I love Team Fortress 2. It was the first major MP game I ever played, I got it as part of The Orange Box, so I've been playing it for a long time even before the whole free-to-play conversion. I took a bit of a break from it recently, but have re-entered with full gusto.

Why the hell is it that half the servers I play on are just 'kill' servers where no one even seems to want to cap a point on either side? Pipeline Race has to be my favourite gamemode, and the Hightower maps are all just filled with people running around and shooting each other, not pushing the cart at all. Is this common in other areas of the world (I'm playing in Australia), and when did it even start? I totally understand why people would want to play like this, but why don't they do it on servers made for it, such as 2fort maps with no victory conditions? Some even maliciously go against me, such as telling the enemy team where my sentries are, or calling me a 'buzzkill'.

Very few people still play that game seriously, nowadays. There are only a handful of populated servers, and Valve's official servers are unregulated and often filled with hackers and bots. It's just mostly just people playing the game very casually and messing around. Balance has long since gone out the window with the constant introduction of new weapons.

The only game type that's still played semi-seriously is MvM, and even that mode is kinda dying. Most people still come back during holiday events and what not, but those never last. It's a sad fact to accept, but most of the playerbase has moved on to other games.

I started playing again recently and haven't had this problem. Servers I hit up are more than willing to actually play the game while still dicking around.

I used to play that game a lot when it came out and really got in to it when the challenge achievements came, but lost interest when they introduced the DOTA like crates and keys, crafting and drops.

It's real shame what happened to TF2. I started playing, thought it was quite fun, but the whole experience was ruined by the hats, weapons, crates, and trading. Look at how the TF2 download is now like 14 GB full of garbage.

So I stopped playing, but now they're shoving the same shit into CSGO and I don't really want to play that any more for the same reason.

I think it was Yahtzee who said that all the hats stuff kind of goes completely against the original design of Team Fortress 2. Simple, not over-designed characters whose silhouettes are immediately recognisable. Seriously, no other class based shooter has managed to pull off the differentiation of classes, both in playstyle and look, the way Team Fortress 2 did (just look at Brink).
Kind of really sad to see it go out like this, there's even no matchmaking with a party (outside of MvM). I think a major issue is that victory or loss seems to not matter at all in a game of TF2, given how easy it is to even switch sides mid-match. Dare I say it, but I think that TF2 could really benefit from actual queues with no team switch mid-match, as well as some kind of reward for victory (maybe a slightly higher chance of item drop, I don't know), or at the very least some statistics that keep track of your win-rate.