Casual is Fundamentally Broken [TF2] 

Not allowing f2ps to call medic is criminal

The legend says that that one Powerhouse you left is still going

The tf2 devs lobotomized their own game with meet your match, then screwed off and left us with the mess. The amount of sheer incompetence is unbelievable.

The Meet Your Match update broke so many things about TF2 (not just matchmaking) that it becomes absurd when you think about it.

13:43 I've been wanting to say this for a long time. Thank you for telling more people that yes - it's literally impossible to get rid of a party of six.

This just goes to show that the people who made the Meet Your Match update were not the original TF2 devs, all they wanted to do is to re-invent the wheel with a new and "modern" change and look. The casual matchmaking system makes this game a chore to play. Just revert it back to quickplay, easily the best way to play a game like this, it might not be perfect, but we had the tools available to ease the stomp and keep players engaged in 1 server that could last up to hours.

I love that the primary functionality of the badge/ranking system today is not to ensure balanced matches as intended, but rather to provide screenshots of all blue badges on one team and all red badges on the other, showing empirical proof that matchmaking isn't working.

Fun fact, you can use console commands to vote even when the menu bug happens. vote_next_map 0 will do the map on the leftmost, 1 for the middle, 2 is the right side

Imagine if we could vote on the next map DURING the current game

Thank God this means I’m not going crazy. Another thing to note is that since TF2 is a really old game, a good amount of players have had more than enough time to achieve godlike pubstomping skills. Which possibly amplifies the amount of steamroll servers Matchmaking can dump you in.

Party queuing on casual is especially detrimental on a region with a thin playerbase, such as Asia. I can't stress how much I hate payload nowadays because of those comp 6 stacks constant steamrolling the opposing team. It's either a boring or displeasing game. I used to blame them to queuing up as a party, but to think of it, it's all due to casual's flawed design. My God, MYM. What the hell did you do to TF2.

2011 pre-f2p update veteran here, people talk about how to save tf2 like getting rid of the bots (rightfully so), but if you really want tf2 saved, we really need valve to revert casual back to quickplay that alone would do so much to help to make the game playable

The sense of dread I feel when one team is losing slightly, four people requeue, and then the bots start joining. You opened my eyes to how the bots are stronger with casual's ruleset

Ftp players violently nodding to indicate danger

I've been keeping a little Excel spreadsheet on the reasons for leaving a Casual lobby. After about 300 matches, 35% of them are for matchmaking reasons (of which 24% are unbalanced teams, 7% are empty servers and 4% are maps that are already over). On average, I spend 8.1 minutes in a lobby before requeuing/logging off. Interestingly, just 7% of all requeues are due to bots or cheaters (however, those are specifically bot-ridden games that I have to quit, I don't account for solo bots that get kicked quickly)

Without question the best video I've seen covering casual mode, I've been thinking a lot of the same things for a very long time. The old 45 minute round system was perfect as it was and I've missed auto-scramble every single day it's been gone, and dreaded every single casual game that's been a completely one sided team stack in the same way. I think it's a shame that a lot of community servers that still abide by that old system will only ever run one map each, especially if it's not a particularly great map like 2Fort or Harvest. It must be frustrating on Valve's part to sink so much time and effort into a system that simply doesn't function as well as the old one, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There was no reason to make casual a diet-competitive mode in the same way there was no reason to make the Eviction Notice a diet-GRU.

Finally, someone who agrees that you shouldn't be able to party with six players in Casual Mode. Team stacking is super lame. Unfortunately, you can't really do much to stop it, even in community servers where you can freely switch teams and scramble. But Valve's matchmaking system seems to encourage it.

You can see this in effect on your game hours. The number of hours spent in game is significantly larger than the sum of hours spent playing each class

God I wish I could've been around when you could freely spectate, switch teams, and more importantly, call for team scrambles. Casual is so often a miserable experience where there's a massive disparity of skill levels between teams, leading to one completely stomping the other, and it's not fun regardless of which side of the stomp you're on. It's a diet competitive mode where nobody is incentivized to stick around as soon as things don't look to be going your way. These days I don't even bother sticking around if the game's unbalanced, everyone's gonna leave at the end anyways.

It's been nearly 8 years since MyM and I still miss being able to duel my friends at any valve server at any given time.

