"Is there anything to make me come back to TFC?"

A twofold question there, really. The first way to look at it, is "Does the 11.08 patch have anything in it that will make me return?" - to which the annswer is, sadly, no.

Voice comms is a great idea. But the implementation is poor - most people don't have headsets, my voice comes out garbled. The few people I CAN hear perfectly have little to say (let's be frank here, most of the time when playing you no longer need comms - the situation makes itself perfectly clear and the team works together as well as ever it could.)

Public matches, well - you can /ignore joe llama, so no harm is done. The problem, as I see it, is that expert players are going to try it once, then go back to better alternatives. Which means that the few real public players are going to have no-one to talk to.

It raises the bar for gaming. The forums talking about castle wolfenstein test are all clamouring for voice-comms. EVERY new game MUST have it, the halflife engine incorporating it means that there is no longer any excuse. But, fundamentally, it doesn't improve my TFC experience as the game exists right now.

I'll pass over the ATI problems, the garbled voices, the 'please answer a questionnaire' UGH. Blah blah "have kindly provided space for the questionairre" - trying to sell me a headset? Yeesh... Not to mention the difficulty servers seem to be having keeping hltv set up (or connecting to it)

Strange lag-like spikes. I was rubberbanding like mad, getting shot from nowhere, the whole nine yards. And yet net_graph said no ping, tiny choke, high framerate... very odd. But is voice comms on the same tried tested and tired maps enough to make me come back?

No.

But that leads me onto the second aspect of my question. Which is to read it as: "Is *ANYTHING* enough to make me come back to TFC"

And I think for a while, and get all speculative. And I really WANT to play TFC like my nostalgia says it was. But new maps would just move the same strategies around a bit, or be poor gameplay as everyone struggles then discards the map. New class balance would just cause moans, then mass exploition of whatever the class du jour is.

Apart from changing the game into a completely new game, I don't see ANYTHING that could keep me playing the game long enough to approach my previous levels of skill - and thus begin to enjoy the tactical level play again.

Really - what WAS in this patch? The new scoreboard is kinda nice, though some seem to hate it. On the plus side, it didn't trash my custom models, it didn't trash my configs. TFC will probably be uninstalled the day QUAKE is, but, sadly, it will probably only be played again the day quake is...

I'm sad now. It feels like boxing day.

Dear valve.

Thank you very much for the socks. They will be nice and warm. I am glad that you are still thinking of me.