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You cling to your Casual, as if it hasn't already decayed and failed you. But I am already saved. Let me offer you an alternative you can't refuse.
If you're not gonna read anything else, just read the first paragraph. If you're sold on my pitch, keep reading.
Tired of endless leaving and requeuing? Tired of the steamrolls and being placed into matches that have already ended? Tired of being put into matches that only last 5 minutes, 10 minutes if you're lucky? Tired of metal doors slamming in your face? What if I offer you something that could change your life forever? Well maybe that's a bit much, but something that can change your experience on tf2 forever? And no I'm not talking about Payload or Dustbowl or anything Casual, I'm talking about...
~~Bringing Back Qui~~ Community servers!
And not the Skial and x10 and highertower types that we all know and hate, but the ones that are like Casual but with more tools and options to help you (yes YOU, good sir) self regulate and balance your experience built within the server. Rather than surrender power to the Matchmaking machine spirit overlord, and all its mysterious ways, these servers rightfully give power back to the hands of the PEOPLE where it belongs, giving YOU control for dictating whether the game is balanced or not and using the power of DEMOCRACY to curb steamrolls from happening for more than one round. For instance, players can vote for a team scramble to help balance out the teams. And what it does is that it randomly redistributes all the players on the server across the two teams so that the skill difference between the two is minimal and makes it harder for either side to steamroll the other. If a majority of players pick "no" because they think the teams are already pretty well balanced, then a team scramble won't happen. Democracy! And as a bonus, the scramble will wait until the round is over so that you can continue to play the game without interruption. It might suck because you're in the middle of a roll, but you won't feel the need to leave the server as much because the teams might not be as unbalanced next match.
But wait! There's more! The (by default) 45 minute round timer for ALL maps almost guarantees that you'll never join a game that had just ended. KOTH and CP maps aren't arbitrarily ended by a "best of three" system, so you get to play on a map for as long as you and your fellow server dwellers want to (with the power of DEMOCR-). Want to change the map in the middle of a game and not rely on the timer ending? You can call a vote for that! Want to extend the round timer when you don't want to change the map just yet? You can call a vote for that! Want to join the other team and play against your friends without having to rely on autobalance to do it for you? You can do that so long as it doesn't make the team sizes unbalanced! Want to have more than 5 friends join one server at the same time? You can do that! Want to join your friends near instantaneously while they're in the middle of a match without having to wrangle with a god awful party system that makes you sit and wait for agonizing minutes at a time? You can do that with the power of ad-hoc connections, something that isn't possible with Valve servers! You just load in, pick your team (as shown in the attached image with the doors), and you start playing. It's almost like magic! No queue, no nothing, just plug and play.
I will admit, the servers aren't perfect and they have their flaws, like how sometimes a scramble doesn't make teams balanced and leads to another round of steamrolls, but voting for another scramble is a whole heck of a lot better than endlessly requeuing in Casual and trying to find a balanced match THAT way. 9/10 times, a team scramble WILL give you balanced teams and therefore a balanced match and it will continue to stay balanced for a very long time due to the large team sizes minimizing the impact that any one highly skilled player can do. If you wanted a way to break up that 6 player comp stack spawncamping your team on Dustbowl, something that thankfully you're seeing a lot less in Casual but is still very much a thing, a vote scramble would be your way of doing just that. And to keep them from reforming their stack, for a short period of time after the scramble the game will keep players from switching teams. It just works.
Now with all these perks for using community servers, there must SOME catch, right? It's just too good to be true! Well, there is one catch that I can think of and it's that NOBODY PLAYS THEM. And not because they're bad or anything, it's that players simply do not know the option exists, and the ones that do don't play them because there's no one playing on them, and so the problem persists. This post serves to help educate players like younger me about the existence of community servers. They've always been an option, before MyM, before time had a name, before Valve servers were a thing, since the very beginning of tf2, there has always been community servers. For a time, they were the only option you had. And I'm not talking 2007, I'm talking about much more recently. I'm talking about the bots.
