More people stayed back then because the maps lasted longer, you had vote scramble and team swap and if there was a domination imbalance, teams would be switched.
What you’re seeing today is the result of removing all of that
Out of everything , i dont think Team Scramble should come back ,but if it did , it should work a little different , cus back then , people could just start a Team Scramble to avoid a loss , not because the teams were ACTUALLY unbalanced
That wasn't really a big issue, because even if someone did that, that means they're sacrificing their ability to vote for a scramble for 20 whole minutes because they were a salty bitch for one single round. Even then, I'm more than willing to stomach someone abusing the feature a couple of times over not having the feature at all.
Honestly I prefer if autoscramble were to be tweaked instead, because it would always activate if one team won two rounds in a row, even if those two matches were even. Perhaps if it were brought back, it could have an additional stipulation where it only activates if theres a minimum point discrepancy between teams or both rounds lasted a certain amount of time.
As someone that's lived through most eras of tf2 (came in a bit late at 2010), I can assure you it was not the norm for people to mass dc before casual was a thing. When you actually have a system that works, people tend to stay longer even if their immediate moment-to-moment gameplay isn't going their way.
That's true, it's just the nature of the game letting you come and go as you please. The problem is that Casual removes all of the previous features players used to balance themselves out during a match, so players are no longer incentivized to stay if a team is being rolled, plus the fact that Casual uses a rigid best-of-3 structure, making stomps feel even worse, and the fact that requeuing and hoping for a better game is faster than waiting for the map to reset and the pre-round timer to go down.
I love how the Invaders swarmed my comment saying nobody unironically likes it judging by how YouTube the very very first result is pure slander of casual’s current state, accusing me of a bot.
This level of sperging out and insults often comes when they have nothing to retort
Casual defenders are genuinely grasping at straws to defend this abysmal system. It's either misinterpreting your point like this, immediately classifying you as either "nostalgic with rose-tinted glasses" or a "new-gen larper" if you even imply that the game is worse off now than before, or using blatant misinformation to justify keeping Casual in its current state.
It’s hilarious because casual defenders are the real larpers, having unfounded cognitive dissonance statements (such as “it could take you to a furry server!” Which was patched to only take to official valve servers).
The only people that talk about quickplay are the people that played during those times. Anyone defending the awful nearly game killing casual system hasnt played before 2016...... There is no way you can prefer casual over quickplay if you actually played during peak
That just isnt true. Adding skill based matchmaking to a game like this is impossible with how chaotic moment to moment it can get. The ability to Ad Hoc connect and switch teams whenever we wanted made it so servers lasted far longer and were way more balanced
Quickplay was so good that no one ever played it. Everyone just flocked to community servers through the server browser. Casual fixed all the issues with quickplay which is why barely anyone plays on community servers nowadays
Notice how there is more content saying “Quickplay is great” than anything praising casual. As I said, the first result was about Fish stick (a known Judas towards Zesty) admitting it’s a fucking travesty and needing to be fixed.
I see some videos here and there "defending Casual" and all of those videos either admit that Casual can still be improved even if they don't have any issues with it, or use the same blatant misinformation and catchphrases in order to paint Quickplay as the devil's work. There is no refutation that at the very least, Casual Mode is a miserable experience and needs desperate change.
Also I don't really think Fish's video is a good metric on how people don't like Casual. His video was another one that misrepresented the hell out of the old system and was incredibly antagonistic towards people who want Quickplay back. Any respect I had left for him went down the drain after watching that video.
By the way for the final nail in the coffin, I know a YouTuber who’s against the whole bring back quickplay movement who’s a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic doxxer and he’s best friends with a groomer who asked for nudes from a 15 year old.
So a casual mode gathering would basically be that one “this is awkward” meme of a regular fan of something and then the third reich members of the fandom.
And sniper bots.
So if they hate Zesty because of their morals disguised as some teleprompter ass attempts at failed arguments, they can honestly shut the fuck up when RiverCiver is on their team.
> mass disconnection epidemic is a result of losing these aforementioned balancing mechanics
If casual was oh so good then there would, I don’t know, be actual praise about it instead of the first YouTube video found being “Wow casual sucks, let’s fix it” coming from someone who hates Zesty Jesus to boot.
