Dear Valve:

Team Fortress 2 has been, for many, an absurd hat-based combat simulator. Now it is nothing like it was.

Many days ago now you released an update that was supposed to alleviate issues the TF2 community found with "Meet Your Match." You added a votekick option and removed abandonment penalties for leaving casual matches. As a community, we appreciate this and also recognize the advancements that matchmaking has brought to the game. However, as made evident by the response of the player base, this is far from enough. As I am sure you have noticed, TF2's ratings in the Steam store have fallen from 96% to 72% (as of July 25, 2016), in the span of only a few weeks. This is not an error. Many TF2 players have been disgusted with this new update, and some have quit the game altogether. However, this does not have to be the death of TF2.  All you have to do is listen to the community that supports this game. People like b4nny and mr. slin are great, but they only have the viewpoint of the best of the best in the game. Their slant only wants TF2 as an e-sport, not as a ridiculous game like the other 99% of the player base knows it as.

Valve, you can fix this.

A list of grievances and suggestions collected from the player base, as of July 2016, are as follows, in no particular order of importance:

• Matchmaking servers- Many people are reporting being queued into games outside of their region regularly, with ping over 200. This is NOT playable, regardless of what the devs think. 
• Do not force players to leave a server after one round of gameplay. Many friendships and teams were formed on the old pubs after messing around on Dustbowl or Steel for hours, not 2 rounds of pseudo-competitive "Casual." Keep the maps on regular rotation, allow players to vote for the next map, and give players the option to stay on the server if they want to keep playing with friends on it.
• Do not track kill-death ratios on the Casual queue screen. TF2 has never been about KDRs, and that's part of what made it a source of silly fun. But now, the game has become a cartoonish version of Counter-Strike with this addition. A lot of the fun is taken out of the game when people have to worry about how effective they are at killing. An easy fix would be to change deaths to assists.
• The ranking system is already pointless due to hacking. The top player is a member of LMAOBOX.com.
• For no reason should the viewmodels in the game be locked at 54. There is no logic in this decision and having a nauseating 54 forced as a default deter many people from competitive.
• From Reddit user 3Wave: 

  "Simply put, there is a problem in competitive matchmaking. The only steps any of the afflicted have in common is they close the game either during the loading process of a competitive matchmaking game at some point or they just got done playing a competitive MM game (rank up or no rank up apparently) and close the game and it causes TF2 to refuse to load with the error "CUtlLinkedList overflow (memory allocation error)". This error isn't actually important, more on that later.

  Things that have been done by various people to attempt to fix this problem: * Verifying game cache. (includes deleting shared files like Item Schema) * Reinstalling/updating drivers. * Deleting Steam & TF2 and reinstalling. * Wiping their entire computer and reinstalling. * Using different OS's. * Using an entirely different computer and reinstalling.

  None of these help as the error seems to be a corrupt file on Valve's end, at the account level. If you use any other account your game will run fine. If you use the afflicted account on any computer, it will crash. The only way to launch TF2 successfully is to force Steam into actual offline mode which means you can only play on VAC Insecure servers with no item server support, as forcing Steam into actual offline mode will make Team Fortress 2 not make a network connection to Valve.

  There is no known fix. One or two people have had it fix for them after a period of days with them doing nothing special, but other people have been afflicted for longer with no cure.If a Valve employee happens to stumble on this one instead of the other thread, here's a list of dumps:
  http://www.filedropper.com/dumps
  https://www.dropbox.com/s/oru29o24qrye4g7/crash_hl2.exe_20160722185710_1.dmp?dl=0
  https://puu.sh/qaQh1/8f8326c7e6.dmp
  http://www.filedropper.com/crashhl2exe201607250601391
  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/egj4vvhpb2yzugc/AAA-v87el2uJxJnQDmeCWAuva?dl=0
  http://puu.sh/qdJeQ/3dfdef5e57.dmp
  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ngnfndjzf0ly8d3/AABdRdEYq_8emPikz1DvQ63na?dl=0"

• Autobalance and spectating-Nobody enjoys a 12v6 round of Payload. If you don't want to re-enact autobalance, at least permit team switching and spectating. It is AWFULLY hard to call out hackers without a spectating option.
• VAC bans- Hacking is still a rampant issue in TF2, and with a new update comes new exploits. There will never be an end to the hackers, but Valve can still release new waves of VAC bans once in a while.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfDU_wFoLbY
• Quickplay-This needs to be a set part of TF2, and fast. As Valve said in the update, people can play on community servers. That's all fine and great until nobody joins the community servers, and when they do, they get a barrage of ads. Most new players don't even know HOW to use the server browser. With a quickplay button, an option could be available to play on either Valve servers or community servers.
• Within the community, there is a large group of players who wish to enjoy the TF2 pub experience, even though Valve abolished pubs altogether. With community servers being the only option, many players want to play TF2, not "XXX_N0sc0p3's x10 Randomizer Crit Server." There is simply a hole where pubs were that community servers aren't filling right now, and this can be the answer if quickplay is an option. There could also be a check box for whether the player wants a vanilla game experience or not.
• Optimization- this should not even be an issue, but it is. Across the internet, people are reporting a framerate of 20-40 FPS in-game while being able to run things like GTA V and The Witcher 3 at over 100 frames a second. This is a game that was released in 2007. It is horrendous that a game so light in the graphics department as this can be optimized so terribly. Some people leave because they can't play how they want anymore, but others are leaving because they CAN'T PLAY. Please, clean up your game.
• Weapon Balances- The Righteous Bison, the Cozy Camper, and the Buffalo Steak Sandvich were nerfed into the ground. They provided a new way to play that nobody had ever complained about. These nerfs need to be undone, but are not a priority.
• At the same time, the Quickiebomb Launcher was buffed for M1-M2 stickyspamming, and things like the Danger Shield and airblast mechanics were untouched.

Valve, if you can see this, know that this is part of the key to saving this dying game. Though small, this community loves this game with all our hearts. TF2 shouldn't and doesn't have to compete with Overwatch--they are two separate games. Many of us play TF2 for the social side; the people we mess around with on pubs for hours are how many friendships in this game are made. We want to fix this game, Valve. Please, let us help you.

As one Steam review said:

"This game was a mess and that was what I fell in love with: a mess, an organized mess."