You all remember those, right? For 8 long, agonizing years bots made Casual unplayable. I've still got the scar tissue on my account to prove it, with Valve hitting f2ps in the crossfire when trying to deal with the bots and making them unable to call for a freaking medic. TO THIS DAY I still can't use voice or text chat. It's horrible, but it's proof that I was there! However, for those who weren't, let me catch you up to speed. And for those who forgot, let me give you a refresher.
You know MvM, the gamemode that Valve is supposedly making an update for? Think of that, but entire waves of only sniper bots that never unscope, never miss, and always lock to a player's head when one is in their line of sight (basically, if Grey Mann was really serious about taking over Mann Co.). Going invisible won't save you against these guys. They join a server, sometimes on both teams if you're unlucky enough, shooting everyone on the other team that isn't also a bot, and then leave when there's no more players to grief to repeat the cycle again on another server. And that was just the beginning, at some point they started kicking real flesh and blood players and spamming racial slurs in chat. They were spamming false accusations of players being bots, confusing players to kick other players, which then opened up room for more bots to potentially join their team. There were so many that on very rare occasions, if one side was full of bots of one brand and another side was full of bots of a different brand, the bots would be shooting each other! And if a bot of one brand joined a team that already had a bot of another brand, the former had a chance to be kicked by the latter, mistaking it for a player! One or two of them on a team was manageable, they got kicked almost immediately, but the most egregious of them joined using the party system, so you had groups of 6 that were unkickable because you needed a 7 player majority for the kick to go through and that wasn't possible with team sizes of 12. If THAT happened, players just left because after that point, it was actually impossible to play a normal game of tf2 and you're better off just requeuing for another game. Of all the clankers, these ones deserved the slur the most. They were the worst of the worst. This went on for 8 long years, and Valve was perfectly fine with just doing nothing up until the playerbase started getting fed up with it and forced Valve to do something. This sounds like a fever dream, but it's not, there's still videos about them doing their thing on Youtube! If you type "tf2 cheating bots before:2024", you'll see countless videos on this topic. It was a nightmare for anyone playing tf2 on an official Valve server. [Here's one by Shounic showing one of the ways that they avoided shooting each other](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIwqlKDPq4s), but there were plenty more videos like this talking about the bots.
Now there were many reasons why the bots didn't target community servers, the main reason being that there weren't many players to grief on those servers. Computing power is limited, and the best way to maximize the bang for your buck as a bot hoster would be to target Casual. But even if they had unlimited computing power, VAC becoming outdated only affected Valve servers. It was in the name, "Valve Anti-Cheat". Community servers had their own anti-cheats and moderators separate from Valve's and those systems actually worked and got cheaters banned.
But even with these bot free alternatives to Casual, players didn't populate them, me included. I spent hours requeuing and getting bot infested server after bot infested server for that one gem of a full server with actual players because I thought it was worth it. Even if the teams were unbalanced, I was just happy to play a match of tf2. I had no clue that community servers existed or that they were even good. Let me remind you that community servers were around since the game's release, and I didn't know they *existed*. These servers and all their improvements to Casual go largely unnoticed because players understandably don't know that they exist. So I ask you to don't do what I did and please give them a try. I blame Valve for this by putting community servers right underneath the very abandoned Competitive mode that no one touches.
You might be asking, "If all these features are so good, then why doesn't Casual have them?" and to that I say that the players back then DID have all these features, but then Valve took them away from the playerbase when they released Casual. They tried fixing something that wasn't broken by replacing it with something else. In other words...
**These community servers are the closest thing you have to playing Quickplay.**
I know people are iffy about reverting a system that has been around for a decade now, so this is a way to show what people have been missing out on all these years. These servers give you a taste of what tf2 used to be like, before MyM and before the bots. There weren't as many servers as before, but if there's enough demand for these servers, maybe more will pop up later down the line.
But in the future, I don't think you'll have a choice. Community servers might be your only option once again. Casual's matchmaking system is slowly crumbling with the staggering weight of 100+ maps year round, that is way too many and it's being stretched too thin. Remember how the system broke last scream fortress and NOBODY could get into a game? And every update like it will have new maps added to the game. It's decaying before our very eyes. This is not normal.
