Hat Simulator 2 | Playing Team Fortress 2 for the First Time | YTPMV

TF2 is a cartoonish multiplayer first person shooter created by Valve in 2007. It has 9 different classes, with different weapons that are made to be perfectly balanced with each other, and you play as one of the 2 teams called RED and BLU. It has unique maps with a vibrant industrial design and is a fun casual experience where you can decide to do whatever you want and in most cases, end up helping the team. There is a competetive scene however, this isn't the way most people play the game. Most players choose to just have fun and mess around. It is also well known for being the inspiration for other multiplayer FPS games and has also massively impacted internet culture with memes. It's a simple but fun game to play.

However, after the Meet Your Match update, the game has been getting much worse due to Valve's neglect. First, they removed the quickplay system, a system allowing you to quickly join TF2 servers, including both Valve and Community servers, and replaced it with a matchmaking system where there was now a Casual mode, which is just Valve servers. This failed at trying to make TF2 competitive while making it easy for bots to gather in servers and ruin the experience for the players by aimbotting, ddosing the server and kicking players. Even worse, you cannot kick the bots because of the new party system introduced in MYM, since bots would just queue in a party of 6, making the vote not go through since they take up half of the team and can just vote to not kick themselves.

There are other problems with the new matchmaking system such as matches only ending after 2 rounds instead of a time limit that lasted up to around an hour or reserving places for players to join, which can cause a team to be very unbalanced for a few minutes. Not to mention the useless level system, which does absolutely nothing, and the fact that matchmaking is very broken. Sometimes you won't be able to find a match despite waiting for 30 minutes or so and having to restart the game or wait a while before joining into a server.

UPDATE: Both the bot hosters and the bots have been banned by Lord Gaben. Let's see if Valve can stay on the treadmill.

Community servers allows for custom maps and modifications to the game with plugins, which can be a fun experience if you ever get tired of vanilla gameplay. Some of the most popular custom gamemodes are Class Wars, 10x/100x/1000x (the weapon stats are multiplied), Randomizer and Versus Saxton Hale (all players fight a boss called Saxton Hale). There are also some vanilla community servers with the aim of bringing back a pre-MYM ruleset (like castaway.tf). These usually return the timer to 45 minutes, allow you to team scramble, vote for maps and more (basically just returning TF2 back to its glory days).

There are multiple ways of playing TF2 since you can choose different weapons for each slot. You can get new weapons from random weapon drops, which you get by just playing the game, and by gambling in Mann vs Machine or by opening crates. You can also buy weapons or trade for them.

🎞️ Meet the Scout | 🎞️ Bonkumiru by MowtenDoo

Scout is the fastest class in the game. He has a low-range scattergun that is very effective at killing people with low health, a pistol for mid-range distance and a bat as a melee to bonk enemies with. He can also double jump, making him hard to track and shoot down. He is from Boston and has an overconfident personality.

🎞️ Meet the Soldier | 🎞️ Soldier Vs. Masked Spy by wazgul

Soldier is a patriotic American with a rocket launcher. He is the most batshit insane character of TF2. His primary weapon is a rocket launcher, which has powerful splash damage, a shotgun as his secondary and a shovel as his melee. You are able to rocket jump with the rocket launcher making Soldier one of the most mobile classes in the game.

🎞️ Meet the Pyro

Pyro is an arsonist with a flamethrower, who can't speak. He can only muffle through his mask. His primary weapon is the flamethrower, his secondary weapon is a shotgun and his melee is a fireaxe. Pyro is very easy to play as you can just walk forward and hold down left click on the flamethrower, which is known as w+m1.

🎞️ Meet the Demoman | 🎵 Good Demoman Song

Demoman is the black scottish cyclops. He has a grenade launcher as his primary, which shoots explosive pills that can move around on the ground before exploding, a sticky bomb launcher that allows you to place up to eight stickies on any surface until you decide to detonate them and a bottle as his melee. Demoman is known to be an alcoholic, causing him to act comedically erratic.

🎞️ Meet the Heavy | 🎞️ Sandwichmiru by STBlackST

Heavy is a fat Russian man with a minigun. He is the tallest and biggest out of the classes. His main weapon is a minigun, his secondary a shotgun and his melee is his fists. He is also the slowest, making positioning important, but he can gun down light classes very fast.

🎞️ Meet the Engineer

Engineer is a texan who can build machines. He can erect sentries, which automatically shoot at enemies, dispensers, which heal teammates and provides metal, and teleporters. All of these machines can be upgraded 3 times to make them faster and stronger. He is very smart and he has a relaxed personality.

He has a shotgun as his primary, a pistol as his secondary, a wrench on his third slot to repair and build machines, the construction PDA for building machines on his fourth slot and the destruction PDA for destroying them on his fifth slot.

The most common playstyle for Engineer is called turtling and it is where you just build in one spot and stand there for the rest of the game, without moving much.

🎞️ Meet the Medic | 🎞️ Team Service Announcement #21

Medic is the healing class. He can heal teammates with his medigun and uber them, making them and himself invincible for a few seconds. He is German and has a bird called Archimedes, which is stuck inside Scout from a previous operation (this is probably why Scout can capture a control point as 2 people). His character is like a mad scientist as he is overconfident and easy-going. He is paired best with Heavy, giving Heavy an overheal of 150, causing his total health to be 450HP, the biggest total health there can be in the game.

His primary is his medigun, his secondary a needle gun, which is very delayed and inaccurate, and his melee is a bonesaw.

