Team Fortress 2, that shooter with wacky character intro videos so good I have to watch each of them at least once every six months, got its 2025 summer update late last week. There are a host of new community-made maps, items, and taunts, in addition to a fair few bug fixes from Valve themselves.
Cool to see, though one vocal group of players are keen to see the developers delve back in and make some changes to matchmaking, having penned an open letter to the Steamy company outlining hopes for the revised system that melds the very old old one with the slightly less old one the game’s had since 2016’s Meet Your Match update.
First of all, the summer update. You can read the full notes here, but the highlights as follows. There are 10 new community maps, dubbed (clears throat) Citadel, Aquarius, Fulgur, Cargo, Conifer, Boardwalk, Blowout, Mannhole, Demolition, and Pressure. You can add 23 new community-made items and 14 unusual effects to that, with the latter being split seven-seven between hats and taunts.
Closing out the additions are four new taunts: The Final Score, Bear Hug, Texan Trickshot, and Flying Colours. I can guess exactly what two of those’ll look like if done by a Heavy, the others are a bit more mysterious. Among the bug fixes are tweaks to outdated in-game tips, the Heavy’s model being updated to add a fittingly-named “bullets bodygroup for cosmetics”, and “the Texas Half-Pants not fully using rimlight”. That last one’s probably fairly boring in practice, but it made me snigger.
So, that’s the update – nice and beefy for a game that’s slowly inching closer to its 20th birthday (sorry if that’s made you feel old).
Now, onto the letter. A group of TF2 players dubbed BringBackQuickplay and YouTuber Megascatterbomb have penned an open letter they say they’re planning to send off to Valve, calling for the reintroduction of several features from TF2’s pre-2016 quickplay matchmaking system. The central goal is a move away from skill-based matchmaking, back to a system that puts community-run servers at the forefront and allows team switching at will. As of writing, despite the letter being cited as from the entire Team Fortress 2 community, those behind it say its recommendations are based on a survey that got about 3.5k responses.
This also isn’t the first time in recent history that Team Fortress 2 players have decided to crack open a word processor and write to Gabe Newell like he’s their MP. Earlier this year, a group that looks to have included at least some of the same folks put together another letter to Valve (in the exact same font) about giving players who’ve not upgraded to a premium account back the ability to use comms tools like text and voice chat. That change debuted in 2020 as part of Valve’s efforts to combat bots, something Team Fortress players came together under the #SaveTF2 moniker to call for action on.
Basically, the game with the spy that goes boink hasn’t been short on campaign groups over the past half decade. We’ll have to see if this latest letter goes anywhere, or just remains a thing that’s garnered some thumbs up from some Team Fortressers who frequent Reddit.
