Since part II of the series in August, CompTF2C has found a new administration under its most recent technician and reviver, Xinayder, and one of its earliest members and a PuG runner since last year, kotowski. Check out the initial announcement by Güven on Discord, and then admin kotowski’s Community log #1 for more insight on the transition.

Now CompTF2C again offers a pickup game schedule. It hosts a North American server once again, and just as the EU one, it is 24/7 online, acting as an MGE server outside of pickup hours. This full-time availability makes spontaneous pickup games a possibility for the future of the scene. The previous financial and technical collaboration with AltTab servers is over– saluting Jaws for his long-time service. Our new technician/host Xinayder has been providing a seamless experience so far. In addition, wider community support is enabled, with Ko-fi tips. You can tip Competitive TF2C once to get the Derby Booster role on Discord for a limited amount of time, or set monthly tips to become a member of Jenkins Coal Co. ☕

Logs

Let’s not hold back the biggest tech news anymore: TF2 Classified has proper logs. In the previous article we reported that some match stats looked promising upon uploading the server logs manually to logs.tf. That was after a test game with bots and had its own drawbacks. Now after a proper PuG, we can proudly show what the first-ever parsed logs of a TF2C game looks like (koth_bagel_rc12, September 12^th, 2026). Xinayder went further and installed F2’s Supplemental Stats v2 and Medic Stats to the servers, which both worked, and gave us the first extended stats of TF2C in the next PuG session.

Source engine games never stop surprising us players in revealing ever more depth to a class, weapon or mechanic we thought we fully knew about. Firstly, there are the gimmicky depths. Many would have memories of watching B||oodsire’s Meet the PROro 2 and witnessing a reflect jump for the first time, or seeing a friend sentry sprint in-game and being left completely puzzled. These techniques certainly require effort and mastery, but the more striking fact about them is how the mechanic has always been a part of the engine, but somehow never appeared to you as a possibility. Much like bunnyhopping remaining hidden for years in Quake engine, Source’s ancestor. Then there is the other kind of depth, which is reached by repeatedly digging into familiar ground. Consider an era when players walked to mid fights, and the good old sticky jumping giving rise to the first roll-out schemes in the hands of Demomen like ryb^{1, 2a, 2b} and Byte who went the extra mile of finding and perfecting faster and more difficult options through choky layouts like Badlands’. Or top Medics like TheFragile* insisting on using Crusader’s Crossbow despite the drawbacks of its initial design, and proving to everyone that it is viable.

Team Fortress 2 Classified still offers a vast area when it comes to such exploration. And the latest YouTube video of Vooglet shows us the ultimate example of the sweaty, hard-to-reach type of depth. Vooglet plays and studies arcing R.P.G. Soldier, and he has been since six months before the game’s Steam release. The first image that comes to mind upon hearing the term is the blind, random rocket spam you stumble upon on public servers. In Vooglet’s hands, however, it becomes the Artillery subclass, or Arcsman as he calls it. He goes and figures out, for various positions in each map, where to place his crosshair in order to deliver rockets onto critical locations– like Counter-Strike players do for grenade throws. He records these findings on cheat sheets to use later in games, some of which he shares with CompTF2C.com readers through this article.

In the last article in March, we laid down the road map for changes that need to be implemented to TF2 Classified for a viable competitive gameplay, while documenting the temporary solutions made by CompTF2C in the pre-Steam era. Now in August, CompTF2C and a few of its stubborn members stand as a community actively involved in testing, bug fixing, and pinpointing them for the developers. The following is the progress report of that.

