Team Fortress 2 Update Thread

The number of people working on TF2 changes daily. It can be as low as 2 people or up to 15 people.
The concept of “TF Team” (or even Dota team, CS:GO team, ...) is actually a confusing misnomer.  (Can change immediately at any time, depending on what's needed.)

Q: The community consistently requests more transparency from the TF Team, yet they never do
it. What makes transparent communication difficult for the TF Team?

A: Valve once told something to a famous youtuber (I will not name this person), said youtuber
misunderstood what Valve said, created a video with their misunderstanding (which was watched by tons
of people), and spread a lot of false information which caused Valve a lot of unwanted pain (it’s too
difficult for them to reverse the damage that was done and correct the tons of misunderstandings caused).

That’s not the real answer but that was an interesting anecdote. The real answer is that Valve as a
company has never really embraced the “talk a lot” attitude from Day 1. They have a lot of projects going
on that they can’t ever promise anything because they don’t know if they will come to fruition or not (and
if so, when will they come to fruition).

Valve feels that even if they did become fully transparent, it’s not what the community ultimately wants.
Valve thinks that talking more won’t make the community that much happier, but in fact might even
cause a storm of people to become angry (given how diverse the TF2 community is, there’s bound to be a
group of people who will become angry at any statement Valve makes). It’s safer for them to be silent.

All that being said, Valve doesn’t completely shut themselves from the community. They do read Reddit,
Facepunch, emails, etc. and see what the community is talking about, so to that end they try to stay on top
of community matters. Valve prefers to sit on the sidelines and watch the community discuss problems
with the game amongst itself. Valve has a position of authority, so them chiming in on something can
open dozens of misinterpretations and flame wars. You’ll never see them comment on (e.g.) random crits.

One big hazard with transparent communication is that people may think Valve is promising something.
Valve does a lot of internal experimentation and there are a lot of things in the TF2 debug build that never
make it to the release build. For example, the gas passer was in the “cheese shop” since early 2016 and
they benched the ideas because the experimentation didn’t seem to go in the direction they liked. They
would’ve opened a massive can of worms if they said “we’re currently trying out a new pyro weapon” in
2016 because people may think that a new pyro weapon is coming soon (i.e. a promise was made).

Valve could be trying out new weapons and features for TF2 even to this day. They won’t tell us
anything about it because they don’t know if what they are trying out will ever ship to the live game. (The
server binary does have artifacts of scrapped update concepts.)

MvM is a small component of TF2 so it is not considered as important or high priority as the rest of
TF2 is (same for medieval mode, etc.). That will be a difficult pill to swallow for MvM players but it’s
true. Just like how TF2 isn’t considered as important/prioritizing as other projects Valve has going on,
similarly, within the scope of TF2, MvM is not considered as important as the rest of the game.

Weapon balancing is a very tricky game that Valve admitted they have a lot of trouble in getting right. Valve cited that sometimes
they buff a weapon only to nerf it immediately 3 times later, so it’s tricky to reach the sweet spot.

When Valve rebalances weapons, they try to do so in a manner that does not affect one specific game
mode or “niche” of the game too negatively. They try to strike a balance between all the various niches
TF2 has (e.g. highlanders, 6v6, casual mode). They will not balance weapons for the sake of one niche
(people don’t need to worry that one day TF2 weapons will be balance to the wishes of comp leagues).

Valve’s hours are somewhat random. Due to the flexible nature of working at Valve, working hours
can vary. Some people may work from 11 AM to 7 PM, some may do the regular 9-5, some may come in
at 1 PM and leave at 9 PM. Unlike most companies, Valve does not measure employee time in “hours”
but rather in “employee productivity.” They have periodic reviews of their colleagues every now and then
(“rate your peers”) to check that everyone is being an asset to the company. (Measuring the number of
hours worked is considered a flawed metric.) Some people are “workaholics” so they may work a lot.

On days approaching a major update, the number of hours per day can be higher than normal, especially
after they released a big update and need to fix a bunch of bugs that came with the update. They can
usually compensate for that by taking a few days off after working crazy hours for days and days.

The TF Team gets on average 100-150 emails per day. Examples of mail they receive are: Spam, hate
mail, people asking where is the next content update, mappers begging Valve to buy their maps (likewise
for item makers), medals requests, and the like. Most of it, however, is feedback from players (primarily
coming from the “Leave feedback” button on the main TF2 page).

Valve tries to read every email sent to them, but they dedicate a limited amount of time (they spend on
average 1-2 hours on reading emails per day), so they will skip or stop reading emails partway through
(especially if it starts rambling or goes off tangents and is becoming a waste of their time).

For example, if the email subject is non-helpful, they may skip it, or they may read the first 2 sentences
before moving on to the next email. If the email is short, they may read it in whole but not internally
acknowledge it if it was lacking a lot of substance (e.g. a one sentence email “Remove random crits.”).

As mentioned earlier, in addition to email, Valve also reads Reddit, Facepunch, and other public forums.
They spend quite a lot of time reading things posted by the community from a lot of different channels.

Valve can’t tell anyone when/if the next update will happen. Valve said that if they had
all the man power in the world, they would happily push a content update every 3 months to TF2, even if
it means the game becomes 50 GB in size (though old community maps may be removed to keep the
mapcycle current). However, they don’t (because of the way the company works) so they don’t know
when they will be able to get the next content update out, if ever.

Q: What will happen to TF2 (and other Valve games for that matter) if lootboxes are outlawed?

A: There are plenty of other revenue models that Valve’s games can adopt if lootboxes become banned
from many jurisdictions. They didn’t say which model they would go for because they haven’t thought
about it yet, but they are not concerned about it and won’t worry about it until it becomes a problem.

Given that the CS:GO team confirmed that CS:GO is not moving to Source 2, do not hold hopes that TF2 will.