Same. Blizz games are the only things missing on my steam deck. It just much better than having to do jank workarounds or having to deal with their launchers.
The game has currently over 70000 players online (source: Steam Charts)
I know its not THAT big of a number for such a well known brand, but its still a big number. When will Blizzard fans learn that review bombing ain’t gonna do anything if they still play the game and pay for their stuff? We’ve been doing that for years now…
I mean, they play products released by Blizzard/Activision, so I doubt much learning will take place. Especially after all the decades of Activision being complete tools to their customers.
The second that merger was announced I peaced out. I knew what was coming after having witnessed what became of COD.
You can see a little steam icon in-game and after playing for like an hour I only saw 1-2 of those. I think most people are still using b.net. 70k seems pretty good ngl
But it says 300k currently. So yeah, it is quite a bit more popular in reality than TF2. Baldur’s Gate is at half a mil currently. Counterstrike over a mil.
Not to suggest the game isn’t doing well. Just throwing the numbers up for consideration
The last time I tried to play TF2 (2022), I joined 5 random servers and only found a handful of real people. The rest were bots. Is that still the case?
For the most part, yeah. The only way to avoid getting into matches with bots is to find community servers with active moderation. I queue into Uncle Dane’s servers when I feel like booting up TF2.
Most bots target the game’s “Casual” mode, since it’s the easiest way to hassle the largest group of people. If you play that mode, you will encounter bots. It sucks that you have to curate your own experience, but you can almost entirely avoid the problem by choosing your own community servers to play on instead.
IMHO: I’d argue that community servers are a “purer” TF2 experience in the first place. So many core game features only make sense in a pro-social “hangout” environment. I’ll rattle off a few from the top of my head:
Super long map timers are enjoyable as long as players can leave/join at any time
Unrestricted joining/leaving/teamswitching works as long as autobalance and votescramble exist
votekick/votescramble are great as long as people aren’t encouraged to abuse the system to gain an edge
Casual rips almost all of that out in favor of emphasizing the gameplay skeleton which remains. You’re no longer showing up to a permanent place with people you can get to know and be silly with. When the round timer ends, Valve may as well be blowing up the server and nervegassing the other 23 players for all it affects you. I posit that TF2’s Casual mode isn’t merely a “non-competitive mode” – it’s an “anti-social mode”. Playing TF2’s Casual mode is like… showing up to the amusement park, alone, except all of the restaurants and bathrooms are permanently closed and they lock the exit gates behind you.
FWIW: a lot of that number is genuine. Bots may be prevalent, but their numbers don’t generally wildly fluctuate over short time periods. Between June & July the TF2 playercount shot up by 50k and most of that was probably organic.
Thing is, I actually like OW2’s core gameplay more than OW1. I can’t say it’s necessarily better than OW1 would have been if they hadn’t abandoned it for years to (fail to) build OW2’s PVE, but so it goes.
But I reinstalled just to see if I’d want to try with the new Invasion content, and here’s the thing:
I played about 5 rounds of QP. They were all horribly mismatched in terms of skill level, and I enjoyed 0 of them. So the idea of grinding through a new battle pass, although liking the RoboAna mythic skin, was a nonstarter even before talking about how crowded a launch season this is. Like even if I wanted to, I don’t have time for this battle pass.
And then the new PvE content? I mean maybe it’s good, but nothing about any of the PvE they’ve released in the past would support that. It’s been consistently mediocre IMO, so I dunno why I’d suddenly want to pay for the privilege.
I’m annoyed that I have about 2000 coins I’m never going to use (love that I can’t use them to buy the invasion bundle just to screw around with the new stuff), but I think it’s time to give up and move on.
The PVE bundle for a few missions costing about the same of what I paid for the entire ow1 is just insulting. For what I understand they’ll release multiples PVE bundles for 15$. The entire ow2 is only a money grab machine.
I should be mad at the market for this practice but I’m already so pissed off that I’ll direct all my hatred towards a single stupidity: Fuck all mobile consumers who made this kinda of shit the norm in the gaming market, fuck all candy crush players who gave infinite money to Activision Blizzard.
Good - fuck Blizzard. They literally were like “We’re going to OW2 for PvE! I promise we’re totally not just doing it because we want to monetize it more!”
Also keep in mind they announced it at the same exact time that they wanted people to stop talking about them and Taiwan. And all the sexual harassment at Blizzard.
They had no details about it at the time. They just wanted something the mainstream press could run instead. And tanked a game to keep it from cementing on their face. Idiots.
“I’d play more games, but I’m too busy working to afford the upgrades to my PC, upgrading my PC, and then going online to discuss how much I’ve upgraded my PC! Also, hopping linux distros every time I hear about a new one, and then going online to talk about that!"
steam
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.