Small intro first:
I'd always played console growing up. I got a laptop when i turned 18 and went to college. 6 years of console CoD didn't prepare me. Even for being new to M+KB and TF2 I was beyond atrocious. The following story happened probably within my first 50 hours.
After going through the first days of "backburner fun to play" and "wow scout way too hard" I decided to get used to playing demoman. I'd only played it very little so far but I didn't have any class one day and decided to grind some community servers to improve. Obviously it went terrible and I was getting very discouraged.
I left whatever 247 server I was on, gathered my courage once more and started looking for one final server before I was going to stop TF2 for the day.
Demo once again. Barnblitz defense. Round hadn't started. The perfect practise.
I took things slowly. Just looked for good trap spots along the tracks, played around a med that for some reason was eager to heal this gibus demoman with a dream whenever i'd call for med.
Enemies were kind of oblivious I noticed (just running to cart, crouching behind it and dying) so I was getting easy kills just trapping the cart. Some pyro was trying to burn me from across the map
I eventually took my first death and looked at the scoreboard. 10-1, not bad! I kept playing the way I did but eventually they capped the first point after a couple of unfortunate events. I press tab: 25-2! wow!
I was finally figuring things out. The enemies were somehow worse than me but to me it was a victory nevertheless.
The medic at this point just had a medigun up my ass and heavies and pyros just kept running into my trap on the cart. I was so happy. 42-3. Finally I was seeing improvement in my gameplay.
I was excited and steam messaged a friend, telling him what was happening and how happy I was.
Soon after something caught my attention. A soldier just running at the cart I hadn't trapped, standing behind it basically unmoving, spamming rockets at my from across the map. That one pyro did the same. Still trying to burn me from across the map. A heavy and medic soon joined them.
I knew what it meant but was hoping I was wrong. I gathered my courage, and pressed tab once more.
The scoreboard looked great. I was soon closing in on those 50 kills and they hadn't even gotten to 3rd point yet. A kill count to be proud of. But my eyes were fixated on something else. the words BOT written all over the scoreboard in the ping section. No human on the server other than me. I released tab and did a 180, staring right into the face of my pocket medic. A soulless stare met my gaze. One I will never forget.
I'd never felt so humiliated in a videogame.
I left the server, hoping to be done with TF2 for the foreseeable future.
A notification popped up: "DO YOU WANT TO ADD THIS SERVER TO YOUR FAVORITES"
no.
"DO YOU WANT TO BLACKLIST THIS SERVER"
yes.
i did not play TF2 for a week after that