Even the announcer voicelines changed: it went from "mission begins in x seconds" to "competition begins in x seconds". As if the mercs were there for a friendly competition and not to kill each other. Everything about the update was so on the nose about turning tf2 into a tryhard competitive esport

game of ctf starts scout immediately runs in a straight line for intel and returns and nobody stops him the server collectively doesnt even have 5 points yet scouts cap twice more. its been like 2 minutes. i have 3 points back to the loading screen to go to the same map we were already on when i reconnect half the server is gone

Queueing in casual is pretty much a gamble, like in mvm, you're more likely to be put on a losing team, since the losing players there are rage quitting, giving you their spot.

If there is one more thing I think we can all agree to change about casual is that re-enable the GOD,DAMN,VOICE COMMAND FOR F2P. What were they thinking when doing this ???? It barely worked to prevent bots spam voice chat,like at all,and only caused problem to TF2 players as a whole

People who started playing TF2 post Blue Moon simply do not understand what TF2 was like before MYM. MYM did irreparable damage to the game that we are still directly feeling the ramifications for. WE MUST RETVRN TO QUICKPLAY.

"Casual" with 10 minutes cooldown when u leave :skull:

I'm glad someone mentioned that "fixing" TF2 shouldn't only be about bots. Removing bots won't "fix" the game, without them it's still a fundamentally broken game.

7:25 This does even more harm by allowing bots and cheaters to que 6 players in a server at once so they don't get kicked. Cheaters especially use this method to gaslight anyone who points out the fact that they are cheating and to kick the ones who try to kick them.

Although I firmly believe TF2 is a casual game at heart, I still think competitive has a place as an official thing, but it needs to be treated as a fundamentally different game mode from casual. Most games with a competitive scene have casual as basically a diet version of Comp but TF2 isn't like that, Casual and Competitive are so inherently different from one another that creating an environment where they are interchangeable is virtually impossible without ruining what makes TF2 so good in the first place. What I mean with this is that Comp in TF2 should be treated the same way as MVM, a different game mode that changes how things are played without affecting the main game, because otherwise is like adding Upgrade Stations, Tanks and Sentry Busters to Casual.

Bro... PLLEEAAAASEEEE!! Attack Defend / Payload / any asymmetrical gamemode where Red defends and Blu attacks is NOT "stalematey". If an asymmetrical gamemode "stalemates" that just means Red is winning. Can people PLEASE learn this? Please? I don't even know where people get the notion from. Rest of the video is good tho

13:33 It's extremely hilarious that the aimbotting guy (the one being spectated) is wearing the Cheater's Lament.

looks like you forgot to mention that the match only lets people join in batches and sometimes you can sit alone in a server for hours before it decides to let 23 people in at once

In short: Quickplay was better. Not perfect but much better

Botting is quite literally only possible because of casual. If we reverted back to quickplay, the botting crisis would be done for overnight.

Axe casual altogether, bring back the era of dedicated servers with map voting and time limits.

Imagine waiting 5 hours for casual just to have a server filled with bots

ptsd back when people weren't forced to autobalance, so itd be 2 v 12

Reverting to quickplay would solve so much

The only solution is to retvrn to quickplay. Which Valve will never do, because Valve will never admit to such a mistake, much less revert it, and especially not this late into the game's lifespan.

being reminded of quickplay and how it used to work is such a shame, it literally just worked. you'd think "isn't casual just quickplay renamed?" but, no, it was a straight downgrade and the beginning of the bot problem right there.

I used to wonder, why "switch teams" key doesn't friggin work. Now I know why Thanks lister

I wasn't playing when quickplay existed, but boy does that sound like a direct upgrade to Casual!

Casual mode killed 85-95% of tf2 maps. if you don't have the five most played maps selected. you will never play on anything else. At Least Quickplay allowed least played maps to actually have players. i remember playing on hydro and nightfall years ago. it been so long since i got one of those maps.

I've been saying this for years, and I will keep saying it: Meet Your Match was a disaster that put TF2 on the death spiral that's been plaguing it ever since. If there is one change I could make to TF2, it'd be to bring back Quickplay and get rid of the current matchmaking system.

This is by far the best video I've ever seen regarding the technical problems with Casual. Personally, I retain the same opinion I've had since July 7th, 2016: remove matchmaking entirely. The system does not work, has never worked, and will never work as well as what we had back in the day. You can add in features from the old system to matchmaking, but it doesn't matter because the design doesn't work for TF2 in the first place. The fact that nu-Valve never undid that damage is testament to their elitism and incompetence.

