Had you asked me a little over a decade ago if TF2 were a game you could "plug and play" and enjoy, I would've said yeah. I remember getting some friends into it, and we had a blast, because of the wide learning curve and ease of entry.
I have a friend who were a lot into improving, so I got hooked into it aswell. And since there's a lot to learn, that isn't absolute necessary to be able to perform well. It's a very enjoyable experience to get better.

However, nowadays i wouldn't recommend TF2 to anyone who have never played or experienced the game. The game have become much more focused on being balanced in a way that's very concerning. The main focus of the game in general to be a fun laidback FPS sandbox experience have been replaced with a lot of narrowing on being absolute balanced to perfection, which in return have steered the game into a less relaxed, laidback mentality.

This is basically an entire essay on some of the issues the game is facing, and why I wouldn't recommend it.

For some reason Valve and/or the TF2 Team refuses to back down from the "Meet your Match" update changes, which tried to steer the game even more into being "competitive viable". As a result the game have received some really odd overcomplicated micro mechanics, or outright made even more weapons less fun and/or viable. The intention was good, but it's just not working well. And I find it extremely dissatisfying that no remedy have been made.

TF2 was designed to usually benefit from both teams having a range of skill. Per standard if a team was doing too well, the game would scramble the teams in an effort to even out the teams. The game would also attempt to autobalance at a valid opportunity, only attempting this if the round weren't likely to be about to end. However Meet your Match accidentally threw all of this out the window with it's matchmaking system, now the game will attempt to find the "best match" rather than their previous quickplay system.

For reference, the quickplay system would attempt to find the best server for you to play on, if too many players left the server early due to a bad experience, the server would be ranked lower, making it less likely to be put on a server that weren't fun to play on.

With the matchmaking system, it tries to put you on a server based on the player rank. Nobody seem to know exactly how it does this, but it don't seem to work very well from my experience, From my experience I'll usually get put into servers with heavily onesided teams and with the same people over and over. There's seemingly no real way to "derank" so you'll often experience the same thing over and over again. And the penalty for leaving is long queue times. You can't avoid a specific server either, the matchmaker will often put you into a previous match within minutes of leaving and requeuing. The matchmaking servers also play on a fixed amount of rounds, with no autoscramble in place, even when the match is over and a new match begins, it does not seem to attempt to scramble the teams. And for autobalance, the matchmaker seem to throw out every in place rules for when to do autobalance, usually the classic system would most likely pick from already dead players, and never attempt to autobalance when a round is about to end/begin. The new autobalance system will forcefully pick certain players (that it deems to be the best choice) at any given point. Often leaving people frustrated.

When the game was rebalanced to allow every weapon to be used in a competitive environment, a lot of them retrieved "micro managed" attributes that aren't very well communicated, or does work well outside of that environment. For instance were one of spy's revolvers given armor penetration, while the heavy retrieve armor while some miniguns are spun up while a shot would have put him below X hp, they are not very memorable, and they are frankly very confusing. Some weapons were made completely useless outside of competetive, The Sandman used to have a mechanic to leave players stunned and unable to attack, this was replaced with slowness that does not even work as intended. While this weapon was mostly accepted within a more casual setting, most competetive people absolute hated the fact it left them vulnerable. It definitly needed a rework, but the new rework is laughable.

On top of that, the game have a degenerate automated bot crisis which Valve seem to turn a blind eye to. While some games like CSGO (now CS2) have various tools to combat the issue (like trust factor, VACnet, the Overwatch system etc.) they haven't deployed any solutions to TF2. The bot crisis should really be treated as a type of DoS attack.

One side effect of blatant cheating bots, and that it's become more of a norm. You're more than likely to run into cheaters in general than ever before, while most cheaters will go unnoticed, some cheaters will stick out like a sore thumb. You can often tell by how they either have too much game sense, but plays terribly, vice versa or simply show obvious signs ("snapping" aimbot etc.) Whilest this have sadly become a common occurrence in most games, in TF2 players seem to hardly notice, probably due to how common it is.

