So I recently contracted the nostalgia virus, and it had me asking: "Why don't I reinstall Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 for a little bit?" They are games we played to death with around 6000 hours playtime. TF2 has left a mark on us personally from the communities in them, and the experiences in playing competitively.
That's in the past though, nostalgia trips have always left that feeling of unsatisfied yearning. Usually people are willing to leave things there, assigning the mismatch between feelings past and present to those rose-tinted glasses of memory, but this time I felt like there were more tangible reasons to be explored, and I think I've found out why.
Both games have changed plenty over their lifespans. Dota has had so many gameplay changes over the years that a lot of it I forget while playing as someone who thought that adding talents 9 years ago was a bit too much. It's still Dota though. You wait for queue to pop, there's a smurf in the game, teammates get mad. Everything that makes the game the experience that it is, is still very much identical between now and a decade ago.
Team Fortress 2 is the polar opposite and in that I feel serves as a much better chance for insight, not only for the game itself over the years, but gaming as a whole.
This is a 2007 game that's a sequel to a 1999 game that was a mod for 1996's Quake. TF2's ye olde PC-gaming bones, foundations firmly set in a time that didn't know what a Minecraft was, can be felt and seen almost immediately, especially if you know what to look for. It has all the movement tech of an old arena shooter and then some, there's console commands to tweak the minutest options to your liking, and there's a server browser that is to this day the same one that could be found in that 1999 original.
This browser is the key that unlocked the heart and soul of the game. There was a quickplay option that after a few moments threw you into a random default server, but nobody used it. You used the browser to find the community servers, anything from very vanilla experiences to something ridiculous like a Warioware mode or homing-missile-based-dodgeball could be found, and community was absolutely the keyword here.
If there was a mode or a map pool that you particularly liked, you learned the name of the server, you added it to your favourites tab in the browser, and you started to become a regular in the server that provided you with the TF2 experience of your liking. You'd see familiar hats and hear familiar voices day in and day out. With a few of these servers, you could ensure you were always playing with pleasant people and anyone stereotypically toxic could be avoided.
TF2's competitive scene was also a reflection of the era it emerged from. Around this time the biggest games for competing were still things like Starcraft through its immense popularity in Korea and the big console FPS's through MLG. There were no million dollar prize pools and more importantly the idea that a game would be built around competing was nearly unheard of.
If you wanted to get "serious" about Team Fortress 2 you had two options; either make an account on a forum and make a post about wanting to find a team for entirely unofficial 3rd party competitive leagues ran through those forums, or know a guy that knows a guy who's looking for someone to fill a certain role on their team and they'd add you to their team page on the forum. Team comms were through Ventrilo or Mumble, and the entire endeavor of 'competitive Team Fortress 2' was balanced on a very delicate knife's edge of class limits, weapon banlists, server settings and limited map pools.
There's a whole bunch of talking in past tense there, so what happened? E-Sports became the main focus of gaming. A million dollar tournament is not a headline anymore, and ranked mode is a near mandatory expectation. The TF2 community saw all of this and asked: "Hey can we have that too?".
Ranked in TF2 began to be rumored and spoken about by well known figures in the community around 2013, with some of them being from people who spoke to Valve directly about their aims around using a ranked mode to gain data for weapon balancing. A beta test emerged in 2015 and... it was bad. On top of the many errors innate to a beta test, the core of this official form of competition amounted to using the main team size used in those unofficial leagues and ignoring everything else.
A year later, it was released within a major update, and the game was transformed. The entire main menu was changed, quickplay was replaced with a 'casual' mode and all of Valve's official servers were removed from the server browser.
So what does a post-official-competitive TF2 feel like? What is the experience like? Competitive mode was almost entirely unchanged from beta. It's dead. Not 'It's less active than its peak' dead. Properly dead. Even in the beta it was starting to wither on the vine with all its flaws and dissonance from what people wanted it to be. Everyone went back to their unofficial leagues and the old ways became status quo once again. So with the main reason for changing how people interacted with the game as a collection of communities taken away, what is left?
The communities died too. In Australia at least, all those distinctive servers and modes just don't exist anymore. If you want to play the game, you use casual mode and leave yourself to the whims of modern video game matchmaking. You can sometimes recognize names you've come across before but the expectation is there to be no friendly chatter, no mic activity, no bonds forged nor familiarity, just the game. The gameplay is still great, being the same as it was in its hayday. The experience is gone though, it's just another thing to play.
Truth be told, almost every multiplayer game nowadays are just things to play. Look at any aspect of how they exist beyond their gameplay and they fall short in ways that make them miserable. A "fun" exercise one could perform is to watch any prominent League of Legends stream. Nobody hates playing LoL more than people who still play LoL and revolve their lives around it. Quite a few of them have more or less said 'I wish I could play something else, but if I do my viewer-base and thus my livelihood is threatened'.
