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Team Fortress 2, or The Erasure of Online Neighborhoods

April 23, 2025

Since I was a teenager in the 2010’s, there’s been one constant in my life aside from making music and crashing out on imageboards about stupid things nobody cares about, and that’s Team Fortress 2. A love after my own heart, there are only a few games I have such a special connection with. However, there’s a problem with TF2, it is a problem not specific to TF2 but with online gaming spaces as a whole. The problem is the continued atomization and isolation of players in modern games.

You may stop me right there and say “How ridiculous! It’s never been easier to connect to people online. After all, we live in the age of Discord servers at a time when PC gaming—and online gaming generally—has never been more popular.” But how many of those Discord servers you’ve joined do you actually engage with on a day-to-day basis? How do you even begin to find a group of friends to play with? Are you going to go into the overly sanitized and chaotic official Discord server dedicated to the game itself and root around for possible new friends? The thing you should know, if you’re younger than I am, is that it didn’t used to be so difficult to find friends through online games. In fact, it was easy and it happened organically.

My first time being exposed to TF2 was through memes, and I’m sure it was the same for many people. It was around 2010, me and my friend were stumbling through YouTube for laughs and found Painis Cupcake by RubberFruit, a now legendary video for players that played TF2 in its hey-day. Many of these videos and memes transcended the game and became ingrained in internet culture. The game was a staple of people that enjoyed meme humor or YouTube Poop, and of the cynical anons of 4chan.

It wasn’t until 2012 that I decided to install the game and try it out for myself. The Mann VS Machine Update had just come out and though I had no idea what I was getting myself into, I was excited. I instantly fell in love. The gameplay was perfect, but more than that was a sense of freedom. It didn’t seem to matter much if I was good at the game at all. It didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t have all the weapons or hats. There were players who were really skilled at the game, and there were some that outright refused to play to the goal of the match. The latter were known as friendlies. Instead of playing “the right way”, they would don ridiculous hats, act silly and unhelpful on purpose, and most importantly: they’d communicate to other players not about the goal but just about anything else. This stood out to me and I realized that the game I was playing was in fact an online chatroom with guns. As I’d soon come to find out, this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Outside of official servers, the Quickplay server selector would throw me into community servers. These community servers served just about any niche; there were servers for only friendlies, servers for skilled players, servers with custom maps made by anybody, servers with their own rule-sets and silly plugins, servers made entirely for trading items with other players, you name it. But eventually I’d find a few of my personal favorite servers, and I would return to them consistently several times a week. Gradually, I’d begin to recognize many of the same players in these servers, and they would recognize me. “Oh hey Jello! You missed what happened earlier.” They would catch me up on something funny that happened; a crazy argument over voice-chat or someone trolling other players and being silly. Sometimes we’d talk about school or music or drug experiences or girls or life in general. We were allowed to sit in these servers for as long as we wanted, usually hours, just to hang out. Over time, I found genuine friendship in many of these same people that frequented these servers. None of us realized what we had until it had been taken away from us.

Sometime in 2016, Overwatch was released. It was new, sleek, modern, fast-paced and flashy. A big part of Overwatch being modern is that it did away with the server lists, instead opting to put players searching for a game into a queue for “matchmaking”. Matchmaking was designed to funnel players into a single match with peers around their same skill level, and it used algorithms to do this. More than that, it was an officially supported e-sport. In contrast to this sudden juggernaut that Overwatch was, Team Fortress 2 was old. It had released all the way back in 2007, and ran on an engine from 2004, and once again it was not an e-sport. Valve began to feel nervous about this competitor, and in response, decided to push out a brand new update for TF2 known as Meet Your Match.

This new update introduced a Competitive Mode, in an attempt to groom TF2 to debut officially as an e-sport. However, the update also entirely replaced Quickplay servers with something called Casual Mode. With this new Casual Mode, you were no longer allowed to join the specific servers you wanted, when you wanted; instead you were thrown into a matchmaking queue. Once you joined a match, you’d have to wait for the game to fill with players. Once the match started, it would end after just two rounds and dump you out of the server. No longer were you allowed to hang out and play for as many rounds as you’d like; here was an XP system complete with ranks and shiny badges. The most important change, though, is that this outright removed the possibility of joining community servers from the Casual Mode menu. Community servers were instead relegated to their own tab, beneath Competitive Mode, completely nuking their visibility and their player-bases as a result.

Practically overnight, a huge swath of community servers dried up and died. Over the next two years, all of my favorite servers were completely dead. After several updates and patches provided no solution to fix Meet Your Match’s huge underlying failures, there was a mass exodus of players. All of the people I’d met were gone. The people I’d talk to at least once a week for years were gone. Once Meet Your Match had stained the game, Valve decided to abandon it, inviting hordes of cheater bots to abuse the matchmaking system. This became known as the bot crisis, and it rendered the game sometimes unplayable for 8 years.

More importantly, the introduction of matchmaking created a norm of silent matches. People were playing a match, saying maybe a few words if anything at all, then leaving and re-queuing 10 minutes later when the match ended and the server re-shuffled everything. It was hard to understand at the time what had happened to TF2 and how drastically the climate of the game had shifted. The game has continued like this for longer now than it had before Meet Your Match. Most of the players today weren’t even playing prior to 2016 and know nothing different; they have no idea what they were robbed of.

Even more tragic than all of this is the knowledge that most modern online games are built this way: with matchmaking and competitive in mind. Likewise, this has generally the same effect on their players. They are totally isolated, not out of choice, but because these matchmaking systems discourage community. Their in-game text and voice chats are heavily censored, moderated and sanitized for corporate safety. Players are more bitter and agitated with their peers, and are rewarded nothing if they are not highly skilled at the game, not even potential friends or a sense of place.

TF2 was my virtual neighborhood until it was decided by its developer that my neighborhood would be better off as a highly confined e-sport. This move was a symptom of what the games industry still suffers from today: the increasing ability for corporate and commercial interests to stamp out any fun wherever it can become more optimized for profit. Most older online games were like TF2 in terms of their sense of community, but none else had the sheer volume of options at your disposal that you could use to communicate and express yourself with. Unfortunately, TF2 is both in my mind where the relaxed, casual fun of online games ended, and where the rinsed, mass-marketable, gray Faraday cage of modern online games began.

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