It’s really heartbreaking to see a beloved game like this be neglected so badly, played this first on the orange box for Xbox when it came out back in 2007, then switched to pc play it fully in 2010 right after I graduated high school. Had many fond memories of this game and all the updates I’ve played through most of my 20s. It was until MYM came out that the game started to become less enjoyable and that Valve literally just fucked up the entire game to try and accommodate competitive matchmaking, which wasn’t even needed and was a piss poor mode to, I was hopeful for the jungle update help the game, but that update was very lackluster. It wasn’t until wow classic came out that I decided to stop playing the game anymore, and never looked back since, and I co me to realize that Valve can’t even make any good updates or games anymore, and I won’t touch TF2 till they undo that shitty MYM update and fix damn game already.

Its really sad that Valve had about 7 years to revert all of the changes from MyM and they still refuse to do so. People were begging for them to revert the changes during the first WEEK of the update releasing, but if they werent willing to bring Quickplay back back then, they arent ever going to now. Remember everyone, we are here now because Valve wanted to cash in on the comp shooter trend

WHICH WAY WESTERN MAN? : A) playing casual for the 5% chance of a well balanced lobby but only seeing the 95% chance of bots and closet cheaters ruining the game B) playing vanilla community servers and getting rolled by comptards C) playing sourcemods like TF2C and OF but having to deal with tiny server sizes

There is actually a button in the top left that you can select to make your party not stack together on the same team. But the button has said feature coming later since meet your match…

People usually call me an old-head when I say that pre meet your match casual was better in multiple ways other than just the Quick Play system. This entire video is what i've thought but couldn't explain for years. The entire vibe of new casual is different, this just opens my eyes a lot lol

I fundamentally disagree that casual *can* be fixed. As you explain at the start of the video the whole concept of casual is not only flawed, but fundamentally wrong for the game. I made a video about how the whole issue with bots could be solved, or at least greatly helped, by returning to quickplay with only community servers with proper moderation. Plugins to ban all known bot accounts, vote bans and an actual human that can unban falsely banned human players. Quickplay community servers needs to return, valve servers and casual need to go, that's the only realistic way the game can be fixed.

2016: Wait your match 2024: Requeue your match

Playing with friends is horrible, before we could queue together, or just join the server through steam, and either play together, or have fun against eachother. After MyM, we NEED to queue together, which leads to longer searching times, and you MUST be on the same team. Most annoying thing for me is that playing together, it went from me seeing a friend playing and me just joining them, to needing to ask to leave the game, create a party and queue up again. May be one of the reason why everyone I knew (myself included) drifted away from the game.

I think quickplay could be reimplemented as a simpler way for new players to find community servers, like another option instead of the complicated and outdated server browser

i think not being able to switch teams is one of the biggest reasons stomps happen so often, it used to be that if you were a bad player on a losing team you'd try to switch to the winning team and if you were a good player who wanted to try to help the losing team for a challenge you'd swap and overall it would balance out, but now if the good players are paired there's no dynamic flow of skill between teams

I started playing in 2014 right after the love and war update, so I did get a few years of quickplay in. Anyway, I think you are spot on about how casual is fundamentally flawed, and the best solution seems to be to return to quickplay! Though with a few minor changes like changing autobalance like you suggested. I think that what casual tries to implement is useless and doesn't make any sense. The ranks you get are useless because they don't mean anything. I play pubs most of the time and I think I am pretty good at the game, but I am only tier 3 in casual because I mainly play on Uncletopia or Skail, or other vanilla (or similar) pub servers. For those who don't like casual, I can recommend to look at the community server browser even if you don't like uncletopia. There are a bunch of random servers that get filled up at peak hours that play just like normal tf2 or have normal custom maps or 32 players. They are a lot of fun and feel like quickplay with how the fun keeps going on if you stay in the server. Also, the bot problem portion is spot on, because bots can't take hold if there is a server that is constantly full or nearly full. Great video.

at this point, if they reverted nearly all the changes they made in the past two major updates, that would be a major improvement to the game

God I miss manual team switch. Never realized how bad Meet Your Match damaged this game.

I miss the 24hr map specific servers. I will always consider those times as tf2’s golden years. I spent many hours playing double cross and goofing around with everyone

Replacing Quick Play with Casual was the very first thing that allowed for the problems TF2 deals with today.

honestly, the best fix would be to bring back quickplay, at least for joining community servers. they can keep casual mode, but it's very clear there's a demand for quickplay to be back

Just revert back to quickplay

What's worse is that you can use the "Retry" command to re-join the server as soon as you're being warned about getting team-balanced. You can also still vote for maps at the end of the Casual match by using certain commands. I think it was "map_vote 0" for the map on the left, "map_vote 1" for the map in the middle, and "map_vote 2" for the map on the right. I even had all 4 of these commands bound to my keyboard. Retry/re-join being on my asterisk in my numpad, and left, down and right arrows to vote for the 3 maps when it gets bugged.