It all started with Xinayder entering the Discord server in May. Him and PuG runner starm0nster started testing different game modes in July to see where the tournament mode Ready Up function and the stopwatch functionality fails. Xinayder didn’t stop there, and went to the public TF2 SDK to understand how it works in live TF2, and from there, estimate how it could have gone wrong in TF2C. This led to a conversation between Güven and the creator of the TF2 Competitive Fixes plugin, twiikuu, who guessed that it could be about the fact that there are four teams defined in TF2C, whereas only two teams are able to ready up via the tournament HUD in a 2team map. That brought to mind what f stated about the initial post-Steam PuGs. A quick search in the Discord DMs reminded us that f indeed reported Ready Up to be functional in 4team maps. This further clue led to twiikuu finding the exact code that goes wrong, which, Xinayder documented properly. On 31 July, the developer team fixed the issue with the release of TF2 Classified update 3.0.12! Another bug reported by Xinayder, concerning Arena and the tournament mode (although may not be vital for the scene) is also fixed with update 3.0.12.
He went further and found bugs possibly hindering tournament HUD for 4team, and again, found where it could go wrong in the TF2 SDK as well.

The developer team behind Team Fortress 2 Classified, EMINOMA, has partnered with the independent TF2C Mapping Community (TF2CMC) -supported and led by the very same host of AltTAB servers- to organize the first official TF2 Classified mapping contest. Following the footsteps of the 2010 art pass competition of TF2, the participants are tasked with taking a de-artpassed version of a map originally created by Waugh101, now renamed arena_competition_template, and using it as a blank canvas to create their own art passed version, under an original name. The winner will have their version hosted on AltTAB Standard and VaultF4 Custom Maps servers for the forseeable future, in addition to receiving supporter perks on both servers.

The contest was announced on TF2CMC Discord server three days ago on July 6, with submission due six weeks later, on August 24. There are already around a dozen submissions on the #artpass-contest-submissions channel of the Discord server, where mapmakers are sharing their work in progress. Themes range from Yukon-like Canadian environment to industrial harbor. The map is relatively compact, so there is still plenty of time for mappers to join the contest and present their own vision of what the level could become. Even if you are not a mapper, the TF2CMC Discord is a great place to admire these new creations and join the weekly playtests with a community of creative individuals.

Note that, just two days before the contest was announced, TF2 Classified released its Modding Tools–a small but thoughtful gift to mappers and modders alike.

Thanks to the release of these tools on Steam, it’s now easier than ever to get started using Hammer for TF2C. Eminoma’s provided guides and example VMFs are perfect for learning TF2C’s style, and this contest is a great opportunity to have a go yourself. – Jaws, TF2CMC Lead and AltTAB Owner

We have witnessed the breakthrough of Steam-released TF2 “Classified” (first time we call that name here) on January 31, 2026 together with the rest of the world, where its number of concurrent online players peaked at almost ten thousand. More than a month passed, and there is still a steady number of about one thousand that plays TF2C any time of the day. Technically, our game is now based on the inherited live TF2 code. An immediate consequence of it is working tournament HUD for some of the game modes, and A/D (or PL) stopwatch for some other, as was prophesied. We are closer than ever to get rid of the need for the manual entries of mp_tournament_restart and mp_restartgame X to start a match, the presence of an admin in the server, or dependency on an SM plugin (efforts of rainwyre and Jaws) to count the time. (Yes, we know it sounds puzzling for the live TF2 folk who had a fully functional tournament mode since 2008.)

Of course, we are still missing out on a seamless experience on any game mode. Nevertheless, it is the beginning of a new era for competitive TF2C where all the ugly workarounds can be made native to the game. Commands PuG runners are trained for, configs made by carefully picking the not-server-crashing cvars from ETF2L‘s (special thanks to them), custom SM plugin for proper VIP-assignment (by Jaws), another custom stopwatch-like SM plugin as mentioned above, VIPR-specific scripts using Stripper SM plugin (with help from Dynamilk), vscript to regulate the respawn behaviour of Territorial Domination at round-starts (a short code by Güven)… all are now archived in our old Tech Manual page. Thanks to these old warhorses, and to anyone who contributed and played, CompTF2C managed to organize various events and competitions throughout 2025.

While TF2C competitive community keeps organizing pick-up games regularly on its Discord server, the development team EMINOMA is still working hard to make sure the game is running smooth for everyone. After that, there will likely be a time for when they finally roll up their sleeves to improve competitive. The rest of this article lists what TF2 Classified will need when that time comes.