YMMV / Team Fortress 2

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YMMV tropes with their own pages:

• Broken Base
• Game Breaker
• Memetic Mutation (the official wiki also has its own page)
• Scrappy Weapon
• That One Achievement
• That One Level

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A

• Abridged Arena Array:
  • If you see any competitive 6s game, it almost always be on a 5CP map. Process is probably the most popular one, but pretty much every 5CP map is a good contender for a 6s match. This usually is because competitive players like that teams are always on offense, games always start with spawnpoints far from mid (allowing for some skillful rollouts), and the meta picks for 5CP^note Two Scouts, two Soldiers (One each for flanking/roaming and pocketing.), one Demoman, and one Medic. have been widely accepted in their place of dominance.
  • On the other hand, if you want to play casually while actually playing the map objective, expect to play a lot of Payload and asymmetrical (AKA: BLU attacks, RED defends) Control Point maps. This is because they force one of the teams to play entirely on the offense, whereas CTF and 5CP would see a lot more defensive play on both teams, making them devolve into deathmatches and/or stalemates.
  • If you play Mann vs. Machine, good luck finding a Mann Up game for a tour that isn't Operation Two Cities. Even after the other tours were also given a chance to drop the highly coveted Australium weapons on completion, players still stick to Two Cities, as the other tours tend to either be insanely hard (Gear Grinder, Mecha Engine) or require more tickets to complete (Steel Trap, Oil Spill).
• Accidental Innuendo:
  • The Medic is a source of endless innuendos. The Medigun is suspiciously shaped and vibrates; it's no surprise, therefore, that popping an uber too soon is a bit like jizzing in your pants, as seen in this comic. And, Dear Penthouse, I never zhought zhis vould happen to me... So it's appropriate that Freud was the first Medic.
  • The Love and War update added several new weapons, including a rather... odd-looking scattergun. It wasn't long before this happened.
  • The Original, as a Call-Back to the Quake rocket launcher, has the first-person view model centered at the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, this also led to exactly the kinds of jokes you'd expect.
  • The Corpse Carrier is a Halloween-limited cosmetic for Scout that makes it look like he's been bisected and is being carried around by another Scout. Usually it's a playfully spooky-looking item, but if a Scout wearing the Corpse Carrier rag dolls onto his stomach, things can look very...different, to put it mildly.
• Adorkable: Ms. Pauling. Just listen to her voice lines here. She makes awkward, adorable jokes to try to get the each of the merc's attention.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Inevitable, since the official characterization of the classes is limited to the animated videos and the comics - which don't exactly go into depth and can contradict each other at times. For example:
  • Theoretically the Mercenaries are supposed to be highly skilled professionals, but it has been implied in "The Contract" that they are really a collection of drunks, mental deficients, illiterates, psychotics and war criminals, with the implications that some are even doing this 'job' just for shits and giggles.
  • "Meet the Pyro": Is Pyro a sick but truly good person who only wants to spread happiness, or just sick? That time Engie read Pyro a Christmas story can lend itself to either possibility.
  • Because the female NPC's only periodically show up in the comics and animated shorts, they often end up as the source of various interpretations. The most popular depiction of Scout's mother is a mafia queen, with Scout's brothers serving as her mob. She's also generally a smoker, sharing cigarettes with Spy.
    • Helen, Miss Pauling, Yana, and Bronislava have all been depicted as Yaoi Fangirls at some point. The first two, because they spend time mostly watching a group of men on television screens all day, while the second two have fantasized about Sniper and Spy (the fans interpreting this as Heavy's sisters wanting Sniper and Spy to sleep with each other, and not Yana/Spy or Bronislava/Sniper, respectively.)
  • Although Merasmus consistently refers to himself as male, he's consistently misgendered, and referred to as "Madam" by several characters. This has led to the theory that he's genderqueer, although it could also be that he simply doesn't notice/doesn't care at this point when people mistake him for female, most likely due to his robe looking like a dress.
  • In his in-game dialogue, the Sniper is mostly just a jerk, but not in a funny way like the Scout, giving him shades of The Generic Guy personality-wise. In his "Meet the Team" video he is much, much more charismatic and laidback, making it a fan favorite among the videos. He doesn't appear in the comics very often, but when he does, his personality is usually somewhere in between.
  • What are we to make of RED Spy's anger at seeing the pictures of him with BLU Scout's mom in "Meet the Spy"? Was it just him staying "in character" as BLU Scout? Was he angry with himself for letting someone photograph him? Or, considering the heavy implication that he genuinely cherishes her, was he morally outraged at someone taking pictures of him in an intimate moment with the woman he loved? Knowing him, it could be all three.
  • Spy seems to hate the Scout in expanded universe material more than any of his other teammates but at the same time he has been extremely nice to him on occasions. Is it because he’s actually not that bad of a guy? Does he love Scout’s mom so much he’s willing to go through hell to make her son happy? Or is he Scout's father who helps Scout out to make up for his neglect?
    • "The Naked and The Dead" implies that the third interpretation is intended to be canon. Having left both Scout and his mother many years earlier due to not wanting the responsibility of fatherhood, Spy slowly comes to accept his son as the expanded universe continues to develop, eventually telling a dying Scout that he's grown proud of him.
  • Exactly how Ms Pauling feels about Scout gets quite a bit of this, partly due to the videos and the comics flip-flopping on the matter and partly because of a certain tweet by Jay Pinkerton (which may or may not have been a joke). If Pauling's not interested, is it because of her status as a workaholic, Incompatible Orientation, or is it just his jerkass tendencies rubbing her the wrong way? And when she shows signs of reciprocating, is it because she's genuinely warmed up to him, is she just using him as The Beard, or is she just bad at understanding the cues that he's interested in her?
  • Whether the mercs could be classed as True Companions, Vitriolic Best Buds or just co-workers that despise one another has been debated in the fandom and even on this very wiki. Given how the official media changes positions on the subject, providing plenty of evidence for all three interpretations, how much is left open to interpretation and the setting indulging in Comedic Sociopathy, this isn't surprising in the slightest.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation: In "The Naked and The Dead," Scout passes out from injuries in the mountains. Pyro's response is to...silently toss a handful of snow onto his face. Were they checking for a reaction? Trying to help stop the bleeding? Or just trying to bury Scout, in a sort of "lol okay bye then" way?
• Angst? What Angst?: In Expiration Date, none of the team panics all that much about them going to die in three days due to tumors from the teleporters, not even when they only have an hour or two left. Then again, they're hardened mercenaries who die every day for a living.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Captain Punch, the Final Boss of the Mann vs. Machine mission Bone Shaker. Due to being restricted to melee and extremely slow to boot, players can simply stay back and wear down his (admittedly massive) health bar while he can do very little in return. It doesn't help that he comes at the end of one of the most brutally difficult missions in the game, making him seem even easier by comparison. He can become extremely problematic if you lack the DPS to outpace his regen and kill him in time due to his titanic HP and ranged resistance, but chances are that if you have a team that managed to beat the rest of Bone Shaker, you'll probably have the DPS to melt him down. It helps that his Fists of Steel make him take doubled damage from melee attacks (something that is normally suicidal due to his One-Hit Kill punch attack), allowing savvy Spies or Demoknights to spam Uber canteens and take out a massive chunk of his HP while invulnerable.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Since the game uses highly stylized art reminiscent of a Pixar film which, coupled with bright colors, apparently makes it look "cartoony". This is contrasted by large amounts of blood, players gibbing upon explosion, and a mild level of swearing. You can occasionally run into 7 or 8-year-old kids online whose parents obviously didn't pay attention to the rating. Speaking of online, as a multiplayer game with voice and text chat, it's very common to hear even more inappropriate language than what was originally put in the game; there's a reason the ESRB warnings state that "online interactions are not rated".
• Award Snub:
  • The 2012 Annual Saxxy Awards in a nutshell.
    • High Five Fail won the Saxxy for "Best Replay", and... well, saying that people were displeased would be an understatement. The original isn't even on YouTube anymore thanks to backlash, though copies exist.
    • The Wishmaker won the Saxxy for "Best Comedy", beating out Practical Problems and Sabotage. While most agree that The Wishmaker was the best in terms of the technical aspect, with the most fluid animation and best use of lighting, the actual comedy aspect of the short falls flat for many, especially compared to its competitors. It's usually said that The Wishmaker should have won a Saxxy, but not for "Best Comedy".
    • Subverted in one case, however. When Bad Medicine won the Saxxy for "Best Drama" instead of Story of a Sentry, there was a bit of a backdraft in response, and some went so far as to spam the Bad Medicine comments section with complaints. When it was revealed that Story of a Sentry won the Saxxy for "Best Overall", the backlash died down.
  • Some say this happened again with the 2013 Awards as well, with Disruption beating out "Quest of the Demoknight" Final Level Playthrough for "Best Comedy", though it's much more mild than most examples as both entries are considered good. Still, when the losing video happens to have been created by the mind behind the much-beloved Team Service Announcement series, there's bound to be vitriol.
  • Together We Stand won the Saxxy award in the drama category in 2015. No problems... up until you realise that this entry was a DOTA animation; see Fandom Rivalry below. This eventually ended with TF2 fans reporting the creator's YouTube channel en masse, causing it to be suspended.
  • And in 2016, The Pybro, a polished resubmission of last year's entry, won Best Action over brilliantly animated Double-Edged Defense. Even TTMR, the former's author, thinks it was a snub, and destroyed his Saxxy for that movie.
  • 2017 has Chicken Strike, which is a CS:GO-centric film. While it didn't draw nearly as much ire as the aforementioned Together We Stand, people were wondering how a CS:GO film beat out other, arguably better animated, TF2-centric films, especially since prizes for winning are mostly exclusive to TF2 (save the trip to the Valve offices). This split the base into 2 camps; Either people liked that "Chicken Strike" won, or players thought all winners should be TF2 centric, and should not allow other games in the first place.

B

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Some love Soldier for being both incredibly deep and complex to master, yet simple to pick up and learn to play. Others hate him for the fact that due to being Robin Walker's favorite character, he gets new content with both higher frequency and quality than any other class^ExampleThe Uber Update was meant to be an update that focused around the Medic, since it's the update that released with his Meet the Team short. In said update, Medic got three new weapons... and Soldier got five. Especially jarring considering that some classes have only received one class update within the same amount of time.
  • Half of the fanbase think the Pyro is a fun class with unique mechanics (exclusive focus on close range, combos, airblast), and the other half consider him a skilless noob class with abilities that are unfair or unfun to fight, take no skill, or are overpowered. It doesn't help that the programmers have a difficult time balancing Pyro; at one moment, Pyro is the weakest link with underpowered ways to deal damage ^note on release, Pyro had a flamethrower with pitiful range and damage, incredibly wonky hit detection, and had no airblast to compensate to the next where they're hell on two legs and overpowered weapons that take no skill to use ^note the first version of the Phlogistinator could quickly build a charge that fully healed Pyro, made them almost invincible, and gave them 10 seconds of crits, and that Pyro could use those crits to very easily build a second charge, rinse and repeat and back to being the weakest ^note The Puff 'n' Sting tactic is arguably the only competitively viable strategy that doesn't relegate Pyro to an airblast machine, and the Tough Break version was its weakest with a ridiculously long draw time on the Axtinguisher that didn't justify using it at all.
  • After the 2020 bot crisis (which is still ongoing four years later) there have been some genuine debates over whether or not Sniper fits into TF2's class design well, with no sign of a consensus being formed. One side of the discussion claims he's too overpowered even without aimbots involved, as he's the only long-ranged class in the game. Every other class performs best in mid-to-close range combat; this often means the best counter to a good Sniper is another good Sniper, which isn't always the easiest person to find in a public server. Meanwhile, the other side argues that, when played fairly, Sniper needs genuine skill to be effective, and his present game balance shouldn't be punished for the hackers' actions. Sniper's inconsistent-to-poor performance in close-range combat is one of the most commonly cited points in favor of this argument, as it gives the other classes some critical opportunities to deal with him.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Upward is well-regarded for possibly being the most well-balanced TF2 map, if not the best balanced Payload map. Every class has a purpose - good flank routes for Scouts and Pyros, Sniper sightlines that cover a wide area without dominating the battlefield, multiple candidates for good Sentry nests, and so on. There's a good reason why Upward sees one of the highest player counts on servers, both community and Valve-hosted.
  • Viaduct; Simple in layout, yet balanced effectively as the capture point is on a hill and there's plenty of bridges and high ground. Health and ammo is placed very well, and matches don't seem to result in ample spawncamping nearly as much as other KOTH maps like Nucleus or Harvest.
  • 2Fort, Turbine, and Hightower, while stalemate-y, tend to be used for respite in just being able to deathmatch in a seemingly endless round without having to worry about any real objectives. Less-so in casual matchmaking, as the game tries to make playing the objective a priority, albeit a small one, but it's not unusual to see roundtimers topping off at 25 minutes even there.
  • Pier, added to the game permanantly as part of the surprise Smissmas Update of 2020, is beloved by the community due to the unique layout the map has, the surprisingly underutilised beach theme, and for being one of the first new maps officially released for the game since Jungle Inferno three years prior.
  • Crasher, a halloween-themed map released in Scream Fortress 2022. This was, by far and away, the most popular map in casual play during the event, and that's because of its central gimmick; One person becomes a giant who must deliver a bomb to the enemy teams' gate to blow it up, while allies help protect the gate and help the giant get to the enemy's gate, while the opposing team does the same thing. The game suddenly turns from reverse-Capture the Flag, to a bite-size MOBA, filled with micromanaging and a fun and effective gimmick. The announcers sound like mad scientists that would make Medic look sane by comparison, and while the layout is fairly open and simple due to the inherent nature of the mode, it's surprisingly balanced, and tends not to be riddled with snipers.
  • The 2023 Smissmass maps are a stiff competition for this accolade. Special mention goes to Galleria and Turbine Center though, as while they are reskins of Nucleus and Turbine respectively, they bear very little resemblance to their namesakes, the former is converted into a Player Destruction map with what amounts to community in-joke Continuity Porn, if there even is such a thing, and it playing very dynamically. Meanwhile, Turbine Center, despite being nominally holiday themed, revamps most of the textures to look more like a mall-cum-office space, with many players wishing that the map would be kept and replacing the original map.
  • The community-made Valve-supported MvM campaign Titanium Tank is well-liked for being very enjoyable and unique in an otherwise rather repetitive gamemode, but there's two parts that stick out:
    • The final round of Spyware Shipping on Dockyard. When the countdown for the wave ends, everyone hears a robot Demo line calling them tiny. Weird, but there isn't really much time to think on it as the robots start coming in through the gates. After the initial wave of robots, an ENORMOUS robot Demo (several times larger than a normal giant robot) bursts its head through the building where the robots exit through. Enter, the Dockyard Mortar Monstrosity. Suddenly, the round becomes about struggling to hold the first area as the abombination periodically spits a nuke down onto the playing field. If the robots ever manage to bypass the shipping area and capture the gate, the tank that spawns halfway through will appear further into the map, and will almost certainly cap, between its head start and enormous HP. It's ridiculous in concept, difficult to beat, and pretty much impossible to do on your first try, but it's a unique idea and it feels so awesome when you finally beat it.
    • Teien is unique in that it features a set of train tracks bisecting the map. It's always a treat to see the mildly humorous sight of a giant being run over by the train, but the Titanium Tank mission Program Seppuku has a second card up its sleeve. Three tanks come in through the second last wave, two at the start and one at the end. The catch? The final tank has sentries mounted on top of it. It's very interesting, as before, the tanks were normally just walking bullet sponges that you had to soak with damage, but now there's an element of skill and danger to dealing with this tank. It does let down the actual final wave, which is just a giant Heavy-Medic combo with infinite respawning backpack Soldiers, but the wave before more than makes up for it.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Any Mann vs Machine mission with Romevision enabled. There's no in-game explanation as to why the Hardy Laurel makes the wearer see the robots as if they're wearing ancient Roman armor and the carrier tank as a Parthenon-like building.
• Bragging Rights Option: The Spy relies heavily on stealth and on mimicking the enemy team. However, experienced players can easily spot even a good Spy, and Pyros are notorious for their "Spy-checks" with their flamethrower. Even so, getting a good backstab means that you instantly kill any enemy and disrupt all of their plans in one fell swoop. This is invaluable to a team, especially if you can take out key players and then disappear again.

