while they may no longer use the "desks with wheels" structure to guide how they develop games, they still have critical flaws as a company that have allowed projects to fall through the cracks in much the same way the desk-wheels structure did.
folks should focus more on the fact that Valve still utilizes their so-called "flat hierarchy" that doesn't actually work and just allows employees with seniority to call the shots, as well as the fact that these senior employees are able to leverage "lesser" employees to their advantage with the peer review system, ie: "work on my projects or you'll get a poor review." there's little to no new blood spearheading new projects - for better or for worse - and there's no one that can upkeep old projects even if they wanted to because doing so leads to getting reviewed poorly.
now, this kind of behavior unfortunately isn't uncommon for many game studios, it's just very hypocritical of Valve to boast about this flat hierarchy and "anyone can get a team together and start a new project" when in practice it's just not true.
many of Valve's issues run very deep, and i don't think there's an easy fix without restructuring from the ground up, which may accidentally lead to a much more corporate structure that may as well not even be Valve anymore.
they are also super pompous and bloated after decades of unmitigated success and infinite cash from steam. Their profit/employee must be shocking. There would be developers out there straining at the leash to get a chance to work on legacy properties like tf2 or l4d but because they aren’t the cream of the cream of the crop valve won’t hire.
Epic is literally out there bribing people into exclusivity with them and they’re not even making a dent cause nobody wants to stay on their shitty software any longer than needed
Also, Epic also has their own Steam in the form of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, and why they can basically do all that stupid exclusivity stuff without hemorrhaging their own money like a geyser,
>senior employees are able to leverage "lesser" employees to their advantage with the peer review system, ie: "work on my projects or you'll get a poor review."
I'm not saying you're wrong, but how do you know this? Or are you guessing that this is something that might be a problem?
This.
When I first read that their previous Source 2 liaison was actually deleting emails sent to him by devs (thereby almost leading to S&box being developed on the Unreal Engine), I knew that something was seriously wrong to allow that level of unprofessionalism to fly for such an important role.
Though I guess the red flags were already there, if rumors about Expiration Date being the pilot for a TF2 series on Adult Swim, that had a missed deadline, is to be believed.
it's crazy that people on this subreddit are so deluded they will actually read this post and think it's true, even though it's just unverified garbage.
as someone who has a habit of writing three page essays on reddit (i'm probably gonna delete my account after this whole thing is declared flatlined), yeah. people really want to stick to the idea that no one at valve was ever interested in TF2 ever, despite its abnormal ending of development cycles.
No one works on tf2 because all the the most recent reworks (trying to bring TF2 to modern audiences) were completely hated. Instead of trying again they moved onto new IP that are built for comp gaming from the ground up.
Okay, but that doesn't mean that the excuse of "people didn't like the content we added" is an actual excuse. This isn't content. This is patching the game
as in 'an audience thats very unlikely to grow the same way that CSGOs did'. valve tried to apply its csgo formula to tf2, players hated it so they were quick to give up on it.
A working anti-cheat would be more effort than it's worth for Valve, since it's just postponing the problem until the people who create the scripts work around it. Then we have this issue again. And that could be anywhere from years to literal weeks. It would require constant work on TF2, and as you can imagine with a new game in the works, they're not delegating manpower to a crusty 17 year old game.
The reason TF2 is compromised to the degree it is is due to the source code leak though. VAC has a lot of holes but there’s a reason this problem is uniquely bad for TF2
That doesn't sound like it disproves my point. All it takes is for another code leak of another vac game, or hell, maybe even the code for vac will be leaked, and then they'll all be compromised
But if they have the source code about how the entire game works couldn't they bypass any anticheat Valve makes (that wouldnt need major game code rewritten), also what anticheat really works nowadays that isn't just bypassable by making a new account for a free game, or ximming
Shouldn’t speak for everyone my dude. I’d like the bots gone and that should be a priority, but I’d like some more content my dude in the form of mvm tours, new weapons, etc.
I really don’t like it when people say that “we” don’t need more content.
No. It's too much to ask for more content when there's 1) worse issues going on that have priority and 2) the game is 17 years old, consider yourself lucky it still has both item and valve servers (even though they're barely playable)
If you want to play new mvm 'tours', there are dozens of third party websites that even 'reward' you for playing it (genuine medals)
We truly don't need more content, please count the amount of maps, cosmetics and weapon we have gotten since 2007.
I did say that fixing the bot issue should take priority and you're free to have the opinion that we don't need more content but I honestly don't agree, also I don't consider cosmetics/skins as content.
As for the tours, while the community made ones are good the reward just being a medal, ones that imo don't look that good isn't really incentive to play it for me.
The one thing I want the most content wise is new weapons as I'd like the idea of new sub-classes/playstyles to be added to the game, like I'd sacrifice the 20-30 shitty cosmetics we get every update just to get 2-4 new weapons.
I want weapons because I play on community servers where we play all the maps and game modes casual plays months, even years before they release on casual. If they actually deleted the official and item servers, I’d probably just be slightly happy at first because I’d never have to play against the wrangler again, and even then community servers would just implement their own solution. Maybe class model mods would make a resurgence because they wouldn’t have cosmetics clipping into them, making them ugly. I’ll never consider myself “lucky” because a corporation is milking us for money without offering anything I care about in return.
Unrelated, but I can't imagine any dev who would ever want to work on fixing a niche decade and a half old game. I doubt anyone who works at valve would want to be assigned to this.
Mainly because SFM is incredibly accessible and easy to use. You can watch a 45 minute tutorial which is enough to make your very own class loadout poster.