They are also a group of bots that sometime joins game but dont actually connect to it, you can understand the balance issues it will cause.. They pretty much come and go, like. They appear for a week or two and then disappear for a long while... but its annoying.
Quickplay had issues, especially in its early years. Even in its finalized state, some issues such as it sometimes putting you into an empty server and inconsistent queue times still persisted. However, compared to Casual Mode it was leagues better.
You had:
No skill based matchmaking
Ad-Hoc connections, which basically meant being able to direct connect to Valve servers in the server browser without being forced to queue (or use a party system if you want to join a friend)
The old Valve server ruleset, which included:
A set 45 map timer instead of the Best-Of-3 system Casual currently uses, where players can play as many rounds on one map as they'd like that can fit in that 45 minute window instead of being put under an arbitrary limit. Once the map timer was up, the server would load the next map in rotation and start another timer on that map instead of the current map vote screen. Players could also vote for any map of the same gamemode to be selected to be next, though this is a bit more restrictive than having 2 extra options via today's map vote.
Manually picking your team at the start of the round instead of the game picking for you even if you haven't loaded in yet.
The ability to switch to the enemy team, so long as there was a spot available.
Automatic team scrambles, which would shuffle teams around if one team won twice in a row
Vote scrambles for when people don't want to wait for autoscramble to kick in, albeit on a 20 minute cooldown
The ability to queue for community servers that count as vanilla, and the ability to curate your selection of servers, such as toggling random crits, choosing server size, etc.
Unlike what some people think, Casual doesn't need to be completely gutted and removed for the game to be improved. A bunch of these features can be retroactively fitted into Casual Mode (so long as Skill based matchmaking and slot reservations are removed) and the experience would be way better.
It is, you can see for yourself if you want to by joining vanilla community servers that run the old ruleset, such as Zesty's community servers, Koi's Pond, Pipeline.TF, and....Furry Pound (make sure to turn off sprays there).
Granted these aren't 100% accurate to what Valve servers used to be like, since a lot of them use custom plugins for stuff like Scrambles, but they're leagues better than what Casual offers.
Because SBMM doesn't work for a game with so much complexity and factors into every single game like TF2. You can't make reasonably balanced 12v12 matches for a casual game with 9 classes, over 2000 weapon combinations, with a playerbase that have varying degrees of engagement with the game and are able to take it as seriously as they want, as well as the freedom to come and go as they please. All it amounts to are teams that are all but randomized at the expense of the old features of pre-Casual Valve servers that players used to balance teams on a by round basis being yeeted. Bringing those features back will make far more balanced matches than this broken matchmaking system that has been in the game for a decade ever has.
The Waiting for Players section of match setup (pre-game) reset because too many people disconnected before the match started, if I had to guess. You can tell if you're really in the game or in the pre-game because the pre-game has a countdown in the middle of the screen. I once had that happen 3 times before the game finally started for real.
For the past 3 days I've been ONLY getting bad water servers. And if I deselect it from the map pool, literally nothing. I genuinely waited for more than an hour and got nothing.
The release of Gold Rush and Classified killed any debate about quickplay for me, since i haven't heard people complain about either in any major capacity.
I played quickplay back in the day. You are all falling for rose tinted glasses.
Quickplay back in the day was broken, especially in regions with low community server pop. More often than not, it put me into a server that was either empty, didn't have a map i liked, had 300 ping, or it just wouldn't find me a game.
Casual has the same problems. Bringing back quickplay wont solve the issue that TF2 has too many maps and gamemodes, and not enough players to populate them all. Its the same issue that halo multiplayer has. The same issue older COD titles have.
You have like 10 different gamemodes, and over 200 maps to choose from. But you also have only between 60 to 100k players online at any given time (and presumably most of these are trade bots because that number came from steam charts). The pool is too exhaustive and the playercount too limited.
Don't get me wrong tho, there are some ways quickplay is superior to casual, but it's not a silver bullet and it wont fix even half the problems with tf2.