C

• Canon Defilement: Many 'fics portray the team as shell-shocked soldiers unused to battle, more melodramatic than gleefully psychopathic, and waiting on tenterhooks for the war to end. In canon, not only are the Mercs willing participants, they all greatly enjoy their work. The writers of these 'fics occasionally don't have a good grasp on what a mercenary is, or what they do for a living.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Many fans of the storyline suspected that the Announcer was on a Life Extender the moment it was revealed they existed, bolstered by people looking like her in the past popping up in the same comic strip and a third Life Extender machine existing but being hidden from the audience. Gray Mann pretended to joss this theory by using the third Life Extender for himself, but the theory was eventually confirmed anyway in Blood in the Water.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict: Hoo boy, it's been there since fairly early in the game's lifespan. On one hand, there are the casual players who enjoy the silly and ridiculous fun that the game oozes in spades, but on the other, there are the competitive players who love the nuanced and skillful gameplay that lies underneath TF2 "wacky" facade. Neither side understands the other - to competitive players, casual favorites like plr_hightower and friendly servers^note Servers where people just stand around and socialize without any attempt to play the game as it was originall intended are boring and aren't a good example of how the game is intended to be played, while to casual players, competitive mindsets and rulings make the occasional person who wants to play for skill come off as stiffy, toxic jerks who won't leave them alone.
• Catharsis Factor: The post-round slaughter of the losing team, though, of course, it only applies when you're on the winning team. It's especially cathartic if you've fought a long, grueling round and only won by the skin of your teeth, or if your opponents happened to be massive jerks.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Multiple people have claimed that the Baby Face's Blaster (a Scout primary that lets him gain extra max speed when dealing damage, at the cost of a slower base speed and losing boost on double jumping or in later versions, getting hit) let the Scout outrun his hitbox at full boost. This is false. Making matters worse is that Soldier and Demoman, via blast jumping, can hit speeds far exceeding a max-speed Baby Face's Scout, but do not outpace their own hitboxes, leaving it in question where this claim actually came from.
  • Many people believe that Demoman's Grenade Launcher had 6 pipes in its clip back when the game originally launched in 2007 and the clip size was reduced to 4 in an update. While this is true for Xbox 360 version, Grenade Launcher always had 4 pipe clip in public PC builds with the first public beta from September 18, 2007 already having the nerfed clip size.
  • For a long time, it was believed that Medic gains increased random crit chance from the damage dealt by their Medigun target. This was eventually disproven when people examined the game code and ran tests with debug logging enabled.
  • Because Scout is the team's youngest member and looks really small next to his big, muscular comrades, it's common to assume he's a teenager. According to the description for the Track Terrorizer, he's actually 23 (and in later comics, he's 27).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • While there is really one good loadout, a lot of the weapons are in pretty good spots and some classes have weapons slots were every alternative is alright. For instance, the differences between the Scorch Shot, Detonator, Flare Gun, and Shotgun are openly acknowledged to mostly come down to personal playstyle and preference. Other examples are the Soldier's weapons, where pretty much any loadout is "acceptable", except for some weapons that are inferior to other options (i.e. Panic Attack), just plain bad (Mantreads), or "crutch" (Black Box), and the Sniper's loadout, which is much the same.
    • Some weapons also invert this: prior to their nerfs, the Dead Ringer, Reserve Shooter, and Darwin's Danger Shield, among others, were the most hated weapons in TF2 and using them would often get others to call you out for having no skill.
  • The Heavy is the worst case of this because there is only one Heavy playstyle on account of how similar all his primary weapons operate. Most of his primaries are gimmicky variations of stock (Huo Long heater giving you a ring of fire to deter spies, Natascha for extra damage resistance etc.), with the only primary to escape this category being the Tomislav (which lets you rev up 20% faster, silently, and gain 20% better accuracy over stock at the cost of firing speed), while the Sandvich and Second Banana take up the secondary slot, and the GRU/FoS are used for their utility. Anything else is practically non-existent, unless you want to have a Fat Scout loadout.
  • The Medic really only has a single choice for his primary and melee slots. The Crusader's Crossbow and the Ubersaw respectively. The former has easy to land hits alongside being able to heal teammates from a distance, compared to the Syringe Guns that suck for defending yourself at any range and don't have any helpful utility for your team, and the latter gives you an instant 25% charge for every hit you land, which is pretty valuable compared to all the other melee options the Medic has. This lack of variety among options contributes to why so few players in pubs pick him.
  • Now applies to Mann vs Machine, apparently, there is only one proper class set up for each map, and if you try to use anything else, you will be met with anger. This commentary discusses the topic.
  • This is what "W+M1" is all about in reference to Pyros, the theory is that inexperienced players would settle for having the flame thrower on at all times as the only tactic in game.
  • New players will automatically default to either Sniper or Spy the moment someone dominates them, as these are essentially counter-classes for the other 7 on the team. This also means that they tend to ignore all other objectives until the offending person is dead at their hands (which, given the circumstances, usually doesn't happen).
  • Also present in a meta sort of Player Archetype. Good luck finding a server without an Anger-wearing, Strange Sniper Rifle shooting Sniper.
  • You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who prefers the stock Shotgun on any of the classes that can equip it, especially in pubs. For most players, it's either teetering on the brink of being a Master of None, or accentuating the "boring" in Boring, but Practical too much to be fun.
    • Soldier's Shotgun is an incredibly useful Pyro deterrent and a backup weapon to swap to when he runs out of loaded rockets with his slow-to-reload primaries, but most players either use one of the backpacks or the Gunboats instead.
    • Pyro's Shotgun can easily decide duels against other Pyros, layer on chip damage to enemies barely outside their range, and burst 90 damage at close range when used in tandem with their Flame Thrower. Their Flare Gun is more commonly used instead, being better at longer range and more satisfying to use via its critical hits, and the runner-up weapon for them is the Panic Attack with its faster combo and higher close range damage.
    • Heavy's Shotgun is easily outclassed by his utility foods. His Minigun is already such an impressive damage dealer at close range, which redundifies his Shotgun.
    • Engineer's Shotgun lets him defend his buildings from enemies and can reliably let him win 1v1 fights if he gets the drop. But many players orient themselves around their buildings, so the Rescue Ranger is a must-pick for them, and for anyone who plays more aggressively, the Frontier Justice, Widowmaker, and Panic Attack fill that niche better.
  • If you're playing 6's your team will consist of two Soldiers (One having Gunboats), two Scouts, a Medic and a Demoman. The other five classes are used infrequently ^note Pyro, Heavy, and Engy to defend last or guard chokepoints, and Sniper to kill off high-value targets like Medics. Spy sees the least use of all of the mercs, due to his status as a surprise pick - if he's played for more than one stab, the enemy wises up quickly and starts spychecking but most of the time it will be the same team comp. This has significantly hurt Team Fortress 2 competitive popularity because while it's seen by many as the most interesting Team Fortress 2 experience to watch it's also turn off people who main the five other classes feeling as though they were excluded from it, and somewhat goes against the class-based gameplay and item switching mechanics the game was based off. Highlander^note  a 9v9 with each team having only one class each has mostly come about because of these complaints.
• Crack Ship: Sniper x GLaDOS, stemming from their voice actors being married in real life. Sniper's voice actor John Patrick Lowrie even jokingly acknowledged the ship in a reply to a Wheatley-roleplayer's review of a book he had written. And once again mentioned on his Twitter in a Thanksgiving post. There's also this video uploaded by Robin Atkin Downes, which has him, Lowrie, and Ellen McLain conversing as their characters, with Sniper offhandedly mentioning that he's married to the Administrator.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The addition of name and description tags for items can lead to this. A somewhat common name for the Shotgun is "Kurt Cobain's Microphone", for example.
  • As for the Jungle Inferno update, some players tend to rename the Gas Passer as "Zyklon B".
  • Don't be surprised when you find a Demoman wearing a turban and dynamite strapped to his chest in a plane running around and suicide-cabering people to death while screaming "Allahu Akbar!" in the voice chat. Or if that's too subtle for you, just running around literally beating people over the head with 9/11 on a stick◊ instead.
    • Or even better, you could go for a faux-Ku Klux Klan all-class loadout consisting with white Executioner and Bruiser's Bandana cosmetics, especially if you're wearing it as a Demoman.
  • This is the game's premise: a group of cheerfully amoral, murderous stereotypes kill each other. Repeatedly.
  • Performing the Russian Arms Race on a ragdoll can give away the impression that the Heavy is having sex. With a corpse.
  • The game has a full-fledged achievement for making someone Rage Quit. And since it's for the Pyro, you're implicitly encouraged to bully new players for the achievement.
  • Thanks to the Sniper's Jarate, throwing jars of your own pee at people is a legitimate combat tactic in this game. Then there's the Scout's Mad Milk, which is labeled in-game as a "Non-Milk Substance"... which led to the inevitable slew of jokes and weapon re-names implying that it's "milk" of a different kind^note not helping matters is that it was originally going to be called the Mann Milk.
• Cult Classic: Not the game itself, but rather the PS3 and Xbox 360 ports of the game have a small cult following for a number of reasons, including the absence of bots, the modding scene, and even being unable to own a PC. Unfortunately, the PS3 servers shut down on March 29th, 2023.

D

• Demonic Spiders: With enough skill, any class becomes this, but here are some specific examples.
  • Engineers. If they manage to build up a nest they become extremely difficult to kill, especially if they are protected by good Pyros. Certain nest locations are especially nasty; out of sight of the enemy team (ex: the Intelligence room in 2Fort), placed on the Intelligence itself (2Fort's intelligence room is again a good example), in a chokepoint where people must pass in order to proceed (The courtyard area and the entrance to both Buildings in 2Fort), the area outside the main spawn areas (the apex of the bridge roof on 2Fort), or, for the Engineers who like to be massive arses, underwater (the moat in 2Fort. It's a pretty Engie-friendly map.) Narrow halls are also a pain in the ass to fight an Engineer in; Engineers with enough fortification may never leave their Sentries; and with a Pyro around they can counteract any Spy's attempt to rid the buildings. If a Gunslinger Engineer is with you, you can rest easy knowing the only threat to you is a Spy; which is of course negated if you have a Pyro with you (Pyros often spray teammates vigorously with fire if they look odd, and only disguised Spies light on fire if this happens to them); especially one with the Homewrecker, a sledgehammer that destroys a Spy's Sapper in seconds, combined with the Engineer's Wrench, only amazing Spies can deal with such a massive threat.
  • Snipers. Anywhere that has an open space means that there could be a Sniper, somewhere in the distance, waiting for his charge to build so he can one-shot anyone within his view radius. A far away Sniper is also difficult to deal with - bullets deal less damage due to dropoff, while a projectile will be easily sidestepped by them. Most public teams also have at least one or two, if they aren't being spammed.
  • As pointed out by Star, Pyros. They have fairly decent health but with no movement penalty, and can airblast you into the air which makes you effectively dead if they know what they're doing. Furthermore it's difficult to land close-range hits on them with shotguns because you have to stay out of their range, and they can deflect most explosives back at you and your team. The only reliable ways to kill an excellent Pyro is either being a decent Sniper (though they can still fire flares at you which screws up your aim), going Engineer and plunking down a Sentry, or being a Heavy who can survive their attacks and mow them down (given that they don't catch you unrevved and you can track them as they strafe around you).
  • A good Scout is effectively invincible. They can kill any class (except the Heavy) with two shots from their Scattergun and effortlessly dodge all weapons except the conventional bullet firing ones. Not only that, but at any time during a fight, then can simply run away, something that you can't do at all unless you want them to fill you with buckshot in the back, and they move around extremely fast and are hard to hit. The only real counter is to have obscenely good aim with your gun, have a sentry, or confront them in a tight corridor (though, a good Scout will probably avoid tight corridors, so... yeah, you need amazing aim or a sentry).
  • Demoknights can basically run around in a battlefield and mash the attack button, because 2 of their swords essentially make them unkillable except by maintaining range. This only escalated with the inclusion of the Tide Turner, letting them keep their Grenade Launcher and turn mobility to retain their mid-long range abilities until balance patches took it down a few notches.
  • Soldiers. Their Jack of All Stats status - good damage, above-average health, and high mobility through rocket jumping - means it's difficult to fight against a Soldier, especially if they have the high ground or are bringing along the fabled "Medic Girlfriend" (a Medic who does nothing but heal this one specific guy). The only class who can counter Soldiers moderately effectively is a Pyro who can reflect rockets, but that's only if they don't have the Shotgun equipped.
  • Mann vs. Machine mode has several candidates, which becomes worse when Mann Up Mode brings 2-3 times the number of their kind:
    • Heavy Robots of any shape can be a tremendous pain in the ass. Their high health and damage can tear apart a team in seconds, particularly if they're spammed. The Fists of Steel-equipped Steel Gauntlets are particularly evil, with their extreme ranged damage resistance, 900 health (more than triple the average Heavy), and a habit of ganging up on players who try to melee them to exploit their Achilles' Heel. Since they're also not considered giants, they can gain a Healing Factor and even more damage resistance when they pick up the bomb, leading to insane amounts of firepower being needed to put them down. Luckily, they're fully vulnerable to Sappers and Backstabs, but very few people are willing to put up with a Spy on their team.
    • Sentry Busters, for Engineers who have yet to figure them out. They have a deceptively large amount of health, run fast as hell, and the only strategy against them other than "concentrate fire on it and hope for the best" is to choose the building you need the most, picking it up and hauling ass with it in tow before it blows up, which if your timing is off will destroy your buildings and kill you instantly, if the other enemies don't do it first while you're fleeing. However, an Engineer with enough experience can manage or recover from regular Busters, turning them into Goddamned Bats; see below.
    • Extended Buff Soldiers and their Battalion/Concheror cousins. The power of the three banners is offset by their need to charge through damage and short durations, but these guys don't need to worry about any of that, since they start with a full buff that lasts for 90 seconds. The worst part is that they generally come in swarms and/or together, letting them stack all three buffs at the same time,^note Mini-crits, crit immunity, 35% damage reduction that increases to 50% against sentry damage, increased movement speed, and 35% lifesteal which can be devastating if given to significantly powerful bots, especially Giants.
    • Giant Rapid Fire Demomen. The Grenade Launcher is already one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Now, imagine giving that to something that can spam grenades almost indefinitely, has a metric ton of health, and break through just about any defense because, unlike other robots, it seems to prioritize sentries as the biggest threat.
    • Giant Burst Fire Soldiers and Demomen for a similar reason. While they don't have a continuous stream of projectiles, they will fire their explosives in gigantic salvos, instantly killing anything in a massive area in front of itself, especially if they're buffed or crit-boosted. Fortunately, they only fire when fully reloaded, but you best be hoping you've stacked enough resistances once they're loaded up. The Colonel Barrage variant for the Soldier has a clip size of 30 (although with a rocket speed penalty and the appropriate reload time) to let them create a storm all by themselves, while Major Crits is that but crit-boosted.
    • Super Scouts. Most Giants are Mighty Glaciers that sacrifice a good chunk of their speed for their massive health and firepower. Super Scouts on the other hand are the fastest robot in the entire game (double the speed of a regular Scout) despite having nearly ten times the HP, and can easily outpace even projectiles if not slowed or killed quickly. While their damage output is pathetic for a Giant, they'll usually just ignore players and make a beeline for the bomb, before running straight for the bomb hatch with their blazing speed. Combine that with their erratic movement making them hard to hit, if even a single one slips through your defenses with the bomb in tow, you can kiss your run goodbye - it's not uncommon for early Super Scouts to end the wave seconds after it starts. On the bright side, they're highly vulnerable to slow and displacement effects.
    • The other Giant Scouts aren't much better. The Major League Scout moves at the full speed of a Scout and has the ability to spam the Sandman's stun balls all over the place, letting them just slow or stun anyone that gets in their path to the hatch. The rarer Giant Jumping Sandman Scout is all of that but with highly evasive jumping maneuvers and significantly boosted damage, and the Armored Sandman Scout sacrifices a bit of speed for massively inflated HP that lets it shrug off fire that would normally kill any other Giant Scout. The Force-a-Nature Super Scout can not only one-shot things sent to block it with a point-blank meatshot, but their guns also inflict significant knockback, letting them just toss aside anything between them and their goal. Finally, the Giant Bonk Scout can go invincible for the first bit of its lifetime before blitzing through your lines, and will do it again if you can't kill it fast enough.
    • Giant Medics. These bots are only found pocketing specific Giants, and wield Quick-Fixes with such buffed healing rates that anything that they're healing is quite literally immortal unless you completely cut off the healing, leaving Shoot the Medic First or separating them from their patient with knockback as the only options. This is easier said than done since not only will the Giant tend to defend its Medic with its life, Giant Medics have HP second only to the Giant Heavies and bosses, making them very difficult to kill. And even if you manage to bring one to low health, it starts with a fully charged Uber, and will use it if you can't burst down the last slivers of its health bar, fully healing itself to undo all of your work and becoming effectively immortal for its duration, while also making both itself and its patient immune to knockback and slow to boot. There's a second variant that has no Uber, but has high passive life regeneration to keep it healthy if you can't damage it constantly. Basically, you will have to kill these things quickly if you want to stand even the slightest chance of winning, but everything about them is stacked in their favor. And to top it all off, sometimes multiple will pocket a single Giant, making taking them out even harder.
    • Mecha Engineers were literally designed to be this in-universe. They teleport onto the battlefield and unless you find them before they set up, they instantly put up a LV 3 sentry and a teleporter. They will also endlessly repair their buildings, with an infinite metal reserve, and will move their buildings forward if your team is pushed back. So basically word for the wise: FIND THEM AND KILL THEM before their buildings are set up (harder than it sounds, considering most of them have deceptively high HP and move fast) because EVERY OTHER DEMONIC SPIDER can instantly teleport onto the battlefield if the teleporter is set up, getting them closer and closer to the bomb hatch. Don't camp the teleporters, either; enemy bots exiting this way are Ubered for three seconds, even things like Giants or Sentry Busters. Some of them won't build teleporters or teleport in, but these ones tend to spawn in large numbers, letting them set up a network of Level 3 Sentries to keep you pinned down unless you have a long-ranged specialist to take them out.
    • Robot Snipers will hunker down in the enemy backline and take potshots at you from across the map, just like a real Sniper. While they cannot headshot and their aim is telegraphed by a laser, they have disturbing accuracy, fast reflexes, and can still charge up their rifles to deliver massively damaging shots from any distance, forcing you to find some sort of cover to hide from them. They're easy to kill if caught out, but they often appear at such a distance that you can't effectively kill them unless you counter-snipe, as they're smart enough to evade incoming projectiles a lot of the time. The rarer Sydney Snipers are even worse, as they charge faster, can now deal mini-crit headshot damage (since they always aim for the head), and will Jarate targets to make them take even more damage from all the other enemies on the field. To make matters even worse, on higher-level missions, both of these Snipers may have Razorbacks specifically to screw over Spies trying to assassinate them.
    • Bowman Snipers can overlap between this and Goddamned Bats. They're the only offensive type of Sniper that shows up in large groups instead of only coming in occasionally for support, and they wield the Huntsman, which is already considered a powerful weapon to begin with because of Hitbox Dissonance and the fact that a single well-placed arrow does enough damage to mortally wound anyone without bullet resistance. To make matters worse, many of them pack damage buffs or crit-boosts to make every shot a killing blow. Now imagine a horde of these enemies coming at you and pelting you with a Rain of Arrows. Without a good Medic to counter the arrows (no way will a Pyro be able to reflect so many at once), these guys will overwhelm you very fast, not helped by their tendency to come with Pyros who will ignite their arrows, to make them deal even more damage and afterburn. Empire Escalation on Mannhattan adds large Rapid-Fire Bowman Snipers which have a boatload of health, spam arrows like no tomorrow, and are crit-boosted to boot, making each hit all but guaranteed to one-shot you. However, they're not considered Giants, so a single backstab can take them out...
    • With the Mecha update, we can add EVERY permanent crit-boosted robot to the list. To clarify, they are all essentially One-Hit Kill machines (regardless if they're giant or not) that even with maximum resistances upgraded, they will still kill you in 2-3 shots. Crit-boosted giants are one thing, but the problem arises when this is given to all the spammed enemies too, making each individual one a credible threat. With uber canteens only lasting for a few seconds, you can bet much hair-pulling ensues when a team tries to finish a wave for dozens of these pests, only for the next wave to have even more of them.
    • The jumping Samurai Demoknights exclusive to Two Cities missions. They're mildly durable and strong to boot, but their main claim to infamy is the high jump they do before charging and circling around mid-air. This will very rarely not kill you, since their midair circling makes it incredibly difficult to land a hit, they charge for a long time in midair and thus will pretty much always charge crit if they're not already perma-kritzed, and said charge crit is a melee attack, which is not a damage type you can protect from with upgrades. Since they're using the Half-Zatoichi, any kill they happen to make can undo much of the progress to destroy them, and the final kicker is that they're technically not giants, so they can get all three bomb buffs. On the flip side, them not being giants makes them fully vulnerable to Sappers and backstabs like the Steel Gauntlets, and a skilled player can strike them first with a Half-Zatoichi of their own for a One-Hit Kill.
• Discredited Meme: Bonus Ducks, as of the End of the Line Update let-down.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Make no mistake, the mercs enjoy their work, but many shippers prefer to think they wouldn't hurt a fly.