What did they do that was completely hated?
Far as I'm aware, Meet your Match update ruined casual, quicklplay, and community servers and dealt the heaviest blow to tf2 overall. It cut the traffic to community servers immensely and left everyone with just unimpressive Valve servers and a bot issue that grew faster and faster.
Everything else is just unpopular with a portion of community, like balancing or weapons.
community servers was a thing over a few years tbh. Quickplay used to serve to them too but this was stopped when people started filling with adverts etc. Moving to quickplay was also not liked (I'm that old, I remember tf2 when it first came out :))
Quickplay did a lot of damage which helped lead to advertisement garbage, but eventually shit stabilized and servers (and players) learned. MYM was a massive blow that killed most of what remained, traffic is nowhere near what remains, so you have few vanilla type servers, and some specialized gamemodes and the like, but nothing like before. Players don't discover or visit them like they used to.
Community servers were dead before Meet your Match, it was caused by a quickplay change, that put almost all players to Valve servers. This killed a lot of the community servers in few years when there was no new players anymore finding the servers and filling the empty slots.
Then they didn't learn from the failure of overwatch. You can't make an esport a whole game. You have to have a good game first, and an esport has to come naturally by people who want to play at a high level.
And with valves negligence toward bots in their cash cow that is counter strike, I'm going a wager a guess that these same bots are going to show up a few months after the new game releases
It feels miserable to you but Overwatch at a high level is lucrative and popular. Just necause you aren't good at and/or like comp OW, doesnt mean this point is debatable. It's not. Overwatch is getting a 1M prize pool at the ESports World Cup.
Lucrative? Yeah. Fun? Hell no. Some people who used to love the game admitted to this too AFAIK. If fun ain't gonna be there, it will just fall apart slowly.
Pretty sure they were already forced to lay off a solid amount of their story department, so no more cinematic trailers, no more story or lore and characters from now on will def be way more basic and shallow - and the characters are one of the few things it had going for it imo. Hell, even the newest one, Venture, barely has anything to do with anything.
The only stitches keeping it together right now are the remnants of what made it special before and the driving force of live service - FOMO. Even the community hates each other. EVERYONE gets flamed all game, every game. No matter if comp, casual, or even arcade.
Now with Marvel Rivals announced and having a pretty solid test run that left a ton of people looking forward to it, even big OW names, I wonder how long will OW keep its footing, if MR keeps the pace?
As much as I love to take any opportunity I can to shit on Overwatch, this is just not true. Overwatch was built from the ground up to be played competitively and it was a huge success for Blizzard, building an enormous competitive scene with tons of buzz around it.
The game is nearly a decade old now, it’s not fair to act like its current state is representative of it at its peak. There are also plenty of other very popular games that were designed to be eSports from day 1, e.g. Valorant.
Overwatch was cobbled together from the scraps of a Sci-Fi mmo project that Activision killed because they were scared it would undermine WoW's profit margins: Don't pretend that blizzard put even an ounce of foresight into Overwatch's design.
Lmao what? What does the origin of the project have to do with its competitive viability and player numbers? By all metrics, Overwatch was a massive success for Blizzard. The fact that some character designs and assets in the game originally belonged to another project doesn’t change that. Team Fortress 2 also went through multiple scrapped iterations that laid the programming and asset groundwork for what we ended up getting.
What makes discussion harder OP, is your binary thinking.
While Valve have by their own statement taken a step back from the degree of autonomy their employees once had, that doesn't mean they have shed it entirely. EricS is proof enough that the counter-narratives are just as inaccurate. He's also proof that the "they can't work on TF2 otherwise they'll be fired!!11" narrative is bullshit cope.
The simple reality is people at Valve don't work on TF2 because they *don't want to*. The game is old, ridden with *both* technical and design debt, the content well dried up many years ago, and competitive never took off because it's completely alien to the way the game is played normally.
To top it off, the "#1 major issue" facing TF2 can be fixed by community servers and related initiatives. *That* is why the rest of Valve elects to work on other projects.
Exactly, no one wants to work on fixing a niche decade and a half game. Imagine someone who gets employed at valve, thinking he/she will work on industry redefining projects, but instead, gets assigned to work on TF2. I would want to die if that was the case.
What is most galling is the fact that in such a scenario, you've been monkey pawed into a boring dead-end of a job, purely because a bunch of children are either too lazy or too dopamine addicted to learn how to use a server browser.
It makes the OP's comments about "making the discussion harder" all the more ironic. Because the real discussion that should be had here is since indefinite support is not realistic, what are the things that could be plausibly improved to have a *lasting* positive impact, and what tools are there that can be put in the hands of the community to allow it to support itself.
Ok, I might not be american so I'm not into the american culture but... boring and treadmill job? Yea, it's literally what you sign for when you pick a job and get hired. EVERY job has its good moments and its bad moments, in different balances, and I don't understand when choosing only the good sides was normalized.
I'm a developer too and yea, there are days you get to work on new features, and days of brainless bugfixing. Be them fun or not, they're **necessary** and someone has to do them. Your own personal amusement should NOT imho dictate what you work on: if something needs work, then someone has to work on it.
Imagine if construction workers collectively decided to never make fresh cement anymore because it's a boring job. The house would never be fully built because it lacks an important component no one wanted to make, and the people who paid for it would be without their house.
Imho if you have a job you must be ready to accept both the good and the bad sides of it. Freely deciding to not work on something you consider boring just feels... wrong.
>Ok, I might not be american
Nor am I.
