Via a Valve employee on the Team Fortress 2 subreddit, it looks like Valve is ready to take the competitive Team Fortress 2 scene seriously, as they said they would in the past. A post made by Valve employee vJill (confirmed by their Steam profile having the Valve Employee badge), opened up a steam group for information related to the competitive beta. Specifically, the group will be used to send out beta invites, so those who want to get on the action should probably make their way over to the group and join up now. The group was created today, but what's unclear is the time frame for which the implementation of the beta is, and how many invites will be sent out. As of right now, the group has over 7000 members, including the author of this article.
- Teams such as the FITH highlander team (that the writer is currently on), will find another option for matchmaking available in the Beta.
What's unsure at this point is exactly what the matchmaking will consist of. The most likely candidate for matchmaking to get first will be the common 6s format used (as you can see on the UGC page), but other formats such Highlander (one of each main class) or even 4s may have to wait to get implemented, or not be implemented whatsoever. It's also unclear if this will have any effect on any tools used for matchmaking made by external parties, such as TF2 Center.
Quick Take
About Time Valve, although I'm honestly surprised that it's getting it at this point considering how old the game is. It may indicate that Valve still plans on supporting TF2 in the near future, although the updates in terms of gameplay changes have been getting scarce over the last few years. Whether or not this is going to make a huge difference in the long run considering the current outlook of the game is unknown, but it's still nice to see that Valve was being honest when they said that they were going to take a look at implementing it. And hey, at least it gives me more people to burn as a Pyro in competitive.