E

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Scout's mother became very popular due to her good looks and sweet relationship with the Spy.
  • Archimedes also has a loyal following. Pick a video of doves at random on YouTube, and chances are that you'll find a reference to Archimedes in the comments section.
  • When it comes to fan videos, fan-made Femscout is probably the most used female character model.
  • The TFC Team has experienced a very high popularity rise in the fanbase for being comic-only characters.
  • Gameplay-wise, the Pyro is divisive, but as a character, they're among the most popular members of the team. What makes them qualify as this is that they're rather Out of Focus in supplementary material, so scenes focusing on them are few and far in-between, yet fans of the firebug eat up every second of it. The fact that they beat the Heavy in the Meet your Match competition speaks volumes about how much people love the Pyro.
• Even Better Sequel: Inevitable, considering that the original was an independent mod made in 1996.
• Evil Is Cool: Well, duh, that's why the game is so much fun!

F

• Fan Nickname: There's enough of them to warrant its own page on the official wiki.
  • The original name for a Demo with the Targe and the Eyelander was called "The Close Combat Kit", but fans called them "Demoknights" since it sounded better. Then, with the Uber Update, a weapon set gets released for Demoman that focuses on melee only and was named "One Thousand and One Demoknights"
  • One of the Soldier's unlockable primary weapons, the Black Box, when combined with the Concheror (which passively heals the Soldier and his teammates) and The Escape Plan (which increases the Soldier's speed proportionately to how low his health is), is often referred to as the Crutch Box or Bad Box loadout due to the specific loadout allows the Soldier to heal up to 20 health for every hit, regenerates 4 health per second, and nope out at lightning speeds.
    • Soldier's first primary unlock, The Direct Hit, is also derided as the Direct Miss and the Direct Shit because it has a nearly non-existent blast radius and requires very careful aiming, and most of its users totally forget that and treat it as a hitscan weapon without leading their shots properly. That these players are usually only able to hit things with it at extremely close range means it has selectively been dubbed "The Best Melee Weapon In The Game" as well.
  • The Rocket Jumper, Mantreads, and Market Gardener loadout has been dubbed the "Trolldier" loadout, and using it is referred to as "trolldiering". While complicated to use, the Market Gardener can kill 7 of the 9 classes at full health with one hit if done correctly, often leading to rage from those who fall victim to it (hence the name).
  • Pyros who do nothing but swim around in a body of water and hit people with the Neon Annihilator are dubbed Pyrosharks.
  • "Butterknifing" is the act of Cherry Tapping someone with the Spy's knife in hopes of getting a stray backstab due to Hitbox Dissonance. The knife itself cannot receive random Critical Hits unlike other melee weapons, so it's laughably ineffective outside of a backstab.
  • The Sniper's unlockable Huntsman is commonly called the Lucksman, as the arrow has a weirdly large hitbox that causes it to land hits more often than it should appear to. For these reasons, some also affectionately call it the Cuntsman or the most tasteful Huntspam. Or the Cuntspam.
  • 'Shpee', often used as a derogative term to people who love playing Spy despite not having any experience of how to play him effectively.
  • Hoovies, a term used to denote friendly Heavies who doesn't fight, instead just waltz around the battlefield giving sandviches to everyone. They are often equipped with the Tomislav (whose faster spin up time and silent fire allows them to defend themselves if needed), the Holiday Punch (a pair of mittens that upon doing a critical hit, does no damage, but instead makes the target laughs) and of course, the Sandvich or any lunch box items.
  • Any hat or weapon with the stereotype of players overestimating their skill is referred to as a "War Pig" thanks to SoundSmith's Stereotypes Series.
  • A beginner player on Reddit once referred to the Spy as the "Tuxedo Terrorist".
  • A lot of fans will affectionately refer to Soldier as "Solly", and Sniper as "Snipes".
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Calling the Medic a Nazi. Even Valve themselves are not fans of this and have confirmed many times that he isn't or ever was one.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Holy damn, Dota 2. The rivalry between the fanbases is so large that it often results in a bloody and violent forum Mob War. The fanbase has accused Valve of prioritizing Dota 2 as their chief money maker over them and refusing to pay attention to TF2 at all. When things looked like they were finally cooling off, the announcement of Artifact and Underlords, both spin offs of Dota, brought up much anguish from the TF2 fanbase, once again inciting riots about Valve favoring Dota instead of supporting their long-running titles (to which most Dota fans will say that they didn't want this either).
  • The fandom also has a giant rivalry with Overwatch, seeing it as a massive ripoff or shameless imitation of this very game. Almost right at the announcement of Overwatch, TF2 fans were saying that this was Blizzard's attempt at making a "dumbed down" copy of Team Fortress. Even to this day, it's almost a Berserk Button to mention Overwatch to some fans of TF2, and it's not uncommon to see inflammatory comments being made at either game in the comments section of a Youtube video on one or the other. Of course, attitudes on either game may still depend on where you go - See Friendly Fandoms below.
    • After the emergence of Fortnite, another light-hearted cartoony shooter that shares many dancing emotes with TF2, many TF2 fans moved on from bashing Overwatch to Fortnite, sometimes even joining their former rivals to do so. Though eventually, this behavior became looked down upon, as well.
    • Notably, after Overwatch 2 released on Steam in 2023, interactions between the two fans made a massive comeback, mostly due to Overwatch 2 quickly becoming the lowest rated game on Steam. Some TF2 fans laughed at their misfortune and saw it as proof that TF2 had "won the war", others empathized with Overwatch fans after drawing similarities between Blizzard and Valve's apparent poor management of their games, and others were just happy that Overwatch was finally sharing a platform with its spiritual predecessor and expressed excitement at a potential crossover between the two games.
• Fanon:
  • There is no proof for it, anywhere, but almost everybody believes that underneath the Pyro's suit is some extensive and horrific burn scarring.
  • While nothing in-game or in the comics suggest so, some fans like to think it's necessary for Spy to kill someone before taking their form in a disguise.
  • On the subject of Spy, many pieces of fanart where he's not wearing a mask depict him with grey or silver streaks in black hair.
  • In GMod videos, Demoman is consistently portrayed as pass-out drunk or constantly imbibing, partially because the sound of him burping is easy to make funny. In canon, he's typically sober when in good spirits and not on the job — and even then, he doesn't always drink when he is on the job.
  • The Medic is probably the biggest example of this trope, with interpretations ranging from genuinely good-meaning man (with a weird concept of ethics) to heartless sociopath willing to put anything on the line to further science. Add to that some people still believing he's a Nazi, hints towards him being Jewish and you've got yourself weapons grade Flame Bait.
  • An emerging community on Tumblr and Archive Of Our Own have begun to theorize that the Heavy is autistic.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A small subset of fans flatly refuse to accept the official comics and promotional videos as canon, or as anything except promotional material. To them, only the game itself is canon and relevant. This is becoming harder and harder to justify, however, as the comic, trailer, and "Meet The..." plot has slowly creeped more and more into the game itself.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Soldier/Engineer has no real basis in canon, but they do hitch up in fanon quite a bit, and is much more popular than the canon Soldier/Zhanna.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: Until the game became F2P, most of the Yaoi Fangirls making fanart and fanfiction for the game had never even played it, making this a case of Most Gamers Are Male played straight. Also applies on a lesser scale to those who mainly follow TF2 for the GMod videos, like Painis Cupcake or Vagineer. Reasoning on this can be varied, from "I like the universe, but I don't like first-person shooters/video games in general" to No Export for You (a lot of fanwork on Tumblr is from Japan and Korea), to health problems like epilepsy and motion sickness that restrict how much, if any gaming they do. Although unfortunately the girls who do pay and play often get dismissed as "just here for the gay porn" or "just here because you think [insert class here] is hot" if they dare to reveal their gender to the guys, even if the female fans were there before the F2P update or play competitive Highlander.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Although things got off with a rocky start, fans of Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch have a somewhat decent relationship and it's not uncommon to see characters from both games interacting in fanart and other fanmade works. This is especially helped by the fact that one of the developers of Overwatch have praised TF2 and take comparisons as a compliment. Of course, attitudes on either game may still depend on where you go - See Fandom Rivalry above.
  • The Paladins and TF2 community are very friendly with each other, largely in part due to being a free-to-play hero shooter on Steam, has a decent difficulty curve to get used to (the card system in place of swappable weapons to shake up the playstyle of a given character). It also helps Paladins got a skin that has Barik be turned into The Engineer (with Grant Goodeve as the VA!), which definitely made the two fandoms all too happy to get along with each other.
  • Many TF2 fans have gotten into JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, between many famous community members enjoying it and the love of its memes, ultimately culminating in a community-made Jotaro-themed hat and an accompanying jacket.
  • The Team Fortress 2 fandom and the Touhou Project fandom are also very close. This is probably because both games are very similar (exclusive to PC, Chromosome Casting, revolves around shooting enemies, everyone wears some kind of head ornament, the source of countless memes...) to the point where Touhou is often considered TF2's Distaff Counterpart.
  • Due to both being games released in the late 2000s that still have an active playerbase in the 2020s, there's a significant overlap between the TF2 and Minecraft fandoms.

G

• Goddamned Bats: Servers will inevitably be flooded with one class the day that class's update comes out. Quite literally, when the Scout update came out.
  • One of the driving concepts behind the Sniper update was to release the Spy update at the same time to combat this.
  • Amusingly, the Soldier/Demoman combined update reversed the trend slightly. Since one of the available unlocks would be determined by which class did better in the week preceding the release, the servers became flooded with Soldiers and Demomen even before the release... to the point that servers have crashed because of a limit on dynamic entities within the map.
  • The Engineer update was probably the worst example of this. There were so many Engies that you could barely move without being sentry gunned to death. Most servers would even implement a 2 or 3 Engineers per team limit. On the other hand, good Demomen, Soldiers, and Spies had a field day.
  • With the Polycount Update, this made some people complain about the Goddamn Fish.
  • All future updates will address multiple classes at the same time in order to combat this.
    • There have also been updates that don't focus on any particular class at all, most notably the Halloween updates.
  • Combat Mini-Sentries. Instantly-deployable, chip off your health fast, and love to appear out of nowhere. Even after an update that reduced their base deployment speed, people are still rather split on them.
  • Several types of enemies in Mann Vs. Machine qualify:
    • Sentry Busters again. Once you understand how they work and how to escape them, a well-entrenched, level-headed Engie who's paying attention will (almost) never be threatened by them again; just pick up your sentry before they reach your nest, walk towards them to make them explode prematurely, then put your sentry back in its nest. If you time it right the explosion also takes out a part of the robot horde. Problem is, the more often you successfully do this, the more often they respawn, over and over and over... the Announcer shouting "Look out for that Sentry Buster!" over and over and over... listening to that tick-tock noise over and over and over...
    • Robot Spies will periodically spawn in squads announced by the Administrator, and unlike other bots, they'll spawn from seemingly random locations behind the frontline before disguising and trying to screw with you. Like normal spies, they can backstab players for a One-Hit Kill, as well as use sappers to disable Engineer buildings. While their AI is poor enough that their disguises can be seen through very easily, the problem arises when they often spawn in large enough numbers to just overwhelm you if you're caught off guard, and have an annoying tendency to spawn just as major threats show up from the front end of your defenses. To a team that can identify and eliminate them effectively, they just become a nuisance that forces you to divert attention away from the main wave just in case of the possibility that they try something at an inopportune moment.
    • Giant Black Box Soldiers for being massive Stone Walls. Out of all the giant Soldier robots, they have the lowest damage output due to the fact they have a significant damage penalty and fire all their rockets at once, and then slowly reload. Here's the problem - each rocket that successfully hits a target restores massive amounts of their health, letting it heal itself for what amounts to its entire health bar in a single salvo. As such, if the team doesn't evade the rockets or the Medic can't continuously block them with the shield, the damn thing can either freely capture a gate, or just plant the bomb by outhealing all damage you deal to it - and unlike their smaller variants, them being Giants means that you can't just one-shot them to outpace their healing. That said, they're every bit as slow as the other giants, and can swiftly be killed before they do anything if dealt with properly, but it's the sheer tediousness of doing so that makes them more annoying than difficult.
    • Über Medics in Mann Vs. Machine are a massive annoyance if not dealt with the proper way. While experienced players (particularly Demomen with sticky bombs, Pyros with the Gas Passer, and Snipers with Explosive Headshot) can blow them all up before they can pop their Ubercharge, woe betide those who damage them enough but fail to kill them, as they will pop their uber and make their assisted unit (usually a Giant) invincible until it wears off, allowing the group to push further. If one does this near the hatch, you run the risk of the bomb carrier just planting the bomb while invincible. There's also two variants, one of which heals extremely quickly, the other can regain their Ubercharge extremely fast, both of which are equally frustrating.
    • Any bot that inflicts knockback, like the Force-a-Nature Scouts and Blast Soldiers. While they often have a damage penalty that makes it hard for them to actually kill anyone, their insane knockback just lets them toss aside anything in their way, screwing up your positioning and leaving openings in your lines for themselves or other bots to run through. This also applies to their giant variants, as well as the boss Chief Blast Soldier.
  • When the Pyro vs Heavy war was announced, the update post has stated that points towards one side are given by simply being on a team and earning points, rather than playing Pyro or Heavy and killing the other, reducing the amount of class spam in servers. Regardless though, players could expect at least three or four Pyros or Heavies each per team.
  • Predictably, the Jungle Inferno update (the resulting Pyro update from the Meet Your Match war) ended up with servers being flooded with Pyros for the first two weeks after launch. Two of the weapons released actively seemed to make Pyro's afterburn immunity less of an issue with the commonness of Pyro 1v1s - the Gas Passer causes Pyros to ignite despite their normal immunity to afterburn, and the Dragon's Fury's main aspect is to crit burning targets, but it'll still crit Pyros if consecutive shots are landed. But, if you didn't want to play the new weapons, expect to be forced to play a lot of Engie, Heavy, and Sniper, classes who are good at countering Pyro.
  • From the Halloween event maps come the Green Skeletons. While not very damaging, they still pester the player by following them around and their bright glowing green skin can very easily give away the player's position to the enemy, if the player's attempts to destroy them did not already. To make matters even worse, the larger, player sized skeletons are not completely defeated when destroyed, but will instead break apart and respawn as a horde of even smaller skeletons.
• Goddamned Boss: With boss truces coming into play, Merasmus shifts from That One Boss (as detailed below) to this. With PvP disabled, Merasmus dies more often than not, so the only thing he really does is stall out the map for a few more minutes, between the time it takes to defeat him and the fact that the Control Point is reset to neutral after his death. If the teams are evenly matched, that generally means you'll be playing for about 20 minutes at minimum^note Both teams have a timer of nine minutes. If the round is back-and-forth, that means this map will be running for around eighteen minutes before factoring in Merasmus, which tends to be very exhaustive for the average map.
• Good Bad Bugs: With a game with a double-digit age running on a very buggy engine, tons of glitches are possible:
  • The aforementioned Spycrab and the ability to play as a glitched character called "The Civilian."
  • As of Dec 18th of 2009, all those who were here to know him in his short 24 hours of life will never forget our good friend the Spygineer. Let him forever erect those French dispensers with console command "build 0" in his cheese and wine-laden heaven.
    • On April 29, 2010, the Spygineer returned for one more go — along with the ability of Engineers to build infinite buildings.
  • R.I.P. "Crazy Legs" Scout.
  • Alas, poor level 3 mini sentry, too cutesy for this blood-filled game.
  • There was also the "rapid airblast" glitch, or the Syringe Gun reload glitch, both of which cause their respective weapons to fire faster than intended.
  • There was an exploit that allowed the Heavy to run at top speed even without having the Gloves of Running Urgently active.
  • Using the Buffalo Steak Sandvich with GRU once resulted in ridiculously fast speed for the Heavy.
  • Players actually fire out of their heads, rather than from their guns. This isn't very apparent with most classes, since most of them hunch over while firing and are generally better off dodging bullets than exploiting cover... except the Heavy, who stands up very straight with his Minigun revved up. This results in the popular tactic of standing behind a shoulder-height object and mowing down enemies with your mouth gun and tiny small head hitbox.
  • Due to being able to taunt while stunned, even if it's a kill taunt, two Huntsman Snipers can have ancient Australian psychic battles.
  • A clipping issue can cause Pyro flames to go through the otherwise impenetrable starter gate before the beginning of a round. Since whoever was standing there was probably taunting, it's pretty funny, and they respawn fast enough to not hinder the team. On the other hand, it also works occasionally through chain link fences, which is a Game-Breaker. Then again... why wouldn't flames be able to pass through a chain-link fence?
  • The taunt for the Equalizer causes the Soldier to crack his knuckles before holding a grenade to the sky and gibbing himself and anyone nearby. Nothing wrong so far, until you notice that the explosion radius is centered on the Soldier's hand when he holds it up. Doing this taunt while standing under a low ceiling causes the Soldier's hand to clip through the ceiling as he does the taunt, and he survives because the ceiling blocks the explosion; if anyone's standing on top of said ceiling though, they're dead. Suijin's bridges are most famous for this exploit.
  • Before the bug was patched, using the Buffalo Steak Sandvich could let the player switch their weapons from melee, resulting in a Heavy spewing mini-crit Minigun bullets.
  • Switching from a Detonator to another weapon and landing a hit on a burning enemy granted full crits before that was patched.
  • The infinite Diamondback crit exploit.
  • The Machina's double-kill fanfare glitches whenever more than 2 people are killed at once — the effect stacks for every additional kill, resulting in a ridiuclously loud sound.
  • Valve's Achievements have their fair share of bugs, but one in particular stands out — the Identity Theft Achievement is a Spy Achievement that is given for backstabbing the enemy you're disguised as. Stabbing someone with the Your Eternal Reward awards you this Achievement instantly.
    • Fridge Brilliance sets in once you realize that backstabbing someone with Your Eternal Reward actually fits the name of the achievement much better. Why shouldn't you get an achievement called "Identity Theft" when you steal another player's identity?
  • Using the Director's Vision taunt and pressing the Cow Mangler 5000's alt-fire simultaneously will make the Soldier fire a glowing beam of energy with his bare hands
  • In 2Fort, in the BLU base a Dispenser in the doorway between the hay room and spiral ramp will completely block enemy players and the Engineer who deployed it. In the RED base, a player can always bypass a Dispenser built in the same place by crouch-jumping over it.
  • The Training Mode was meant to be for single-player, but some people actually managed to get into other people's training modes. Griefing ensued before it was fixed.
  • When the Red-Tape Recorder was first added, sentries sapped with it retained their health when downgraded to level 1, and were capable of having far too much health if upgraded again. Although the sentry glitch was fixed quickly, another glitch let teleporters build up astronomical amounts of health.
  • When the Demoman is holding a one-handed melee weapon, crouches, and the player taps the "walk forward" button a small amount, Spooky Demo Arms results.
  • Dropping bread into the pit at the end of Payload maps used to create a giant explosion.
  • If you're on fire and you activate the B.A.S.E. Jumper mid-air, you won't lose altitude until you stop burning.
  • Scouts could destroy friendly teleporter exits by repeatedly firing baseballs over them as somebody tried to teleport. This causes the teleporter to self-destruct. Although the baseball one was fixed, Medics could do the same with their syringe guns until that one was fixed as well.
  • The Shortstop was allowed to reload quicker for a brief time after the release of the Gun Mettle update. Fans of the weapon who thought this was an intentional buff were not happy that this was actually a bug that was patched soon after. But hey, after Meet Your Match you can shove people with it (like a crappier version of Pyro's airblast) and now you can shove people off cliffs, even though pyro can do it better and faster.
  • The Gun Mettle Update had several issues with dropped weapons and the like being able to destroy the final point on Payload maps.
  • Before it was shortly patched, shooting the alien landmines on 2Fort Invasion with the Rescue Ranger (Engineer), Crusader's Crossbow (Medic), or Huntsman/Fortified Compound (Sniper) could kill your own teammates. And you'd be credited as killing them.
  • After the Meet Your Match update was released, it is possible to spawn in the other team's spawn point when waiting for other players, making it possible to get some ridiculously cheap kills if playing the right class.
  • Before it was patched at the end of August 2016, if a BLU Engineer built a teleporter exit during the 60 seconds before setup time and has the Eureka Effect equipped, they could teleport out of their spawn and to wherever they placed their exit, allowing them to harass the enemy team during the setup time. Attack/Defend maps had this exploit at its worst: an Engineer who escapes their spawn during setup time using this exploit could then go on to cap the first point, which if pulled off would result in the setup time being increased by whatever extra time is awarded when the point is capped. In the worst-case scenario, on maps with multiple stages (ex. Dustbowl), fast capping both points on the first stage would sometimes result in the BLU spawn gates being locked and never opening during the second stage, giving RED an easy win. It's truly a sight to behold.
  • Scream Fortress 2014's Carnival of Carnage, before they were all patched, had tons of these:
    • Engineers could build teleporters behind their spawn rooms.
    • If a spell was casted by Merasmus at the same time as the transition to a Bumper Car minigame, the effects of the spell would carry over to the minigame. This resulted in such scenarios as underwater bumper cars, among others.
    • Spies could disguise while under Merasmus' melee-only curse using the "Last Disguise" function.
  • In Mann vs Machine, since Engiebots weren't planned to carry the bomb, they don't have any coding telling them to take the bomb to the hatch. This actually makes it beneficial to force an Engiebot to carry the bomb, since support robots aren't required to be killed in order to end a wave and players can focus on getting rid of the rest of the robots.
  • Until the Meet your Match update fixed this, Engineer lacked a pelvis hitbox. Did this affect gameplay at all? No, since what wasn't part of Engy's crotch was pretty easy to hit anyway. Was it funny to see the occasional video demonstrating this by shooting him between the legs with a Sniper Rifle? Hell yeah.
  • The Jungle Inferno update changed the Gloves of Running Urgently to deplete at a rate -10 health per second. However, if a Heavy has the Dalokohs Bar/Fishcake equipped, then rapidly switches between his melee and primary/secondary and eats the Dalokohs Bar/Fishcake while health regenerates and then rapidly switches between their melee and primary, the Heavy's health will continue to go up, faster and faster and forever, allowing him to overheal to astronomical amounts of health and effectively become an invincible tank, or at least invincible to everything except backstabs. It was quickly patched out... and eventually replaced with another infinite healing glitch that was triggered by using a killbind with the GRU out, then using a special keybind as you're about to respawn and going AFK for a bit (this one was also patched out).
  • One of the objectives for the Dead Ringer contract is to absorb damage from the resistance offered by the watch when cloaked. The contract can be completed by just jumping off cliffs with the Dead Ringer activated.
  • Sometimes, a Spy's disguise would be lacking a head or feet, making them very easy to detect. Occasionally, the corpse of a Spy who has just used their Dead Ringer will fold in an unusual manner, letting an attentive player know the Spy is still at large.
  • An update released early in 2018 came with a bug where throwing Mad Milk and picking it up granted the Scout infinite mid-air jumps, in exchange for getting them stuck in the Civillian pose and not letting them fire weapons. Cue the occasional sight of a birdscout infinite double-jumping away from danger and into the skybox (and sometimes many). Unfortunately this only lasted a day.
  • Spies can reload much more quickly by pulling out the Dead Ringer during the reload animation.
  • For the longest time, Demomen could kill players on the other side of certain walls or floors on certain maps by placing stickybombs against said wall or floor and detonating them right as a player is walking on or standing right next to the location of the stickybombs. Upward had the most infamous case of this bug, where Demomen could kill REDs in their final spawn by placing and detonating stickybombs attached to the ceiling outside BLU's final spawn, as RED's final spawn is directly above said ceiling. It was finally patched with the release of Scream Fortress 2018.
  • The infamous Crate Depression of 2019; some specific, old crate series became bugged on the 25th of July update, where the normally ultra-rare Unusual-quality hats suddenly became a guaranteed drop from every unboxing. Cue prices tanking for Unusuals (even hats that weren't part of the lineup of those crates) and the TF2 economy just crashing and burning in general, to the point where it brought TF2 back onto the headlines of gaming news sites for a brief week or so.
  • The Invisible Heavy exploit; if a player chose Engineer, then pressed the attack button and switched to Heavy outside of spawn at the exact same time, the corpse would drop after the switch to Heavy and make him invisible. An invisible Heavy couldn't move, but he could still use his weapons and taunt, resulting in players being shot and potentially killed by someone they couldn't even see. This eventually got patched in January 2020.
  • In the Dustbowl tutorial, waiting a bit before skipping the intro movie will spawn a second set of bots for both sides. The bots on your team will even carry over to the second stage.
  • By changing your loadout outside of the spawn room and then buying an upgrade to make the game update the loadout of your character, it's possible to buy upgrades for some weapons that normally wouldn't be able to use those upgrades (like getting a point in firing speed for the Soda Popper).
  • Killing a Sentry Buster by dealing a very specific amount of damage causes it to die without exploding. This almost never happens intentionally, but it's a bit of a relief when it does nonetheless.
  • If the player does a partner taunt with no one around, the camera view will switch to third-person and their character will stand there untill someone does. While this is normally has the useful utility of letting you peak around corners without exposing your hit box, it has a unique benefit when done as The Soldier: equip the Beggar's Bazooka (fires three times extremely quickly, but feeds directly from reserve ammo so it fires immediatly after loading in a rocket), activate a partner taunt immediatly after loading three rockets to keep them from firing, then wait for an enemy to pass by, and become a human tripwire!
  • In July 2023, after the Summer 2023 patch was released, another patch was released that allowed custom textures stored in materials/vgui/replay/thumbnails to always load regardless of a server's sv_pure^note A server variable that forces Source Engine games to disable custom skins. While at first this seems like a dick move to modders, there are ones who use custom skins to make walls transparent, players glow in the dark, etc. settings to improve compatibility with custom HUDs. Modders soon realized they could potentially make any custom skin work on sv_pure 1 servers if they use models that call for textures stored in this directory. Valve tried to patch this with Scream Fortress 2023, but modders found ways around it.

