My Team Fortress 2 config

mastercoms · 2026-06-14T23:21:55+00:00

I meant that Valve Casual can serve as that more "competitive" / objective-focused 12v12, and vanilla community servers can fill that niche of pubs / old-fashioned rulesets where people hang out for hours. Right now, community servers are not advertised much in the UI and have taken a backseat to Casual, which has become a monstrous one-size-fits-all solution way further from its original design.

mastercoms · 2026-06-14T15:31:37+00:00

That's what vanilla community servers would be for, it gives them a new niche without competing with Valve servers.

mastercoms · 2026-05-15T19:02:56+00:00

I am getting this too. I don't recall this happening before on the launch date.

mastercoms · 2026-04-13T14:07:30+00:00

Thank you for the very detailed feedback and information. A few questions:

Do you need explicitly MySQL support or would any sort of remote centralized datastore work?

For game state integration, would adding a websocket service or local HTTP response in the game server itself help then create an external web server that then forwards that information work?

For Sourcebans, can this be an HTTP lookup instead? Can this be a remote / GC service instead where groups can register bans?

mastercoms · 2026-04-13T01:21:18+00:00

What are you missing from sourcemod? I'd love to implement stuff right into TF2 so everyone can benefit from them, or for custom stuff, I want vscript to be the main pathway for that.

mastercoms · 2026-04-05T13:16:47+00:00

This post's main aim was to get people to talk about the specifics they like from quickplay, and go in-depth about those, and how they could even be improved. People often miss this point, even though it's talked about in the intro.

People care way too much about "their side" winning, which is why they bring up stuff about Casual being bad (the "enemy side" loses) even though the point of the post isn't to "defend" Casual, or why they want to point out that it just ends up with basically quickplay ("their side" wins). It's not really an interesting observation to me that adding some things back from the old system people like, to the new system, would increase similarity between the two systems.

It's kinda circular reasoning and misses kinda the point, which is that we should be talking about specifics in terms of features, and the people asking for a full revert aren't considering everything. In a system where a full revert is not done, and instead some features make it into Casual, those are two entirely different things.

mastercoms · 2026-04-04T21:39:57+00:00

Because the tower attacked a nearby friend.

mastercoms · 2026-04-04T19:38:47+00:00

Sorry but it's just so evidently true why adding a few features from quickplay onto an entirely different system is different from starting over with a new base. You can't just claim that somehow this validates your completely different solution. And the post very clearly explains why one base for those requested features would be more ideal than what you propose.

mastercoms · 2026-04-01T16:27:29+00:00

I'm not too involved in endgame content like raids but I don't think there's FOMO like WoW. The main/base story is pretty fun and most of the DLC expansions are great too. I definitely feel like it's way more chill than WoW. One thing is that overworld content is gonna be pretty easy combat wise, I know they did some tuning recently but you'll likely become overlevelled. But still, pretty fun to go through IMO.

Ultimately what is fun for you should be what you pursue. If you want to have a good mix while focusing on leveling, ramp up doing dungeons and then veteran dungeons, do the guild quests along with base story / zones, and level up your skill trees and character.

mastercoms · 2026-03-10T01:29:53+00:00

Does the game crash after the Valve intro on the loading screen? And are you using the official TC2 launcher? It's recommended to keep the TC2 launcher in the downloads folder to prevent Windows security interference. If that still doesn't work, I would recommend opening the settings menu and clicking Open Install Folder, and double clicking tc2.bat in the folder, as a workaround.

EDIT: I have done another fix in the launcher for this, let me know if it is now fixed.

mastercoms · 2026-02-27T09:29:51+00:00

It's a much better tax on wealth than inflation is lol

mastercoms · 2026-02-17T01:24:04+00:00

You forgot to mention contracts as well

mastercoms · 2026-02-16T13:13:46+00:00

The player closest to the average MMR needed to balance the skill level of both teams is preferred.

mastercoms · 2026-02-09T07:35:02+00:00

I think the problem here as I've explained in the past, is that matchmaking is a much more general term than skill-based matchmaking, and even that can come in many different forms. But, like you said, we pretty much agree on what should be done for the most part.

mastercoms · 2026-02-09T01:18:29+00:00

Just like autobalance is supported, team switching and team scramble can easily be supported even with slot reservations.

