Recent reviews by LoPV

Cool game continuously getting updates for the price of free. I really like the feeling of exploration the games gives you, at least for the first playthrough. Has some issues like sailing being tedious but if you play without permadeath I think it's a good gateway for the average person to 'traditional' roguelikes even if Moonring isn't exactly one itself. One of the best free games I've played.

UPDATE: Valve has rolled out a massive banwave against the bots as well as many human cheaters. It remains to be seen whether or not Valve will keep this up. If the servers are clean after a few months, I'll update my review back to positive.

For anyone who hasn't tried the game, there is no better time in the last 10 years or so than now to try it out and profess to Valve that you enjoy the game in its bot-free state. Hopefully the game will the game will continue to be maintained, but since it remains unclear for now, the review still remains negative.
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ORIGINAL REVIEW TEXT:

TF2 is a classic FPS that endures only due to its passionate fanbase. The characters are still iconic, the gameplay at its best is still fun with a ton of mechanical variety. You can have hour-long games with tense back and forths finally ending in a climactic finish, and you can have silly experiences just hanging around with friends or strangers. You can still have a fun time if you are a longtime veteran of the game, but I cannot recommend it to new players due to the neglect from the developers of the game, Valve. The game is flooded with cheaters, both human and robot. A new player to the game not only needs to learn the actual game mechanics, but also about bots. Things like, "what does a bot name look like?" and "when should you re-queue because a server is unrecoverable and completely lost to bots?" If a new player didn't spend money on the game (a free to play or "F2P"), they cannot even ASK these questions, because in the last few years Valve disabled chat usage for F2P players.

The F2P chat ban has not solved the issue of the bots spamming the chat because bot hosters just buy premium for the bots. It's not that expensive for them since it takes months for the bots to be banned, if they even get banned. Instead, it has ruined the experience for new players. New players can't ask about their weapons. They can't chat along with everyone else. They can't even use the hotkey bound by default by the game to call for a medic. Given that the game is a team game the chat ban has a direct negative effect on the gameplay for the F2P player and their team. Valve could theoretically revert the F2P chat ban at any time just as quickly as they started it. Valve should know by now the chat ban has done nothing to stop bots from spamming the chat, but it remains in place. Is Valve that desperate for bot hoster's money?

Even with all of these issues, Valve cannot even be bothered to state anything about the game beyond the fact that basically no one is working on the game, nor interested in working on it. Valve claims to want to avoid "treadmill work" where recurring maintenance is needed, but is perfectly fine with the "treadmill work" of releasing new content for people to pay for. More microtransaction crates are added to the game while the game on official Valve servers remains pretty much unplayable if you don't know how to properly navigate those servers in the modern era of TF2. While TF2 may not make anywhere near as much money as Counterstrike, I would assume that it makes enough money to hire a contractor to manually ban obvious cheating spinbots if nothing else.

While the game isn't dead due to the community who has stuck with it for over a decade, the game will slowly wither away unless Valve takes action against bots and cheaters, and allows the F2P players to have a voice again. All of which seems very unlikely.

For anyone who does want to try start playing as a new player regardless, I recommend either avoiding casual or actively taking the time to learn about the bot issue first:
- Look for snipers with robotic non-human movement, huge aim snaps, or aiming straight up 100% of the time to identify bots. Some bots do not play sniper but may still aim straight up or have huge aim snaps.
- Leave servers when one team is 50% full of bots or more.
- Avoid healing bots. Don't push forward when bots are present to be courteous to the enemy team.
- Always kick bots as soon as possible because bots will begin votekicks on real players when they can.
- When a votekick starts, do not vote to kick unless you are sure that the team overwhelmingly believes the player in question to be a bot, or even better, verify the player is actually a bot yourself.
- Keep an eye on the chat to see if anyone is calling out bots on either team. People aren't always correct or truthful, but it does mean you should check on the player in question.
- Avoid certain maps/gamemodes during bot waves (the CTF gamemode and the map Harvest get especially bad).

As for community servers, "Uncletopia" servers exist but they are not the same as the "true" casual experience that Valve intended. There are class limits and the players tend to be more skilled and more focused on playing the game to win, which is not a bad thing but may not interest all players."Skial" servers are closer to the "vanilla TF2" experience but most of their servers are 24/7 servers for specific maps with only a couple true casual servers. Other "vanilla TF2" casual servers exist but are often empty.

Although this review may be posted at the same time as many other negative reviews, this review is sincere. I cannot recommend the game to new players anymore.

For whatever it's worth, Valve, fix TF2.