H

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In "The Sound of Medicine", we see a brief scene of the RED Sniper taking aim at a horde of robots, before being quickly headshot by a robot Sniper with a Huntsman. This scene (unfortunately) reflects the state of Casual play all too well in 2020, as the main game saw a massive surge of Sniper aimbots taking over casual servers, with players having to work together to out-vote the cheaters on a near-constant basis.
  • The commentary for Hydro has a few nodes that clearly demonstrate how hopeful the developers were about the map's design and its potential replayability, even going so far to say they were trying to avoid stalemates with it. Hydro would wind up becoming one of the most hated maps in the whole game partly because of the reputation it gained for being extremely prone to stalemates (and if it wasn't, then it was its polar opposite), the backlash so strong that it was abandoned from the rotation mere weeks into the game's launch.
  • One of the Spy's voice lines for dominating the Soldier became a lot harder to hear after the passing of Soldier's voice actor, Rick May, to the point where many players want the punchline to be changed to the Spy sobbing:
  Spy: Oh, Soldier, who will they ever find to replace you? ANYONE! (he laughs)
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Remember how protective Heavy is of his Medic (e.g. "GET BEHIND ME, DOCTOR!")? With the release of "A Cold Day In Hell", it becomes clear that Heavy is extending to Medic the very same protective Big Brother Instinct that he shows to his own family. Then "The Naked And The Dead" shows up, and... trust us, if you mess with his Doktor, then not even Gray Mann's immortality machine is going to save you from a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
  • In a few videos, we see the Spy acting like a Jerkass towards the Scout, and particularly a Jerk with a Heart of Gold during "Expiration Date", on top of being in a relationship with his mother. In the comics, the Spy is revealed to be the Scout's father, and he is nothing but proud of his son, even if he doesn't have the courage to admit it without the use of a disguise.
  • The community-created Soldier's Requiem taunt that was added in 2015 as a one-off joke. Fast-forward to Rick May's death in 2020, and fans all over the world now use it one of, if not the ultimate sign of paying respect to the man who brought everyone's favorite patriotic rocket jumper to life.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • The Demoman gets a lot of hate and is regarded as overpowered by many, because both of his weapons can be spammed to hell and back. The sticky bomb launcher gets the most hate, since its bombs can be detonated in midair, and thus it can be used much like a rocket launcher with a trajectory and twice the capacity. Most Demomen use the sticky launcher exclusively and are basically playing a faster, more effective (but frailer) Soldier. The few that actually use and are good with the primary grenade launcher as well are absolute terrors; a direct hit with a grenade does more damage than a rocket, but can bounce off walls and be lobbed from behind cover, something rockets can't do. He is limited to one in competitive 6v6 matches simply for being too overused.
  • Soldier, the game's generalist class, is often regarded as being too good at filling any role, be it attack, defense, or support. His rockets are extremely potent and quick, the splash damage is so large that the Soldier very frequently doesn't even have to aim to damage opponents, leading to infamous "shoot your feet to win" moments where the Soldier just spams rockets at his feet to kill lower health opponents nearby. They're also regarded as better sentry busters than Demoman or Spies, the Engie's intended counter-classes, because they can easily three-shot a sentry while remaining out of the sentry's range.^note This isn't even factoring in the Direct Hit, which, normally regarded as having too many drawbacks for its power boost, is extremely effective at Sentry busting, usually two-shotting them before the Engie even knows what happened. His banners offer a variety of support and offense, sometimes letting him push past chokes just by himself, with one even granting him passive regen even when not active. On top of this, his Escape Plan gives him a very easy way to escape bad situations by increasing his speed based on how much health he has left. Overall, this results in the Soldier being a very potent class in and of himself; to the point that the game has gained a reputation of having nothing but Soldier mains in every even remotely serious match.
    • This isn't even factoring in specific builds; 'the Bad Box' build is widely regarded as being the most hated loadout for any class in the game, because the specific items in this set give Soldier such increased chances of staying alive that he may as well not need health packs. The Black Box is a rocket launcher that sacrifices one of the rockets in his clip for giving his explosive damage a static Life Drain effect, healing 15 health as long as it does even Scratch Damage. The Concheror is a banner that not only gives Soldier a passive regen effect, but also allows him (and nearby allies) to have a temporary burst of speed after its charge meter is filled. The Escape Plan is a melee that increases Soldier's speed while active based on how little HP he has left. All three together results in a very, very durable Soldier that can easily survive many situations he should have had no right making it out of alive, on top of still having a very potent damage output and mobility. When he does find himself in a situation he shouldn't be able to get out of even with his multiple ways to heal, he can activate the conch, pull out the Escape Plan, and nope out at speeds faster than the Scout. Needless to say, this makes this specific loadout very, very irritating to fight against, with many people in the TF2 community regarding it as a Skill Gate Character. The loadout became a lot less annoying after the healing factor of the Black Box was made to scale with the damage you do, meaning that you now have to be competent with landing hits to replicate its previous healing strength (and even then against only a single target, as the healing is now capped at 20 per rocket).
  • Nobody better sits on the higher tier throne than the crown prince of asshattery himself, the Scout, not so affectionately called Scunts by most of the player base. While he's extremely difficult to master, the results are well worth it, as general consensus is that a good Scout main effectively has no major weaknesses. Low health? Means nothing if the enemy can't aim fast enough to hit you in the first place. Normally, this means the Scout has to hit like a fly, right? Nope! The stock scattergun is extremely potent, able to three-shot a non-overhealed Heavy if all of the pellets connect. It's also worth noting that every other viable primary sidegrade the Scout had eventually had to be nerfed into the ground for making him too good^note with the exception of the Backscatter, as everyone agrees that weapon was always pretty terrible. His secondaries are also great; the Pretty Boy's Pocket Pistol allowing him to drain health from his enemies he hits and heal himself, helping negate his low HP penalty, while the Mad Milk is an even more potent health drain that also lets his teammates heal off of any enemy he hits with it, while also giving him a way to extinguish afterburn. He also gets the Winger, which is poor as a gun but increases his jump height, and a throwing cleaver that causes bleeding on hit. His melee weapons may be weak, but it's a non-issue since most mainly use the Atomizer, a bat with the ability to give the Scout a triple jump while it's out, further increasing his mobility. His "hard counter", the Engineer? Virtually non-existent in sixes, since the time needed to set up his buildings is extremely crucial and with so little teammates to guard him in sixes, he very rarely gets to set up, on top of both teams having Medics by default, meaning an Uber push makes all his effort worthless. All this means the Scout can wreak absolute havoc in it. Even in pubs where Engineers can set up easier, most smart Scout mains know how to bait the Engineer out from the nest and take him down, and how to time their peeks to the Sentry's animation to avoid most damage while they slowly chip away at it with the scattershot. About the only thing that can stop a good Scout main is an entire nest of sentries, at which point most will focus on dealing with the rest of the team so their team can push and wipe the sentries out. It says a lot that while most of the other good classes sit in S tier on most competitive lists, Scout is the only class to have an entire tier to himself most of the time, sitting solidly at SS tier in competitive play.
    • Part of this is that in standard gameplay, the Scout is countered by the Engineer (who has sentries for auto-aim that kill the Scout in two seconds) and the Heavy (who can shred him with a hail of gunfire and survive anything short of the Scout unloading his whole magazine at point-blank). But because Heavies and Engineers are an endangered species in 6v6 competitive, a format that focuses entirely on 5cp maps, this makes the Scout even more unstoppable. It doesn't help that the standard Demoman and Soldier are some of Scout's better matchups — unlike the Heavy, who uses hitscan, they're reliant on projectile weapons that can be dodged, and the Scout happens to be the best at that — and the Medic is also required, whom Scout can very easily pick off. Tellingly, in Highlander matches where Heavies, Engineers, and to an extent Pyros are all active on the battlefield, Scout is considered far less dominant.
  • Snipers are widely despised both for being the only Long-Range Fighter class in a game focused heavily around close-range combat and for being one of the classes most notorious for one-shotting players out of the blue (the other, the Spy, can only do so from melee range and is countered by the team being Properly Paranoid). While they do have a red/blue dot designating where they're aiming, it's very easy to miss in a firefight, to say nothing of skilled Snipers relying on quickscopes to render this disadvantage nearly moot, and as such playing against a good Sniper is often a frustrating cycle of getting headshot, respawning, and trying to keep your head down only to get it blown off again as soon as you step into their line of sight. It's quite telling that in Highlander matches (where all classes are present), the only real threat to the enemy Sniper is often your own Sniper, and many fights are started or decided by the Sniper getting an important pick-off.
  • A Low-tier Spy is a Low-Tier Letdown without debate. High-Tier Spies are only really average compaired to most players. The best spies on the other hand are widely hated for how they completely ruin any plan you could possibly come up with. These spies reveal details on your team to the enemy before the fight even starts by (ab)using the disguise kit, which is (wrongly) accepted to be useless, avoid easy kills to make them less predictable, prioritize bringing down logistics like teleporters and dispensers over kills, use their team to cause the openings to kill you medic/engie/sniper, and most importantly do not try to play like an offensive class. These spies are completely unpredictable, with impecable acting when disguised, careful use of their different knives and guns for the situation, making cloak illusions to mess with persuers, and half the time, they might not even exist, having experience in other classes and switching in and out of spy to keep the opposing team paranoid out of their minds.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the Scout update, Valve added a domination line where the Scout says that he's not even wearing a helmet, played specifically after the domination of a Soldier. Then came the hats, with a baseball helmet for the Scout. You'd expect him not pulling that line while wearing said helmet, but he still does it due to the way the voice response system works in-game. Irony ensues. To add to the irony, thanks to the hats, it's possible that the Scout is wearing a helmet but the Soldier isn't.
    • When dominating an Engineer, Scout's line is "Here's something you shoulda built: a not-dying machine!" In a later comic we learn that's what Engineer's grandfather's magnum opus was, and Engie's job is to fix it.
  • To a certain extent, the Sniper's line about "blokes that bludgeon their wives to death with a golf trophy" in Meet the Sniper. You can't officially kill anyone with a golf trophy in the game, but as of June 2011, you can bludgeon them to death with a filmmaking trophy... which turns them to Australium. Really.
  • Right before Meet The Medic came out, there was a pre-order bonus for the new Magic: The Gathering game. One of the items was a Planeswalker Helm for Medic, with the description "Just tell people it qualifies you for veterinary work". The Medic achievement "Ubi concordia, ibi victoria", which requires the Medic to assist in killing three enemies on an enemy control point, has a picture of a wounded dove.
  • The gameplay footage at the end of Meet The Sandvich is identical to that of the end of Meet The Heavy, only the Heavy is now eating instead of gunning down BLU. The BLU team members are still dropping like flies, however, as if to imply that RED Heavy wasn't actually responsible for any of the deaths in the first video.
  • One of the Demoman's injured noises (most usually from being ignited) sounds identical to the Rabbids.
  • In a comic accompanying the Mac Update, one of the two Apple employees introduces the Heavy to a gun that would set up a blog for him, and update it with a kill count. As of 2011, we now have Strange weapons, most which count the amount of kills made with them.
    • In that same comic, Soldier boasts that his Mann Co. Shovel is better than any Apple product and is shortly interrupted by said shovel suddenly bursting into flame. The Jungle Inferno update brings us War Paints, and one of the weapons that can come as a War Paint is the Diciplinary Action, a melee weapon for Soldier. War Paints can also come in Unusual quality, and one effect causes the weapon to appear to be smoking with heat. We can now have Soldiers with a burning Mann Co. whip.
  • Even before the aforementioned Mac Update comic, in Meet the Engineer, the Engineer has a machine that displays the number of kills made with his sentries, now the game has Strange weapons that count the total number of kills a player made with a weapon, with the Engineer's melee weapons specifically counting sentry kills in addition to regular melee kills.
  • In Meet the Sniper, the RED Sniper headshots the BLU Heavy and also shatters the BLU Demoman's bottle behind him. This was patched out of the game fairly early on... only to get added back in with the Machina, which can penetrate through multiple characters once fully charged.
  • This post from 4chan◊ ended up being spot on in regards to the way the Pyro views things. (Spoilers for those who haven't watched "Meet The Pyro" yet)
  • After the release of the Sniper vs Spy update, the Spy will sometimes say to a dominated Scout: "This is Scout! Rainbows make me cry! Over!" At the release of the Pyromania update a little over 3 years later, the Pyro has a weapon that can fires rainbows only from the player's perspective and appear anyone who can see how the Pyro sees things. In reality, it appears as the stock flamethrower. Guess who the Spy's nemesis is.
  • Also, a hilarious extra at the end of the Stuart Ashen recording microscopes review has Ashen setting fire to a My Little Pony fake, laugh maniacally, sighing *hats* at the end, and then proclaim "Pyromania Is Magic". Cue two months later, with the Pyromania update...
  • In The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of Action 52, he asks who would want to wield a lollipop as a weapon when he reviews a game called "Lollipop". When the Pyromania update came out two years later, the Pyro received the Lollichop, a weapon that appears as an overly-large lollipop in Pyroland.
  • In the Halloween 2011 update, one of the soldier's lines when in his robot costume was "I am a robot, I am here to take American jobs." Then came Mann vs. Machine.
  • The Octo-Heavy, a joke video about a "boss battle" consisting of a Heavy with 8 Medics. Just a fun little joke video, though, right? Mann vs. Machine mode introduces robots that can and will form 5-Medics-on-1-Heavy formations. Or even NINE Medics on one Heavy. And the Heavies are Giant Mooks.
  • There exists a little Team Fortress 2 mod called Prop Hunt where players on one team become random props and must hide from the players on the other team. Enter 2012's Spectral Halloween Special. Merasmus will disguise himself as a random prop some time during his boss fight.
  • One of Scout's domination lines against the Sniper is saying he has a tiny head. In the 2012 Halloween update, the Ghost Fort map has a random effect that turns everyone's head tiny.
  • In a case of taking an already funny line and making it even funnier, Scout's line "My blood! He punched out ALL my blood!" from Meet the Sandvich is referenced in the 2012 Halloween event, only now he says "spilled" instead of "punched".
  • On this very wiki, the caption for Pyro's character folder alludes to Pyro being The Stig, a mask-wearing mysterious racecar driver from Top Gear who never shows his face. Because he's a driver in the PC version of Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed, s/he actually is a mask-wearing mysterious racecar driver who never shows his/her face. (Does that make Spy Jeremy Clarkson, and Heavy James May?)
  • In Pyro in Shellnut, Spy saps Wheatley. Almost a full year later, Wheatley became an unlockable sapper replacement for the Spy.
  • An unintentional Actor Allusion: Robin Atkin Downes played Luxord in Kingdom Hearts II, stealing medallions from Captain Jack Sparrow and invoking his zombie pirate transformation. Now you can make Medic into a zombie, complete with squawking zombie bird. Sadly, no pirate costume, though.
    • Also, one of the Medic's taunts has him use his bonesaw like a violin. In other words, he's played us like a damn fiddle.
  • The Soldier's "Bilbo Baggins" domination taunts to the Sniper are hilarious in light of Team Fortress Comics #4 which reveals the Sniper is actually a New Zealander.
  • This griefing montage video uploaded back in 2011 has a player named Balrog trapped in a teleporter trap among others saying he's having a pool party. Three years later during the "End of the Line" Update, the Pool Party was added as a taunt for the Pyro. Bonus points because Balrog was playing as the Pyro.
  • One of Soldier's "robot" costume bonus line, "Oh no! That robot is a ghost!" was already funny ... and then came Undertale with one of the characters ( Mettaton ) fitting that line very well.