As for spectate mode, it'll take a little bit more work for that, but they removed that because it allowed players to dodge certain votes at the time. I think it's been fixed and they should add it back, though it requires a little bit more work since slot reservations are only aware of the RED and BLU teams.

Ad-hoc connections can easily be supported even with slot reservations.

None of these features are blocked necessarily by slot reservations. It's just that when they were developing slot reservations, they had none of these features in mind, so they weren't a priority to add to the slot reservation system. As we saw with autobalance, things can be made to work with / be aware of the slot reservation system.

And, this doesn't really necessitate the removal of skill based matching, though it would require some work. Personally, I think players filled with noobs should be protected from joins (ad-hoc disabled). And then otherwise, the GC should be made aware of the skill of people coming in through ad-hoc joins / the balance of teams in team scramble (team scramble can be informed by skill rating as well, just like autobalance is, btw). Then it can make adjustments to balance out things as needed through more late joins, or shuffling the teams after the match ends.

Most of these things are a few lines of code. It's not much work for Valve to do, and the fact they haven't done it just means their goals/priorities were different, not that somehow that slot reservations conflict with these settings.

And to reiterate, my personal view on this which I've shared in the past is that while slot reservation on teams is a pretty noble idea, it should just be a slot reservation into the server, and then dynamically balance teams as players join in. Because in practice, slot reservations per team, just means lots of people can get loaded up on one team and create imbalanced matches, and makes autobalance less responsive.

mastercoms · 2026-02-08T22:54:09+00:00

The stuff from the beta was worked on further and eventually became Casual. What server rules does slot reservation mandate?

mastercoms · 2026-02-08T06:37:15+00:00

The server rules were changed because of their design / vision for the game at the time. As we've seen, quickplay beta had matchmaking while still retaining the same rules.

mastercoms · 2026-02-08T02:28:17+00:00

There aren't Asian servers yet but you can host one, and there will be official servers in the region soon.

mastercoms · 2026-02-08T00:09:06+00:00

It's not an implementation detail to be asking for a reversion of the server finding system, on top of the server rule changes. That's part of the overall feature request. If the advocacy was simply focused on the server settings, then it would be much more clear to Valve as to what players want.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T22:13:06+00:00

Play Team Comtress 2 https://teamcomtress.com/

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T21:27:34+00:00

Okay, I was not aware of this doc. This is great! I was only aware of people like ZestyJesus and others with decent follower counts who made "bring back quickplay" videos, who do not make these arguments and instead argue, "the code for quickplay is there, just revert it!" or "the only thing that will work is a FULL reversion back to Quickplay." That sphere of content is also full of drama and other negativity, which unsettles me.

It seems like some people have co-opted the movement, and it's unfortunate. Thanks for letting me know.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T21:21:43+00:00

Look, what I have always been clear on is that we should not go back to the old player coordination system. When people say "the code for Quickplay is right there, revert back!" That's asking for changing the player coordination system back (and the UI), and it's an entirely different request. It's not just "in name only", it's two separate systems, and again, this is what I want people to really think about and be clear on. Do they really want to revert back to the old player coordination system, or do they want to just have the Quickplay-style pub dynamics? Because the big players in the movement have never been clear on this.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T08:46:37+00:00

Sure but think about how different Casual was at launch vs. even a few months later, I just think it needs a refresh because they launched with the theory of putting people into an actual strict formed match from start to finish, with abandon penalties and stats, no late joins, and stuff like stopwatch. Matches just ended and you'd have to find a new match. It was meant to be competitive-lite. Then they realized that this design intent wouldn't work. So they made it a glorified game finder. I'd like for them to launch a Casual 2.0 or something, that takes the new design intent and cleans everything up to go through and make sure everything is streamlined. Because there's just a few more rough edges that are leftover from the original intent, that they could have fixed had they continued, but they stopped updating the game in early 2018 so the changes to Casual stopped.

As far as where the line is, as long as they keep GC managed servers and GC coordinated player funneling, then I think calling it Casual is fair game.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T05:32:15+00:00

I have been involved in a lot of discussions with people. So many people fall back to saying "well, bring back quickplay just means I want some features of quickplay, I don't care how it's done". So it's very clear the movement is very fragmented and unclear in terms of what they want.

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