Took me a few seconds to not parse this as TF Chead and wonder if “Chead” was the new “stan”
1 Like
I played tons of TFC and switched over to TF2 when that came out. Best era of TF2 is definitely “first set of alt weapons” as cuba says but I kept playing for a long time after that, dropped off around the release of the horde mode. Either way, I would be interested in returning to it given that there are apparently decent servers still.
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The horde mode was actually a pretty smart addition, I just wish they didn’t perform the most vile monetization for it ever.
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Ironic that TF2 was in many ways Valve’s masterpiece but also where they started experimenting with the real deep monetization which is all they do any more. The peak and the fall.
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I always want to read this stuff
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I’ve been on vacation for the past week. This was my first match after coming home and I feel pretty proud of it 
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My favorite thing about regularly joining the same set of servers in games of this vintage is how it takes on the online feel of being a regular at a corner bar. This is something that was lost when all multiplayer games switched over to matchmaking services
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lobby matchmaking is the devil and i will die on this hill
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Dan Cook, who’s one of my favorite social game design theorists, categorizes friendship factors in online games as:
- Proximity
- Similarity
- Reciprocity
- Disclosure
with Proximity as the first essential component. Open matchmaking solves for game rule problems (ensuring play consistent to the full room and matched skill levels it’s balanced for) and engineering problems (the fastest and most consistent matchmaking) at the cost of social design.
It’s not an unreasonable tradeoff, but I wish it was more widely framed as a tradeoff because the limited view it’s usually talked in is strictly through the game rules and engineering problems it’s designed to solve.
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joke’s on them, once you escape the bell curve and land yourself on one of the two extreme skill matchmaking points, you end up seeing the same 15-20 people over and over and you’ve recreated the community
all designers have done is codified and engineered ELO Hell
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Does TF2 has a bed rep with The Youth for being an embarrassing grandpa game or something? TF2 fucking rules. Or, like, it used to, before hats. I thought everyone acknowledged this.
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