  • In one of Mother's Basement's rants about Sword Art Online, he takes a pot shot at the series' In-Universe game "Gun Gale Online" by saying that stats in first-person shooters are meaningless and brings in Team Fortress 2 as one of the counterpoints. He says "Imagine a version of TF2 where Spies and Heavies have the same character model? It would be a disaster". What he doesn't know however is that what he just said is entirely possible in TF2 with the randomizer mod, where a Heavy can get Spy's arsenal and become a Spy Heavy or vice versa.
  • A popular joke within the fandom is that Spy is Scout's father. Then Team Fortress Comics #6 ultimately confirmed it, with Spy apologizing to his son disguised as Tom Jones.
  • In the Game Mod Fortress Forever, which is meant to be a Spiritual Successor to Team Fortress Classic, the menu theme is titled "Goldrush Ectasy", and the spy's cloaking ability functions similarly to the Cloak and Dagger.
  • On July 13, 2019, Youtuber STBlackST posted the latest in his "Unusual Troubles" series of silly Team Fortress 2 animations, "Infinite Unusual Troubles". Twelve days later, a routine game update had the unintended side effect of causing some older crates to guarantee an unusual cosmetic on opening, crashing the in-game trading economy overnight with infinite unusuals.
  • Another Scout line where he asks if somebody's keeping track of the heads he batted in became funnier with the introduction of Strange weapons in the Über update and later the introduction of Killstreak Kits in the Two Cities Update, the former counting the total number of kills, and the latter counting the number of successive kills in a single life.
  • For a bit of a crossover example: Spy (French) and Scout (Boston-born, but sounds New Yawk) often quarrel and engage in Teeth-Clenched Teamwork. This wouldn't be the first time we've seen this dynamic.
  • Engineer's hat "The Danger", added in 2014, inspires multiple comparisons to its reference, Walter White: both Dell and Walt are bald, bespectacled geniuses from the American south, they both seem nice enough in a casual setting yet have a hidden unhinged streak, rely on their wits and allies to kill everyone stronger than them, and Breaking Bad's finale even has Walter build a Sentry Turret that sweeps the area in front of it. The comparisons become funnier when Blood in the Water, released later that year, reveals that also like Walt, Engy is struggling against an inevitable mortality, albeit the Administrator's rather than his own.
• Ho Yay: As all of the playable characters are male except the Pyro, Ho Yay seems encouraged, both in-game and by fans:
  • A lot of people see a certain "subtext" in the Heavy and Medic's close cooperation, with their lines.
    Heavy: I love this doctor!
    Heavy: GET BEHIND ME DOCTOR!
    • Brought back up with "Meet The Medic". Most of the short centers on the two of them, and there's a lot of long glances and smiles between them. Medic even pinches Heavy's cheek at one point.
  • Valve has acknowledged this with the "Beaux and Arrows" Sniper achievement for killing a Medic-Heavy pair with a Huntsman... and then turned around and torpedoed it with the Demoman's Medic-specific domination taunt which may or may not be true:
    Demoman: DOMINATED! ...And I been shaggin' yer wife! Ahah!
    • And with the introduction of the Back Scatter for the Scout, there's the achievement Back 2 Back (killing a Heavy/Medic pair within 20 seconds) — the icon for which is a heart.
  • Valve acknowledges the ship again with the description of the Medic hat Gentleman's Ushanka, which reads:
    "Made from genuine German rabbit fur, this military-grade trappers' hat makes the perfect complement to the Officer's Ushanka. Let the officer in your life know you'll always be right behind them, with a Medigun at the ready and a matching wardrobe."
  • While "End of The Line" isn't canon, Valve alludes to the subplot between Heavy and Medic as "romance action" (with a later asterisk clarifying that it's "more of a bro-mance").
  • One of Medic's unlocks, a fancy Napoleonic coat that was released as a Napoleon: Total War promotion, is called "The Foppish Physician". "Fop" means a stylish man, which he certainly is, but has also meant gay. There's also the announcement of the Something Special For Someone Special, which portrayed some Pocket Medics as lovesick stalkers (although it's unclear if they meant the character, or the people who play him).
  • Not even the Pyro is immune to Ho Yay! The Engineer and Pyro seem to be slowly evolving to work together, a la Medic & Heavy. Some of Engineer's lines reflect this, and he will occasionally apologize to a Pyro he's just dominated.
    • Not to mention, the magazine Pyro was reading◊ at the end of Meet the Medic contains...Man on Man.◊ The two assumptions are that he's a woman enjoying a little gay porn, or he's a gay man enjoying a little gay porn.
  • The Pocket Medic, originally only for the Heavy, can now be equipped by the Soldier as well. Also, whenever a Soldier shouts "Medic" while looking at a friendly Medic, he will call him "sweetheart", "sally", or "pumpkin". Some fans have noticed. Has resulted in some Ship-to-Ship Combat. Later, Medic got his own Pocket Heavy...
  • There's a bit of Merasmus/Soldier, too. They bicker like an old married couple, Soldier threatens to shove something up Merasmus' ass (his broom, but still), Soldier informs Merasmus "the heart makes its own rules" when trying to justify killing Merasmus' new roommate, and now, after landing in prison, Merasmus had Soldier's class icon tattooed on his bicep.
  • Medic got some of this towards Sniper in Old Wounds. He's incredibly happy to see Sniper, and is apparently fond of him to the point that he's willing to spend billions of dollars so he can revive him after he's fatally wounded by the TFC team.
  • "The Naked and The Dead" brings us some Sniper/Spy moments. When Spy was caught by Classic Sniper, his modern counterpart practically panicked and rushed to save Spy (losing his pants in the process). Scene afterwards in which Spy and completely naked Sniper were sitting next to each other and smoking was described by some fans as "mistaken for slash fanart".

I-J

• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming:
  • Soldier/Engineer is "Helmet Party".
  • "Classcest", or one class paired with another of the same class (i.e. RED Sniper/BLU Sniper would be "Snipercest").
  • Sniper/Engineer is known as "Trucks 'N' Vans".
  • Scout/Sniper is "Speeding Bullet".
  • Engineer/Pyro is "Fire Forged"/"Texas Toast".
  • Sniper/Spy is "Knife Party".
  • Even some really rare pairings have names. Heavy/Sniper is called "Vegemite Sandvich", Demoman/Spy is "Bomb Voyage", and Scout/Pyro is "Flash Fire".
  • Soldier/Merasmus is "Magic Missiles".
  • Demoman/Sniper is "Sword Van".
  • Medic/Sniper is "Bush Medicine"/"Urine Sample".
  • Medic/Heavy is sometimes called "Red Oktoberfest" or "Heavy Medicine".
  • Medic/Engineer is "Science Party".
• I Knew It!: Some people saved up a lot of duplicate weapons, in case the Polycount weapons had specific blueprints. They did.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Scream Fortress's VIII - XIII (2016 - 2021) were more or less the same thing as Scream Fortress VII (2015), with no real additions to "new content" outside of the usual cosmetic case additions and community maps. Most notably, Merasmissions were in no working order for the first week of VIII, despite being more-or-less identical to last year's Merasmissions. The newest addition in over four years is just some Scream Fortress-themed warpaints, added in IX (2017) and again in XIII (2021). That and a new model to represent the cosmetic case.
• Junk Rare:
  • Rare items like Unusuals or high-tier cosmetic unboxes tend to look garish or ridiculous.
  • Some of the costliest items on the TF2 Market tend to be stock item reskins (ex. Australium weapons, Botkiller weapons, high-tier Decorated weapons, etc.), meaning that if you want to show them off, you need to deal with not being able to reshape your loadout to what you want it to be.
    • The epitome of this are probably the Saxxy and the Golden Pan. They're among the rarest items in the game^note the former is obtained by winning the vote in the annual community-hosted Saxxy Awards, the latter is obtained from MvM with a less than 1% drop rate or bought from someone who owns one at the generally agreed-upon price of OVER 2,000 US DOLLARS, and in addition to the aforementioned "they're just stock reskins" problem, they're especially impractical on Spy, who lacks a dedicated backstab animation with these weapons and also creates easily identifiable golden statues with the class focused around being sneaky.
• Just Here for Godzilla: With its game modes, large variety of items and community that makes custom content, the game proposes a very varied gameplay, but it's not uncommon for many players to almost exclusively play a certain class (known as "maining"), a specific game mode, or even only play the game to collect certain items.

L

• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: The Scout, usually with Ukefication or other forms of Canon Defilement.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • In Team Fortress Comics #3, Scout's death is implied three times, whether by a bear whacking a skull off him, his heart stopping, or Soldier seeing a ghost wearing Scout's costume. Naturally, he's fine each time.
  • TF Comics #4 ends with Sniper shot in the chest by his TFC counterpart, and the next issue has his class emblem lying in a pool of blood as a cover. He dies... and then gets brought back to life by Medic.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Spy gets it the worst of any class in the game. Sure, he's the very definition of Difficult, but Awesome, as a competent Spy can absolutely terrorize a team and sow chaos behind their lines to allow your team to push the objective... but everything the Spy can do, another class can do better. Getting key picks? The Scout and Sniper can do that better, as Scout can get behind enemy lines faster and isn't done for if he's caught off guard, Sniper can get those picks from safety without having to spend time going behind the enemy lines, and both of them aren't completely boned after getting that first pick. Sentry busting? Both Soldier and Demoman can do that better without sacrificing survivability or damage output, as they both have effective tools to do so: Soldier can shoot rockets from outside Sentry range, and Demo can blind fire at a Sentry from safety. What if the sentry's in an awkward place neither of them can easily hit, or there's a giant sentry nest going on? Well, if it somehow devolves into that, an Uber Medic with help from a offensive class can often cause a massive push to destroy the sentry plus any others in an area being camped, on top of increasing the survivability of the entire team in the process. In short, while the Spy isn't a bad class per se, there's often very little reason to pick him over any other class.
    • It doesn't help that Spy creates a problem of Crippling Overspecialization. His One-Hit Kill capabilities makes him very attractive to new players who probably won't be able to use him effectively due to lack of experience, but even if all Spy players are sufficiently competent, too many Spies means too little frontline classes to push the objective or engage the enemy long enough for a Spy to do his work.
    • This, oddly, makes the Spy both a Skill Gate Character and Difficult, but Awesome, with their usefulness being mostly dependent less on the player's own skill and more on the skill gap between them and their opponents. In the disordered environment of a pub, a talented Spy can wreak havoc and effortlessly chainstab a whole team, but when the team is coordinated, even the best Spy will have to struggle to get off even one kill. On the other hand, an unskilled Spy is notoriously a complete liability.
    • And even if a Spy is skilled enough to be a help to his team, any chance of that can be undone just by the other side communicating, as the voice chat is instant, and team-only. If the other side is talking, there's no hope of a Spy being both stealthy and effective, as any victims will immediately inform their allies exactly what to look for and where to look. If a team is talking, the only way for a Spy to survive now is to instantly cloak and immediately haul ass. Any other tactics will work maybe twice before the other team changes their layout to counter them.
    • However this also is slightly mitigated in higher skill ceilings since the Spy's kit is insanely good, IF it is used right. Disguises work well for brief moments if the player is a good actor and knows the classes nuances, allowing for split second deceptions that can ruin a push. The cloak can allow you to get into the perfect position to exploit the opening and his other tools work in concert to make the spy the biggest menace in the game. The problem is that using all the Spy's tools like that is insanely difficult, more so than managing any other class, so most players never get to the level where they can keep up with the other classes, but those that do...
  • In Mann Vs Machine, high tier scrappies are not observed due to the cooperative PvE nature of the game. Low tier scrappies, though, are more relevant — Mann Vs. Machine only allows for 6 players at once and one unskilled and/or ill-equipped player can cost the entire team the game.
    • Prior to the Two Cities Update, frequent Mann Up players in the Mann Vs. Machine Mode considered the Medic to be the worst class to play, largely because Engineer was actually better at healing with his Dispenser^Why?Dispensers have the advantage of healing any number of people at once, while Medics can only heal one; the Scout can also throw Mad Milk and mark giants for death, allowing the team to both heal and deal mini-crits to the behemots, healing them immensely while depleting the robots' HP. Medics have the advantage of mobility, overheal, and uber, but none of those are very useful in a wave-defense game mode because you'll be trying to stay in the same location, the AI isn't coordinated enough to focus attacks at once (which are what makes overheal useful), and even with upgrades, ubers don't happen frequently enough to face the loads and loads of different enemies. and could do lots of damage with his sentry gun at the same time. Players going Medic were often the most likely to be kicked from games if they refused to switch class, or even before they got a chance to switch if they didn't have any previous Mann Up Tours displayed (which is the quickest way to identify new players to the mode). He was saved in the Two Cities update, which gave him such a massive buff^Specificallyhe was given the ability to revive players, a shield that can block incoming damage, and cheaper, better upgrades that he's now considered viable instead of or in addition to an Engineer. While Medic has mostly remained on the lower tiers in high-level play and is even seen as a crutch for good players, he nonetheless is no longer a "Trash-tier" class, though still badly overshadowed in most things by his teammates and is generally agreed to be in the meta for the Two Cities tour thanks to the abundance of crit spam making it rather stressful for other classes to play.
    • Spies and Snipers are some of the least-picked classes in MvM due to them being assassination classes in a game about clearing hordes of enemies who need players to be extremely competent to be good with them. Spy can compensate with a Sapper upgrade that lets him stun groups of robots and stab them from any angle, but the Sapper is also given a cooldown in this game mode, leaving the Spy rather defenseless shortly after attacking, although this can be almost nullified with the Dead Ringer, since robots will stop tracking you down the moment you run out of their range. Him needing to be in the thick of things also requires a fair number of resistance or speed upgrades; however it is generally agreed that a good Spy can tear through hordes of bots, slow giants, shred giant Medics (which even experienced players can struggle with) and even be a great cash collector thanks to his disguises, which will always fool robots except if you disguise in front of them (and even then all you have to do is run out of their sights and they'll forget about you since they never spycheck), still he requires a high level of skill ceiling and understanding of robot AI, which makes him beginner unfriendly. Sniper, on the other hand, has a very high skill floor — a competent player can tear through bots with explosive headshots as well as other classes, but an incompetent one becomes very dead weight. Both Spy and Sniper, being a form of Critical Hit Class, also become less effective against Tanks which have no weak point for easy headshots/backstabs, though the Sniper is better off due to having the Bushwacka (which deals critical hits when it would normally deal mini-crits). By loading that weapon up with Attack Speed increases provided you have the spare money to do it and getting a mini-crit buff from either a Soldier's Buff Banner or the Sniper's own Cleaner's Carbine (Jarate doesn't work due to Tanks being immune to debuffs), the Sniper can bang on Tanks with rapid attacks that deal 195 damage a hit, which does add up.
    • Pyro dips in and out of this status due to the class's niche roles in this mode, though mostly due to it being very attractive for beginners which can taint its actual competence. Airblast is good for pushing bots back and resetting the bomb, but unless the map you're playing on has pits or instant kill traps to cause an instant bomb reset, you're only delaying the bomb's movement while not giving a good contribution to damage which you need to clear the wave anyway and may even become a nuisance to your team since airblast can throw Sniper aim, Demoman's sticky traps, etc and is generally only seen as a good option if the bomb is near the last point and the team's been pushed far back. The Phlogistinator becomes useful for destroying Tanks, but this also sacrifices the utility of the airblast, though more competent teams (especially those with Snipers who want bots to stay on a straight line) will not mind since the free crits can greatly help tear down giants and hordes and Pyro can easily burn robots to do some chip damage to assist his team with kills. Pyro is also less effective as a damage class due to them being a Close-Range Combatant, forcing the player to have investments in resistances and mobility so that they not die too quickly in the midst of combat. Pyro would be rescued from this perceived status with the introduction of the Gas Passer, giving them access to burst damage for clearing out tight groups of robots or even picking off Medics like a Demo would. This makes Pyro and Demoman generally interchangeable in the game mode, even after the Gas Passer's nerf; though in turn many saw this as making Pyro too viable for his own good.

