The "Meet Your Match" update: One big step for competitve MM, one gigantic leap backwards for pubs

Hey all, chances are that over the next few days you are going to hear about a lot of shit being thrown Valve's way for the most recent TF2 update. As someone with lots of TF2 experience (about 400 hours, which I know is peanuts to some other users), I figured I'd try to give everyone a bit of context on what the hell is going on, and I'm going to do it bit by bit because I'm a bad writer.

First, the update itself if you want to read. Note the "Day 2" at the top, that takes you to a second page.
http://www.teamfortress.com/meetyourmatch/

Competitive

Fantastic that Valve has finally done this. It's been needed in the game for an incredibly long time. Unless something crops up in the next few days, this is pretty alright. I have not been able to try it myself yet, due to the servers being hammered and/or mm just being buggy. For those used to playing 12v12, Competitive Matchmaking is 6v6, so bear that in mind.

Balance

Some interesting decisions have been made here to say the least. Not going to go through everything, but changes to the Medic make one of his Mediguns lose one of its major advantages, and the Spy movement speed increase, despite just being 20 units from 300, is huge. Makes him faster than Pyro, the natural enemy of the Spy. I'm also 90% certain that the Righteous Bison hitting a target multiple times was an intended design choice, so no idea what's going on there.

It's a bit of a kick in the teeth that they decided to make a meta-game out of balancing/redoing the two classes most in need of a retool, the Heavy and the Pyro. The blog claims that both will eventually receive updates, with the competition determining who gets it first, whereas the messaging everywhere else seems to indicate that only the winner will get a nice update. Who knows, because Valve clearly doesn't.

'Casual' mode and the death of pubs

So they decided to copy their competitive set-up and bring it across to a Casual Matchmaker, which VERY strongly resembles Overwatch's Quick Play, and this is where the problems start. You click a button, you pick which game modes you would like to be queue up for (minimum of 2), and you wait. Again, no idea if it's just because of load or just bugged matchmaking, but so far I have successfully entered a single game, which was on a map I dislike on a game-mode I dislike. You are punished if you abandon games by an increasing cooldown before you can enter the queue, and every game seems to end with a disconnect, meaning that you have to requeue for another game. Valve servers are now no longer in the server browser, effectively killing the idea of 'pubs'. Oh right, and there is also a level associated with your casual play, which as far as I can tell, means nothing, except maybe outside of how much time you have dumped into playing games in this queue.

Here is a list of things that TF2 players are used to doing and like to do that you cannot do anymore in this redone system:
-Quickly join games in progress
-Pick which map you would like to join (personally, I love pl_upward and pl_borneo)
-Leave games without penalty
-Take everything chill
-Remain with the same group of people as the server goes through map list without having to reconnect to the server
-Vote to extend the time on a map to have more rounds on it
-Vote for next maps

The community has so far not taken this move particularly well. Though there is a server browser for community servers, here is what those look like in Australia
-Half are idle/trade servers
-Of those that are left we have: 24/7 TDM 2fort or plr_hightower servers, servers with fast respawn (which are not fun, at least not to me), some nice servers with alternate gamemodes if you ever feel up for playing, such as TF2x10 or Prop Hunt, and maybe some servers that are running proper games, which in my experience mainly take place on cp_dustbowl.

There a lot of very angry people and people saying that this will make them leave the game and I have no idea if it will abate or not, or if Valve is even taking this reaction into consideration.
Personally, I would like to see the return of Valve pubs along with their new Casual Play.

They should put the Valve pub servers back in the community server list.

That would solve a lot of these issues. However, I question these changes on a larger scale. Overwatch was designed ground-up for these features...and it seems like Valve's bandaiding them onto this 10 year old game that is WAY MORE casual than Overwatch.

TF2 is not an Esports game lol. It works ok for CS and DOTA, but not TF2. Blows my mind that Valve are trying this. My TF2 time is spent on (default respawn) 24/7 2Fort. And there's usually regulars there that liven up the experience.

ps: lol you gotta pay money for a competitive pass? for t fucking 2?

Haven't played TF2 for months but I like the sound of a lot of the balance changes. They really needed to freshen up the game and I think this achieves that. The casual matchmaker doesn't effect me much personally, most people who were good at this game played in community servers. I don't like matchmakers in general though so they should keep the option to join directly.

@mcfart: Either you pay money or give Valve your phone number and link it to your account. I understand that it's to deter cheating and making new accounts if you get caught, but man is it not fantastic.

Just going to give this a shameless self-bump.

Valve listened, and released this reply, barely 2 days after the update went live.

http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=22797

Basically, Casual Mode is here to stay, but more robust tools will be implemented to make it resemble the pubs of old, including the ability to select specific maps. Abandonement penalties (which amount to being unable to rejoin the queue) have already been ripped out of the game.

I'm conflicted on this. As much as I appreciate Valve clearly listening to some of the strongly worded opinions of the community, I feel like they should have stuck to their guns on this for a bit longer. The internet can often be a fickle beast, and what is the worst thing in the world one day suddenly comes acceptable a week later. They should have waited until the initial rage abated, and then maybe seen what complaints still persisted.

People have been playing it competitively for years, even predating the game going F2P. So even prior to 2011.

I don't think there should be a penalty for dropping out of a game. Sometimes I'm just not very good compared to my teammates (I hate weighing them down), or nobody's cooperating/working together, or everyone's screaming at each other over chat. Or I just have such unbearable lag that I can't play. Or a family member needs my help with something.

You have no idea, TF2 has been an esport for years, and is very good that way. Just because you play a game a certain way, doesn't mean that is how its supposed to be played.