For those of you who know me, you know what I my values are. For those of you who don’t, I have a very well developed sense of Honor, Sportsmanship and Teamplay. If you are offended by this you may as well click on another site because I don’t pull punches. I call things like I see them.
I’ve been active in the TF community since almost the beginning and have seen many changes, some good, some bad. The game code and eye candy have improved immensely, thanks to TF Software Pty. Ltd. and Valve LLLC, Kirkland, Washington. Well, TFS merged with Valve (actually Valve bought them, but why split hairs? To me, Robin and John will always be TFS) and were able to tap vast resources and talent that wasn’t available until then. I won’t go into a history lesson, but suffice to say that they gave us TFC to hold us over until TF2 comes out. By the way, I want to personally thank the TFC team, especially Erik Johnson for all the hard work they did to get it out the door.
Shortly after TFC’s release I was unable to continue playing for various reasons. One of which is a lot of travel associated with my job. I’ll be finishing up a four-month road trip in a few weeks and hope to get back in the game again. Even though I am not on the servers every day I am still able to glean a great deal from various forums, web pages and from friends that I trust a great deal. So don’t get your panties in a wad if I say something that you don’t like because I’m not on the servers.
TF (and now TFC) has always been plagued by a lot if immature players who will do anything to be noticed. Well, let’s face it - we all want to be noticed, right? Sure we do. We would all like to be recogized when we enter a server. That’s human nature. The problem is that there are a lot of wankers who don’t have the skill or maturity to be noticed in a positive way, so they do anything else they can to be noticed. I know you’ve seen them. I call them the "Look at me" type. They love to spam MM1 with taunts and profanity, have the "leet" names and usually do anything they can to p*ss you off.
This hasn’t changed during the time I’ve been away. If anything, it is probably worse. TFS/Valve (I know, I know - the are the same thing now) took away the ablity to easily cheat. That leaves wanking. Respawn camping (I hate that term), Scout rushes, all offense-no defense teams (very common) and little-to-no communication seems to be the rule rather than the exception. By the way, I don’t care what Clans do - that’s their business. I address public servers, so keep that in mind.
I could go on for a long time about the lack of honor in the game but I’ll save that for another time. Anyway, I finally get net access again and check out the PF forums. I kept seeing references to something called "TPF" and finally asked someone what it meant. Well, TPF is a group of players who have banded together to share information and help one another. They are a great bunch of guys and I like to lurk on their forum. Yes, they have a forum on Planet Fortress. Just go to the PF Forums and click on TPF. They also have a web page, http://www.teampf.org, which you can visit to see what they are about. It encourages me a great deal to see the quality and maturity of this group. They are concentrating on teamwork and communication, and I am hoping to infuse a little more thought on the Honor part of the equation 
To me, murdering a defenseless player in the respawn doesn’t cut it. I think most of TPF agrees with me, but there is one particular sphincter who continues to promote the practice and is tolerated. But overall, I have to support what they are doing and am very happy to see a group like this! There are more and more players discovering the joy of helping their teammates and seeing just how much fun this game can be.
Well, I’ve rambled enough for today. No one’s reading this anyway, so I’ll call it a day. But I will say that I’m encouraged by what I see from TPF. Good work, guys
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