🎞️ Meet the Sniper

Sniper is an Australian assassin with a sniper rifle, who can one-shot enemies if he gets a headshot. He pisses inside a bottle and can throw it with a secondary weapon called Jarate. His primary is the sniper rifle, his secondary a machine gun and his melee a machete. If you can master the aim required for Sniper, he becomes the most overpowered class in the game, able to instanty kill anyone in the match.

🎞️ Meet the Spy | 🎞️ Buttsecks

Spy is a frenchman who can disguise as other classes. He can also go invisible with his Invis Watch making stealth a key part of Spy's playstyle. His primary weapon is a revolver, which is slow to reload and does a small amount of damage, his secondary is a sapper, which can destroy Engineer's buildings, his melee is a knife, which can instakill enemies if you backstab them and the Invis Watch on his fourth slot.

There are more than 80 maps included in TF2 and they are each created for a specific gamemode like Capture the Flag. You can tell which mode a map is by the prefix in the mapfile name (eg. ctf_2fort). They are meant to emulate the teams quickly building bases to battle against each other, which is why there are random buildings and props scattered throughout the maps. There are the 6 classic maps that have been in the game since the beginning of TF2 and they are:

2Fort is a Capture the Flag (CTF) map, where you have to go to the enemy base and bring back their intelligence briefcase. It is the most played map in the game because it doesn't require much skill or teamwork making it the perfect place for friendlies (players who don't kill other players) or new players. The front of the bases usually have Snipers on the balcony and you can experience some sniper battles between each team. The intelligence is located in each enemy team's base in the basement, making this a classic Engineer spot. There is also the sewers, where you can go through to flank the enemy or avoid the battles happening above.

🎞️ It's Beginning to look Alot like Dustbowl

Dustbowl is an Attack/Defense map, which means that you have to capture 2 control points if you are on BLU and you have to defend the control points if you are on RED. After the match finishes, teams are switched. There are 3 different stages of Dustbowl, the first stage finishes very quickly and is unbalanced towards BLU. The second stage gives RED the advantage with the amount of open space and the third stage is a more balanced stage, which usually results in a win for RED. It has a badlands aesthetic making it feel unique. There are also a lot of chokepoints.

Granary is a Control Point (CP) map, where you have to capture 5 control points and you win the game. Each team starts with 2 control points already captured and the middle one is uncaptured. After a few seconds the middle control point unlocks and the teams go all out against eachother from the beginning of the match. Granary is a big map with a lot of open space, making it fun to explore and to travel to each control point. Inside each base there is a lot of detail being put into interior, making you feel part of the universe that TF2 is set in. There is some interesting level design, especially with the middle control point where you can actually go up vertically on jump on the crates and shoot enemies from above.

🎞️ TF2: Stopping the train on Well

Well is another Control Point map but with trains, which can kill you. It is very spacious and both teams have massive bases. The middle control point has 2 trains coming from different directions, making players go straight for the point. There are a lot of sniper areas on this map with open windows from high-up places. The map feels like being in a city with the industrial buildings and colour pallette..

🎞️ Meet the Demoman

Gravel Pit is an Attack/Defense map but with 3 control points. It is dense with the amount of buildings in each area of the map and has a lot going on. It feels like being at a construction site, as the name suggests. There are a lot of high-vantage points like the tower at the last point.

Hydro is the only Territorial Control (TC) map in the game. This is a bit like King of the Hill (KOTH) but there are 5 territories with control points that a team must capture. If that team captures all the territories they win but the enemy team can also do the same to your team's control point. This is my favorite map because of the beautiful scenery and map design. It is very unique and spacious. However, it can be confusing because some areas of a territory are closed off depending on which territories are captured by which team.

Mann vs Machine is a 6 player co-op PvE mode where you fight against waves of robots, who are trying to blow up your base. By killing bots, you can get cash, which can be used in the Upgrade Station to buy upgrades for your weapons and powerups. There are 2 ways to play MVM, Boot Camp (free) and Mann Up (paid). When you complete a tour in Mann Up, you earn random items (like bot killers) and if you're lucky enough, you might just get one of the rarest types of weapons in the game: Australiums. When you complete a tour in Boot Camp, you get no items. I prefer Boot Camp because I personally don't like to use real money to gamble for items.

Usually, you fight against 6-8 waves of bots before completing the mission. However, there exists a Halloween-themed mission called Ghost Town is a constant fight against thousands of zombies in a single wave: Wave 666.

Before the update, Mann vs Machine was teased in hidden rooms behind TOP SECRET doors across different maps, showing photos and other pieces of evidence about the robots and sketches of them and how they work. You can typically find some frightened NPCs in the TOP SECRET rooms. Some of the maps that they are located in are: 2Fort, in one of the server rooms near the intelligence and Doomsday behind one of the teams spawnrooms.

As usual with Valve, this mode was neglected even though it had some high potential, with how fun and how much of a money maker it is.

TF2 was shipped on the Xbox 360 and PS3 as part of The Orange Box bundle. Portal, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Part One and Half-Life 2: Part Two are also included in The Orange Box. They contain the original 2007 version of TF2 and were untouched by Valve after release, making this one of the best ways to have a vanilla experience of TF2. Infact this was how I first played TF2 back in 2012 on Xbox Live. Due to not being updated by Valve, there are game-breaking glitches and exploits that you can still perform. There is also a huge modding scene around this game since only having the original 6 maps can get boring.

The console versions rely on a lobby system hosted by players instead of having servers, where you can search for different maps and player limits. This has kept the game alive for . This system can break on some Xbox consoles for unknown reasons so you would have to rely on your friends/recently played with lists.

- Vanilla weapons only

- No bots

- No dedicated servers - lobby system instead

- Better graphics

- No cosmetics

- No airblast

- Runs at 30 fps

- You are unable to vote

- You return to the lobby after a match ends