A New Frontier Awaits — TF2 lands on FACEIT

TF2 arrives on FACEIT, featuring bot & cheater-free 12v12 gameplay, with an ÜberCharged casual experience.

The not-so-secret news is out! Our short SFM teaser hinted at what we’ve been up to, but considering how many of you have been involved in our discussions and testing, we’re not surprised to see the amount of news that is already out there!

So many people from around the TF2 ecosystem have contributed directly to this new community-driven project, and today we are extremely excited to share (almost) all of the details with all of you.

A short, serious PR announcement to describe the project would read like this:

On the 20th of March, FACEIT will launch a new FREE platform for TF2 where players, content creators, tournament organizers, and communities, of any kind, will engage with a mix of new and rewarding play experiences, innovative community tools, and a closer social network to further enrich and develop the TF2 ecosystem.

To put it simply, this is a project with three main objectives:

• Give the community a great new gameplay experience with a particular focus on casual 12v12
• Design and invest in a rich series of events, products, and activations that will see direct involvement and contribution from many third parties from the TF2 ecosystem
• Provide a central platform where the whole TF2 community can feel closer and interconnected while playing and having fun

As you can imagine, we simply can’t touch on so many topics, dates, and details in a single blog. We’ll be following up with lots more details in the coming days, so keep an eye on our dedicated Twitter and Discord channels.

In this first blog post, we are going to focus on giving an initial overview of the new 12v12 system that sets out to provide the community with a new accessible and rewarding experience, free from cheats and bots and where everyone can enjoy high quality and chaotic TF2.

This experience will be free for everyone to play from the 20th of March. From today, anyone can apply to join our short Closed Beta, and with things to test and polish everyone is welcome!

The 12v12 experience on FACEIT

The new 12v12 experience has been designed with three main product values in mind:

• Classic 12v12s, ÜberCharged to get instantly catapulted into a match full of 24 players, on your favourite map, where you can play the 12v12 experience that we all love — with no meta, role limitations, or try-hard play style — but where autobalance, random critical hits, and bullet spread are all disabled.
• No cheaters and cheater-bots to play in a safe environment where sometimes you will be the best player on the server (and other times not), but where everyone is always a human, playing fair and by the rules.
• Progression and Prizes to amplify your joy for a win or console you after a loss. No matter if winning a match is everything for you or if you play just for fun; prizes and progression will be there and every single match will be another step toward something else, maybe a new hat or a fancy new rank.

This direction is the result of considerable feedback collected through internal meetings (we have some hardcore fans of TF2 here at FACEIT), multiple community surveys, and countless 1:1 conversations with content creators and community leaders who provided an unmatched level of support and enthusiasm.

We don’t have a name for this new experience, “Organized 12v12 Pugs”, “12v12 Casual+”, or any of the many other names that we’ve been reading in the past hours by scrolling through your comments. What we are sure about instead, is believing in a single, simple concept on which this whole experience has been shaped on:

A match where 24 players commit to play, from the beginning until the end, with no cheats, and within a rewarding framework, it’s a great TF2 match! No matter if you win or if you lose and it is a single unit that we can use to build positive, lasting, and unique experiences.

Ten years of story, a huge and energetic community, a player count that is still growing today, and the availability of something that many other games can only dream of — VALVE’s continued support of dedicated community servers. We are here to propose and support a new direction and we are asking everyone to be pioneers and explore this new frontier together with us: If nothing happens, nothing changes.

Below, you can find a more detailed overview of the three main propositions for our new 12v12 experience.

Classic 12v12: Select your favourite map, join the queue and quickly get into the match with no auto-balance, no random critical hits, and no bullet spread.

The new 12v12 experience is entirely based on an accessible and user-friendly system, where players simply need to select their favourite map to enter a fast queue, as solo or in a party with friends (up to 6 players).

We made decisions on both map pool and queue algorithms to obtain a strong compromise between providing an effective list of maps/game-modes and keeping the queue time as short as possible, so you can get into games almost immediately.

The following is the first version of the map pool from which you will be able to select at least 3 maps before joining the queue:

• ctf_2fort
• cp_dustbowl
• pl_upward
• koth_harvest_final
• ctf_turbine
• pl_badwater
• plr_hightower
• Pl_swiftwater_final

For instance, a player who likes to play Payload will be able to select only Upward, Badwater, and Swiftwater maps before joining the queue, and will therefore have a 100% chance of playing their favourite mode.

This is of course only the first version and we will be actively looking to expand this initial list based on your feedback. This first map rotation has been chosen by selecting maps and modes that the vast majority of the community is playing today based on publicly available data.

All the matches will be configured with a classic 12v12 game setup except for three main changes: disabling autobalance, removal of random critical hits, and turning off random bullet spread. These were among the most commonly requested improvements shared by the community in feedback rounds.

However, by running some more detailed research we saw that some of you do like the unpredictability that random critical hits and bullet spread bring to the server; at the same time, we understand that these two features are not among the most relevant factors in driving your enjoyment when you are playing a 12v12 TF2 match.