This video has been a long time coming. I think acknowledging just how flawed the current layout shows that the rose tinted glasses have fully come off, and that people are done giving Valve the benefit of the doubt.

I honestly haven't played too much since 2016, but whenever I hop on and have to see that scoreboard and wait on map select it's like a cold splash of water on my face. Like do people really want to map swap so often (no, obviously)? Why am i waiting for so long? Why is everyone leaving the server? I also really miss being able to swap teams and scramble at any time, as well as face my friends when I wanted to. I really miss the old systems man.

FINALLY Someone is talking about balancing lobbies problem. I play only 3-5 maps in casual, which I like, and amount of times I put into team of newbies brought me to a thought of some kind of hidden pool in casual mode. In 8 of 10 matches I get into one-sided ownage, where one team consists of experienced players with hundred or thousand hours and they do an objective and my team consists of players, who barely knows how to move. And guess what is the result: I have to requeue for another match in hope, that this time I will be put into competent team...

Crazy how Overwatch being so popular managed to destroy TF2 not because it was a batter game, but entirely because everyone wanted their game to be competitive

This game has spent over third of it's life in this state and I am glad you have made this in the wake of FixTF2. It's not only about bots, but there are a lot of deep-seated, unresolved, retroactively forced design problems that caused TF2's decline. 12:48 OMG you actually know the source leak as the reason for bots was debunked years ago. This is the best informed FixTF2 thing ever and it's not even associated with it.

Here's my pitch to solve casuals problems: - First off, quick play needs to come back. This is to mainly mitigate the need to turn casual into this sort of Frankenstein hybrid of old and new. With quick playback, we can fully focus on helping casual cater to a more coordinated environment, which is what the point of casual was in the first place. - I agree with lowering the pre match timer to 30 seconds, as you said. It helps tone down with the amount of waiting. - Ditto with reloading the same map again. Instead, simply reloading the game modes logic and starting again would do wonders to save time and make players stay. (Like what happens on a per round basis). - I also want to add that matches can start when there are a minimum of 4 players on each individual team so that matches start sooner, and latecomers are easier to add to that match. - While I agree that team stacks can be problematic, automatically splitting them might not be the ideal way to do things. There is an option to do so in the main menu (still labeled as coming soon, lol), but I would rather propose that starting a vote against a person in a party will simply not take the party members vote into consideration only the other members of the same team. That helps with dealing with cheaters while also helping people play together on a team if they so choose - (Again, assuming quickplay is back) I don't think giving people the option to freely change teams would be a good idea for casual. However, I fully agree with the return of spectating. I hope these are at least somewhat decent changes, but I'd love to hear other ideas. (Or if mine are flawed in some way)

hey is there a way to get in contact with you? I like this vid a lot

Valve broke the matchmaking, got mad, and then left the game to rot. Modern Valve deserves its hatred.

This is actually one of the biggest problems in tf2 right now and for the past few years, if not the biggest problem, but most people seem to ignore it

It's so hard to get a good 5cp match with valves matchmaking either your team gets curbstomped or you curbstomp the enemy team

Learning about the “silent sbmm” does so much to explain why I have several great games, and then despite usually hanging around the top of the leaderboard I then have 3-4 games on different servers that are complete slogfests, finally ending with a decently balanced match only to start the whole process over again

Matchmaking really ruined the whole vibe TF2 had which made me love it in the first place. I’m afraid to say this but we may never go back to how things were.

reverting to the old way of finding servers would fix MANY problems with tf2, and would aliviate bots. also allow f2p to talk again

thank you for this video. I understand the bot crisis is the main problem in casual right now, but a lot of people will just never acknowledge how unsatisfying casual is in it's "fixed" state. I've played this game from 2019, far past the Quickplay days, but within a year or so I started to realize how unfair, short, and frustrating matches are with the current system we have. And yet it always confused me why no one seemed to call out these issues as often, and treated the problems with casual being "part of the experience".

Tbh I feel like your suggested changes to Casual can be summarized with just "Revert back to Quickplay", but I'm afraid Valve (like most gaming companies and developers) are just too proud to admit fault and do so, even to the small capacity of implementing those changes to Casual itself.

