Recommend a good Team Fortress 2 server?

[Bureacreative]

Hey all,

TL;DR Looking for a good vanilla rotation.

Long story long, I'm looking for some TF2 players to recommend me a server to play on.

I used to be all over the Trashed Gamers servers and those were perfect. Active, vanilla, and a quick rotation of all game modes on the old-school maps. Apart from that, the community was great. Friendly folks but they were concerned with first playing the game, not screwing around with trading taunts. There was no team stacking, never saw a single cheat, life was pretty good.

Then I stopped playing frequently so I could play college and build racecars, and when I returned the TG servers had gone dark. Since then I've been on the Valve servers pretty exclusively because that's almost all I can find for vanilla servers. Almost everything else I see in the browser is 24 hours of one map, 10x crits, minecraft, or idle.

But the Valve servers, frequently, blow. I've seen aimhacks (VAC taking a vacation?), teamstacking out the bumhole, and the rotations are slow and skip a lot of killer maps. I spend a lot of my time pissed at my team. I of course recognize bad performance is as much my fault. I should just play better, but I'd rather be somewhere where I just enjoy playing at all times.

So does anyone, and I know my criteria are pretty specific and ridiculous, know of a server like the ones I used to play?

inb4 whining about TF2 being better before f2p (or was it???????)

 

[Neverhoodian]

Welcome to modern day TF2. You can thank Valve's Quickplay feature for that. I used to have a laundry list of great servers that included Trashed Gamers, but they're all gone now.

Decent community servers that match what you're looking for are all but non-existent, at least where I live (West Coast U.S.). Then again, my criteria is even more restrictive (no more than 24 slots, no custom maps/mods, no fast/instant respawns). I've heard rumblings that there are some good European servers, but any ping over 100 is practically unplayable for me.

The TF2 Classic [http://tf2classic.com/] mod has some great "official" servers, but they're often unpopulated due to the mod's relative obscurity. Tread with caution outside of these, as other servers tend to draw channers and are extremely toxic (why they chose TF2 Classic of all places to congregate is beyond me).

So yeah, I'd like to help, but I'm afraid I'm in the same boat.

inb4 whining about TF2 being better before f2p (or was it???????)

I'd say it was. Your average TF2 player generally was of a higher skill level than it is now. Also, the playerbase may have been smaller, but it was friendlier and more tight-knit.