As a result, we decided to turn off those three gameplay mechanics, for now, to obtain an experience that ensures:

• The outcomes for all of your matches (whether you win or lose) are always and solely determined by the ability of all the players during the game and not by random factors
• A matchmaking queue algorithm that progressively improves and a strong set of rewards will incentivise all players to play every match in full, removing the need to have an auto-balance system.

No cheaters, no bots

Cheats, Bots, and Cheating Bots; a broken record that we have heard over and over. It’s the number one issue that the TF2 community as a whole has been particularly vocal about.

Our mission here is simple: we want to make you feel secure and safe again when playing TF2 with the confidence of knowing that the Sniper who just killed you from across the map… just hit a nice shot.

How are we going to achieve that?

Our approach is not based on solely detecting and banning as many cheaters as possible, even though our industry-leading Anti-Cheat is one of the products we are most proud of. Instead, we always aim to create a true cheating-free experience where several detection, verification, and data-driven systems work together and simultaneously to minimise the chances of encountering a cheater in your match.

Our continuous effort in developing new and innovative measures against cheaters has been one of the most valuable contributions we’ve made to other gaming ecosystems, CS:GO primarily, where the battle against cheating has always been particularly intense.

Now, we’re bringing that technology to our Team Fortress 2 experience, without requiring any further verification steps or enforcing our Anti-Cheat where there is no need. If you are a legitimate player that just wants to have fair and fun TF2 game time, you will not need to do anything besides joining the queue and continue playing.

Progression and Rewards: FACEIT Points, Ranked leagues, Ladders, and Missions

When the match ends, it’s time to collect your rewards! We’ve implemented a variety of reward and progression systems to keep the community engaged and committed. Our objectives are two-fold:

• Reducing match leavers by giving out incentives to all players to always play out matches from start to finish
• Making you feel great about winning, but not feel bad about losing. Sometimes the enemy team is just doing everything right to stomp you, and in these cases, we want you to still feel you are getting something out of the match.

We want to achieve those two main aims by enabling several reward mechanics and a seasonal ranking system that everyone can grind in full.

In the vast majority of the cases, prizes will be expressed in FACEIT Points that can be redeemed in our shop to buy in-game items, hardware, steam codes, and more.

There are several ways to collect FACEIT Points on FACEIT, but there are three main ways in particular for TF2:

Missions: Objective-based campaign where you will simply need to complete certain missions based on various in-game activities such as damage dealt, games played, or amount healed, and so forth. There are missions available for free for all players, with Premium users able to unlock even greater rewards.

Ladders: Time-based leaderboards which will reward the top 100–500 players; available for everyone for free, every day, with simple mechanics which track the 12v12 matches you play when the ladder is active.

Ranked Leagues: Based on a casual progression system, where the closer you will get to the top, the more challenging ranking-up becomes. All users earn brand new rank titles to show off, with Premium users earning FACEIT Points for climbing the ladder.

Many more details on the rewards for playing — will be shared in the next few days. In the first 30 days, we’re giving away up to 30,000,000 FACEIT Points for the community to earn through the TF2 rewards experience so be sure to get stuck in from day 1

What’s coming next?

Sign Up & Play

With so many new things launching for TF2, we’re running a short Closed Beta to conclude our testing and to collect some final feedback from the players who participate. Also, the reward systems we’ve discussed above will all be live throughout this phase, so you can start earning right away!

From today, we’re inviting you to apply for access to the Closed Beta by simply connecting your TF2 account on FACEIT and share your referral links with 10 of your friends; as soon as 10 people connect their TF2 account with your referral link you will receive an invite during the next invite wave.

The first wave of invites will go out tomorrow (Saturday 13th March at 12:00 GMT) so keep an eye on your email inbox!

The full FACEIT TF2 experience is launching on 20th March, when the queues will open for all of our registered users. Our EU queues will open at 6 PM GMT, with NA queues launching at 7 PM EST, and we’ll be expanding into other regions thereafter.

Details & Events

We’re sharing even more information with you in the coming days. Be sure to put these dates in the diary!

13th March @ 3 PM GMT — Reddit AMA with the FACEIT Team

Your questions answered by the team behind TF2 on FACEIT — join us on r/tf2!

15th March — TF2 Creator showcase & FACEIT Point Drops

Join your favourite TF2 content creators as they stream the new TF2 experience on FACEIT in some Closed Beta matches, and earn FACEIT Points through Twitch Drops!

20th March — Queues open to all!

Jump into the queues as we officially launch TF2 on FACEIT. EU Queues open at 6 PM GMT, and NA queues open at 7 PM CT

A final thank you

Finally, we want to say an enormous thank you to everyone who has supported our journey to launching TF2 on FACEIT — your feedback has been invaluable. A particular thank you to creators from the community — including SolarLight, MRswipez1, UncleDane, LazyPurple, b4nny, Delfy, ceno0, Peterscraps, NISLT, spikeymikey, Toofty, Casperr, WAMO, HiGPS, ShorK, Laurennntiu, jbird, shounic, DEWILL, Vorobey, Oristv, ducklife, BigJoey, SilentManJoe, PyroJoe and many more for their feedback; to our amazing Discord server members who have participated in Closed Beta tests; and to the thousands of survey respondents.

We’re excited to be supporting you in returning TF2 to the glory days!

See you on the server.

The FACEIT Team