why should they? people still pour money into this game for incredibly ugly cosmetics and skins that have ruined the gameplay visibility and fun artstyle of the game. The game's config defaults are completely out of date requires heavy tweaking with something akin to mastercomfig necessary to have a smooth and intuitive experience at the cost of making the game incredibly ugly to disable as much of it's unoptimised graphics as much as it can but does come at the price of introducing more bugs and visibility issues. Going this route isn't able to completely fix the poor framerate regardless of PC due to how single CPU threaded the game is and how it doesn't properly utilise modern GPUs. There is also the incredibly awful matchmaking that adds so much more downtime and results with really poor match quality with onesided matches, for years now every server I queue up in I am stuck with absolutely new or bad players whilst the other team is completely comprised of players just underneath my matchmaking rank resulting in one-sided stomps that are simply not fun to play. I miss the days of joining a dedicated server and instantly playing with no fuss and whilst community servers are present they all exploit faking connection latency to fool unknowing players to keep their servers populated despite making it a poor experience for everyone, nor are any servers close to a vanilla experience. I could keep going but you get the picture by this point surely, this game is literally a corpse of it's former self with most sensible players having moved on ages ago with nothing but the filth remaining and the few jaded vets that want to get a glimmer of fun that you used to get from this once great multiplayer class based shooter years ago. This game only has value in being installed for the sake of running the fantastic Open Fortress mod which again Valve screwed over and messed with the talented folks behind that project cancelling the excellent reverse engineering project Open Fortress Base for greedy profit reasons solely and giving them silence in discussions of releasing the mod on steam along with Team Fortress 2 Classic. Those mods are far far far superior to Valve/Live Service TF2 with passionate teams of developers that genuinely care about what they're creating, do play those instead for a far better time along with the fantastic and bizarre beta inspired Pre-Fortress 2.