Gambling, the answer is loot boxes.
I haven’t played TF2 in a long time. I’ve been following a mod called TF2 Classified which sounds interesting though so might jump on that when it’s released
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3545060/Team_Fortress_2_Classified/
I’ve been eyeballing this one for a while, along with OpenFortress. Also found Gold Rush today which seems to be EXACTLY what I’m looking for (and the things they’re avoiding are literally the reasons I stopped playing TF2 around 2011ish). Unfortunately the playercounts for these sorts of mods are abysmally low.
The TF2 economy is so insane, whenever I get a glimpse at it it’s like a whole other world. One that I want to stay far, FAR away from.
I played 1000s of hours of tf2. The last time was probably like 6 years ago. I still get weekly friend invites on steam from people who only play counter strike and tf2. I know exactly why, and it’s weird.
Why?
Everyone have a good word for Valve as a publisher but it’s sad to see some of the most talented game designers in the history publishing their last good game 15 years ago.
Last update: December 23th, 2025.
Yea, they’re probably making some point, but I’m not gonna bother watching if the thumbnail is already wrong
What the tf2 community considers an “update” is the updates with names.
Every update of the last 9 years has been to celebrate a holiday or event and not actually a properly named update like Gun Mettle, Meet Your Match, Sniper vs Spy, Jungle Inferno, etc etc.
Even checking thr history page on the website you can see that its just “Halloween” a bunch of times and then finally jungle inferno back in 2017: https://www.teamfortress.com/history.php
They mean specifically “major” updates, ever since 2017 after Jungle Inferno it’s just been cosmetic additions, bugfixes, and the yearly holiday events which are typically pretty big but not big enough to be considered major.
The updates are just turning on and off the seasonal things and adding community maps and stuff.
Not according to the patch notes though
The patches are mostly community fixes, which is not the way to treat a game that makes tens of millions per year. The game’s matchmaking is broken and needs either a major rework or outright removal. Some recent change broke MvM to the point it takes hours to queue up.
Matchmaking? TF2 moved away from community servers? Bleh.
A lot of people prefer community servers and want Valve to outright remove matchmaking for reasons like
No team switch on matchmaking
shorter game times outside of control from players
end game map vote instead of near when the game ends (which also breaks randomly)
matchmaking putting you in a match right before it ends
MvM matchmaking being outright broken
The infamous Matchmaking Error: A connection to the Steam VAC Servers could not be made.
I personally think these problems can be fixed by Valve without the need to remove matchmaking alltogether, but i agree that the way Quickplay used to work was better than what we have currently.
