>>12153224 (OP)
I played a pretty good amount of TFC from about 2002 to 2004. I liked it quite a bit, the nine classes felt unique, maps had a lot of variety, you'd get a nice balance of fighting vs objective gameplay.
What killed the game for me was when competitive play got bigger and bigger. I think TFC suffered from a major problem with balance but also an oppressive design with grenades being such a big deal and extreme mobility for every class which resulted in a game that was nearly unplayable when fighting someone who was just elite at it. As the population dwindled and all that remained were hardcore players, a lot of mechanics and classes were sidelined and the same few started to dominate the game and overshadow everything else.
I think a good example of the differences in the game was just how 2fort operated early in TFC's life vs much later on. I remember playing on a public server where people were pushing in to blue's base, would grab the flag and move it ten steps before dying, only to respawn and try to push in again and move it another ten down the road. Spies would take the long route in through the sewers, engineers would construct sentries on turns, it was a slower pace for the objectives although the action was still really frantic.
Later on, you'd see scouts who would spawn, conc jump from the battlements on their side to the enemy, drop down the elevator to the flag, conc jump back up the elevator, then fly across the enemy battlements to score before picking up another set of grenades and doing it all again. It took like 20 seconds of swift motion to score a point and most of the enemy team would simply fumble around vaguely aware of what even happened and be completely unable to formulate a counter to it all. Not to mention snipers who'd headshot people so quickly no one know if they were bots.