Had you asked me a little over a decade ago if TF2 were a game you could "plug and play" and enjoy, I would've said yeah. I remember getting some friends into it, and we had a blast, because of the wide learning curve and ease of entry. I have a friend who were a lot into improving, so I got hooked into it aswell. And since there's a lot to learn, that isn't absolute necessary to be able to perform well. It's a very enjoyable experience to get better. However, nowadays i wouldn't recommend TF2 to anyone who have never played or experienced the game. The game have become much more focused on being balanced in a way that's very concerning. The main focus of the game in general to be a fun laidback FPS sandbox experience have been replaced with a lot of narrowing on being absolute balanced to perfection, which in return have steered the game into a less relaxed, laidback mentality. This is basically an entire essay on some of the issues the game is facing, and why I wouldn't recommend it. [h1]Bad decisions[/h1] [h2]Made for fun, updated to sweat[/h2] For some reason Valve and/or the TF2 Team refuses to back down from the "Meet your Match" update changes, which tried to steer the game even more into being "competitive viable". As a result the game have received some really odd overcomplicated micro mechanics, or outright made even more weapons less fun and/or viable. The intention was good, but it's just not working well. And I find it extremely dissatisfying that no remedy have been made. [h2]Bugged Matchmaking[/h2] TF2 was designed to usually benefit from both teams having a range of skill. Per standard if a team was doing too well, the game would scramble the teams in an effort to even out the teams. The game would also attempt to autobalance at a valid opportunity, only attempting this if the round weren't likely to be about to end. However Meet your Match accidentally threw all of this out the window with it's matchmaking system, now the game will attempt to find the "best match" rather than their previous quickplay system. For reference, the quickplay system would attempt to find the best [u]server[/u] for you to play on, if too many players left the server early due to a bad experience, the [u]server[/u] would be ranked lower, making it less likely to be put on a server that weren't fun to play on. With the matchmaking system, it tries to put you on a server based on the [u]player[/u] rank. Nobody seem to know exactly how it does this, but it don't seem to work very well from my experience, From my experience I'll usually get put into servers with heavily onesided teams and with the same people over and over. There's seemingly no real way to "derank" so you'll often experience the same thing over and over again. And the penalty for leaving is long queue times. You can't avoid a specific server either, the matchmaker will often put you into a previous match within minutes of leaving and requeuing. The matchmaking servers also play on a fixed amount of rounds, with no autoscramble in place, even when the match is over and a new match begins, it does not seem to attempt to scramble the teams. And for autobalance, the matchmaker seem to throw out every in place rules for when to do autobalance, usually the classic system would most likely pick from already dead players, and never attempt to autobalance when a round is about to end/begin. The new autobalance system will forcefully pick certain players (that it deems to be the best choice) at any given point. Often leaving people frustrated. [h2]MOBA like attributes with little communication/bugs[/h2] When the game was rebalanced to allow every weapon to be used in a competitive environment, a lot of them retrieved "micro managed" attributes that aren't very well communicated, or does work well outside of that environment. For instance were one of spy's revolvers given armor penetration, while the heavy retrieve armor while some miniguns are spun up while a shot would have put him below X hp, they are not very memorable, and they are frankly very confusing. Some weapons were made completely useless outside of competetive, The Sandman used to have a mechanic to leave players stunned and unable to attack, this was replaced with slowness that [b]does not even work as intended.[/b] While this weapon was mostly accepted within a more casual setting, most competetive people absolute [i]hated[/i] the fact it left them vulnerable. It definitly needed a rework, but the new rework is laughable. [h1]Cheating crisis[/h1] [h2]Bots[/h2] On top of that, the game have a degenerate automated bot crisis which Valve seem to turn a blind eye to. While some games like CSGO (now CS2) have various tools to combat the issue (like trust factor, VACnet, the Overwatch system etc.) they haven't deployed any solutions to TF2. The bot crisis should really be treated as a type of DoS attack. [h2]Silent cheaters[/h2] One side effect of blatant cheating bots, and that it's become more of a norm. You're more than likely to run into cheaters in general than ever before, while most cheaters will go unnoticed, some cheaters will stick out like a sore thumb. You can often tell by how they either have too much game sense, but plays terribly, vice versa or simply show obvious signs ("snapping" aimbot etc.) Whilest this have sadly become a common occurrence in most games, in TF2 players seem to hardly notice, probably due to how common it is.