But even if Casual dies, community servers will still be around. I don't want to jinx it, but Valve can't touch community servers, otherwise they would've gotten rid of them a long time ago. All they can do is starve player traffic towards them, and that they did, but that's a post for another day. Community servers today are time capsules of what tf2 used to be like, all the tools and options that players used to have. Valve had every reason to nuke them back then, make Quickplay into nothing more than a distant memory, but they didn't because they'd get a lot of backlash for doing so because people regularly played on them. If Valve were to nuke them nowadays, I'm not so sure they'll get any backlash, because Casual is all that most players have experienced. Would people even care if Valve got rid of community servers? I'm not saying that Valve would do something like that, but in case they do, please play them while you still can.
Here's a list of servers that you can go on that come close to that Quickplay experience:
The most popular one that I've seen that's closest to Quickplay is Zesty's vanilla servers, who only disabled the Vaccinator (because of course he did) and that's it. It should be a completely standard Quickplay experience otherwise, and you can find his servers on zestyjesus.com.
Uncle Dane has his own servers, but with class limits and no random crits turned off, so it's a little less like Quickplay (and don't even think about going friendly, you'll get kicked immediately). You can find HIS servers on uncletopia.com.
And finally, The Furry Pound is full of furries. It's not what I personally default to but I think they're all around decent people. Very reliably populated throughout the week, however I don't know if they have any special rules like the first two. These servers might be the closest you get to vanilla Quickplay, with no weapon bans or class limits. If there's a website for active servers, I'm sorry but I don't know it.
But what was the point of me telling you any of this?
I believe that once you get a feel for both Quickplay AND Casual, then (and only then) can you stake your opinion on which side you're on. Before this post, a lot of you probably didn't know what those doors had to do with the rest of my post, but now you do! Now go out there and experience Quickplay for yourself, preferably a server that has players on it.
But if you were to ask me, I'd say that there's no contest. Quickplay is just Better Casual that gives players more options and tools that Casual just straight up doesn't have. The only option you have of changing the team composition of a stomp is to requeue and hope the next game isn't a stomp, which is heavily inefficient and could be so much better. There are probably other improvements and potential flaws that I missed but those are the ones that stuck out to me.
\#BringBackQuickPlay
Author: HackedPasta1245
http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1uc9ja6/you_cling_to_your_casual_as_if_it_hasnt_already/
If you're not gonna read anything else, just read the first paragraph. If you're sold on my pitch, keep reading.
Tired of endless leaving and requeuing? Tired of the steamrolls and being placed into matches that have already ended? Tired of being put into matches that only last 5 minutes, 10 minutes if you're lucky? Tired of metal doors slamming in your face? What if I offer you something that could change your life forever? Well maybe that's a bit much, but something that can change your experience on tf2 forever? And no I'm not talking about Payload or Dustbowl or anything Casual, I'm talking about...
~~Bringing Back Qui~~ Community servers!
And not the Skial and x10 and highertower types that we all know and hate, but the ones that are like Casual but with more tools and options to help you (yes YOU, good sir) self regulate and balance your experience built within the server. Rather than surrender power to the Matchmaking machine spirit overlord, and all its mysterious ways, these servers rightfully give power back to the hands of the PEOPLE where it belongs, giving YOU control for dictating whether the game is balanced or not and using the power of DEMOCRACY to curb steamrolls from happening for more than one round. For instance, players can vote for a team scramble to help balance out the teams. And what it does is that it randomly redistributes all the players on the server across the two teams so that the skill difference between the two is minimal and makes it harder for either side to steamroll the other. If a majority of players pick "no" because they think the teams are already pretty well balanced, then a team scramble won't happen. Democracy! And as a bonus, the scramble will wait until the round is over so that you can continue to play the game without interruption. It might suck because you're in the middle of a roll, but you won't feel the need to leave the server as much because the teams might not be as unbalanced next match.