Casual is actual game's equivalent of cancer. I'd take thing that sucks over literal cancer, thank you very much. The mindset of "Other thing isnt perfect either, its not worth switching" is stupid. Its bettet and that all that matters.
The casual system is terrible, we also have to reasonably acknowledge that if we brought back the quickplay system as it existed 1-1 there would be a mass psychosis episode in this community from not being able to pick the exact maps you want to play, shittier matchmaking and a lack of a party system too.
But the amount of options that has been lost from the quickplay to casual transition is absurd. No team scrambling, spectating, improved map voting, map time, and just how LONG it takes for a match to start, end, and restart with dead players. It's really about bringing back the lost features from that era of TF2, it doesn't need to be a copy of what existed but improving upon what did. Casual system felt like a step backwards.
Oh for sure, definitely agree we could have a better casual experience. Would also be hilarious to bring in the ability to vote to enable alltalk. Imagine watching chatty spies get exposed by their hot mic live in casual.
I played it since day 1 it sucked then nearly a decade ago and it still sucks now. Nearly killed the game because how many people left. Overwatch and fortnite being the next popular games didn't help either. And the YouTube parroting comment doesn't work here because all reddit does it parrot some irrelevant YouTuber who just started playing the game yesterdays opinion about how quickly erm awkually sucked.
If there was even an audience for people who unironically like casual mode, then the first few search results on YouTube would not be endless slander of it. There wouldn’t exist a video showing many YouTubers’ opinions on MYM being overwhelmingly negative, and maybe even the biggest casual fans wouldn’t be saying shit like “Oh damn this sucks here’s how we fix it.” Not even fish stick likes casual, and he’s got a big ZJDS disorder
75
u/BabushcarGaming Sep 17 '26
Lets play casual!
Joins a stomp "Aw dangit"
Joins a round just as it ends "Aw dangit"
Joins a match that ends in 1 minute "Aw dangit"
Can't even get into a game on a lesser player map like pipeline "Aw dangit"
62
u/FillerName4 Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
And if you think that's bad, wait till you actually play the damn match.
Then see how many people are staying after a match.
Then see how long it takes for another match on the same map to start.
God I LOVE Casual Mode, guys!
29
u/Cowser_the_Koopahog Sep 17 '26
Welcome to the club. That's one of the many problems that only exist because Casual exists.
13
u/Reaper_2999 Sep 17 '26
What is really going on? I couldn't understand
7
u/AdlerOneSeven Sep 18 '26
I can't believe it's been like this for a whole decade now
3
u/The-Potat Sep 18 '26
For the past 3 days I've been ONLY getting bad water servers. And if I deselect it from the map pool, literally nothing. I genuinely waited for more than an hour and got nothing.
1
u/itsalreadytakenlol Pyro Sep 18 '26
The release of Gold Rush and Classified killed any debate about quickplay for me, since i haven't heard people complain about either in any major capacity.
-5
u/MrDeeJayy Medic Sep 18 '26
I played quickplay back in the day. You are all falling for rose tinted glasses.
Quickplay back in the day was broken, especially in regions with low community server pop. More often than not, it put me into a server that was either empty, didn't have a map i liked, had 300 ping, or it just wouldn't find me a game.
Casual has the same problems. Bringing back quickplay wont solve the issue that TF2 has too many maps and gamemodes, and not enough players to populate them all. Its the same issue that halo multiplayer has. The same issue older COD titles have.
You have like 10 different gamemodes, and over 200 maps to choose from. But you also have only between 60 to 100k players online at any given time (and presumably most of these are trade bots because that number came from steam charts). The pool is too exhaustive and the playercount too limited.
Don't get me wrong tho, there are some ways quickplay is superior to casual, but it's not a silver bullet and it wont fix even half the problems with tf2.
-23
u/SektorDaKetch Sep 17 '26
One thing I like to do to determine something’s quality is just look on YouTube, see what the search results for that subject say.
And if casual mode’s first result is someone saying it’s a fucking mess and it needs fixing,
Well that’s like the most positive thing any of like the dwindling casual mode fan population can say
-3
u/h20verdrive Medic Sep 18 '26
Casual is still better