Team Fortress 2 has been out for about nine years and is still getting a lot of love from Valve. The recent batch of Team Fortress 2 love brought a competitive mode!
The announcement was made on a official Team Fortress 2 site, which detailed what Competitive mode will bring, as well as the description for the new update, Meet Your Match (it looks like it was written by Lev Tolstoj himself)!
"Ever since the first apes climbed out of the trees, there were apes who did it faster. Some apes just fell out of the tree. It's a sad fact that all apes are not created equal.
Presenting our newest tree-climbing-down simulator, matchmaking. Play alone or with your friends against players of similar skill levels. Climb out of that tree at your own speed, confident that the apes around you aren't beating you to the bananas. Which technically grow IN trees, but maybe the ripest ones probably fall to the ground? Yeah, that makes sense. Look, this isn't a banana simulator, people."
Competitive mode will be a 6 versus 6 ranked match with all 9 characters available, as well as all the guns, bats, and hats crammed in to the first person hat simulator. There are 18 titles and badges to be earned in Competitive mode which can be used to prove that you are in fact a better monkey than your opponents, or dolphin for that matter.
"Ever since the first dolphins crawled out of the ocean, they've longed to pick a fight with the fat, banana-eating apes over by the trees. And now they can, in a structured dolphin-safe environment."
For players who aren't fans of competitive ranked gaming, the Casual mode will still be available, but it will be improved. Instead of joining a random in-progress, players will be matched in a unranked 12 versus 12 game where all players are supposed to be of the same skill level. The auto-balancing will disappear with this, meaning that players will play for the same team the whole game, unlike in the past where teams got changed through out the match to compensate for leaving players.
A lot is changing in Team Fortress 2 so click here and here to read it all yourself.