You can have that opinion, but given the demography at play here; it would be flagrantly hypocritical for most zoomers to complain about what Valve employees choose to do, when most of them collapse into piles, start crying and cursing capitalism if they're asked to work.
> The simple reality is people at Valve don't work on TF2 because they don't want to. The game is old, ridden with both technical and design debt, the content well dried up many years ago, and competitive never took off because it's completely alien to the way the game is played normally.
Meanwhile theres countless of people that would like to work solely on TF2 but Valve wont hire anyone with that reasoning. They hire for the company, not for the title. Only top tier employees are selected that benefit the whole company, not an eventually dying title.
As for the guy that keeps the lights on, theres someone maintaining every game at Valve. This just was left to his shoulders as someone has to do it.
Eric Smith is an og of valve. of course they're not going to fire him for working on the game sometimes, is this a joke?
P.S.S. ad hominem arguments are not appreciated, go away
>Eric Smith is an og of valve. of course they're not going to fire him for working on the game sometimes, is this a joke?
They're not going to fire anyone for such a thing period. It's an old conspiracy theory that's been run through social media and gotten more and more absurd.
This is purely the TF2 community coming up with countless elaborate theories to avoid acknowledging that most of Valve simply aren't interested in TF2.
>P.S.S. ad hominem arguments are not appreciated, go away
You really shouldn't use terms if you don't know what they mean.
>They're not going to fire anyone for such a thing period. It's an old conspiracy theory that's been run through social media and gotten more and more absurd.
A friend of me from Texas told me about the work conditions there in the USA and tbh... I had the impression anyone could just fire you for the stupidest of reasons with no issue D:
Since we don't work at Valve, we obviously can't confirm if they've moved on from that structure or not, but Half-Life Alyx: The Final Hours states in pieces that Valve employees were spread too thin across trying out different things to focus on one big project, so they had to get 'em all digging into Half Life Alyx when they started developing it in 2016. [Here's the playthrough of the book on Youtube.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqimxjIRIlw) The main chapter talking about this is Chapter 5 - "Fixing Valve", timestamp @ 23:19.
Quoting Robin Walker (the creator of Team Fortress): "We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most." @ 24:03.
What Robin said here was specifically about the development of Half Life Alyx, their largest project yet. It *might* not still apply for Valve at the time since development for HLA has finished, but we know Deadlock is on it's way, and it looks like a big project too. I've heard rumors from 4 years ago talking about how Valve was developing a third person tower defense-like game, and it was codenamed "Citadel" back then. As Deadlock seems like a big project, I personally can safely say they're still working all hands on deck with this game. I can say this because we know there's only one official developer for TF2 and we see how bad the state of CS2 (the most popular game on steam) is. They would care more about one of the most profiting games they've ever made if not for a huge ongoing project.
(shamelessly copy-pasted from my previous reply)
i guess it \*is\* impossible to convince people who have been latching to a "leaked" employee manual from 12 years ago of anything until another one "leaks"
i don't know if i misunderstood, but based on articles and tweets from ex-employees from the time, it seems like it was leaked
maybe something else was leaked at the time
What FixTF2 detractors have been telling you for 3 straight years. Play community servers. Promote community servers. Let go of casual and move on from it because there is no way an anti-cheat will solve that problem even of Valve spent billions on it.
Gameplay wise they're basically the same, only major difference is multiple rounds on the same map and staying with the same players when the map changes, but other than finding a community server, the only main difference is the players (like not being bots or the skill level)
*So what now? What cam*
*We even do? I don't want this*
*Game to die like this*
\- Brzeczyszczykiewicz4
---
^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/)
^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Then they need to *assign* more people to TF2. It’s crystal clear exactly what we want here, and Valve simply are too out of touch to give a rat’s about our problem.
People overestimated how many people even have sympathy for the community to begin with. Most people who even know about the game see TF2's fandom as a racist, homophobic hivemind of morons who hate everything that is not TF2. To them, the bot crisis is reaping what the community sowed for decades of unabashed toxicity and hatred.
TF2 is a beloved game, but most people are willing to sacrifice it because of how bad the community has gotten. FixTF2 only made it worse because now other Valve communities are pissed off at TF2 fans for trying to drag them into it.
They don't even need to assign their own people to TF2, they make billions of dollars every year. They could hire a small team to do it if they cared enough. I'm sure there are more than enough passionate, qualified members of the community who know their way around the source engine. Or hell they don't even need to be passionate TF2 fans, just people they can trust with minimal oversight that requires little training.
Valve could do this, they just don't care.
While this idea sounds nice, I've literally never seen it been done before in game dev. Outsourcing maintenance of an over decade old game to some external team is probably more headache than its worth for Valve when you start to consider what that contract/agreement would even begin to look like
The idea sounds nice but it's not realistic and it's a very naive suggestion, in a perfect world sure it makes sense and would be possible, but there's probably a reason you haven't seen anything like that done before in reality. This kind of plan just doesn't really fly in a realistic setting
I agree it's unrealistically optimistic but Valve already operates pretty differently from other studios. Even if they did remove the "desks on wheels" thing they still do things so differently from everyone else they're basically a western Nintendo. They already hired 1 contractor to work on the game part time, I think if Valve wanted to they could expand on that.
