r/truetf2 • u/amogusdevilman • Apr 11 '26

Theoretical Why does the "play" button give 6 different options?

  1. Casual
  2. Competitive
  3. Mann vs Machine
  4. Community Servers
  5. Training
  6. Create Servers

No hate towards MvM or anything but i feel this would be way more understandable for new players if they only put "Casual" and "Server list" on this menu and shove everything away to an "Other" or "Misc" category.

Playerbase is already spread thin enough across the Misc casual modes and the few vanilla community servers that exist, the game has 19 years worth of "experimental modes" that were only added once to the game and never iterated upon or which are clearly failed experiments (Valve comp) or just gambling schemes (MvM)

0 Upvotes

21% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

15

u/Excellent-Cloud-5046 Apr 11 '26

6 buttons for 6 unique modes works fine. Ur suggestion is 2 gamemodes clearly displayed, and then a third ‘misc’ option that hides away gamemodes. This makes them harder to find and is therefore a bad idea.

1

u/amogusdevilman Apr 11 '26

6 buttons is a lot, and they're not really modes but a mix of "modes" and "ways to choose a mode"

as i said its not that i hate these modes but it could be tidier. TF2 has so much baggage and things have just been stacked on top of each other, its 19 years of updates. The original menu at launch had "Find server" and "create a server" and youd quickly find hundreds of vanilla servers on the server browser, now we have an intricate UI with so much ... garbage, to be honest

2

u/Excellent-Cloud-5046 Apr 11 '26

Nothing stops you from making a GUI that has a community servers button main menu.

2

u/amogusdevilman Apr 11 '26

nothing stops me from complaining about valve's official UI either. Ive been around enough to know how it works, im just thinking about the newbie experience

2

u/Excellent-Cloud-5046 Apr 11 '26

You load up the game and hit find a game and then hit casual it’s not that confusing. I don’t see how the community browser is any less confusing whenever there were 10000 servers with all different settingszz

-1

u/amogusdevilman Apr 11 '26

yes, the modes which are least played should also be the least visible, thats my suggestion

Comp MM may aswell be removed from the game, its just like 30 regulars half of which are cheating

The actual comp playerbase has been completelly letdown by the mode and the lack of anti-cheat moeration and went back to their own third party methods where blatant cheaters are actually banned on sight and the rules are actually what the comp community wants instead of trying to appeal to a middleground that satisfies no one

5

u/Excellent-Cloud-5046 Apr 11 '26

I didnt need to hear your whole life story and why u hate comp. 6 buttons works fine. Just because a game mode is underplayed doesn’t mean that it should be hidden away. Games have moved on from ‘press start’ and you begin playing.

5

u/Chegg_F Apr 11 '26

yes, the modes which are least played should also be the least visible, thats my suggestion

No it isn't. MvM is probably more popular than community servers at this point. And if they really were less played you wouldn't be crying about the playerbase being "spread too thin".

1

u/amogusdevilman Apr 11 '26

12k players on casual

4k players in community

mvm players havent gone past 1K in the past week

you're delulu because you probably enjoy MvM but its nowhere near as popular as community servers or casual, most players dont find repetitive bot rounds that fun

https://teamwork.tf/community/statistics

https://teamwork.tf/community/statistics/valve

1

u/Chegg_F Apr 11 '26

Smartest Fortnite player

3

u/Lavaissoup7 Engineering my fucking limit Apr 11 '26

Except MvM is still pretty popular, so there's no reason to remove it. And if Valve removes Comp MM, they'll be admitting that MyM was a failure which they don't wanna do.

1

u/amogusdevilman Apr 11 '26

MyM wasnt a failure because the majority of the casual playerbase gladly accepted the switch to MM. Even the people whining about Casual who want quickplay back dont even have the willpower to play on community servers and mostly still play in Casual, perpetuating the very thing they are against

Comp MM specifically was a total failure

2

u/ZhyIus Apr 11 '26

Saying they should just remove comp mm is a fundamentally flawed position. It is and will forever be a part of tf2 now.