It seems that a lot of this game's problems can be fixed or mitigated by reversing the changes from the "meet your match" update...

I never realize how problematic the Casual mode it is, but when you talk about it, I now just realize how patience I am, or maybe because every time I wait, I just go watching YT video then come back.

You have successfully explained everything I hate about Casual and everything I loved about Quickplay. Pretty much all the points you made at the end of the video need to return to official servers.

The solution is to gut Casual entirely and return to the old quick-play system with map timers, team switching, spectating and AD-HOC connections.

me: getting on tf2 to have some fun chat: OMEGATRONIX joined the enemy team me: requeues

Some of my friends were saying matchmaking was necessary for TF2 to stay alive. What ended up was the complete opposite -- it severely harmed TF2 to the point of arguably no return. I was not opposed to matchmaking update on principle of people preferring different playstyles, but Valve decided to shove this matchmaking mentality down the casual players' throats. There would have literally been no problem had they just kept Competitive Mode completely separate from the old way of playing the game. But nope, Casual Mode, because it's like in other competitive-driven games! Some of my friends were excusing Casual Mode purely on basis of poor performance, i.e. if it had more resources allocated, it would be superior to what was before. Too bad that never happened. Maybe it shouldn't have happened at all if there were no resources to support it. Pre-bot crisis, the most damning thing about Casual Mode was the waiting times. Even as of recently, my friends were saying that, bot issue notwithstanding, casual mode has become much faster in terms of you connecting to matches. Faster compared to what? The intial release of MYM? It's still way slower than it was before when you could directly connect to a server -- just like with software and websites these days, people just get used to software being slow and not getting any faster, even though the current hardware is more than capable of that. ...Anyway, the slow connection times ultimately led me to abandon TF2 long before the 2020 bot apocalypse.

I agree with everything you say in this. It’s actually shocking how valve never brought back quick play, literally everyone liked it better.

1:18 funnily enough, the teams i get do not run 5 spies, but instead 5 soldiers, or 5 demomans or 6 engineers or 4 Snipers.

This just made me realize why I couldn't bring myself to play this game since 2017. I should've been playing community servers and mods since the start. Thanks for that, Lister!

Everyone needs to share this video and remind Valve tat they need to bring back Quickplay if they want to save TF2

Yeah, one-sided matches is something I'm all too familiar with. I have been playing TF2 since 2012, and was solely playing on community servers, so, I never experienced the game during the Quickplay era, so, reverting Casual to be more closer to Quickplay as discussed in this video would be great...but, as it currently stands, I have my doubts. I WANT to be proven wrong.

wanted to shout out tf2 classic, which uses the old community server structure and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it has none of these issues official servers are moderated by humans, no spinbots, 30-minute map timer, human cheaters are rare and generally get caught quickly, automatic scramble system, etc (also new maps, game modes, and weapons, with a major update in development)

I think this just might be the best possible answer to dealing with bots and team balance issues

I always thought of those changes back in the day as mildy annoying, never thought about the fact that like 90% of the vot probpem is caused by em

i believe they should also revert muting f2ps for at least the voice commands because recently ive seen over hundreds of bots text, and mic spamming servers

Hit the nail on the head on a lot of things - I didn't even realise the design of it was this flawed. I've always had huge gripes with pubstomps for example, and learning that switching teams, team scramble etc USED to exist, but dont anymore, is horrible. I know it sounds crazy, but I dislike pubstomp games only slightly less than bot games... I don't really get to play the game either way. Also, in regards to cheater parties of 6, I've noticed that sometimes one of them will disconnect and reconnect if teams are unbalanced in playercount. I'm pretty sure the reserved slot means cheaters will intentionally disconnect and reconnect to evade being autobalanced, which would've allowed them to be kicked one by one. My gosh.

Yeah there’s no words for casual. This is why I and my friend group play on the small niche groups of “normal” community servers that host custom maps and generally just have normal, quick-play es que settings.

I just play community servers at this point

I wasn't around in the time of Quickplay but it sounds positively DIVINE

Honestly, while I get that there were a lot of issues with it, a rollback to Quickplay (and then build upon that) feels like the easiest option possible than trying to fix an inherently broken mode.

it's impressive how TF2 didn't die on the meet your match update, that was a horrible decision, they even made f2ps not be able to call for medic, valve is really dumb but the players also didn't help and kept buying crates and keys and whatever.

Meet Your Match and its consequences have been a disaster for Team Fortress 2.