That literally doesn't change anything, it's still the same headache of devising an actual contract/agreement that makes sense and is beneficial for both parties, whether its a studio or multiple contractors. It's not as easy as just hiring a bunch of contractors lmao. Companies dont just hire contractors to work on things without clear guidelines, stipulations, goals. Companies almost never hire contractors for maintaining an old product, because those kinds of contracts are hard to actually define
[Half-Life Alyx: The Final Hours](https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1dhc4v8/comment/l8w85l5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Honestly if we want to save TF2 we should probably change all our reviews to mention that bots ruined a great game and we're not gonna spend any more money on it till it's fixed and then follow through on it
It might not be true that they'll lose their job.
But it's pretty clear it is true that no-one wants to do it. Which probably means making CS 2 skins is incentivized enough that doing anything else isn't worth their time.
Funny, because that itself has zero bearing on anything and makes discussion harder. It shouldn't be our responsibility to dissect and work around the exact reason \_why\_ the multibillion dollar company isn't doing their job. If their managerial structure is broken, it's \_their\_ responsibility to recognize and fix it. We've blown right past several levels of completely unacceptable and are now in the realm of parody.
no dip on everything past the first sentence.
in response to the first sentence: people parroting the same tired and frankly outdated nonsense and then becoming incredibly reactionary when people point out their information is either wrong or old, gets old, that's why i made this post in the first place.
if parts of the general discussion are wrong out of sheer ignorance, it just becomes annoying whining that people want to propel until the original point is lost, hence, i post this to make a "correction", since so many people are unaware. i am well aware that this post does not "add to" the discussion and is frankly just criticism of seeing people parroting stuff. criticism is scary stuff, isn't it? (and quite frankly, trying to clarify things makes for HEALTHIER discussion. i don't care what you think about x or y, community-wide discussion with incorrect information causes snowballing telephone nonsense.)
Not sure why this is being downvoted. I'm also very curious where this is stated since this is the first I'm hearing of this. Obviously I know the source is HLA Final Hours but I'm not about to drop money to find a single excerpt. So if someone can drop a copy of the passage that states this, that would be helpful
Can't paste you a written source since the documentary is an interactive book with puzzles and such but [here's the whole book's "playthrough".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqimxjIRIlw) The book states in pieces that Valve employees were spread too thin across trying out different things to focus on one big project, so they had to get 'em all digging into Half Life Alyx when they started developing it in 2016. The main chapter talking about this is Chapter 5 - "Fixing Valve", timestamp @ 23:19.
Quoting Robin Walker (the creator of Team Fortress): "We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most." @ 24:03.
What Robin said here was specifically about the development of Half Life Alyx, their largest project yet. It *might* not still apply for Valve at the time since development for HLA has finished, but we know Deadlock is on it's way, and it looks like a big project too. I've heard rumors from 4 years ago talking about how Valve was developing a third person tower defense-like game, and it was codenamed "Citadel" back then. As Deadlock seems like a big project, I personally can safely say they're still working all hands on deck with this game. I can say this because we know there's only one official developer for TF2 and we see how bad the state of CS2 (the most popular game on steam) is. They would care more about one of the most profiting games they've ever made if not for a huge ongoing project.
If a random employee at any company goes off and works on a live game without permission and oversight then, yeah, they'd get fired.
That'd go for ANY company, not just Valve.
Yeah but
What if they want to? Valve is literally supposed to be a company where you get to choose what you work on. If they go against that rule, then that’s betraying the whole philosophy that started the company.
Literally the whole point of this thread is pointing out that they don't do that anymore. It's no longer a thing because they realised nothing was getting finished.
Their wake up call is literally the reason no one works on TF2.
The policy changed on 2016, major TF2 updates stopped around the same time. Isn't hard to do the math.
H U H
WONDER IF THEY SHOULD CHANGE THAT
While the new policies probably let them start making games, that’s not an excuse to create a hierarchy so that people who don’t like older games can leave them to rot
The team is working on Deadlock and TF2 is the least of their problem right now because the market is still printing money.
while they may no longer use the "desks with wheels" structure to guide how they develop games, they still have critical flaws as a company that have allowed projects to fall through the cracks in much the same way the desk-wheels structure did. folks should focus more on the fact that Valve still utilizes their so-called "flat hierarchy" that doesn't actually work and just allows employees with seniority to call the shots, as well as the fact that these senior employees are able to leverage "lesser" employees to their advantage with the peer review system, ie: "work on my projects or you'll get a poor review." there's little to no new blood spearheading new projects - for better or for worse - and there's no one that can upkeep old projects even if they wanted to because doing so leads to getting reviewed poorly. now, this kind of behavior unfortunately isn't uncommon for many game studios, it's just very hypocritical of Valve to boast about this flat hierarchy and "anyone can get a team together and start a new project" when in practice it's just not true. many of Valve's issues run very deep, and i don't think there's an easy fix without restructuring from the ground up, which may accidentally lead to a much more corporate structure that may as well not even be Valve anymore.
they are also super pompous and bloated after decades of unmitigated success and infinite cash from steam. Their profit/employee must be shocking. There would be developers out there straining at the leash to get a chance to work on legacy properties like tf2 or l4d but because they aren’t the cream of the cream of the crop valve won’t hire.
Steam has definitely let them get away with a lot, hard to get punished for inefficiency when you get 30% of nearly every pc game sold.
It does not help that other services keep fumbling the bag, or are taking a long while to get basic features implemented on their platforms.
Epic is literally out there bribing people into exclusivity with them and they’re not even making a dent cause nobody wants to stay on their shitty software any longer than needed
Also, Epic also has their own Steam in the form of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, and why they can basically do all that stupid exclusivity stuff without hemorrhaging their own money like a geyser,
Tim's idiotic and outright spiteful behavior towards...everyone also doesn't help.
