I’ve never considered myself a gamer. I do spend more of my time on computers than most people do, and some of that time is spent playing video games. This is a short telling of how I started playing Team Fortress 2, stopped, re-started, and re-stopped.
In January 2014, I somehow learned about Team Fortress 2. I know that I made a Steam account that month just so I could install TF2.
By Steam statistics, I played almost 2000 hours of that game between January 2014 and January 2015. It was the first and last video game I got addicted to.
But, the number of hours there isn’t exactly accurate. That PC1 was so slow that I often kept TF2 running overnight or while I was at school, so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to launch when I was in reach of my keyboard again. I guess that I still had at least half of that play time in that year, which is a huge amount of time.2
In January 2015, I decided to stop playing TF2, and I pretty much hadn’t played any video games between then and 2021.
In late 2021, I decided to put together a PC. I had been living with older ThinkPad laptops for quite a few years at that point. Due to being forced to use M$ OS and tools, I needed a windows system at that point, and my laptops were underpowered for that sort of bloat.3
Long story short, I ended up with a very capable and fairly affordable system.
I installed TF2 after more than six years of not playing it. It ran fine, and I was reminded of what I found so addicting about it in 2014. In the summer of 2022, I bought a dedicated GPU, and at this point, my computer became a veritable gaming machine.
I started playing more graphically demanding games, as well as games which require consistent system performance.
One of these games was Valorant. It was a fun, competitive game, with a smooth learning curve. I would play this almost daily with a few friends. While I was slowly improving, I often found playing Valorant more punishing than rewarding. I eventually decided that I do not want to spend my time with friends this way.
I kept playing TF2, but because TF2 doesn’t have a serious skill-based matchmaking competitive system, I would play it much more casually, though not to the point of not caring about winning.
At that time, TF2 was still going through the bot apocalypse. The game was plagued by spinbots, aimbots, idling bots, all kinds of bots. The game way unplayable on official servers. Community servers were still fine, though. This is when I started playing on Uncletopia.4
Not only were there no bots on Uncletopia servers, but the average skill level of players was much higher. The game could be played as intended, and the match outcome had some correlation with the skill demonstrated by the players of both teams.
Slowly, the bot crisis abated; the official servers became playable again, and I’d sometimes play on them. I’d still mostly play on Uncletopia. Over time, I noticed that the average player on Uncletopia was getting worse. Outcomes of most matches started becoming predictable.
Uncletopia has strict rules about the conduct expected of their community, and at some point during the first half of 2026, I ran afoul of their rules, most likely frustrated by the failure of my team to demonstrate basic understanding of the game. I was permanently banned from all Uncletopia servers.5
This forced me back into the official servers. I understood that the game wouldn’t be as fun as on active community servers, but I was apalled by how bad it was.
The average player on official TF2 servers plays like someone who has 10-20 hours in the game. Whichever team had more than 2 good players at the beginning of the match would reliably win that match.
There was no way to win if your team didn’t know how to play. There was no official way to get matched with similarly skilled players. The outcome of most matches was obvious from the first minute. Winning was no longer rewarding, because it no longer required skill; losing was still punishing, because it felt like playing alone against an entire team.
Often, the more experienced players on the worse off team would leave after the first minute, which left the worse team even worse off. This would end up causing a churn of players on that team.6 If the team was in a bad position at first, this put it in a place from which winning was almost impossible.
It’s at least partly because of personal deficiencies, but this game isn’t fun anymore. There are no reasons for me to play the official casual mode in TF2 as of today, 2026-08-02.7
Thank you for the few hundred enjoyable hours, and the kind people I met along the way, TF2. Au revoir!
The first desktop computer I had was an old office computer that I had gotten around 2012. I don’t remember the exact specs of that thing, but I do remember that it had 2GB of RAM. I eventually learned about linux and FOSS because of how underpowered that PC was. ↩
Calculating a simple average, that would mean I had around 3 hours of playtime per day, for a year… That’s an average, assuming I played every day. I’d have made up for any skipped days, which makes the number of hours even more terrifying. ↩
And not only were the ThinkPads underpowered, they were also running my perfectly riced linux setups, that I thoroughly enjoyed using and abusing, and was not going to compromise with M$-ware. ↩
Uncletopia is a network of community servers started by the YouTuber Uncle Dane, as an attempt to give the community some place to play the game while Valve was neglecting it. ↩
Just to be clear, I agree with the rules and the punishment. I share this to provide context, not as a complaint or a justification. ↩
In casual mode, you’re put in a queue and placed in the first server with an ongoing game, matching the gamemodes you chose. This often places you in matches that are hopeless, near to end, with the losing team ragequitting - therefore freeing up a spot for some lucky guy in the queue. ↩
There are still community servers where the average player is a beast at the game, but the active player pool is around 45 players for the region (Europe). ↩