Team Fortress 2 has now been with us for over 15 years, and for some reason, developer Valve just decided to jack the maximum number of players who can join a server at once up to 100. Valve doesn’t actually recommend you play with that many people, and warns that the game doesn’t properly support that many players, but that hasn’t stopped the community from creating chaotic 100-player TF2 servers.
Valve’s online class-based FPS, Team Fortress 2, isn’t a spring chicken by any definition, having first been released back in 2007 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. And while the console versions have been long since abandoned, the PC version on Steam has continued to receive hundreds of tiny, medium-sized, and significantly large updates, all of which have been free. The latest update to the classic shooter has provided gamers with an option to set the world on fire and invite 99 other TF2 players into a single server.
On July 25, Valve released an update for Team Fortress 2. The patch notes reveal a pretty lengthy list of tweaks and changes, but the one change that caught the attention of many was the quiet announcement that the game’s maximum player count had increased from 32 to 100.
Valve: Don’t make 100-player servers, Gamers: LOL
Also in the patch notes? A warning from Valve letting players know that this new max player count is totally “unsupported” and “not recommended.” In other words, Valve isn’t going to spend time fixing bugs introduced by playing with 99 other folks. If shit breaks, that’s just how it goes. You were warned, after all.
As you can probably guess, even with that warning, many players have already fired up servers with the new max player count, and the chaos that followed was incredible. Watching people play on 100-player servers feels like looking into an alternate dimension in which Valve teamed up with Sega to put out a Total War: Team Fortress 2 spin-off.
Unsurprisingly, playing Team Fortress 2 with this many players causes some issues. Players are reporting lots of lag, poor framerates, broken models, collision problems, and even some instances when the game just crashes completely. That’s not surprising considering this is a 16-year-old game that was never designed to handle 75 people, let alone 100.
But also, I love this so much. Good for you TF2! There is something very impressive about 100 people in a single TF2 match. It’s like an old car making a long road trip after years without a tune-up. It might stall a few times, overheat, or even lock up, but it gets the job done. Brings a tear to your eye, really. It’s also a perfect time to let people create high-player-count servers, as Team Fortress 2 is setting player count records on Steam following the last big update.
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