Constant invitations to spend more money via lootboxes, FOMO-based items, gacha, battle passes, tradable skins so coveted that they've sprouted their own gambling eco-systems. You can thank Valve for most of those becoming commonplace by the way. TF2's crates introduced the concept of the lootbox to the western PC-gaming space in 2010, and Dota 2 gave us the first battle pass in 2013.
Toxicity from both enemies and 'allies' both so pervasive that games like LoL by default have text chat disabled. In present day TF2 where it's casual matchmaking or bust it's a matter of not if but how often people will go out of their way to replicate the pop-culture memory of what old CoD lobbies were like. Edgelord shit is now unavoidable since virtual community spaces are less and less accessible.
In today's gaming ecosystem, the other people you play with have become unignorably disposable and forgettable. You could play for an entire day and have no interactions that couldn't be replicated by a sufficiently skilled bot. In a team-based game, a poorly performing teammate can jeopardize your endeavor to climb the ranks, to reach for that pipedream of being someone who gets paid to be good at your chosen game, the structure of ranked gaming encourages you to point your ire towards your team instead of theirs.
There's just a lot of trend-chasers looking to find a fluke hit to rake in big e-sports money that are unignorably sauceless. Even the biggest example of a battle royale game, PUBG: Battlegrounds, was so deprived of even the slightest crumb of identity that it sued multiple other games for using a frying pan as a melee weapon. Do you remember that the "BG" in PUBG already stands for Battlegrounds? Do you remember that the PU is for some dude named "PlayerUnknown"? Do you know literally anything about him?
Within this haze that gaming seems to be stuck in, where the most popular games are the MOBAs that have been around for 15+ years, the newest iteration of the 1999 mod Counter-Strike, and the version of Counter-Strike that's made by the LoL dev and not the Dota dev, what impact have they left behind after so long? Does anyone that isn't a Dota fanatic know a single Dota video? If Arcane didn't exist, would people that don't play MOBAs know a single character's name in League? To this day I don't know anything about why the Valorant characters are shooting each other.
Well a bunch of people hate partaking but they feel like they can't quit, people are antagonizing others in the same position they are in the aim to reach a goal of being able to make it rich, third spaces are being removed so our means of connecting are limited, corporations are trying to sell us something we either already have or don't need...
...is E-Sports just capitalism as something you can play?
I wish I could be less cynical about a medium that I love and have spent so much time within, but truth be told I am completely burned out of this form of gaming. In fact, I've quit playing any multiplayer game that isn't Splatoon or FF14, with the exception of a much better alternative.
Even compared to any other game I've mentioned thus far, fighting games are ancient. Street Fighter 2 came out before the USSR ended and the Fighting Game Community still cares about and plays it. The fundamental factors of fighting games and where they came from inform so much about how they're interacted with and talked about that it was such a revelation to me when I started playing them late-2020.
There are no teammates to blame nor teammates to blame you. There's only you, your opponent, and the characters you've picked. This 1v1 system innate to the genre forces you to rethink not only your approach to the game, but your personal mindset and how you learn and improve. In FGC servers, there's often a channel dedicated to talking about learning, and compared to almost any 'e-sports game' community, they are downright philosophical about things. These people read books about tennis and articles about poker just to pry apart the rigid aspects of their mentality.
Opaqueness in the mechanics and moves I feel acts as a guiding hand towards this. It's often the case that you'll start needing to dive into wikis to find out how good a punch is, how to do a certain combo route, how to turn a certain defensive situation into a chance for offense, or you could just ask the person you're playing with between matches 'Hey, how does that work?'.
With this focus on individual growth, and the means of competing being the same as it was in its early arcade roots, the prize people care about in tournaments is not the money, but the prestige. Teams don't win, people do, and they care a lot about being recognized for putting the hard work in, the grind isn't for the ultimate paycheck but to be part of their chosen game's history and the kudos that comes with the trophy.
Unfortunately E-Sports is starting to bleed in and how it's sucking the life out of the parts it's gotten a hold of is unignorable. Community icons that used to preach all about the grassroots community of the FGC have taken part in sportswashing efforts and now both SNK, one of the most storied fighting game developers and Evo are Saudi-owned. For those outsiders that don't know, Evo was seen as the pinnacle of the community, every year all of the FGC puts down what they're doing and watches for hours on end for multiple days and people make grand journeys from other sides of the country and the globe just to be there.
I don't know what EVO is going to look like now or how everyone will handle the change of a central pillar of the community. I love fighting games and the FGC, but I can't help but think about how Team Fortress 2 was transformed chasing something that would erase what made it unique. I just hope that the FGC remembers what it loves about itself too before it gets taken away.
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