The current state of the playability of this game is milquetoast. Despite the recent 64-bit upgrade which has tremendously improved visual performance and the ever-continuing cult of love and fanaticism which has made this game truly timeless, this title is under attack by malicious individuals who seek its destruction by degrading the experience in any and every way possible.

Swarms of automated bot accounts have significantly degraded the free-to-play experience through the exploitation of basic functions such as chat, voice, and even in-game voice actions. To which the workaround employed by Valve was to effectively pay-wall these functions by restricting their use to users who have been authenticated by means of an in-game purchase fundamentally defeating the usability of a free-to-play platform.

These same bots also employ exploits that abuse the vulnerability of the game' client-server communication architecture to cheat by arbitrarily killing players with fraudulent sniper headshots immediately when any line of sight is detected even if the bot is not actually looking at the player.

They are so numerous in quantity that they roam from server to server en-masse to which when they comnect, they abuse the server voting system to force a majority vote to kick out legitimate players or players who try to fight back by reciprocally issuing a vote to kick the bots.

They have sewn the seeds of mistrust among legitimate players who play sniper, they are disenfranchising new players by depriving them of basic functionalities, and they have ruined the ability to just play the game like we used to for years.

My most lasting friendships in my relatively short life of 30 years have all been because of Team Fortress 2. I have had amazing memories and experiences born from this game. It single-handedly changed my perspective and opinion on First Person Shooters and online multiplayer games. It shames me and cuts deep into my soul that this might be how the saga ends.

I truly hope that I am seriously wrong, just like when I was a naive 16 year-old who hated shooters and multiplayer games, who saw an ad for this game back in 2011 and thought there was nothing to lose by trying it out.

I will never forget my first 15 minutes after completing the tutorial: I connected to a random quick play server and, as an engineer, I was carrying a teleporter on dust bowl when an enemy sniper suddenly appeared brandishing a ham shank. The sniper exclaimed, "Now this is a knife!" I was then struck with a single critical hit which killed me.

I had no words for what I experienced then and I thought about that moment almost every time I started up TF2.

#SaveTF2 #FixTF2