M

• Magnificent Bastard:
  • "The Engineer", real name Dell Conagher, is a brilliant inventor and mechanic. Capable of building astounding machines and equipped with an intelligent, level-headed demeanor, the Engineer proves extremely collected capable of feats like playing his guitar as his sentries mow down enemies and deploying a large turret in a heated firefight. The Engineer eventually finds himself in the service of Blutarch Mann, yet is not unwilling to threaten or berate his boss when he gets out of line, all the while continuing his work and making genius inventions to better kill his enemies while he sits on the sidelines, When Gray Mann takes over Mann Co., the Engineer disappears flawlessly and proceeds to work alongside the Administrator, keeping an eye on proceedings from the shadows and repairing her life extension machine. When the Administrator passes away temporarily, The Engineer quickly revives her and asks her about her goals, appalled and horrified when she reduces her lifespan to one year, yet having saved her life all the same.
  • "The Medic", real name Dr. Ludwig, is a brilliant Mad Scientist from Stuttgart with incomparable expertise and audacity. First introduced improvising a medical procedure after his patient's heart explodes and saving his team at the last second, the Medic is an utter genius who manages to succeed despite the insanity of his medical procedures, performing experiments and creating inventions that give the team major advantages. The Medic later ends up sidelined after the team is disbanded and joins their opposition, the Classic mercenaries, experimenting on them as well. The Medic eventually revives the Sniper and turns on the Classic Heavy for his mistreatment. After his death and the revelation that the Medic sold his soul to the devil, Medic proceeds to scam the devil by revealing he sewed his teammates' souls onto his own, returning to life and bluffing the Classic Heavy, playing a vital role in his defeat and proving to genuinely care for his teammates despite his immoral ways.
  • "The Sniper", real name Mr. Mick Mundy, is an expert assassin who lives by a simple code of efficiency and politeness. A levelheaded professional capable of absurd feats of marksmanship, the Sniper rarely loses his relaxed demeanor, even when in the heat of combat. Taking pride in his line of work yet never overindulging in it, the Sniper serves the team. Upon the team's disbanding, the Sniper retires to his old home, later ambushing and interrogating Miss Pauling and the Demoman about his biological parentage after discovering he was adopted. Upon learning he is in reality from the sunken city of New Zealand, the Sniper attempts to bond with his biological parents and ends up temporarily killed. After being validated by his adoptive parents in the afterlife, the Sniper returns to life and wastes no time in returning to his previous work, declaring himself to remain dangerous and even killing the cybernetically enhanced Classic Sniper, saving the Spy.
  • "The Spy" is a suave, professional French assassin who turns out to be the father of the Scout. Never short on snarky remarks or knives to shove into peoples backs, the Spy's introductory video shows him ruthlessly mowing down everybody on the opposing team, using his skills and acting abilities to take down the opposition one by one while hiding in plain sight as the Scout, ending the short victorious while fondly reminiscing over some photos of himself with the Scout's mother. Throughout the many wacky misadventures the mercs go through, Spy consistently proves himself to be a tremendously useful asset to the team, at one point defusing a situation involving the malicious Australian version of Santa Claus via instructing a child to let himself get captured and stab Santa in the neck. By the time of the final battle against the Classic team, Spy works well with his team to take them down, while taking some time out of the fight to comfort his son when he thinks he's dying.
  • Miss Pauling is the loyal assistant of the Administrator and a deadly killer behind a bookish exterior. Taking care of the mercenaries, covering up the evidence of Mann Co.'s crimes, and protecting assets, Pauling proves a brilliant manipulator as well, ensuring things go her way and taking extreme challenge in stride. When Mann Co. is taken over, Pauling reunites the team and works alongside them. Pauling saves the mercenaries from being executed at the hand of a lead-poisoned town, and saves herself and the Demoman by talking down the Sniper, always hunting the last Australium cache all the while. Eventually becoming an honorary member of the team and fighting alongside them, Miss Pauling repeatedly proves that she is loyal without fail to the Administrator, no matter the Administrator's end goals or what lengths Pauling must go to in securing them.
  • Helen, the Administrator, is the enigmatic head of TF Industries and the bombastic coordinator of the century-long turf war between the Mann brothers. Deliberately prolonging the war by giving both brothers — and herself — life-extending machines powered by Australium, the Administrator uses trickery and espionage to keep the mercs in line, assassinates anybody remotely problematic through her right-hand Miss Pauling, and manipulates the US senate into handing over their Australium reserve by promising to shoot a monkey into space. When suddenly blindsided by the appearance of Gray Mann, the Administrator swiped Mann Co.'s Australium supply under everyone's noses, and seized every last piece of it in the world over the course of several months through murder and deceit. When her supply runs out and she's forced to confront her own mortality, Helen downs the last vial of Australium she's got, ready to settle one final debt.
• Memetic Badass: Saxton Hale, both in-universe and out. The guy’s got comics depicting him being awesome and a fan made-mode where you get to either fight or play as him!
• Memetic Loser:
  • Just about every person who wears a Gibus will serve as the ultimate Butt-Monkey of the game and its fan animations. Bonus points if they also wear the Pyrovision Goggles (and optionally the Mercenary badge). As these are basically the only cosmetics available without spending actual money, wearing them automatically designates you as a free-to-play and therefore a noob.
  • The BLU Team in the Meet the Team videos, whose members always get killed one way or another by a member of the RED Team. There's even a series of machinimas that shows how incompetent they are!
  • For a non-character example, the launch map Hydro. Nearly every map in the game has at least some vocal fans, even the ones listed under this game's That One Level page, and you'll see people willingly vote to play So Okay, It's Average maps once in a while, but Hydro is the one map that near unanimously gets the whole room laughing for how little anyone likes it. It's so disliked that it's the one map that is almost impossible to find any active servers running it, even official ones (didn't exactly help Valve had it removed from the rotation for the longest time). Tellingly, the backlash against it was so widespread that its initial removal happened when the game still only had six maps, meaning people were willingly to block out what was then 17% of the game content just so they wouldn't have to see it again!
• Memetic Molester: Everyone, but the big three are the Spy (always right behind you and will f[bleep] you), the Medic (turn your head and cough! *glove snap*), and the Sniper (keeps his piss in a jar and lives in a van).
• Memetic Troll: Spy, big time. Acknowledged by Valve in the form of domination lines that mainly consist of immature insults and deranged laughter. Scout also qualifies due to his smug, obnoxious personality that the fanbase loves to milk for all it's worth.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: All the characters (with the exception of the Pyro) are psychopathic ethnic and national stereotypes taken so far that they become Crazy Is Cool.
• Misaimed Fandom: Heavy is often interpreted by fans as pure Dumb Muscle, with his loose grasp on English, incredibly simplistic fighting style, and obsession with his Sandviches as evidence of his lack of intelligence. Fans more familiar with the game's lore would correct them that Heavy is actually a Genius Bruiser who is actually quite well-versed in his native language, to the point of possessing a PhD in Russian Literature, and his broken English is due to it not being his first language. Despite how out-of-character it actually is, Heavy is still frequently portrayed as a complete idiot.
• Moe:
  • Due to their misplaced innocence, goofier taunt animations, and the fact that their gas mask gives them a sort of wide-eyed expression, there are fans that consider Pyro this.
  • For a non-human character, Silvia, the seal from pd_Selbyen, has elicited this due to being an adorable, round, big-eyed Sweet Seal.
• Most Wonderful Sound (or, cue Oh, Crap!):
  • "CHING CHING CHING CHING CHING CHING CHING!" — an opponent repeatedly receiving mini-crits because you set them on fire or chopped them with a "bleeder" weapon after they were hit with Jarate. (Or "CHOOM CHOOM CHOOM" if you have that sound effect disabled but damage display on.)
  • An allied Soldier playing his bugle.
  • "I AM FULLY CHARGED!" — a Medic ready to unleash eight seconds worth of awesome (invulnerability, critical hits, max heal rate + no knockback) or anywhere between two to eight seconds worth of a specific type of damage reduction and healing.
  • The musical stinger you get for a domination or revenge against someone.
  • The cheer for getting a fully-charged Demoman kill with the Eyelander and Charge n' Targe.
  • A baseball hit with the Sandman. "KERRRR!"
  • "Hooray!" You've unlocked another achievement!
  • "Victoryyy!"
  • The Original's firing sound. Arguably the only reason to use the thing. Oh, the nostalgia...
  • The "vszz POWWWWWWWWWWWW" that plays when the player gets a One-Hit Polykill with the Machina. Everyone on the server hears it.
  • The sound effect when you find a supply closet and heal/replenish ammo.
    • And whenever you pick up an ammo pack or Medkit when low on either (Double if it's a big pack, and triple if you're an Engineer low on metal). The delicious chunky *ch-khk* for ammo and *pl-fkss* for health.
  • The sound of a medigun in operation.
  • The sound of a Pyro successfully reflecting a projectile.
  • In Mann vs. Machine, a skilled enough player can push a bomb-carrying robot into a Bottomless Pit. This causes the Administrator to proclaim "Yes! The bomb has been sent back to the start!".
  • Getting A+ credit rating in MvM causes the announcer to congratulate you and give a bonus, which is very welcome, especially in Mann Up mode.
  • Also in Mann vs. Machine, the sound of a Giant or a Tank being destroyed. Especially if it was a particularly strong Giant or even a boss. Doubly especially if it was the last enemy in the wave/mission, or you killed it just as it was about to deploy the bomb.
  • The sound when you extinguish a team-mate with an airblast or Mad Milk/Jarate.
  • For those on Defense in Payload and Control Point maps, as well as the team holding the Control Point on King of the Hill: "Mission ends in sixty/thirty/ten seconds!"
  • The distinct sound that plays when you score a double donk with the Loose Cannon is extremely satisfying.
  • The electricity sounds of a crit-boost, whether it's the Frontier Justice's Revenge Crits, the Diamondback's backstab and sap crits, or the Kritzkreig's Ubercharge.
  • The Killstreak sound effect. Depending on who you're playing against, it can be difficult to break even in kills to deaths, let alone score five kills in one life. This sound exists solely to let you know you're kicking the other team's asses.

N-R

• Older Than They Think: The Scout's "Brother, I hurt people" line is loosely based on a quote attributed to Muhammad Ali.
  "It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand, I beat people up."
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • The "Meet the Medic" taunt has largely become this nowadays. Back when it was first released during the Uber Update, it was notable for being the only purchasable taunt that differed from the others, with a spectacular display of the Medic holding his Medigun while being surrounded by a holy glow and doves flying around him. Today, with the Mann Co. store now brimming with more impressive and interactive taunts, this taunt has pretty much lost its wow factor in the eyes of older players, and many newer players just don't understand what was so special about the taunt at the time because to them, it's just one of many taunts.
  • The three dance taunts where players would join in en masse (the Conga, the Kazotsky Kick, and the Mannrobics) have also become this to a lesser extent. Back when these were released, there would be huge line-ups of players dancing on any server you go to. This type of thing is rare outside of dedicated friendly servers nowadays, especially after the Meet Your Match Update, as the novelty has simply worn off and people just want to play the game. It does occur again whenever a new taunt of this type is added, but seems to have peaked with the Conga and Kazotsky Kick, and spontaneous dance parties are virtually extinct now.
  • The diversity in games cast can be seen a little bit bland today especially compared to games like Overwatch, having only one person of color and no women in its roster (discounting the Pyro for both cases). However when the game came out in 2007 the cast was seen as a breath of fresh air from most other shooters at the time which had very realistic and grounded characters compared to TF2's cartoonish and lively characters with a wide variety of body shapes.
• Pandering to the Base: Valve takes a lot of stuff in TF2 from the community. The Magical Mercenary hat really stands out, as it's a very obvious appeal to bronies, of which there are many that play TF2 and Gaben himself.
• Paranoia Fuel: Any time you round a corner, you could find yourself face to face with any one of the other classes (or a sentry) out to kill you. At least you can hear them... most of the time.
  • See that little red (or blue) dot darting all over the place? An enemy Sniper, camping who knows where, racking up headshots.
  • As an Engineer, you either start shooting at anyone who so much as glances at your buildings, or you end up with a sapper on your sentry and a knife in your back. It's not the Engie's only worry, though — another thing to worry about are Snipers, since you don't know where they're camping and you're especially vulnerable when carrying a building before deploying due to the agility drop.
  • Hearing the beep of a sentry, but unable to see where it is. Especially if you hear it in a building with several tight corners, or alternatively, the higher pitched beeps of a mini sentry in an area with lots of bushes to hide one in.
  • Spies can turn invisible and sneak up on you. Also, they are masters of disguises, and are especially scary if they're wielding the "Your Eternal Reward" knife, which silently kills its victim and instantly disguises as him. There's not even a killfeed alerting the other team. If a teammate announces over AllTalk or TeamTalk "spy is me" or something to that effect, you'd better pay attention to the name of the teammate making the announcement, and start shooting at that alleged "teammate" if he is nearby. Bad Spies are just cannon fodder, but good Spies will milk the hell out of this trope.
    • The Dead Ringer watch takes the Fuel to another level. You can't cloak on demand, but if you get hit, you "die" and turn invisible, complete with your fake corpse (and fake killfeed) dropping on the floor. If you are disguised as another class, the Dead Ringer drops a fake corpse of that class instead. Was that enemy Spy you just killed really dead? Was that enemy Medic you just killed actually a Medic, or another Spy, who isn't actually dead?
    • Spies themselves have it bad if not worse, as they have to be able to pass off as one of the enemy team convincingly and there's the constant worry that enemies will catch on to their disguise, and being caught deep in enemy territory with possibly little or no supporting teammates around is ten kinds of bad news. Woe betide them if there are Pyros on the enemy team and said Pyros are savvy enough to regularly make those "spy check" flame bursts.
• Popular Game Variant: Highlander is a 9v9 matchup with one of each class is a popular format for both casual and competitive play for constraining overpowered classes and encouraging great breadth of tactics.
• Popular with Furries: This game has a surprisingly large furry fanbase, which is baffling since there isn't anything that would appeal to furries in particular. The character who seems to attract furries the most is the Pyro, to the extent that a common joke about Pyro mains is that they're all furries.
• Porting Disaster:
  • A bit of a retroactive one, but the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of TF2 have never been updated from launch (in the case of the Xbox 360 version, it was because Microsoft demanded that updates adding content to the game absolutely MUST be paid DLC bundles, and for the PS3 version, Valve had no say in updating it since the port was made by EA, who has bigger priorities), making them seem incredibly bare-bones compared to the non-Console releases. Anything that files under the main page's Early-Installment Weirdness applies to the console versions too.
  • The Mac version of Team Fortress 2 was always problematic, with a long-standing memory leak issue going back to 2009, which enforced medium texture settings. It no longer even functions due to post-2018 Apple software dropping support for 32-bit applications, which, while that isn't Valve's fault, Valve then not updating the game to include a 64-bit version that would solve the issue (as they had done with Counter Strike: Global Offensive) is something they could've done. Even after several years, the game is continuing to advertise the game as Mac compatible for TF2 when it's still clearly broken. Even when TF2 actually received 64-bit support on 18th April, 2024, the Mac version was conspicuously absent, something CS2 also lacked when upgrading from Global Offensive; the implication being that Valve don't want to make a port. Now, to play the game on Mac devices, you require third-party workaround programs that allow you to download the Windows version, such as BootCamp or GeForce.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • The July 10, 2013 patch buffed a bunch of weapons that were deemed underpowered, most notably the Quick-Fix. It was previously hated for its inability to overheal and having it's ubercharge rendered useless if the Medic has no companion to heal (unlike the stock Medigun). After the patch, it can provide 50% of the overheal of the stock medigun, and its ubercharge now heals the Medic when he's alone. The weapon damn near instantly became loved after the patch.
  • The Medic was always considered the worst class to have in Mann Vs. Machine since they didn't contribute any damage to robots or Tanks and their ability to heal was a moot point thanks to Health on Kill upgrades combined with the fact that the players would camp the Engineer's Dispenser (which would also gimp their Ubercharge building rate). The Two Cities Update in November 2013 gave him the borderline Game-Breaker Shield upgrade that could damage robots while protecting everyone, made it so he could revive fallen teammates on the spot to circumvent the respawn times, and made his upgrades cheaper. The Medic quickly replaced the Pyro as one of the "mandatory" classes for any respectable team in the mode after the update.
  • The Sydney Sleeper was originally dismissed as a useless "noob" weapon, due to it trading in critical headshots for applying Jarate to targets. Later patches both buffed the Sleeper, giving it the ability to inflict Jarate in an area with headshots and fully-charged bodyshots as well as letting it extinguish burning teammates by shooting them, and introduced The Classic, which is generally considered worse than the Sydney Sleeper had ever been. While it's still not the most popular Sniper weapon, the Sydney Sleeper is no longer derided like it once was.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Medic. Valve is very definite that he's not a Nazi; he's really no crazier than any other member of the team. At most, his experiments are dangerous and reckless, but clearly his teammates agree to them in the first place in place for amazing powers like the ÜberCharge. Also, the Soldier never calls the Medic a Nazi, not even in domination lines to the opposing Medic, yet some fanfics give the Soldier this characterization anyway. He's also never seen being homophobic, but that's the way some slash fics would have him.
  • Spy. While not saintly by any means, he's no worse than his cohorts and the fact that a number of the setting's Heartwarming Moments involve him in some way points toward him being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold. However, many fans take his Manipulative Bastard status and often crude or antagonistic voicelines and flanderize him into a purely evil monster. There is also plenty of fan work portraying him as a sexual predator, even though there's not much if anything hinting at such a thing and the Red Spy's canon relationship with Scout's Ma is shown as genuine and loving.

