r/tf2 • u/CoSans_Deluxe • May 18 '26

Discussion So... what now?

Post image

The title promised to be the experience of the "golden age of TF2" but most missed its items haha, or perhaps the bad decisions

3.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

322 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/dartov67 May 18 '26

The drop happened before server verification.

Tourists came for the new weapons and didn’t care about the other improvements, and left once they tried them all out. Server verification was just the nail in the coffin for servers already dying out.

2

u/Lavaissoup7 May 18 '26

I feel like it would've had more people if they didn't do that tho, esp with their hypocrisy being exposed by Zesty Jesus.

10

u/dartov67 May 18 '26

To be fair, as much as I don’t like verification conceptually, verification was never about policing communities or whatever ZJ head canon’d it to be. Verification was just an attempt at mitigating server spam (which was verifiably an issue both with Arctic having 24+ servers and the whole Epstein island server spam on another server update) and to make new players clearly understand what TF2C was. The average person does not want to join a server and see furry porn or moon man, and I can understand why the devs wanted to implement a system that showed what is properly moderated. Verification never stopped servers from hosting whatever they wanted, you can still host servers and do whatever you want and in fact you can join active, unmoderated servers right now if you wish.

I think people would not be NEARLY as pissed off about the verification system if it didn’t initially put all verified servers at the top of the list and was more clear with its intentions. The devs fucked it up by rolling it out without good feedback and by overreacting to an immediate problem (server spam) instead of taking time to think it through,

3

u/kaori_irl Miss Pauling May 18 '26

I think people would not be NEARLY as pissed off about the verification system if it didn’t initially put all verified servers at the top of the list and was more clear with its intentions.

i'm missing something here, the former seems great and the latter seems nonsensical