But wait! There's more! The (by default) 45 minute round timer for ALL maps almost guarantees that you'll never join a game that had just ended. KOTH and CP maps aren't arbitrarily ended by a "best of three" system, so you get to play on a map for as long as you and your fellow server dwellers want to (with the power of DEMOCR-). Want to change the map in the middle of a game and not rely on the timer ending? You can call a vote for that! Want to extend the round timer when you don't want to change the map just yet? You can call a vote for that! Want to join the other team and play against your friends without having to rely on autobalance to do it for you? You can do that so long as it doesn't make the team sizes unbalanced! Want to have more than 5 friends join one server at the same time? You can do that! Want to join your friends near instantaneously while they're in the middle of a match without having to wrangle with a god awful party system that makes you sit and wait for agonizing minutes at a time? You can do that with the power of ad-hoc connections, something that isn't possible with Valve servers! You just load in, pick your team (as shown in the attached image with the doors), and you start playing. It's almost like magic! No queue, no nothing, just plug and play.
I will admit, the servers aren't perfect and they have their flaws, like how sometimes a scramble doesn't make teams balanced and leads to another round of steamrolls, but voting for another scramble is a whole heck of a lot better than endlessly requeuing in Casual and trying to find a balanced match THAT way. 9/10 times, a team scramble WILL give you balanced teams and therefore a balanced match and it will continue to stay balanced for a very long time due to the large team sizes minimizing the impact that any one highly skilled player can do. If you wanted a way to break up that 6 player comp stack spawncamping your team on Dustbowl, something that thankfully you're seeing a lot less in Casual but is still very much a thing, a vote scramble would be your way of doing just that. And to keep them from reforming their stack, for a short period of time after the scramble the game will keep players from switching teams. It just works.
Now with all these perks for using community servers, there must SOME catch, right? It's just too good to be true! Well, there is one catch that I can think of and it's that NOBODY PLAYS THEM. And not because they're bad or anything, it's that players simply do not know the option exists, and the ones that do don't play them because there's no one playing on them, and so the problem persists. This post serves to help educate players like younger me about the existence of community servers. They've always been an option, before MyM, before time had a name, before Valve servers were a thing, since the very beginning of tf2, there has always been community servers. For a time, they were the only option you had. And I'm not talking 2007, I'm talking about much more recently. I'm talking about the bots.
You all remember those, right? For 8 long, agonizing years bots made Casual unplayable. I've still got the scar tissue on my account to prove it, with Valve hitting f2ps in the crossfire when trying to deal with the bots and making them unable to call for a freaking medic. TO THIS DAY I still can't use voice or text chat. It's horrible, but it's proof that I was there! However, for those who weren't, let me catch you up to speed. And for those who forgot, let me give you a refresher.
You know MvM, the gamemode that Valve is supposedly making an update for? Think of that, but entire waves of only sniper bots that never unscope, never miss, and always lock to a player's head when one is in their line of sight (basically, if Grey Mann was really serious about taking over Mann Co.). Going invisible won't save you against these guys. They join a server, sometimes on both teams if you're unlucky enough, shooting everyone on the other team that isn't also a bot, and then leave when there's no more players to grief to repeat the cycle again on another server. And that was just the beginning, at some point they started kicking real flesh and blood players and spamming racial slurs in chat. They were spamming false accusations of players being bots, confusing players to kick other players, which then opened up room for more bots to potentially join their team. There were so many that on very rare occasions, if one side was full of bots of one brand and another side was full of bots of a different brand, the bots would be shooting each other! And if a bot of one brand joined a team that already had a bot of another brand, the former had a chance to be kicked by the latter, mistaking it for a player! One or two of them on a team was manageable, they got kicked almost immediately, but the most egregious of them joined using the party system, so you had groups of 6 that were unkickable because you needed a 7 player majority for the kick to go through and that wasn't possible with team sizes of 12. If THAT happened, players just left because after that point, it was actually impossible to play a normal game of tf2 and you're better off just requeuing for another game. Of all the clankers, these ones deserved the slur the most. They were the worst of the worst. This went on for 8 long years, and Valve was perfectly fine with just doing nothing up until the playerbase started getting fed up with it and forced Valve to do something. This sounds like a fever dream, but it's not, there's still videos about them doing their thing on Youtube! If you type "tf2 cheating bots before:2024", you'll see countless videos on this topic. It was a nightmare for anyone playing tf2 on an official Valve server. [Here's one by Shounic showing one of the ways that they avoided shooting each other](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIwqlKDPq4s), but there were plenty more videos like this talking about the bots.