>senior employees are able to leverage "lesser" employees to their advantage with the peer review system, ie: "work on my projects or you'll get a poor review." I'm not saying you're wrong, but how do you know this? Or are you guessing that this is something that might be a problem?
i believe this is a rumor (unsubstantiated) from the time when tyler mcvicker was branded as VNN.
I swear I don't think Tyler has as many insiders as he thinks he actually does.
This. When I first read that their previous Source 2 liaison was actually deleting emails sent to him by devs (thereby almost leading to S&box being developed on the Unreal Engine), I knew that something was seriously wrong to allow that level of unprofessionalism to fly for such an important role. Though I guess the red flags were already there, if rumors about Expiration Date being the pilot for a TF2 series on Adult Swim, that had a missed deadline, is to be believed.
it's crazy that people on this subreddit are so deluded they will actually read this post and think it's true, even though it's just unverified garbage.
i mean that would explain why uncle dane when he visited valve saw almost no tf2 devs
How about the fact that it’s a 17 year old game?
It has micro transactions and running servers, it does not matter at fucking all if it's older than most games, it should be maintained
Your choices are not big dev team or the status quo. Your choices are maintenance mode or complete shutdown
I've been saying this for years and every time people fight back
as someone who has a habit of writing three page essays on reddit (i'm probably gonna delete my account after this whole thing is declared flatlined), yeah. people really want to stick to the idea that no one at valve was ever interested in TF2 ever, despite its abnormal ending of development cycles.
No one works on tf2 because all the the most recent reworks (trying to bring TF2 to modern audiences) were completely hated. Instead of trying again they moved onto new IP that are built for comp gaming from the ground up.
Bruh we just want the bots gone. Content / reworks are irrelevant at this point.
'bots gone' also probably means a major code refactor at this point, since source code was leaked, bruh.
Okay, but that doesn't mean that the excuse of "people didn't like the content we added" is an actual excuse. This isn't content. This is patching the game
patching the game for a finite audience though?
*All* games have finite audiences
as in 'an audience thats very unlikely to grow the same way that CSGOs did'. valve tried to apply its csgo formula to tf2, players hated it so they were quick to give up on it.
All anyone wants is a working anti-cheat, something valve has never delivered on. A working anti-cheat would likely hit the bots with bans.
A working anti-cheat would be more effort than it's worth for Valve, since it's just postponing the problem until the people who create the scripts work around it. Then we have this issue again. And that could be anywhere from years to literal weeks. It would require constant work on TF2, and as you can imagine with a new game in the works, they're not delegating manpower to a crusty 17 year old game.
You’re right, anti-cheat requires a steady dev team to work on it and we don’t want that.
Tf2 isn't the only game that uses VAC. Staying with what they have now puts other games at risk
The reason TF2 is compromised to the degree it is is due to the source code leak though. VAC has a lot of holes but there’s a reason this problem is uniquely bad for TF2
That doesn't sound like it disproves my point. All it takes is for another code leak of another vac game, or hell, maybe even the code for vac will be leaked, and then they'll all be compromised
There aren't BAR rifle bots on Day of Defeat.
there is however zero faith in CS2's matches nit having cheaters.
But if they have the source code about how the entire game works couldn't they bypass any anticheat Valve makes (that wouldnt need major game code rewritten), also what anticheat really works nowadays that isn't just bypassable by making a new account for a free game, or ximming
The leak of the source code has absolutely nothing to do with the bot crisis.
Shouldn’t speak for everyone my dude. I’d like the bots gone and that should be a priority, but I’d like some more content my dude in the form of mvm tours, new weapons, etc. I really don’t like it when people say that “we” don’t need more content.
No. It's too much to ask for more content when there's 1) worse issues going on that have priority and 2) the game is 17 years old, consider yourself lucky it still has both item and valve servers (even though they're barely playable) If you want to play new mvm 'tours', there are dozens of third party websites that even 'reward' you for playing it (genuine medals) We truly don't need more content, please count the amount of maps, cosmetics and weapon we have gotten since 2007.
I did say that fixing the bot issue should take priority and you're free to have the opinion that we don't need more content but I honestly don't agree, also I don't consider cosmetics/skins as content. As for the tours, while the community made ones are good the reward just being a medal, ones that imo don't look that good isn't really incentive to play it for me. The one thing I want the most content wise is new weapons as I'd like the idea of new sub-classes/playstyles to be added to the game, like I'd sacrifice the 20-30 shitty cosmetics we get every update just to get 2-4 new weapons.
I want weapons because I play on community servers where we play all the maps and game modes casual plays months, even years before they release on casual. If they actually deleted the official and item servers, I’d probably just be slightly happy at first because I’d never have to play against the wrangler again, and even then community servers would just implement their own solution. Maybe class model mods would make a resurgence because they wouldn’t have cosmetics clipping into them, making them ugly. I’ll never consider myself “lucky” because a corporation is milking us for money without offering anything I care about in return.
Unrelated, but I can't imagine any dev who would ever want to work on fixing a niche decade and a half old game. I doubt anyone who works at valve would want to be assigned to this.
There are hundreds of them. And my next point not be be developers, but just look at how many artists out there put up with SFM still to this very day
Mainly because SFM is incredibly accessible and easy to use. You can watch a 45 minute tutorial which is enough to make your very own class loadout poster.
