The cartoonish online first-person shooter forms a big part of my teenage years and I cannot see it going away anytime soon.

Modern games nowadays typically have a short life cycle, fading away just months after they go on sale, but there are also games which still have an active player base more than a decade later.

Released in 2007, Team Fortress 2 is one such gem in videogame history with great fanfare at present time.

For those who have never heard of Team Fortress 2, it is a free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter game made by Valve. Players can pick one of the nine classes to finish an objective with their team, from capturing the flag, delivering payload to holding a control point.

Some may argue the gameplay largely boils down to capturing targets as the attacking BLU team versus protecting territories as the defending RED team, no two matches are the same.

The game’s matchmaking system randomly assigns each player into either team and I would not know how my teammates perform until we start fighting. There is always a strong sense of unpredictability in a highly dynamic environment every time I hop into a new server.

Although I am confident with my skillset after playing Team Fortress 2 for over 5,000 hours, I have no idea whether my team is united enough to be victorious every time.

Maybe I get paired with other experienced players who have rich knowledge of the mechanics and we win the match in record time. Maybe I have to carry a bunch of newbies who barely know how the guns work and eventually lose. Who knows?

After all, the game is called Team Fortress 2, with extra emphasis on the word “team”.

Speaking of mechanics, there is definitely no skill ceiling which limits how much I can improve. I constantly have to think about how I can rocket jump better to travel at a longer distance while sacrificing less health, or use another weapons with different abilities to launch a more effective attack next time.

Over the years, Valve has kept updating the game with new maps and bugfixes so I never feel bored while playing it. I especially look forward to Halloween and Christmas when festive remakes of classic maps are released for me to explore.

The developing team listens to feedback from players as well to adjust classes and weapons. Dead Ringer, a watch Spy can use to feign death when he receives damages, was criticised for being a ‘get out of jail free’ card so it was updated in 2015 to make recharging the watch more difficult. Pyro received a major rebalance in 2017 to make fights against him more fair, just to name a few.

Team Fortress 2 also has a large library of cosmetics like hats, clothes and facial features for me to decorate all nine mercenaries in my preferred styles. A lot of the items are also paintable or can carry unusual effects so my character can stand out from the rest, which is why the community jokingly calls the game “war-themed hat simulator”.

Apart from the gaming cohort, it has a thriving trading community as well where people buy and sell in-game items using virtual currency (known as metal) and sometimes even real-life cash.

In the last 11 years, I have met players from different countries and continents because I wanted to buy their weapons and hats and we ended up chatting about our cultures and becoming good friends.

These happy memories is also why I think it is unfortunate Valve has stopped giving the love and care it deserves, even though it is still top 20 most-played games on Steam.

Since 2021, Team Fortress 2 has faced serious bot crisis when an entire server is filled with Sniper bots using cheats to instantly kill players and ruin the experience for everyone.

Valve said they understand the frustration when a #SaveTF2 campaign was launched to raise awareness of the crisis but the community’s consensus is the game has been neglected.

TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things.

— Team Fortress 2 (@TeamFortress) May 26, 2022

The prevalence of bots in the game has also led to an increase of “hackusation” made towards experienced players, including me. I consider myself a competent Sniper and Scout main as I can comfortably land headshot kills and point-blank shots at close distance frequently to top the server leaderboard.

It is not rare for players in the enemy team suspecting me of cheating with aimbot and wallhack when my years of knowledge and practises are the actual attributes to my dominance during matches.

Undeniably, I sometimes also cast doubt on other players who are better than me as the anti-cheat detection is outdated and incapable of catching foul play. Even when a player or bot is banned, the game’s free-to-play nature allows them to quickly open another Steam account and cause mayhem heat again.

Despite the uncertainty of outcome in matches, some players argue Team Fortress 2 has become stale. Updates in recent years become more and more sporadic without introducing new game modes so veterans may find gameplay repetitive.

A majority of players also prefer sticking to conservative meta such as the team formation of two Scouts, two Soldiers, one Demoman and one Medic in the competitive scene, choosing safety over creative deviation from regular strategy to minimise risks.

When Team Fortress 2 conforms to sameness, it struggles to retain players especially when new competition like Overwatch, Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds gain popularity among people with an interest in the same genre.

But does that mean the end of Team Fortress 2 is imminent? Certainly not.

In April 2024, Valve finally brought the game back to the modern age by updating the client to run in 64-bit, increasing the performance significantly and showing the wide gaming community Team Fortress 2 is not abandoned.

Thousands of trades are still made every day, YouTubers are still making videos discussing the game frequently, creators are still designing new cosmetics and battles are still happening in every server around the world.

While it is true some players are leaving for other titles, more choose to stay and master challenging tactics, such as rolling out of spawn as Demoman and Soldier, airblasting rockets as Pyro, as well as countering Medic’s ÜberCharge and Engineer’s sentry nests.

If I am not in the mood for official matchmaking system and constant battles, I can join one of the many hundreds community servers instead where killing is not the primary objective to chill out and use voice chat with others in a relaxing atmosphere.

New players are also discovering the decade-old game for the first time and enjoy the gameplay thoroughly, learning every bit just like what I did when I first found Team Fortress 2 on Steam Wishlist in December 2013.

As long as there is one coordinated team push into the final control point of Dustbowl, Team Fortress 2 would not die.