I can't believe I'm doing this. I've spent so many hours on this game and have had some of the best times of my life with the friends that I've made here.

If you're new to TF2, it's not in a good place right now. It hasn't been for a long time. I won't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you with hashtags and memes. If you want to hit the big green button and queue for casual, it's going to take you between 3-7 matches before you can get into one that's not infested with bots.

When it's business as usual, the game is still the amazing, unparallelled, messy, meme-y team shooter that so many of us have come to love over the years. But it's heartbreaking, the state of neglect that the creators have left it in. Three updates a year to milk money off of gambling addicts, and occasional bug fixes. Even that update cycle would be fine with this game's advanced age, if not for the fact that you simply can't queue for casual without playing Russian Roulette as to whether you'll be playing TF2, or quitting to desktop and doing something else.

Community servers are incredible and should be lauded, but for the basic function of this game, the idea that you can just hop into a Valve-owned server and have fun playing the game, to be dead, is unacceptable. I don't want to see it continue. I know I can do nothing to stop it from continuing. I'm just sad. I love this game a lot, the culture loves this game a lot even if they don't play it based on views on Youtube, and it's a very special, unique (maybe even unusual) gem among so many games that never quite manage to grab you the way it does.

Please keep playing TF2, please keep appreciating it. I will do the same. But at this current time, I cannot recommend that new players hop in. If you do, you'll be disappointed.