The Blessing and Curse of Uncletopia

Good video! I agree with you completely. There hasn't really been a great way to experience the "middle ground" that Casual Mode offered before the bot issues started. Unfortunately, the best solution would be for Valve to fix their servers. Side note: I appreciate you listing the pros and cons of Uncletopia without resorting to the common suggestion that I see from people who feel the same way - that I should change my servers to appeal to that middle ground that is sadly harder to find these days. That was never my responsibility. That will always be Valve's responsibility. I'm just a guy who plays TF2, I never wanted to be some kind of unofficial game designer. UT always has been and always will be a reflection of what I personally like about casual TF2, and it's definitely not intended to be the final say in what TF2 should look like.

Casual : get sniped by bots Uncletopia : get sniped by gods

To be honest, the main problem I have with uncletopia is the extremely high skill level of all the players. It feels awful to bottomscore every single game because you have 3000 less hours than everyone on the enemy team

One of the worst games I had in Uncletopia featured some guy raging at a medic since he used his uber too early. I told him to chill since it was a casual game and he got even madder saying I was the kind of player that ruins the servers. This is one of the only bad experiences I've had on Uncletopia though and I actually am incredibly grateful to Uncle Dane for doing it during the bot crisis.

You took the words out of my mouth. I am really happy that Uncle Dane went out of his way to host these servers for people to play on without having to deal with cheaters and bots (even though some cheaters make their way in here sometimes) Casual for me however, is fine as is, I still play on them. But I know that there are people out there who still cannot find a normal match on tf2, and I am glad that these players can resort to Uncletopia, who is by far the best TF2 experience you can have nowadays. Just do not play on Badwater, Upward or Dustbowl if you are a new player.

6:39 "There's clearly bad players on Uncletopia servers" Ah, I see you've seen me play

I was reflecting on this just recently--I tried loading up Uncletopia and felt completely overwhelmed by the sheer intensity. I got yelled at for not noticing a scout attacking my Medic while I was revved up against a demo in my face. "Least aware heavy ever," the Medic posted. I hadn't played multiplayer in two years.

Yeah... while I appreciate Uncletopia conceptually, in execution it's one of the most stressful experiences I've had in a while. I usually play support classes like Medic and Engineer, and while I played a few rounds with them on Uncletopia and did okay, it felt like I was always walking on eggshells; as Engineer I enjoy sometimes putting sentries in random spots no one will look for just for the memes, which got me yelled at quite a lot as did not having sentries in certain meta spots fast enough, and Medic felt like the entire team was ready to jump on me if I wasn't healing everyone as efficiently as humanely possible; miss two crossbows in the heat and suddenly someone is letting you know in Voice Chat how bad I am, regardless of past performance. It's why I usually go with Casual nowadays; for as big a pain as the bots can be, at least it feels people are grateful when they get heals, as opposed to expecting their medic to be the next Meyy. I usually enjoy trying hard, but man can Uncletopia take it too far sometimes, lol.

casual makes me want to play Uncletopia, Uncletopia makes me want to stop playing tf2

Completely agree, there’s a certain something lost on Uncletopia, as good as the service is. Something about the innocence of a fresh install, the more seasoned 500+ hours players who are trying but are unafraid to give up a killstreak for a funny killbind, and even the sweaty 2000+ hours people who played every meta strat on every class but want to goof off as a tryhard bison soldier for a round. I love Uncletopia, I play there frequently, but I don’t think it’ll ever have that…best word I can think of is “whimsy” that vanilla casual has. Not to say there aren’t pockets of people who goof off in the servers, but it’s a far cry from casual. Imo, a good taste of what the game could be as a more mainstream FPS with some of the TF2 charm. Unlike Skial, tryhard heaven.

I play on Uncletopia on occasion, and my only issue with it is the random differences between team skill. From my experience, there were rarely any close matches. Either my team was stomping or they were getting stomped. And that's not fun either way. I live for the frantic neck-and-neck competition, but I also love funny moments where I can just T-pose as a heavy and make people laugh at me.

Uncletopia: where all the snipers are as good as bots

I remember logging onto Uncletopia a little under two years ago I think. It was a Dustbowl match. And as soon as I joined, I was greeted with a phlog pyro camping the blue spawn room with a pocket medic on him. There was a whole ass engie nest outside, with a heavy or two camping the spawn for good measure. When the timer reached zero, the red team called us noobs and typed "ez" in the chat. I never played on Uncletopia since lmao Edit: a lot of people are saying that Uncletopia has changed. I’ll give it another shot sometime.

I play on Uncletopia with my friend from time to time but the problem with it honestly are players not allowing dumb and fun strats in a game they'll either vocally complain about you or kick you for doing so, it makes it feel really restricting for a server that has a balanced system.

“i cant have fun in casual mode if random crits exist!!” shows clip of laughing and having fun after dying to a random crit

Seeing a bot with an unusual fills me with a feeling I didn't know I could feel

Uncletopia isn't quite my cup of tea, but I absolutely respect Uncle Dane's philosophy of hosting servers that he would personally want to play on. If I had the knowledge and determination to host servers, I would absolutely set them up in a way that I would enjoy playing.

I still prefer casual. I completely understand the appeal of Uncletopia, but casual just has a different atmosphere that I like more.

I remember my first time playing on Uncletopia, i went in with the mindset of just chilling and having a bit of fun with a chaotic badwater. That mindset completely vanished after i saw a sweatfest of Scout mains on the enemy team making sure i hated my existence laying medic, because the optimal thing was to spawn camp me until i either changed class or left the game.

Also note the following problem with Uncletopia: They constantly cycle these few maps: Upward, Badwater, Snowycoast, Barnblitz, Borneo, Process and Sunshine. It does not matter how much you like these maps, at some rate they are bound to become stale. Yet no other map will ever be selected. The people on Uncletopia are such troglodytes that they are willing to play these 7 maps day in day out. Do you want to play anything else? Do you want a bit of variation? Tough luck, because the non-payload servers (where people will vary in their map choices) are usually empty.