do you not think the fact that most players come into tf2 and see a bunch of retards dancing around a bomb with particles coming out of their heads and people getting angry at others for actually trying to play the game is not because the game's developers have based their changes around this demographic
and yet when they come to realize the flaw with this way of thinking when it comes to making big bucks off the game later down the road as they will with their other two large titles, they not only don't appeal to whatever in between comp/casual demographic there is, they spend far more effort continuing to listen to people who play the game by pressing the g button with their other thumb up their ass than they do to the people who have an interest in investing themselves in the game through competitive gameplay
yeah of course the tf2 team can't throw out support for this (large) portion of the game's playerbase, but they could at least have done something to create a bridge between the casual audience and the competitive players by doing something like, i don't know
- rebalances that make some semblance of fucking sense
- a tutorial that serves as a tutorial or at least something that points players towards understanding how to play the game
- something that showcases competitive tf2, not 30 seconds of players taunting on a podium and then going "COMPETITIVE LOL!!!"
- a matchmaking system that is a) competitive and b) actually working
its late and i cant think of any more (though i know there certainly are) but valve has done nothing to bring anyone to competitive; i can imagine after seeing the "competitive matchmaking" a good portion of players who don't know of competitive tf2 now have a negative impression of it. nothing indicates valve is remotely capable of making the game competitive, and it really seems like they have the opposite in mind.
we got an update that was apparently years in the making (and a goddamn beta that changed nothing) and we got a broken shitty matchmaker that not only doesnt work but one that is so fucking basic i'm pretty sure i could have written the fucking ranking algorithm (as it turns out, mmr is not some number that goes up and down linearly as you win and lose). but, to be honest, this would have been perfectly fine in my book if it had appeared that this was the competitive update. not only are new players still completely in the dark about what the fuck competitive tf2 is, they have absolutely no idea how to play competitive tf2.
i learned of comp tf2 probably a year or something after i started playing, and though i really havent PLAYED it much, i've followed it and at least understand it to some extent. the only way i found out about it was through things completely separate from the game itself. i vaguely remembered hearing "tf2lobby" on a kritzkast episode which was a podcast i heard about from the control point podcast which i heard about from another podcast.... and then i found that it was dead and heard something about b4nny and then i found out, to a small extent, about comp tf2. after the mym update, nowhere in game can you find anything about comp tf2, still, other than the MM. what you've got for an intro to comp tf2 is a fucking ONE PAGE SET OF PARAGRAPHS that vaguely define valve's extremely casual "comp" tf2. sure, you might find something about b4nny or some other competitive tf2 streamer on the streams list that closes by default and nobody clicks on because nobody clicks on those icons up there unless they get an item.
point is, you shouldn't have to do any of that shit. in game, there should be SOMETHING that shows "hey! competitive tf2 is a thing and look how cool it is!" there should be a fucking working tutorial. the game should at least be somewhat tailored towards comp. i played csgo for a short period of time but within days i had already discovered a) the esports scene, at least that it existed + some basic info and b) how to basically play the competitive mm that csgo has (although, i know, it isn't exactly what the pros use and whatnot)
sorry for the incoherent rant