now that tf2 is legal, will all the pedos finally stop playing it?

I'm not very old, but I feel otherwise. I'm 29 now. When I started playing TF2 it was the 25th of November in 2012 which meant I would have been sixteen. It was almost definitely the reason I failed a lot of exams and dropped out of school. Now I'm 29 years old. I don't mind strangers knowing that. I'm 29 years old and I never made the leap to playing serious competitive Team Fortress 2. I knew some people who played it and reasoned that that and UGC was enough. It isn't and every day I regret not playing when I could have. I mge'd and lobbied, and pugged sometimes, in house. Now my only escape from casual matchmaking is Australian "noob pugs" and the other guys are really young and way better than me. I once made a joke about a player being born after TF2 came out and everyone else said that didn't mean much. That's a difficult thing to get over, though I'm sure it's a universal experience.

My favourite ever memory from TF2 will always be watching Crowns win i58 at the NEC. LANs are the best and I think in the future to avoid having to play with incredible young people I will just go to australian LANs and feel like part of the scene without having to play.

I used to be a big Twitch head and pugchamp era b4nny streams could sometimes be an incredible orchestra hit of all the funniest or best American players bouncing off each other. I will remember the late 2010s with fondness forever—everything around the reaction to matchmaking and the pyro update, the schism of implacable optimism and vigorous pessimism, the death of ESEA and scramble for a way forward. I think I'll always F.W. b4nny too.

TFTV has led an onerous trundling life along the way and while it's now I suspect little more than a habitual bookmark-check for relics of the 2010s I for one will remember it as fondly as anything and I'm glad it was never subjected to a redesign or ignominious shutdown. There used to be some really funny guys posting here. World-class posters, and sometimes they were kind of nice at the game as well. The happenings threads around which the site seemed to revolve seem to have been, like a lot of the internet, subsumed by discords. It would be nice if that was not so, or somehow reversed, but people will post where the activity is and they are fond of convenience (of access rather than layout). Let's just hope everyone remembers to check that their posts follow the forum rules and guidelines or gets formatting help. PLEASE EMBED YOUR IMAGES or at least upload to imgur or your own personal website. Nobody wants to click on your (often short-lived) image URLs, I reckon, let alone be reminded of how much private discussion is going on in Discords out of the "public square"!

Speaking of voting in elections, if you guys live in democracies, I recommend voting for a party when those things come up. If you live in an authoritarian kind of place, find some place else you can vote, like a poll or just kicking somebody from a pub. It's a great way to feel powerful—especially if you are, or turning, an obscene age (27+), and the consequences of things like staying up late or having too much of a good thing are, or are starting to become, unbearable. I've had four little beers and one big one tonight and I'm expecting to suffer like a killer in Hell all tomorrow. Just how she goes these days. And I can't even say at least I had a good time fragging out in my twenties. Fuck it all. Just kidding. I invite my fellow "uncs" to add me and we can talk about our favourite shotgun pockets or YouTube Poops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0i6d6zjnG4

I pre-ordered the Orange Box so was able to play in Beta in September 2007. I was 30 years old then, about to get married, two years before my daughter was even born.

I was vaguely aware there was a competitive scene for TF2 but it didn't exist as far as I was concerned. Found a community server pretty quickly and had a lot of fun there playing with a big group of regulars for a long while - seeding servers and playing custom maps - spent way way too much time on 24/7 Warpath2.

The way the game was then definitely holds an outsized spot in my head canon. I still think of every unlock or gameplay change as "new tech" - as in airblast seems like it was added after 5 years instead of 10 months. I remember people getting their first hat drops in the game and making big deals about them the way people would today about getting a top tier unsual effect all-class hat. It was months before I got my first one - a Vintage Tyrolean I still have.

I still find the game a lot of fun to play, though I finally realized I can't keep committing the time to play seasons anymore (and am ~6 years into knowing I'll ever be able to be good at the game) - still love it and appreciate the many interesting folks I've met playing it over the years.

there was a lot of silly bullshit back in the day. stuff i remember:
- badlands getting released and 6s finally having a map everyone thought was good
- damage spread used to sometimes allow a pipe to 1shot a scout
- stickies were bullshit to a degree you can't even imagine. couldn't even break them for a while
- seagull explaining to our team how bombing created a damage differential
- running backburner pyro on cp_well mids because it gave you +50 health
- grinding 39/39 achievements on an empty server whenever a class update dropped
- a hundred leagues popping up and getting abandoned
- dealing with double sandman on cp_fastlane when it could fully stun ubers
- natascha in 6s
- f5ing the soldier update page to get a service medal
- having to use binds for autoreload and rapid fire pistol
- most of all booting up the game for the first time on xmas and realizing it was the best game i had ever played