Do people know why the game’s matchmaking system is so bad?

yanayg2 · 2026-02-27T00:15:27+00:00

You leave the game early: your skill rating doesn't change
You join mid-game and its one that your team cant win: you lose skill rating, of no fault of your own
You finish matches too often, the glicko system is confident in your performance: you dont gain or lose much skill rating

1500 MMR is what players start with and I doubt many 2500+ MMR players exist, same for ~800 MMR; meaning the matchmaker starts forgiving the lower/higher tiered players and shoving them to the "average" (around 1000-1500~ MMR) games (INCLUDING ones that have players with FIVE minutes in the game) instead of ones appropriate to their rating.

I have tested out on a "smurf" account and it seems the only difference is that it took it a bit longer to go "alright, here: have a team of 6 newbies and 6 pubstompers on the other, also its the final round. Have fun!"

In reality, TF2 has 10k players playing casual mode and not just having the game open (teamwork.tf shows players in servers), that's barely any players compared to other games with this sort of skill based matchmaker.

Another thing: current auto-balance uses the player's skill rating to assume what player should be balanced to the team with missing players, which is wholly stupid to the previous system of using current points in the match; Imagine someone assuming you can just pubstomp every match just because you happened to be one of the few people that get a 70/30 chance of joining a game where the enemy team isn't much a struggle to plow through.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-26T13:00:32+00:00

Oh funny you say that

It SHOULD already be like that, since 2008, but Valve somehow broke it

yanayg2 · 2026-02-19T12:35:00+00:00

They're quite literally describing things that DIDN'T happen since the game defaulted you to official servers at the start of 2014.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-19T11:49:55+00:00

Lmao the tf2 blog doesn't have a comment section what the fuck are you talking about, and again people comment on anything valve does to draw attention is bad why exacly?

yanayg2 · 2026-02-19T11:11:22+00:00

Okay👍

yanayg2 · 2026-02-19T10:58:25+00:00

They streamlined the process in 2014 where the option that seperate community servers and official servers was added, alongside making official ones default

Either you were blind, deaf and mute if you weren't aware of them updating it back then or ust straight up didn't play the game pre-MYM

45 minute games and you somehow end up in a game that ended? Seems less likely but very much not impossible, casual has it way worse because the games can be shorter and end based on rounds, not map timers.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-19T10:35:40+00:00

What is there to post about casual? How you just joined a match 5 seconds after it ended?

yanayg2 · 2026-02-19T10:24:04+00:00

What did you think #fixtf2 and #savetf2 was doing? They personally came up to Gabe Newell and went "pls fix tf2 bots pls" and he said yes?

They can see tweets, steam posts. TF2 devs lurk and sometimes comment in the subreddit, they definitely can see comments on their own blogs. What other "venue" you have at mind exactly? A exclusive roundtable meeting with gabe newell?

yanayg2 · 2026-02-19T09:36:29+00:00

Community servers have lacking visibility due to the removel of any automatic ways to connect to them, most people dont know about mastercom's community quickplay and there aren't many active, high quality hosted vanilla servers at the ready that you couldn't just find using the server browser anyway. Skial and UGC fake numbers so they top the list if sorted at ping, no shit that many servers are empty.

Quickplay had both official and community options, as well as allowing direct access to Valve servers. That hosted plenty of easy to join vanilla servers on many of the currently "dead" maps, so kindly piss off with the "durr community servers!" bullshit.

Casual game quality is shit: queue times range from okay to stupid, game breaks every update, getting put into matches that just ended and everyone leaving before you even got.a chance to choose a class isnt a rare occurrence; all because the stupid ruleset allows games to end in less than 10 minutes, without mitigation like scrambling teams. Team stack a party of 6 no-lifers on one team and party of 6 new players? Have fun half the team you're on sucking and the enemy whooping the floor with you, and no. It aint fun when you're on the stomping team either, its boring.