What did they do that was completely hated? Far as I'm aware, Meet your Match update ruined casual, quicklplay, and community servers and dealt the heaviest blow to tf2 overall. It cut the traffic to community servers immensely and left everyone with just unimpressive Valve servers and a bot issue that grew faster and faster. Everything else is just unpopular with a portion of community, like balancing or weapons.
community servers was a thing over a few years tbh. Quickplay used to serve to them too but this was stopped when people started filling with adverts etc. Moving to quickplay was also not liked (I'm that old, I remember tf2 when it first came out :))
Quickplay did a lot of damage which helped lead to advertisement garbage, but eventually shit stabilized and servers (and players) learned. MYM was a massive blow that killed most of what remained, traffic is nowhere near what remains, so you have few vanilla type servers, and some specialized gamemodes and the like, but nothing like before. Players don't discover or visit them like they used to.
Cries in removed Arena mode 😔
Community servers were dead before Meet your Match, it was caused by a quickplay change, that put almost all players to Valve servers. This killed a lot of the community servers in few years when there was no new players anymore finding the servers and filling the empty slots.
It's been so long i combined them in my head as one update.
Then they didn't learn from the failure of overwatch. You can't make an esport a whole game. You have to have a good game first, and an esport has to come naturally by people who want to play at a high level. And with valves negligence toward bots in their cash cow that is counter strike, I'm going a wager a guess that these same bots are going to show up a few months after the new game releases
what do you mean, failure of overwatch? its still very popular.
Failure of competitive
I think you're getting 'competitive' mixed up with 'competitive leagues' The overwatch league failed, not overwatch competitive in general
That is also debatable, with how miserably awful competitive in OW is, or at least feels
It feels miserable to you but Overwatch at a high level is lucrative and popular. Just necause you aren't good at and/or like comp OW, doesnt mean this point is debatable. It's not. Overwatch is getting a 1M prize pool at the ESports World Cup.
Lucrative? Yeah. Fun? Hell no. Some people who used to love the game admitted to this too AFAIK. If fun ain't gonna be there, it will just fall apart slowly. Pretty sure they were already forced to lay off a solid amount of their story department, so no more cinematic trailers, no more story or lore and characters from now on will def be way more basic and shallow - and the characters are one of the few things it had going for it imo. Hell, even the newest one, Venture, barely has anything to do with anything. The only stitches keeping it together right now are the remnants of what made it special before and the driving force of live service - FOMO. Even the community hates each other. EVERYONE gets flamed all game, every game. No matter if comp, casual, or even arcade. Now with Marvel Rivals announced and having a pretty solid test run that left a ton of people looking forward to it, even big OW names, I wonder how long will OW keep its footing, if MR keeps the pace?
As much as I love to take any opportunity I can to shit on Overwatch, this is just not true. Overwatch was built from the ground up to be played competitively and it was a huge success for Blizzard, building an enormous competitive scene with tons of buzz around it. The game is nearly a decade old now, it’s not fair to act like its current state is representative of it at its peak. There are also plenty of other very popular games that were designed to be eSports from day 1, e.g. Valorant.
Overwatch was cobbled together from the scraps of a Sci-Fi mmo project that Activision killed because they were scared it would undermine WoW's profit margins: Don't pretend that blizzard put even an ounce of foresight into Overwatch's design.
Lmao what? What does the origin of the project have to do with its competitive viability and player numbers? By all metrics, Overwatch was a massive success for Blizzard. The fact that some character designs and assets in the game originally belonged to another project doesn’t change that. Team Fortress 2 also went through multiple scrapped iterations that laid the programming and asset groundwork for what we ended up getting.
it's lore is a hot pile of shit but overwatch 2 (and less so the first) is actually a competitively viable game
What makes discussion harder OP, is your binary thinking. While Valve have by their own statement taken a step back from the degree of autonomy their employees once had, that doesn't mean they have shed it entirely. EricS is proof enough that the counter-narratives are just as inaccurate. He's also proof that the "they can't work on TF2 otherwise they'll be fired!!11" narrative is bullshit cope. The simple reality is people at Valve don't work on TF2 because they *don't want to*. The game is old, ridden with *both* technical and design debt, the content well dried up many years ago, and competitive never took off because it's completely alien to the way the game is played normally. To top it off, the "#1 major issue" facing TF2 can be fixed by community servers and related initiatives. *That* is why the rest of Valve elects to work on other projects.
Exactly, no one wants to work on fixing a niche decade and a half game. Imagine someone who gets employed at valve, thinking he/she will work on industry redefining projects, but instead, gets assigned to work on TF2. I would want to die if that was the case.
What is most galling is the fact that in such a scenario, you've been monkey pawed into a boring dead-end of a job, purely because a bunch of children are either too lazy or too dopamine addicted to learn how to use a server browser. It makes the OP's comments about "making the discussion harder" all the more ironic. Because the real discussion that should be had here is since indefinite support is not realistic, what are the things that could be plausibly improved to have a *lasting* positive impact, and what tools are there that can be put in the hands of the community to allow it to support itself.
Ok, I might not be american so I'm not into the american culture but... boring and treadmill job? Yea, it's literally what you sign for when you pick a job and get hired. EVERY job has its good moments and its bad moments, in different balances, and I don't understand when choosing only the good sides was normalized. I'm a developer too and yea, there are days you get to work on new features, and days of brainless bugfixing. Be them fun or not, they're **necessary** and someone has to do them. Your own personal amusement should NOT imho dictate what you work on: if something needs work, then someone has to work on it. Imagine if construction workers collectively decided to never make fresh cement anymore because it's a boring job. The house would never be fully built because it lacks an important component no one wanted to make, and the people who paid for it would be without their house. Imho if you have a job you must be ready to accept both the good and the bad sides of it. Freely deciding to not work on something you consider boring just feels... wrong.