S

• Sacred Cow:
  • Still seen as one of the most fun games Valve has produced even a decade after its initial release, even with its outdated and Scrappy Mechanics. As Tycho described:
    "Love for Team Fortress 2 is so universal that people generally assume I’m 'trollin' when I say so, but I might actually hate it."
  • Riffing on the dated or disliked gameplay mechanics is fair game. Riffing on the art style, design and the characters (from a 'story' perspective) on the other hand...
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Bots. Despite the hype at the time where Bots are finally introduced within the game, they turn out to be pretty stupid on your side and pretty aggressive on the opposing side. That, and with the exception of medic callout or Ubercharge activation, there is no way to directly command bots.
  • No mechanic in this game is more scrappy than the Autobalance. Tales have been told of people switched to the losing side at the last second. They are never positive. If you just destroyed a major sentry nest, die to a backstab, then get autobalanced, congratulations! You just helped your new opponents win.
    • The short pre-round period in Arena isn't immune, either. If someone on either team leaves, causing the teams to be unbalanced, a player on the team with more players will be put on the opposite team... but the game won't bother putting them in the other spawn area, leaving the auto-balanced player immediately surrounded by "enemies".
    • Eventually, Valve announced that the Meet Your Match Update would do away with autobalance. At first, people were rejoicing. But then the update came out, and people quickly began to miss it after discovering firsthand how one-sided matches can become if the servers don't autobalance. Players on the losing team leave, which results in their team losing harder, making more players leave in a vicious cycle. Once it gets out of hand, new players can't be added fast enough to replace those leaving, and either the remaining players on the losing team get spawncamped or the server dies. Valve soon re-balanced it, by asking players to volunteer to switch when the teams become imbalanced; in return, the re-balanced players get bonus experience points at the end of the match. Unfortunately, this wasn't really enough either, as experience points are largely worthless and most players weren't willing to make the sacrifice of joining a losing team, thus Valve made the system force switch a player if no one volunteered, and eventually removed the asking for a volunteer step altogether.
  • Mann Co. Supply Crates. For good reason.
    • The Cases from the Gun Mettle and Tough Break updates don't have it much better. Among the campaigns handing them out as rewards (nice job on that contract, here's a free opportunity to spend $2.49!), they're very likely to give you shoddy skins that are barely worth a dime on the Community Market.
  • Much of anything to do with the Mann Co. Store, or the Mann Co. Supply Crates in general. Given that many of the items are seen as grossly overpriced (especially Paint, Name Tags and Keys, given what they actually do), a large number of people would simply ignore the store... if items from the store weren't blatantly advertised on the game's menu screen every time a player started up the game. Then there's also the people who swap Bill's Hats, Mac Earbuds, and Max's Severed Heads around like currency, or the ones who pay hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars for Keys and Unusual hats.
  • There's also the dueling mechanic and Map Stamps, to a lesser extent. Sure, getting free items for dueling against someone on the other team isn't such a bad thing in and of itself, and purchasing stamps to donate money to map makers is actually a good thing... were these things not shoved in front of everybody's faces on the loading screens. This means that, whether you like it or not, you're forced to read about which of your friends are the top duelists in the game, or which random player decided to blow a good $980 on Map Stamps just for the World Traveler's Hat effect. Thankfully, mods exist to remove these.
    • Dueling itself is also annoying. Even if you ignore the duel challenges from Munchkins (which can get annoying if they continue to spam you even after you decline the first one), the game feed still notifies everybody whenever someone scores a point in a duel. On top of this, players who are locked in a duel tend to ignore the map objectives and go straight for their opponent at first sight, which can literally cost you the round. This can be especially telling when you're just about to finish capturing the final point with 20 seconds left on the clock, and the Scout who's adding x2 to the capture rate suddenly runs away to shoot at the Sniper on the other end of the map, leaving you high and dry to deal with the swarm of enemies just arriving.
  • The "Instaspawn" and "Alltalk" server settings can be annoying to some people; neither has any place in a serious game (Instaspawn completely blows map balance to pieces, easily resulting in a perpetual stalemate, while Alltalk makes team communication fairly meaningless when the enemy can hear everything you say). While they're completely optional (and non-default) settings, it can often be rather difficult to find a populated (but not full) server which does not use them.
  • The Queue system in Mann Vs. Machine. Not everyone enjoys waiting up to 10 minutes just to enjoy a game. And even if you make it to the end of the queue, there's a 10% chance that you'll end up with a message saying that the server did not respond after 4 tries, or a 1% chance of getting booted off just a few seconds later with a message saying that the slot is reserved or your ping is too high. This is followed by re-entering the queue and waiting all over. If you're particularly unlucky, it can take several tries and a good chunk of the day. It's no wonder people are frustrated.
    • Or you can land on Snakewater. Which isn't even a Mann VS Machine map.
    • Purists are also irked that sometimes you end up on a server with several weird mods installed or tweaked gameplay as well.
    • And while we're at it, people are also frustrated that a single server will only allow 6 players into the game at any given time. This is because robot players occupy the server slots like humans do. More than 6 human players would mean less bots to fight.
    • On the other hand, some people tend to complain about servers that allow more than 6 people at once. Since all the Mann VS Machine missions were created with a 6-player team in mind, having more basically makes it easier, even if you completely ignore any strategy or tactics (you just overpower the robots). Same with servers that give bonus cash at the beginning.
    • Or how about attempting to join a server with a group, and then getting kicked for no apparent reason? Okay, but you can just re-join your group (assuming at least one of them is a friend) through the server browser, or accepting an invite from someone in the group? Nope, ad hoc connections are not allowed, but some random player can join through the queue through dumb luck, essentially locking you out if you try to join through the queue.
  • Motd (message of the day) advertising will often force you to watch it for several seconds before allowing you to close it. While this is understandable (if annoying) when you first join a server, the biggest issue is that this can pop up even when you respawn. On a team with shorter respawn times, this often means the motd lasts longer than the respawn itself.
  • The Set Bonus mechanic is disliked for several reasons:
    • 1: In addition to the weapons, many of them required a hat in order to gain their effect, and hats are much harder (or more expensive) to find than weapons. It doesn't help that only two of them actually have a downside when the hats are equipped.
    • 2: Since the set bonus can only work if all the items are equipped, this discouraged players from using any of them without the others, limiting player variety.
    • 3: Because these weapons had to be balanced together as a set, this often meant one of them was overpowered or underpowered by itself.
    • 4: It was difficult to determine if someone was actually using the set bonus since not every item would be visible, e.g. players couldn't tell if the Scout had extra health or if the Sniper was immune to headshots. This was such an issue that Valve decided to change it so the set bonus was split across the individual weapons, while the sets would provide a new bonus that didn't affect gameplay balance.
  • Some servers have a mod that punishes spawn-campers: if you kill too many people in spawn, it automatically kills you. It's understandable, but on maps where the enemy spawn is exposed (like Badwater Basin or Dustbowl stage 1), it is far too easy to shoot into the spawn and get yourself killed. Sometimes, however, the mod will kill you anyway, even if you didn't get a kill and only inflicted damage on people in spawn. Infuriatingly, this means you can't kill Snipers that like to hang out in the spawn of Badwater Basin without being punished, while they are free to attack.
  • Quickplay is frustrating, to say the least. One of the major flaws is that if you try to get it to automatically bring you into a server, the game will report hundreds, if not thousands, of servers meeting your criteria... and then getting an error that there were no servers available that matched your criteria. This can even happen if you make the search criteria as broad as possible. And even if you get past this, you'll invariably get put onto an empty server.
  • Random crits. They're hated for pushing certain skirmishes into having luck based outcomes, as a cornered player could randomly get lucky with one of their weapons and blow the effort their pursuer(s) spent in trying to kill them. It doesn't help that they're considered The Artifact from the game's pre-update phase.
    • In a smaller vein, there are crits on capture in Capture the Flag. Imagine, you're closing in on an enemy that you believe is close to death, ready to take them out, then... "You failed! The enemy has secured our intelligence!" and now you're dead from a crit that you received only because an enemy managed to capture your intel unchecked.
  • Halloween restrictions. While they are reasonable on some things that are overtly paranormal (such as the Voodoo Cursed Souls), they are also put onto items that could reasonably be worn at any other time. On the other hand, some "paranormal" items (such as the Wandering Wraith and Eye-See-You) lack this restriction.^note Likely due to being graded cosmetics, as Halloween restricted items do not come with grades.
  • Lag compensation. The idea is that a server would intentionally delay processes to put low-ping and high-ping players on an even playing field, but lag compensation's responsible for the game's terrible melee hit registration, as well as other oddities, such as disparities in Demoknight and Pyro duels, and facestabs.
    • The game's shoddy hitreg just makes itself overly blatant at times. You could get a headshot on an enemy and see a blood decal on their head and nothing would happen, while you could be fighting a Spy with melee and see him perform the backstab animation as you're dying.
  • Items are tied to item servers, instead of individual copies of the game. While this does help prevent people from tampering with the game to give themselves particularly valuable items, it means that an outage can rob players of their unique weapons and outfits. To rub salt into the wound, an item server outage usually doesn't affect all players at the same time.
  • Contract rewards. Doesn't matter if you bent over backwards as a class you never play, or got your friends to help you, your reward is all too likely to be a Civilian grade weapon with a hideous wear level, or a case which will require you to pay money for a key.
  • Quite a few people really don't like the new grading system being applied to hats and skins. Besides the fact that it's an obvious carryover from CS:GO, many people feel that adding tiered skins and cosmetics is unnecessary and that it creates artificial rarity based on the tiering and not if a cosmetic actually looks good.
  • The Competitive matchmaking abandon marking system is pretty awful. While it punishes those who leave a game intentionally, it doesn't take into account the circumstances that a leaving player is under. It even punishes people who didn't even join a server due to, for example, the "ad hoc connections not allowed, matchmaking only" disconnect error which can happen using the matchmaking service.
    • On the other side of people who can and do play, whenever somebody leaves, the game doesn't hand out rewards or penalties, meaning someone on the losing team can Rage Quit and rob the winning team of their hard-earned experience. Fortunately, this has since been fixed.
    • And on the topic of experience, it's way too easy to lose point through a loss. Win 4 games in a row? Your loss the next round will eliminate all that progress, and then some. A patch reduced MMR lost for lower rank players, making getting out of Fresh Meat a feasible task.
    • As if it wasn't bad enough, for some reason, if you play through a game, complete it with no one abandoning, win, and receive a gold medal for one or more of your point groups, you may end up losing experience! However, this is thought to be a bug resulting from losing, disconnecting before the game fully registers the loss, and the game reorienting the progress bar on a win.
  • In order to secure points for your contract, you must continue to play until the round ends; disconnecting before then erases all of the progress you made during said round. This can make contracts much more frustrating to complete on long-lasting maps, such as 2Fort, Hightower (both of which are prone to stalemates) and Ghost Fort (which has the timer last 7 minutes and pause whenever Merasmus spawns). It gets completely blood-boiling when you finish a round with 90+ of the 100 points you need, meaning that you have to play through a whole match just to acquire the last few. The possibility of crashes, connection errors, or being kicked by a Troll doesn't help.
  • Souls in Halloween events take a couple seconds after they spawn to make their way to you. If you die during that brief period, you won't be able to collect the soul(s). Usually a mild inconvenience, but becomes very annoying during contracts, as collecting souls is the primary way of earning points. Capturing a control point or defeating a Halloween boss will drop a ton of souls to significantly speed up the contract, but if you die right when that happens, you won't earn a single point of progress.
  • Valve Anti-Cheat. While not specific to TF2 (as it's also used in CS2 and other Valve games), TF2 has just gotten the brunt of its limitations and problems. Unlike any other anti cheat on the market, VAC runs in userspace, not on the kernel level, and relies a lot on manual ban waves triggered by Valve every so often to cull their games of cheaters. Four issues with this approach when it comes to TF2:
    • Firstly, VAC straight-up does not work on TF2. As of 2024, it has been ineffective at deterring cheaters due to a full-on Bot Crisis that started in 2020 specifically co-ordinated by cheaters and hackers to make the game hard to play by legitimate players. Each match, a whole gaggle of Snipers join a game with perfect aim and kill everyone they see, and then leave again, and the cycle would continue, filling up matches with more bots. Even if they're all voted off and reported, the matchmaker now has to work overtime to find suitable replacement players to fill the teams again...which can include bots. This problem has persisted to this day, making playing casual servers borderline frustrating in some regions, and outright impossible in others.
    • Second, it running in userspace has a very big downside; not installing itself as a driver may be better for the end-users' peace of mind and security, but it also means it cannot easily detect any cheating tools running at the kernel level, which is precisely why other solutions like EAC, Battleye and FACEIT do this to begin with. Valve have tried throwing machine learning at the problem, with some success initially, but no long-term results that would satisfy players, to the point where many players are convinced they cannot fix the problem.
    • Third, there's very little players can do to effectively report cheaters, and while the game has a replay system, it can't be used in conjuction with reports; something CS:GO (and later, CS2 via an update) can do with its Overwatch system.
    • And finally, ban waves seem a good idea on the surface, except that these sniper bots ruining games are automated as they used dummy or stolen accounts, meaning if a large swathe of bots get banned, then more bots will be spun up by the cheaters to compensate not long after, meaning the status quo never changes, and players are put off from participating in matches.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Some players love unusual and unnecessarily difficult playstyles, just for the heck of it:
  • "Trolldier" consists of using a Soldier equipped with the Rocket Jumper, Mantreads, and Market Gardener. The Soldier gains incredible mobility at the cost of removing his best source of damage, relying only on feats of acrobatics to land Critical Hits on unsuspecting enemies. Hightower matches tend to have lots of these players.
  • "Fat Scout" consists of a Heavy who relies on his Shotgun for damage. Being the slowest class in the game and using what's meant to be his last-ditch secondary weapon (which is vastly inferior to the miniguns in most ways), he must be able to ambush his opponents and attack from close range to get the best out of it. About the only upside over an actual Scout is his high health, but this hardly makes up for the utter lack of dodging ability.
  • Anyone trying to get kills with taunt attacks also qualifies.
  • The "worst loadout" challenge requires the user to use the worst possible item combination for a class. For example, the "worst loadout" for the Soldier would be the Rocket Jumper, Gunboats, and Pain Train. The Rocket Jumper does no damage whatsoever, the Gunboats is a waste of an item spot because the user doesn't take self-damage, and the Pain Train's effect only matters in modes with Control Points or a Payload cart, as well as forcing a slight bullet damage vulnerability on the user. The hard part: being successful with this loadout.
  • Getting kills with the Fan o'War, a Scout melee weapon. It has the ability to mark an opponent for death, causing all damage they take to mini-crit for a while. A very useful ability if you then switch to another weapon, but it also does 75% less damage than Scout's already lower-than-most melee damage, so you might as well be hitting them with wet tissue paper. An update did give it the ability to fully crit players who are marked for death, but even a crit from this weapon does less damage than the Scout's other melees without a crit, let alone the massive damage your primary weapon at melee range with the mini-crit boost can do.
• Sequel Displacement: Obviously, when there's a "2" in the title, almost everybody knows that there was a "1", but you'd be hard pressed to find a TF2 fan who's played Team Fortress Classic, let alone any variant of the original Team Fortress 1.
• Ship Mates: The most popular ship, Heavy/Medic, is at the same time arguable since a Demoman domination response mentions the Medic has a wife... but that's not stopping Valve, and artist Makani, from teasing it mercilessly. Much has been made of the epic bromance between Soldier and Demoman, and a deeply disturbing ship-tease may be being hinted at with Engie and Pyro. It's become metatextual with the "Something Special For Someone Special", a high priced wedding ring set that a player can gift to a loved one. Of course, the upsurge of Pyro/Medic from fans has served to further complicate things.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: There are a great deal of custom gamemodes to play in case you get bored of the built-in ones. These range from small modifications like Randomizer or x10, to new playstyles like Vs. Saxton Hale or Zombie Fortress, and to out-of-the-ordinary minigames like PropHunt, TF2Ware, or DeathRun. Additionally, there are many servers which focus more on trading and/or achievements, making combat almost entirely optional. With so many custom maps and mods to choose from, players have been known to spend a huge fraction of their overall playtime on community servers alone.
• Spiritual Licensee: TF2 is often compared to The Incredibles, as they share a similar art style, a saxophone-dominant score, draw heavy influence from James Bond and are both set in The '60s, as well as the early 1970s.
• Squick:
  • Zepheniah Mann's Will is a Played for Laughs Trauma Conga Line for the unfortunate old man, until you get to the bottom of the first page...
  "Possessing no paper in this godforsaken land, I have penned this on my own skin, which has sloughed off in quantity since contracting impetigo."
  • The Heavy's surgery, which takes up most of "Meet the Medic". It's in a cartoony style, so it's not that bad, but it's still fairly gross.
  • What's one of the two ways you can craft Mad Milk? Using reclaimed metal and Jarate. Mad Milk's description, by the way, is "non-milk substance".
  • Speaking of the Milk and Jarate, Strange versions of these can get hilarious at certain milestones. "Gore-Splattered" Jarate and "Wicked Nasty" Mad Milk generate some...interesting imagery.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • Don't even dare to step into Mann Up mode unless you're very intimate with the metagame, or you'll get booted without a second thought. Playing as Sniper or Spy? Trying to utilize Medic's Mad Milk Syringes? Not specializing your Scout to pick up money, slow down robots or mark them for death? Clearly, you don't want to win. STAR_ discusses the metagame in this commentary, as well as deconstructing Complacent Gaming Syndrome by showing himself doing very well as a Spy and a damage-oriented Scout.
  • Spy players in general will be mocked tirelessly because they're supposedly the "worst class in the game," despite the class having bar-none the most unique and interesting interactions in the entire game, which is why many newer players are drawn to him.