Now there were many reasons why the bots didn't target community servers, the main reason being that there weren't many players to grief on those servers. Computing power is limited, and the best way to maximize the bang for your buck as a bot hoster would be to target Casual. But even if they had unlimited computing power, VAC becoming outdated only affected Valve servers. It was in the name, "Valve Anti-Cheat". Community servers had their own anti-cheats and moderators separate from Valve's and those systems actually worked and got cheaters banned.
But even with these bot free alternatives to Casual, players didn't populate them, me included. I spent hours requeuing and getting bot infested server after bot infested server for that one gem of a full server with actual players because I thought it was worth it. Even if the teams were unbalanced, I was just happy to play a match of tf2. I had no clue that community servers existed or that they were even good. Let me remind you that community servers were around since the game's release, and I didn't know they *existed*. These servers and all their improvements to Casual go largely unnoticed because players understandably don't know that they exist. So I ask you to don't do what I did and please give them a try. I blame Valve for this by putting community servers right underneath the very abandoned Competitive mode that no one touches.
You might be asking, "If all these features are so good, then why doesn't Casual have them?" and to that I say that the players back then DID have all these features, but then Valve took them away from the playerbase when they released Casual. They tried fixing something that wasn't broken by replacing it with something else. In other words...
**These community servers are the closest thing you have to playing Quickplay.**
I know people are iffy about reverting a system that has been around for a decade now, so this is a way to show what people have been missing out on all these years. These servers give you a taste of what tf2 used to be like, before MyM and before the bots. There weren't as many servers as before, but if there's enough demand for these servers, maybe more will pop up later down the line.
But in the future, I don't think you'll have a choice. Community servers might be your only option once again. Casual's matchmaking system is slowly crumbling with the staggering weight of 100+ maps year round, that is way too many and it's being stretched too thin. Remember how the system broke last scream fortress and NOBODY could get into a game? And every update like it will have new maps added to the game. It's decaying before our very eyes. This is not normal.
But even if Casual dies, community servers will still be around. I don't want to jinx it, but Valve can't touch community servers, otherwise they would've gotten rid of them a long time ago. All they can do is starve player traffic towards them, and that they did, but that's a post for another day. Community servers today are time capsules of what tf2 used to be like, all the tools and options that players used to have. Valve had every reason to nuke them back then, make Quickplay into nothing more than a distant memory, but they didn't because they'd get a lot of backlash for doing so because people regularly played on them. If Valve were to nuke them nowadays, I'm not so sure they'll get any backlash, because Casual is all that most players have experienced. Would people even care if Valve got rid of community servers? I'm not saying that Valve would do something like that, but in case they do, please play them while you still can.
Here's a list of servers that you can go on that come close to that Quickplay experience:
The most popular one that I've seen that's closest to Quickplay is Zesty's vanilla servers, who only disabled the Vaccinator (because of course he did) and that's it. It should be a completely standard Quickplay experience otherwise, and you can find his servers on zestyjesus.com.
Uncle Dane has his own servers, but with class limits and no random crits turned off, so it's a little less like Quickplay (and don't even think about going friendly, you'll get kicked immediately). You can find HIS servers on uncletopia.com.
And finally, The Furry Pound is full of furries. It's not what I personally default to but I think they're all around decent people. Very reliably populated throughout the week, however I don't know if they have any special rules like the first two. These servers might be the closest you get to vanilla Quickplay, with no weapon bans or class limits. If there's a website for active servers, I'm sorry but I don't know it.
But what was the point of me telling you any of this?
I believe that once you get a feel for both Quickplay AND Casual, then (and only then) can you stake your opinion on which side you're on. Before this post, a lot of you probably didn't know what those doors had to do with the rest of my post, but now you do! Now go out there and experience Quickplay for yourself, preferably a server that has players on it.
But if you were to ask me, I'd say that there's no contest. Quickplay is just Better Casual that gives players more options and tools that Casual just straight up doesn't have. The only option you have of changing the team composition of a stomp is to requeue and hope the next game isn't a stomp, which is heavily inefficient and could be so much better. There are probably other improvements and potential flaws that I missed but those are the ones that stuck out to me.
\#BringBackQuickPlay
Author: HackedPasta1245
http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1uc9ja6/you_cling_to_your_casual_as_if_it_hasnt_already/