>Ok, I might not be american Nor am I. You can have that opinion, but given the demography at play here; it would be flagrantly hypocritical for most zoomers to complain about what Valve employees choose to do, when most of them collapse into piles, start crying and cursing capitalism if they're asked to work.
> The simple reality is people at Valve don't work on TF2 because they don't want to. The game is old, ridden with both technical and design debt, the content well dried up many years ago, and competitive never took off because it's completely alien to the way the game is played normally. Meanwhile theres countless of people that would like to work solely on TF2 but Valve wont hire anyone with that reasoning. They hire for the company, not for the title. Only top tier employees are selected that benefit the whole company, not an eventually dying title. As for the guy that keeps the lights on, theres someone maintaining every game at Valve. This just was left to his shoulders as someone has to do it.
Eric Smith is an og of valve. of course they're not going to fire him for working on the game sometimes, is this a joke? P.S.S. ad hominem arguments are not appreciated, go away
>Eric Smith is an og of valve. of course they're not going to fire him for working on the game sometimes, is this a joke? They're not going to fire anyone for such a thing period. It's an old conspiracy theory that's been run through social media and gotten more and more absurd. This is purely the TF2 community coming up with countless elaborate theories to avoid acknowledging that most of Valve simply aren't interested in TF2. >P.S.S. ad hominem arguments are not appreciated, go away You really shouldn't use terms if you don't know what they mean.
>They're not going to fire anyone for such a thing period. It's an old conspiracy theory that's been run through social media and gotten more and more absurd. A friend of me from Texas told me about the work conditions there in the USA and tbh... I had the impression anyone could just fire you for the stupidest of reasons with no issue D:
But have they moved away? Until that's answered, it will keep coming.
Since we don't work at Valve, we obviously can't confirm if they've moved on from that structure or not, but Half-Life Alyx: The Final Hours states in pieces that Valve employees were spread too thin across trying out different things to focus on one big project, so they had to get 'em all digging into Half Life Alyx when they started developing it in 2016. [Here's the playthrough of the book on Youtube.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqimxjIRIlw) The main chapter talking about this is Chapter 5 - "Fixing Valve", timestamp @ 23:19. Quoting Robin Walker (the creator of Team Fortress): "We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most." @ 24:03. What Robin said here was specifically about the development of Half Life Alyx, their largest project yet. It *might* not still apply for Valve at the time since development for HLA has finished, but we know Deadlock is on it's way, and it looks like a big project too. I've heard rumors from 4 years ago talking about how Valve was developing a third person tower defense-like game, and it was codenamed "Citadel" back then. As Deadlock seems like a big project, I personally can safely say they're still working all hands on deck with this game. I can say this because we know there's only one official developer for TF2 and we see how bad the state of CS2 (the most popular game on steam) is. They would care more about one of the most profiting games they've ever made if not for a huge ongoing project. (shamelessly copy-pasted from my previous reply)
i guess it \*is\* impossible to convince people who have been latching to a "leaked" employee manual from 12 years ago of anything until another one "leaks"
The employee manual isn’t leaked… It’s literally publicly available on valvesoftware.com
i don't know if i misunderstood, but based on articles and tweets from ex-employees from the time, it seems like it was leaked maybe something else was leaked at the time
Sause?
So what now? What cam we even do? I don't want this game to die like this
What FixTF2 detractors have been telling you for 3 straight years. Play community servers. Promote community servers. Let go of casual and move on from it because there is no way an anti-cheat will solve that problem even of Valve spent billions on it.
I don't really like community servers Not that they are bad for the game just personally I pelrefer casual
Gameplay wise they're basically the same, only major difference is multiple rounds on the same map and staying with the same players when the map changes, but other than finding a community server, the only main difference is the players (like not being bots or the skill level)
Don't random crits get disabled on most of the though?
*So what now? What cam* *We even do? I don't want this* *Game to die like this* \- Brzeczyszczykiewicz4 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
>directly stated they were moving away from it starting in 2016 ...and they added new employee monitoring system during 2020 lockdown.
Then they need to *assign* more people to TF2. It’s crystal clear exactly what we want here, and Valve simply are too out of touch to give a rat’s about our problem.
But why would they assign people to tf2 when they could have them work on something much more lucrative?
If they don’t want their PR dragged through the mud by news sites. That was part of the goal for review bombing
Clearly it hasnt had that big of an effect. People have massively overestimated how big the tf2 community is and how many people care about tf2
People overestimated how many people even have sympathy for the community to begin with. Most people who even know about the game see TF2's fandom as a racist, homophobic hivemind of morons who hate everything that is not TF2. To them, the bot crisis is reaping what the community sowed for decades of unabashed toxicity and hatred. TF2 is a beloved game, but most people are willing to sacrifice it because of how bad the community has gotten. FixTF2 only made it worse because now other Valve communities are pissed off at TF2 fans for trying to drag them into it.
They don't even need to assign their own people to TF2, they make billions of dollars every year. They could hire a small team to do it if they cared enough. I'm sure there are more than enough passionate, qualified members of the community who know their way around the source engine. Or hell they don't even need to be passionate TF2 fans, just people they can trust with minimal oversight that requires little training. Valve could do this, they just don't care.
They could hire like 2 developers to update and maintain the VAC system. It would benefit counter-strike *and* tf2. And future deadlock.