T

• That One Attack:
  • Airblast really ticks off many players. It pushes you away, disorients you, and (prior to its rework) you can't airstrafe to try to get out of it. It also reflects projectiles, which tends to drive Soldiers who go without the Shotgun up the wall.
  • The Halloween spell Ball O' Bats. Being hit by it causes bleed and flings you a ridiculous distance up into the air, most likely condemning you to an embarrassing death by fall.
  • The Ball O' Lightning spell is even worse. When hit by it, you get stunned inside of the giant ball of lightning as it slowly kills you off, and unless you have invincibility from some source you're often doomed to die.
  • The Summon Skeletons spell, mostly because it spawns forth a bunch of Goddamned Bats.
  • The Sandman/Cleaver combo, up until the Jungle Inferno update. While it's mildly difficult to do, it's very annoying to fight and be killed by because the Sandman's stun makes you helpless and the Cleaver is essentially a one shot if you get stunned.
  • Medics absolutely revile the Engineer's Pomson 6000 as it drains 10% of Uber meter on hit. Given how game-changing Uber pushes are, a stray Pomson hit right before one will effectively shut it down. It can be avoided by activating Uber before coming out of cover, but this is often considered suboptimal Uber use.
• That One Boss:
  • Merasmus. He has an absolute ton of health and resists miniguns and flamethrowers. He has a highly damaging, if not One-Hit Kill melee attack. He spams bombs everywhere. He launches those who are close to him in the air and ignites them. He teleports. A lot. And when you get his health down to half, he disappears and props are spawned all over the map. You have to find the proper one and destroy it for him to reappear, and if luck's not on your side, he will do it again right when you've almost killed him. And to make all this worse, you've got a mere 90 seconds to do him in. This makes it just about impossible to kill him without a coordinated effort from both teams- and even that may not work.
  • Sergeant Crits and Major Bomber, the final bosses of Broken Parts and Disintegration from Operation Mecha Engine. Both of them have titanic amounts of HP, significant health regeneration, a variety of resistances and weapon buffs, and burst-fire weapons that fire a deluge of crit-boosted explosives, which will kill anyone not building resistances several times over, while still potentially killing anyone who did max out resistances. It's especially bad with Sergeant Crits, as he has higher stats and his rockets lack the speed penalty found on his lesser brethren. While they're the only enemies on their wave outside of support enemies, they can easily dismantle an unprepared team all by their lonesome, before regenerating off all the damage dealt.
  • The Chief Heal-on-kill Deflector Heavy fought on the final wave of Empire Escalation. It boasts 60,000 health that can be swiftly recovered via simply killing a player or two to undo an entire team's hard work, and has the firepower to do so easily; its titanic bulk is further exacerbated by it wielding the Deflector to neuter your DPS powerhouses like Soldiers and Demomen. Furthermore, it also spawns with several Force-a-Nature Super Scouts and a legion of Concheror Soldiers, the former of which will bum-rush the gates while the boss is providing a distraction, and the latter of which will give the boss lifesteal to make it even harder to put down.
• That One Sidequest: For the Jungle Inferno update, Valve really cranked up the difficulty on some of the contracts.
  • Many of the "Do X enough times in one life" objectives. You have to be really good at the game in order to achieve these, since progress towards one point of these resets on death - you can't just play many rounds to grind out these objectives.
  • The Thermal Thruster's bonus objectives require you to extinguish teammates or push back enemies with your launch animation. Because the Thermal Thruster is very slow, either with preparing it or actually launching, you can't expect to do this a lot of times in a firefight without dying. And because of its tiny area of effect and momentum before launching, trying to launch while moving can easily cause you to miss even when teammates are cooperating with you to help on the contract.
  • The Hot Hand first has a very strict requirement - nine Pyroland stars needed to unlock it, which means you need to finish every single bonus Pyroland objective, including the Thermal Thruster described above. While the contract itself looks rather simple — getting multiple kills with the Hot Hand — it's a lot trickier in practice. In normal play, like with most other Pyro melee weapons, you'd have an easier time killing an enemy with your flamethrower than with your melee, not to mention the amount of effort it takes to slap a person to death. This means the most efficient way to finish the contract is in Medieval Mode, and even then you're prone to being outranged by the Demoknights there.
  • The "Expert (class)" contracts. The main objective tends to be "Dominate a player as (class)", with side objectives being "MVP as (class)" and the aforementioned "Do X enough times in one life". Especially if the three available classes for the contract are none that you main. If you don't have a friend who is good at that class, then you're hot out of luck.
  • "Defend the (map objective)". For one, the objective is very oddly worded (it refers to killing people who are trying to capture the map objective, not preventing capture by standing near the cart or on the point). Then there's the fact that the objective requires a lot of points to be completed - thirty individual defense kills. And, because you have to defend the map objective, you're relying heavily on the skill of both teams, not just yours - you can't do this objective if the attacking team is absolutely crushing you, nor if the defending team just completely prevents anyone from touching the map objective.
  • The Gunslinger Contract. You have to kill 3 people with the gunslinger. Sounds easy right? Wrong. You can't use your mini-sentry, you have to melee-kill them. This wouldn't be a huge annoyance, were it not for the caveat of the Gunslinger being the only melee weapon in the game with guaranteed crits after you hit the same person three times in a row. It's insanely difficult pulling this off on any of the normal game modes in Casual, and you only stand a chance of completing it on Medieval Mode, which itself comes with the problem of Engineer being basically the worst class in that mode (mainly because his main gimmick, Buildings, don't exist in the mode and his melee weapons are mostly not built for fighting).
  • The Phlogistinator contract demands that you kill 5 enemies while crit-boosted in a single life. Unless you manage to stay alive long enough to charge the MMMPH meter twice (which is hard enough since the lack of an airblast makes the Pyro easy prey for any remotely competent Soldier), you better hope you get a good enough flank or a pocket medic to kill almost half the enemy team. 10 times.
  • Any of the Map-Specific contracts for some of the more stalemate-prone maps, namely 2Fort, Turbine, and Hightower. Regardless of whether or not you think they're fun to play on, what makes them That One Sidequest is the restriction that you can't turn in a contract until a round ends. Since they're very prone to stalemates, expect to have to just grind away at a map for a long time.
    • What makes this one worse is that the 2Fort and Turbine contracts are the very first ones in the Map Contract tree. So if you're struggling to get these done, you don't get to do the other contracts on maps that actually end. The only saving grace is that, if you find an example of these maps that have gone Friendly^note read: not doing any fighting and just dancing in mid, you can ask if you could just grind out the contract and end the round when done; most of the time they'll understand. Most.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Let's just say the community can get fired up at the drop of a hat.^note After so many updates that provide the community with more hats or new weapons, much of the community erupts in anger whenever another item update comes about; it's to the point where many have begun to switch to a completely vanilla server to get away from it all. The "Hatless Update", an update with no new hats or weapons at all and simply fixes balance issues and other small gameplay bits was met with much warmth.
  • Pyro's voice lines from the Scream Fortress 2013 update sound very different from the original ones, being higher pitched and much less muffled, which of course produced outcry from Pyro players. Fortunately, there's a mod available that alters the new voice clips to sound more like Pyro's other lines. Valve themselves later altered the Scream Fortress lines during the Bread Update.
  • Some weapons that got nerfed ended up being considered some of the worst weapons in the game, such as the Eureka Effect and Axtinguisher.
  • A lot of weapons got this treatment after the Gun Mettle Update. The Loch-and-Load was seen as obscenely overpowered before, now the same people who saw it as overpowered are seeing it as useless, the Detonator is falling out of favor due to it's new damage penalty, which makes it do less damage against enemies by itself than to the user (the one wearing the fireproof suit, no less!) when using the blast jump, and the Baby Face's Blaster is now worthless in Mann vs Machine as the boost will invariably get erased as soon as it's accumulated. The worst case was very likely the Ullapool Caber, as the severe damage nerf rendered it unable to One-Hit Kill even the weaker classes, which was previously the weapon's only real selling point.
  • A Demoman taunt was posted on the Steam Workshop, involving him playing the bagpipes and dancing. It was added in the Tough Break update... and the absolutely wonderful song he played was changed into an incredibly mangled attempt at anything recognizable. Fans were not happy about this, and felt that the TF2 team was exaggerating Demoman's known alcoholism, or the stereotypical horrid sound of bagpipes.
  • After gifting through gift wrap was oddly disabled during the 2015 holiday season, the dev team brought gift wrap back a few months later... but removed the ability to wrap untradable items, as well as gifts now being sent through the Steam trading interface, and thus being subject to trade holds, and thus destroying any reason to actually use gift wrap.
  • Meet Your Match brought about a change that was poorly received; Casual Matchmaking. Quickplay was replaced by a matchmaking system all too resemblant of the one for Competitive matchmaking. A whole slew of problems had people who played on Valve pub servers giving up on the game (at least for a short while):
    • While you can choose which gamemodes you want to play, the problem was, that current system only allowed you to omit three gamemodes, meaning there was always some gamemode you didn't want to play, which ties into the next problem...
    • There were abandoner penalties for Casual, essentially forcing you to play through a gamemode or map you don't like, or else risk being banned from all official servers temporarily!
    • It took close to an hour to join a server, whereas before it was a few clicks and a few minutes away. The tedium was further compounded by servers only running two rounds of one map, sometimes not even a full two rounds^note Payload and Attack/Defend maps were set up in "Time Attack" mode, meaning all BLU had to do was beat the other team's distance record, which could range from the whole map to the first objective before booting everyone out. Players saw that casual mode screen quite often.
    • Autobalance was removed, and new players did not join to replace anyone who left. This creates a Vicious Cycle of a team losing slightly which caused people on that team to leave the game, which causes the team to lose harder and more people leave the game.
    • And finally, to rub salt in the wound, random crits STILL haven't been removed despite all the motions towards making casual mode more like competitive.
    • The day after the update, Valve announced the removal of casual abandon penalties, and promised to fix many of the issues plaguing Casual matchmaking within a reasonable timeframe. In fact, most of these issues were patched out by the end of 2016.
  • A bit of a minor one, but very few people liked the change made to the Starboard Crusader^note It was originally Jotaro Kujo's hat, but a change that came within a day removed the pins (and thus, the JoJo reference), especially with the rumor spreading that it took one person on 4chan to ruin it for everyone else.
• Theme Pairing: The Batter from OFF and the Scout are shipped because they both use baseball bats as weapons. Later, it became an One True Threesome with the addition of Leon Kuwata from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, who is also a baseball player.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Sniper's parents. With the Team fired and Sniper returning home, there was a possibility of dwelling on the relations in the Mundy family, or explaining why weren't they affected by the Australium. We got none of those: they died offscreen and it turned out they weren't his real parents. One issue later they're briefly shown in heaven and it seems they accepted his son's life choices before they died.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The end of the Halloween map Gravestone has a bumper kart minigame ala Carnival of Carnage. The minigame itself is a race to the finish - cool, since it's not already a thing implemented in the game, but also, executed rather horribly. The track can be run through in less than a minute (and, if nobody makes it to the end fast enough, Merasmus just abruptly declares one team the victor), the area around the house is too cramped to drive in without bumping something, it barely incorporates the random spell pickups, and it's very easy to fall off and basically void any chance you had at winning.
  • The 2018 Halloween maps introduced Monster Bash, Cursed Cove and Slasher, inspired by horror movies. Monster Bash has a frankenstein creature but has nothing to do with the gameplay besides collecting gibs, Cursed Cove has no Boss enemy and Slasher just has a repeat of Headless Horseless Horseman, Monoculus and Merasmus.
  • The original Yeti Park idea shown in the Jungle Inferno trailer originally appeared to build up to a potential new boss feature similar to the Headless Horseless Horsemann or the Monoculous. As the game hasn't had any new boss type obstacles in years and all of them were tied to seasonal Halloween events many fans were a disappointed that a new year round variation was removed the moment the possibility was presented.
  • Also from the Jungle Inferno trailer many fans were disappointed that Saxton Hale doesn't serve as a new announcer or commentator for battles in Mercenery Park like he did in the trailer itself.

U-V

• Ugly Cute:
  • The Pyro. Yes, the gas mask and abestos suit would make them look very uncanny if TF2 wasn't incredibly stylized, and yes, their Meet the Team short is the most gruesome of all of them, but it's hard not to see the Pyro as adorable at times. Especially with some of their taunts - playing around in a little kiddie pool with a rubber duck, excitedly clapping after flipping someone, or taking obvious glee in having a dance with their enemies and allies.
  • The bread monsters. Their comically large fangs and the fact that they're made of bread makes them seem less dangerous than they actually are. The Gloves of Running Urgently reskin for the Heavy even makes him wear them as gloves!
• Ukefication: The Scout is a typical target, due to being younger-looking and slimmer than the other classes. Although he's a Keet, he's also quite a violent one, but this is often lost in Slash Fic.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Quite a few players are clamoring for more Player Destruction maps. The gamemode is well balanced, incorporating the fun, frantic, deathmatch-y style of maps like 2Fort, Hightower, and Turbine, but unlike those maps an average round in Player Destruction doesn't last long enough to overstay their welcome for those who are playing for the objective. More Player Destruction maps have been steadily added over time. However, Player Destruction is listed under Alternative Gamemodes from the Casual map screen (Alternative Gamemodes have less servers running them) and is only supported on nine maps (seven of them are Halloween-only and two of them are Christmas themed. There are only two base maps supporting this game mode.)
• Viewer Species Confusion: Merasmus is easy to mistake for a monkey, because of his appearance.
• Vindicated by History: When the game started to get new weapons the community was less than impressed. It didn't help that a lot of them were seen as imbalanced, and people would often be chastised for using any of them (with a few exceptions, like the Kritzkrieg). Years later, the community all but demands new weapons with every major update.

W

• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: At first glance, the game looks like it's pretty innocent due to its Pixar-esque art style...but then comes the massive amounts of blood and gore. And the jars of urine. The supplementary materials contain their own share of child-unfriendly content—including even more graphic violence (the Spy's head graphically exploding in "Meet the Spy"), sexual references and suggestive imagery ("Meet the Spy", "Expiration Date"), and plain old Nightmare Fuel ("Meet the Pyro"). However, just like with any FPS, you will find many 10-year-old kids playing the game online. Although there aren't as many kids playing it as there are in Call of Duty and Halo. Some of them have said it looks too 'kiddie'.
• The Woobie:
  • A lot of people see Pyro as this, whether it's him being the loner on the team to being treated like a freak to his Butt-Monkey status and what have you.
  • The Sniper as of the "Blood in the Water" comic.
  • Heavy, for his Dark and Troubled Past. After his father was killed for opposing Stalin, himself, his mother, and his young sisters were locked away in a gulag. Heavy managed to leave only by murdering the guards, freeing the other prisoners, and setting the place on fire. Afterwards, the guards started coming to his home, in an attempt to seek revenge. He had to teach his family to torture in order to save their lives. When he realizes they can take care of themselves, he expresses worry that he's only been overbearing and bossy to those he loves. Thankfully, his sisters reassure him that they still love him, know he did what he did out of love and share love for the family hobby of torturing KGB agents until they die screaming.
  • Medic, as of "Old Wounds." Classic Heavy seems to personify every player who's ever insulted a Medic main, intimidated them, and treated them like The Load. Heck, Classic Heavy even throttles Medic's pet out of spite and rage! Meanwhile, Medic was delighted to see Sniper again, and even spent several billion bringing his former teammate back to life, only for Sniper to respond by choking him, calling him "smug and evil".
• Woolseyism:
  • Quite apparent in the Swedish translation of the game. While most is translated straight, where a pun would be Lost in Translation it is instead replaced with fitting Swedish pun and so on. This is most noticeable in the achievements and the weapon names.
  • The French dub of Meet the Soldier translated the line "Unless it's a farm!" as "Farms don't count!"
  • In the Spanish translation of the game, Jarate is called "Fraskungfu" (frasco being Spanish for "jar") and the Soda Popper is called the Refrescopeta (from refresco "soda pop" and escopeta "shotgun") or a "Soda Popgun".
  • Happens in the Polish translation as well. One of the best examples: translating "Loose Cannon" to "Działo Nawalone". Literally, it means "drunk cannon" (referring to Demo's alcoholism), but it's also an allusion to the Polish title of The Guns of Navarone.
  • Most translations of names of the Killing Gloves of Boxing and the Gloves of Running Urgently preserve the Fun with Acronyms using translated names that have the same acronyms as the originals. For instance, in the Russian translation The Killing Gloves of Boxing become the "Кулаки Грозного Боксера" ("Fists of the Scary Boxer"^note The translation's Fun with Acronyms for the KGB's post-Soviet incarnation is unintentional... we hope.), and the Gloves of Running Urgently become the "Горящие Рукавицы Ускорения" ("Flaming Mittens of Acceleration").
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • While most of the cosmetics look pretty good, a few look awkward at best and ugly at worst. A few that come to mind are Hazmat Headcase^note A hazmat helmet for both Pyro (who kinda fits with it) and Sniper (who doesn't. At all. Admittedly, Sniper's version was submitted as a joke), Captain Cardbeard Cutthroat^note A cardboard pirate hat and team-colored beard, messily colored in with marker, and Most of the Robotic Boogaloo hats^note Retools of existing hats to look robotic. While a neat concept, their sharp-edged appearance combined with the chipped appearance of the paint turns many a trader away.
  • Special note goes to the paints. While most of them are decent, there are four that consistently get flak: The Bitter Taste of Defeat and Lime, Pink as Hell, An Extraordinary Abundance of Tinge, and A Distinctive Lack of Hue ^note neon lime, neon pink, bright white, and dark black respectively. Add to a cosmetic that gets a large region of it painted, and the result is instant garish. A Color Similar to Slate, while not offensively bright, also gets flak when applied to cosmetics like the Water Waders, which can make RED Pyros look like they're on BLU.

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