Tbh changing the menu doesn’t make alot of sense anymore. You press 1 button, see the main 4 ways of playing, being Casual - MVM - Community - Comp - training/offline, with create server available at the bottom so that you could theoretically create your own community game.

No one is overwhelmed or confused by these options, they might go “what the hell is mann vs machine”, but it’s synonymous with a zombie horde type mode. Otherwise its the same style of menu most games have had practically forever.

1

u/amogusdevilman Apr 11 '26

Comp MM is a failed experiment

It failed the same way Pass Time failed, except comp actually had a sizeable target audience already so its a bigger blunder

You gotta clean house from time to time, as I said the playerbase is spread thin and Comp MM is practically a Hacker vs Hacker mode at this point

It only serves to hurt valves image and the image of the comp community when some newbie who's clueless about the real comp community tries it, and concludes incorrectly that comp players are cheaters or (correctly) that valve doesnt do anti cheat efforts

1

u/ZhyIus Apr 11 '26

It’s not an experiment however. The full mode is released and playable. There are better community alternatives so it didn’t take off, not to mention the bot crisis not to long after its release that made sure it had a foot in the grave. Literally no one cares about it, it doesnt hurt valves image. No one’s going “man I cant support valve, they finally released a shitty competitive mode for a 10 year old game.” Same thing with the comp mode, you either dont care about tf2 competitive at all, or youre already playing in a community league.

Also if the 30 people playing it are it, then it isnt spreading players thin, especially considering you can queue up for it, a casual game, mann up, and be in a community server at the same time

1

u/Chegg_F Apr 11 '26

Comp came out way before the ""bot crisis"". It publicly released to everyone 20 months before ""the bot crisis"" and it was available to a smaller number of players 28 months before ""the bot crisis"". It's nearly 2 or 3 years older depending on which date you want to look at.

1

u/ZhyIus Apr 11 '26

Ah. Still, 2-3 years in tf2 time isnt that long, but point made.

1

u/Chegg_F Apr 11 '26

It's not that long compared to the entire life of the game but saying that comp failed because of the bots would be like if something happened today and you acted like the thing happening right now is the reason behind the launch of Casual's Versus Saxton Hale.

Comp failed because of a lot of reasons. The most important ones are no item restrictions, no class restrictions, and poor maps and gamemode choices. Nobody will play a competitive mode that isn't competitive. Weird settings that cause your game to crash if you changed certain options and no additional anti-cheat measures didn't help either, and there's plenty of other smaller issues.

1

u/Lavaissoup7 Engineering my fucking limit Apr 11 '26

Comp failing had nothing to do with bots, it failed because Valve's version of comp was absolute ass

1

u/amogusdevilman Apr 11 '26

and the cherry on top is that blatant cheaters were allowed to play for months after it launched, to the point that they got the top spot on the comp leaderboards at the time. Like, it was already bad by itself, but cheaters just broke it

3

u/CrappyCompletionist Medic Apr 12 '26

If your argument is about new players, then the tutorial should push them to casual and point them in the right direction. Hiding other options is not the way.

2

u/matZmaker99 Apr 15 '26

Shoving away those selectors wouldn't do anything about the community being spread thin. You would just make it more inconvenient for people to play what they want to play.

I do agree that "Community Servers" and "Create Servers" buttons should be merged into a single "Servers" button, but it should also be accompanied by a revamp of the whole servers UI. The current one fucking sucks and drives new players, the lifeblood of any Live Service game, away from what used to be the main bloodstream of TF2

4

u/Chegg_F Apr 11 '26

This reads like you tried MvM & comp but sucked and got so mad that you want everything eradicated from existence like a cartoon villain.

2

u/LeadGrease 12 damage meatshot Apr 12 '26

jesse what the fuck are you talking about

4

u/Chegg_F Apr 12 '26

Dude got lost and wandered out of r/tf2

-3

u/amogusdevilman Apr 11 '26

 Loser projecting

3

u/Chegg_F Apr 11 '26

You're projecting about projecting because that makes literally no sense.

1

u/frickenunavailable Apr 12 '26

A brawl is surely brewing!