Valve Software, Team Fortress 2 Developer Team

10400 NE 4th Street, Floor 14

Bellevue, WA 98004

USA

July 27, 2025

To whom it may concern at Valve:

The following is an open letter from the general Team Fortress 2 Community regarding the game’s current matchmaking system.

Team Fortress 2, as we know, is a class-based, team-focused shooter that thrives on dynamic, emergent gameplay. Every match is shaped not just by raw skill, but by teamwork, creativity, and adaptability. These traits, combined with the game’s chaotic charm, are what have kept players coming back for nearly 20 years.

However, for the past nine years, since the Meet Your Match update, TF2 has been constrained by a fundamentally flawed matchmaking system known as Casual Mode, which replaced the original and more reliable Quickplay system. Casual Mode was introduced without prior warning or community input, and it arrived in an unplayable, unstable, and deeply unpopular state for almost a year after its release. While the current Casual Mode is functional and has made improvements since its introduction, we believe it still imposes limitations that don’t align with how TF2 is best played and enjoyed. Specifically, Casual's structure often creates friction for players looking for easy-going, social, and flexible match experiences. Based on community feedback, here are the core concerns:

  • Glicko-based matchmaking often results in one-sided matches, with little opportunity for rebalancing mid-game. Unlike previous systems that allowed dynamic team scrambling, TF2’s implementation assumes consistent individual performance in a team-based game, resulting in frustration for both new and experienced players.
  • The Party System only allows up to 6 players to play together, making it take longer to get into a server than an ad-hoc connection.
  • Slot Reservation causes servers to fill more slowly, which delays team balancing and often leads to one-sided matches. Since reserved slots are counted as real players, the game’s autobalance system doesn’t activate properly, leaving teams uneven for extended periods.
  • Matches are short due to them using a best-of-3 system or a single-round limit instead of having a 45-minute map timer.
  • Map Voting Bugs have gone unfixed for nearly a decade, sometimes preventing players from even selecting their preferred map.
  • Team Switching is no longer an option that allows friends to play alongside or against each other if desired at the current moment.
  • Pre-round timers are excessively long and make matches feel slow to start.

These changes not only affected match quality; they also disrupted TF2’s social fabric. The removal of Quickplay abruptly dismantled the ecosystem of vanilla community servers. Previously, Quickplay acted as a gateway, directing players into community-hosted servers and helping maintain healthy populations. With its removal, these servers lost visibility and accessibility, causing player counts to drop sharply. Many communities that had thrived for years were suddenly left without traffic, leading to widespread server shutdowns and the decline of grassroots TF2 communities.

Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with skill-based matchmaking systems like Glicko, the issue lies in how they’re applied in TF2. In this game, a player's effectiveness is often shaped more by team composition, class synergy, and spontaneous cooperation than by consistent individual performance—something Glicko isn't designed to account for. The Quickplay system offered a more flexible and socially oriented approach, where players had the power to seek out and create balanced games themselves instead of having it done for them. While not without flaws, these systems better reflected TF2’s emergent gameplay and community-driven nature. We’re not calling for a full return to the past, but rather a thoughtful integration of proven features that support TF2’s unique gameplay into a modern framework.

        Many of the issues in Casual Mode could be addressed by reintroducing key features from the previous Quickplay system, ideally in a modernized form that builds on its strengths while addressing past limitations. Features worth reconsidering include:

  • 45-minute map timers (-mp_maxrounds 0, +mp_timelimit 45), encouraging longer, more cohesive match experiences.
  • Real-time team scrambling (+mp_scrambleteams_auto 1, +mp_scrambleteams_auto_windifference 2), using actual in-match performance via a player's accumulated points rather than outdated data from prior games.
  • Manual team selection and switching (-mp_forceautoteam 0, +mp_allowspectators 1), a quality-of-life option that worked alongside effective auto-balance logic and allowed people to choose if they wanted to play with or against their friends.
  • Ad-hoc server joining (~tf_mm_strict 0), which allowed friends to quickly and easily join each other’s games.
  • Inclusion of Valve servers in the server browser (~tf_mm_strict 0), allowing players to choose and instantly connect to an official game server at their own discretion.
  • Inclusion of vanilla community servers in its game coordinator (OpenQuickplayDialog), which helps promote and flourish communities, extended the life of the game and provided moderation beyond Valve’s own infrastructure.
  • Waiting for players pre-round timer (~mp_waitingforplayers_time 30), allowing for the game to get underway after the 30-second timer expires without having to wait for all players to connect, preventing any time wasting.  
  • Real-time map voting (+sv_vote_issue_changelevel_allowed 1), giving players the privilege to vote on the next map at any given time based on what gamemode they were playing.
  • The ability to specify precise server criteria via an Advanced Server Options menu, including filters for settings like no random crits, server size, respawn type, and map preferences, giving players control over the match environment before joining a game.

Implementing these features would require moving away from the current skill-based matchmaking structure in Casual Mode, a necessary shift to restore the balance, convenience, and spontaneity that defined TF2 at its best. Reintroducing these features—either by reviving Quickplay or by building a hybrid system—would restore much of what made TF2 fun, fair, and fast to pick up and play. Furthermore, these features would be wholly incompatible with the principles of Glicko skill-based matchmaking. TF2’s implementation of using the Glicko system in a game that thrives on flexibility and emergent play often results in mismatched lobbies, unbalanced team compositions, and a lack of mid-match course correction. Hence, the removal of this system would be the most viable course of action. However, we also acknowledge that Casual Mode has introduced some useful elements, such as ping filtering, player XP levels, and individual map selection. These features could be incorporated into a new hybrid model that combines the strengths of both systems without sacrificing gameplay quality.

For the reasons stated above, we, the Team Fortress 2 Community, respectfully ask for a reformed version of the Quickplay system to be put in the game in any way, shape, or form to its game coordinator. We believe this will help restore the freedom of choice, balanced matches, and strong community support that TF2 was built on. It’s time to bring these back in order for the game to thrive, grow, and be enjoyed by both new and veteran players for years to come.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Signed,

The Team Fortress 2 Community