>>312673
I have a lot to say about Team Fortress 2 and none of it's organized. The short version is that the game's slow and doesn't require keysmashing, so it's more forgiving and easier on the hands than shit like Titanfall, while the techs are obvious to see in motion while also not being outright necessary to use since most of them have some cost in resources or opportunity. This gives the game a smooth skill curve and means you're almost never at a point where the only way to get better is to do the same thing but faster.
The issues with the game are fourfold: fucked matchmaking, bad weapon balance done by people who don't seem to play the game, an excess of untested maps, and cosmetics being so bad that they actively make the game worse via reducing things like team recognition and silhouette identifiability.
The Meet Your Match update reworked the entire matchmaking system, so matches went from taking seconds to get into to taking hours to get into - subsequent updates lowered this to minutes, but it's still noticeably worse than it was before. M.Y.M. caused a lot of other problems, but that's the easiest to explain to someone who has not played the game.
I can't nail down exactly when the weapon balance got bad, but the obvious thing to point to is that they "fixed a bug" causing an overpenetrating projectile weapon to hit the same target multiple times when the game's loading screen tips had advertised that ability as a feature.
Every year, new maps are added to Team Fortress 2. These maps are not made by Valve, but by the community, and it's known that - instead of testing them - Valve just takes top maps from the Workshop and puts them in the game, assuming their popularity must make them good. On top of the obvious problem, there's a second, which ties into point four:
TF2 Emporium.
"TF2 Emporium" is a massive circlejerk of hat designers and map makers - not players, they do not play the game - who have a standing agreement to give positive votes to each other's hats and maps on the Steam Workshop, as well as sharing those hats & maps on social media to drive even more attention to them. It is known for a fact that they also use bots to leave hundreds of positive votes on their pages, making them more likely to be added to the game. They do this for two reasons - the first is that getting a hat or map made by you into Team Fortress 2 can make you quite a bit of money, the other is that they hold spite for the game & its artstyle and delight in upsetting people who actually care about it by getting ugly-looking and balance-harming things added to it. There's also a lot of faggot drama that amounts to them running smear campaigns against anyone who dares speak out against them.
Now to get even more disorganized.
There are many things about Team Fortress 2's core mechanics that make it appealing.
The game is, bluntly, well-designed overall. Most weapons are viable in casual play, maps added before Valve gave up are generally good with balanced sightlines and well-placed everything, and every class is immediately visually recognizable due to silhouette and color placement.
The relatively long time-to-kill, sometimes going into multiple seconds at long range, means you aren't totally fucked if you get jumped, you have time to get your bearings and fight back when surprised, and there's time for another player to show up and even the odds.
Twelve-player lobbies mean it's very likely for there to be another player around your skill level, it's very unlikely for the entire enemy team to be better than you.
The objective-based format means even a bad player isn't "feeding" the enemy team like you might be in a team deathmatch, because the worst thing you can do is achieve nothing rather than a bad player actively making it harder for their team to win. The objectives also, naturally, attract players to a given location, and this is personal but I do prefer guarding a cap, the hill, a flag, or a payload to be more enjoyable than wandering the map looking for players to kill for points.
The ease of switching loadouts and weapons, as well as most weapons serving a specific purpose, rewards crafty players for recognizing an ongoing situation and adjusting their loadout - for instance, if enemy Engineers and their sentry guns are causing a problem and preventing your team from making progress, you can immediately help by switching to a class or loadout that's good at killing sentries, while you can turn the tide against projectile spam by equipping things that let you reflect or destroy projectiles. The room the game gives you to adapt your equipment to a situation is not something I have seen much of, and I like it, because it means the game is actualy won by playing rather than you just being immediately fucked when it starts because the enemy's class & weapon picks counter your picks.
The game has numerous techniques - obviously blast jumping, but also trimping, sentry jumping, damage surfing, and the various counters to invulnerability - but manages to not feel overwhelming because most of them have a cost or risk associated, meaning you're not "losing out" if you aren't tech'ing all the time. Blast jumping can eat a considerable amount of health and isn't always useful depending on map layout, trimping requires the Demoman to dedicate his secondary weapon slot to one of the shields that let you charge & trimp, sentry jumping similarly requires the Engineer to switch out his secondary for the Wrangler that lets you manually aim a sentry along with requiring you to get a sentry in position just to make the jump, damage surfing requires quick thinking and some luck, and every way of inconveniencing an incoming Ubercharge requires you to get close and risk getting torn to shreds.
I liked Team Fortress 2 because it let me play how I wanted without spending more time respawning than fighting, I never felt like I was a burden on my teammates, I didn't have to go whole hog all the time just to do well since there was always someone worse than me in the lobby, and it still let me feel cool whenever I landed a difficult rocket shot or got a cool flank as Spy and stabbed a bunch of people. I likee that tryharding and chill play were both fun and unlikely to get you insulted or yelled at.
It seems like every P.V.P. shooting game nowadays is turbotactical shit where you need to microanalyze every aspect of your loadout before you even spawn in, a constant cocaine trip where you can literally kill someone's character before their brain can process that their character has taken damage, wikislop, montage bait, or some other kind of failed E.-sport. Team Fortress 2 let me be slow while not stopping me from being fast, and it's one of the only games I've ever played like that.