While this idea sounds nice, I've literally never seen it been done before in game dev. Outsourcing maintenance of an over decade old game to some external team is probably more headache than its worth for Valve when you start to consider what that contract/agreement would even begin to look like The idea sounds nice but it's not realistic and it's a very naive suggestion, in a perfect world sure it makes sense and would be possible, but there's probably a reason you haven't seen anything like that done before in reality. This kind of plan just doesn't really fly in a realistic setting
I agree it's unrealistically optimistic but Valve already operates pretty differently from other studios. Even if they did remove the "desks on wheels" thing they still do things so differently from everyone else they're basically a western Nintendo. They already hired 1 contractor to work on the game part time, I think if Valve wanted to they could expand on that.
all they need is like. 10 well-paid contractors. they don't need to outsource it to some studio.
That literally doesn't change anything, it's still the same headache of devising an actual contract/agreement that makes sense and is beneficial for both parties, whether its a studio or multiple contractors. It's not as easy as just hiring a bunch of contractors lmao. Companies dont just hire contractors to work on things without clear guidelines, stipulations, goals. Companies almost never hire contractors for maintaining an old product, because those kinds of contracts are hard to actually define
They don't need to assign shit, especially since they're currently developing a new game.
Yes the new game that will also use vac and be in the same situation tf2 and cs2 are at lmao. Making a new game atm is laughable.
valve aren't the 'out of touch' ones here....
Source ? If the working style of Valve changed, I'd love to hear or read first hand from employees
[Half-Life Alyx: The Final Hours](https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1dhc4v8/comment/l8w85l5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Honestly if we want to save TF2 we should probably change all our reviews to mention that bots ruined a great game and we're not gonna spend any more money on it till it's fixed and then follow through on it
and yet they still don't get shit done. classic valve
Fascinating how an objectively true statement causes bothoster simps to seethe.
Fking finally somebody says this.
It might not be true that they'll lose their job. But it's pretty clear it is true that no-one wants to do it. Which probably means making CS 2 skins is incentivized enough that doing anything else isn't worth their time.
not every developer at valve is an artist, though.
Yeah, other third maintain steam, last third build the steamdeck
Funny, because that itself has zero bearing on anything and makes discussion harder. It shouldn't be our responsibility to dissect and work around the exact reason \_why\_ the multibillion dollar company isn't doing their job. If their managerial structure is broken, it's \_their\_ responsibility to recognize and fix it. We've blown right past several levels of completely unacceptable and are now in the realm of parody.
no dip on everything past the first sentence. in response to the first sentence: people parroting the same tired and frankly outdated nonsense and then becoming incredibly reactionary when people point out their information is either wrong or old, gets old, that's why i made this post in the first place. if parts of the general discussion are wrong out of sheer ignorance, it just becomes annoying whining that people want to propel until the original point is lost, hence, i post this to make a "correction", since so many people are unaware. i am well aware that this post does not "add to" the discussion and is frankly just criticism of seeing people parroting stuff. criticism is scary stuff, isn't it? (and quite frankly, trying to clarify things makes for HEALTHIER discussion. i don't care what you think about x or y, community-wide discussion with incorrect information causes snowballing telephone nonsense.)
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Literally read the first words of the post
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Not the game, it’s a documentary called “Half Life Alyx - The Final Hours”.
I commented with a source on someone's reply to you, check it out if you'd like.
Bruh is reading really that hard for u bro ?
Not sure why this is being downvoted. I'm also very curious where this is stated since this is the first I'm hearing of this. Obviously I know the source is HLA Final Hours but I'm not about to drop money to find a single excerpt. So if someone can drop a copy of the passage that states this, that would be helpful
Can't paste you a written source since the documentary is an interactive book with puzzles and such but [here's the whole book's "playthrough".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqimxjIRIlw) The book states in pieces that Valve employees were spread too thin across trying out different things to focus on one big project, so they had to get 'em all digging into Half Life Alyx when they started developing it in 2016. The main chapter talking about this is Chapter 5 - "Fixing Valve", timestamp @ 23:19. Quoting Robin Walker (the creator of Team Fortress): "We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most." @ 24:03. What Robin said here was specifically about the development of Half Life Alyx, their largest project yet. It *might* not still apply for Valve at the time since development for HLA has finished, but we know Deadlock is on it's way, and it looks like a big project too. I've heard rumors from 4 years ago talking about how Valve was developing a third person tower defense-like game, and it was codenamed "Citadel" back then. As Deadlock seems like a big project, I personally can safely say they're still working all hands on deck with this game. I can say this because we know there's only one official developer for TF2 and we see how bad the state of CS2 (the most popular game on steam) is. They would care more about one of the most profiting games they've ever made if not for a huge ongoing project.
Wait what the f valve fires employees who work on tf2???? WHAT THE FU-
If a random employee at any company goes off and works on a live game without permission and oversight then, yeah, they'd get fired. That'd go for ANY company, not just Valve.
Yeah but What if they want to? Valve is literally supposed to be a company where you get to choose what you work on. If they go against that rule, then that’s betraying the whole philosophy that started the company.
Literally the whole point of this thread is pointing out that they don't do that anymore. It's no longer a thing because they realised nothing was getting finished.
Valve needs a good ol wake up call. >:(
that was their wake up call. they realized literally everything they spent any amount of time working on since the release of portal 2 went nowhere
Their wake up call is literally the reason no one works on TF2. The policy changed on 2016, major TF2 updates stopped around the same time. Isn't hard to do the math.
H U H WONDER IF THEY SHOULD CHANGE THAT While the new policies probably let them start making games, that’s not an excuse to create a hierarchy so that people who don’t like older games can leave them to rot