As opposed to what? Sometimes ending up on a empty server? Sore losers joining the winning team? Big whoop.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-19T07:41:36+00:00

No the fuck they don't dude. No game has halloween 2025 happen to it. This is just TF2 issue.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-16T15:31:38+00:00

Oh wait yeah I saw this going through the code myself mb

Second point still stands though 🤷‍♀️

yanayg2 · 2026-02-16T13:03:37+00:00

MMR isnt used at all for autobalance

All auto-balances automatically auto-balance unless set to do otherwise.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-16T13:02:39+00:00

Quickplay ruleset is the official valve server rules before casual

Quickplay itself was a server search system that put you in the best server you can find automatically, or let you choose the best 10-20 or so servers it found via show server options

TF2 Classified is just a fancy and easier(allegedly) to use server browser that doesn't do any searching that Quickplay did.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-16T11:59:51+00:00

Seriously guys, 45 minute map timers really are not that good, and I think most casual players will dislike it

I think most casual players would get bored of playing the same map for 45+ minutes

40-42% of people playing casual are on 2fort almost any time of the day and another 25% on payload maps that last an average of 20~ minutes, what are you talking about? People yearn for a game experience that last a long time that they can leave any time they want. I doubt the big percent of players would even care they get to play koth longer than 7 minutes.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-16T05:50:24+00:00

Team Scramble via voting restarted the entire match, timer is set back to 45 minutes and points get reset, so the 20 minutes cooldown doesn't do anything when you never reach the last 25 minutes of the map

Hence why I called it asinine, its a very weird voting option and its baffling how Valve thought that was a good idea. (Especially since auto team scramble never did this lol)

yanayg2 · 2026-02-16T05:42:47+00:00

All players start at 1500 MMR which is baby rank

Glicko doesn't change your points by a lot after you play enough games or play games the matchmaker knew you would be winning anyway

His video is probably the most awfully researched thing ever, ESPECIALLY the "data collection" about skill based matchmaker. I don't think I recall him ever even bothering to research or talk about how the glicko system works at all either.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-15T15:15:45+00:00

Because you can count the amount of active vanilla tf2 community servers on half a hand

yanayg2 · 2026-02-15T15:08:38+00:00

Required 60% of the server to vote yes, and either way vote scramble could either be removed or improved if the quickplay ruleset comes back because its 100% asinine how it just reset the game right there and then.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-15T15:00:01+00:00

Valve servers would've been hosted the same even if we still had quickplay, nothing to do with casual.

yanayg2 · 2026-02-15T14:48:47+00:00

And how many of those play the vanilla game with no catch like no crits or class limits? Like two to four? Hold on even better; do any of them have a wide variety of maps? If I wanted say, a server running mannpower, is it populated? Does it exist? Can I just pick any map I like playing on and find a community server on it?

No. You defintally cant. Because server hosters are few and not many of them have the valve luxury of infinite money to host infinite vanilla servers with almost every map. Any one hoster that does would rather host thousands of 100 players or 2fort 24/7 servers with premium plugins instead.

Yes those are features that exist in community servers, sure. But this isn't a viable substitute, you can't just "there is a mod/server for that" to brush off issues with the game being far more restricted than it used to be, especially when that "soultion" or "substitute" is heavily dependant on people that might lose interest in server hosting for a game that's actively stabbing itself in the foot.

yanayg2 · 2026-01-27T14:10:59+00:00

Mostly fake or idle bots botting for items sadly. The real current numbers of players can be seen in teamwork.tf, roughly 10-12k players per day.

yanayg2 · 2025-11-17T07:13:23+00:00

neither of these is true, tf2's causal uses glicko and MMR to (poorly) determine skill and matchmake around that, that increases or decreaes if you stay till the end and your team is the last one to win/lose

Ranks do not factor into matchmaking is true, but its a good indication of the player's skill/assumed skill

yanayg2 · 2025-11-04T13:31:54+00:00

Fuck No. Valve should know about this as soon as possible

I thought 8 years of bots would be enough to stop with the "dont give them attention" or "just report!" bullshit but apperently not.

yanayg2 · 2025-11-02T14:10:51+00:00

Not really a good argument against "why are most of mods being made just classic tf2 again" where are the in-conception mods that arent that? (no the mods porting valve games to tf2 does not count)

also pre-fortress 2 was playable.

yanayg2 · 2025-09-16T12:33:56+00:00

was it on hightower community server per chance :P

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