TF2: Thoughts on Decals (and User-Generated Content)

Removed from the final cut:

“But kids still play this game anyways, therefore it’s our responsibility—”

No. Minors (under 17) do play TF2. At various ages, depending on the household, parents give their children free reign and autonomy to do as they please online, to varying extents, with a built trust between parent and child. Or, the child does so behind their backs, because lets face it, parents can’t monitor their kids 24/7. If their child enters a space they shouldn’t be in, i.e. an adult website or an mature game, like GTA, it’s still not the fault of the adults who are within/operate that space to police those children. The child should be ushered out of that space, the space shouldn't change to become child-friendly. The fault and responsibility still lie with the parents. Additionally, some fault now falls on the minor as well, to which the parents must also take responsibility, and instill that responsibility in their kids. It’s called parenting. Please take responsibility for your own actions, and the actions of your kids, instead of placing that burden on everyone else.

Yes, this will sound very “boomer” of me (for us adults, this will resonate with you moreso since you’ve already grown up), most teens (14-17) are in their…let’s say explorative phase, for the sake of remaining kosher. They’re looking at stuff online (violent games, explicit content, 18+ content), everyone does. It’s no mystery or lie that this happens. Most healthy household’s parents/guardians know this, and generally let their kids do so in a healthy, controlled manner. It’s part of growing up, especially in the modern age. It goes wrong when those authority figures in the household aren’t there to keep their child grounded in reality/morals, and don’t guide them through/protect them from things that may hurt/traumatize them. That’s how it was back in the day, but nowadays parents are all too comfortable letting the internet parent/police their kids.

Also, if you’re letting kids under 12-13 years of age plays mature FPS games, what’s wrong with you?

tl;dr Parents, please take responsibility for your, and your child’s, actions. Police your own kids, and don’t expect other people on the internet to do it for you.

And one more thing- The people complaining about decals, who demand for moderation, think that THEY are the community moderators, and decals will be exactingly moderated to their specific liking. In reality, Valve wants nothing to do with that. They don’t have the resources or manpower, so they’ll just remove the “problem” entirely by hitting the off button on the feature. Hence why a toggle is the preferred outcome, but the complaints in that video are beyond asinine. Valve has always left the players to self-moderate via community servers (before they nuked those with MyM lol) and with report features. Use them.

Skullgirls my beloved, so sad to see how you got censored, and then the people that NEVER played the game started to demonize concurrent players, I hate those people.

Recently when I was playing on Sydney servers, there were plenty of bots overrunning them spouting a lot of vile transphobic and racist shit in voice chat. It wasn’t just one bot, a lot of them kept joining faster than we could kick em. It was honestly unbearable and agonising to sit through.

This concern could very well extend with decals such as the objector which should be worth considering as it provides another avenue to vocalise these awful political views on players in the server aside from voice chat.

The "free speech absolutist" thing is a way more slippery slope than mild moderation. The thing is, this isn't twitter being overrun with nazis or your parents being radicalized on facebook, it's a relatively niche video game for adults. The stakes are low in TF2- there's no need for this space to be moderated as if it's some integral town square meant to be suitable for all ages and levels of skin thickness.

I do wanna say I have a zillion hours on this game from pre-2017 and certainly never saw any CP. I'm sure it's happened, but I'm also fairly sure that person was full of shit and drama-baiting.

I haven't played TF2 in quite some time and ended up here randomly. I'm surprised the reddit crowd isn't calling for the removal of the domination system and domination voice lines for being "toxic and triggering." The beauty of TF2 is that is would/could not have been made today. It is a game about shit talking, random crits, and making children ragequit for daring to open up voice chat. I don't want to see what a sanitized, "serious competitive esport gayming" TF3 would look like.
t. xbox 360 TF2 and 2009 TF2 old man. Get off my lawn.

I really wish I could see the good stuff without seeing the bad. I saw a comment here that stated "Don't gawk at my big black cock" which a picture a chicken which is lovely. I just don't want to see things that are racist homophopic or blatantly AO.

Nah, porn sprays are fantastic

yep this guy make up a good point

being an edgy tf2 community member, i have encountered that kind of weak minded player more than once. Some were talking in voicechat about my 'racist' backpack item names (they are racially insensitive, at worst, and actually humorous rather than mean), and wondering when valve would 'fix' the problem. Those people are real gay imo.

I just think it's neat that TF2 is home to an ongoing conflict between gay furry leftists and neo-nazi chuds

this game is like a month older than me and i started playing a little bit after the summer update, and it is nothing similar to any thing online ive played or been on, yeah theres some offensive shit, but the lack of moderation reminds me of how fun it is to laugh at offensives jokes you find funny but cant laugh at without getting weird looks, this game is the only thing i know that has this lack of moderation, and i hope it never gets any moderation, yeah theres a little bit of bad shit but that makes it fun, i rather seen a heavy having a sign of hentai than having to walk over landmines when making jokes without getting murdered by the people of places like twitter, i think my generation missed out on many of these experiences where you have to deal with bad people, school is the defition of sanitized, idk a single person who watches tv, and most of the stuff on yt is overstimulation without anything to bad for the toddlers to watch, when i started playing this i was one of the biggest snowflakes but this game and how toxic the people are actually has helped me develop a spine and remember how funny the fucked up shit i used to love was and still is

Kinda weird how these exact same arguments are being used by political affiliates that dont have children to sterilize childrens libraries of beneficial books. Most never having never caused any problems but some being there because most library's use a blacklist instead of a whitelist.

If I had to choose between the occasional "offensive"/edgy humor joke about me or how I express/conduct myself. And trusting a corporation to regulate my experience for me. I'd take the former option 9/10 times. Everyone I know agrees with this line of thinking. No matter if they were black, gay, trans. After seeing other corporations force regulations so strict you can't even do things in game such as T-bagging or using the fucking voice lines in a "toxic" (toxic barely even being defined) put in by the developers. It's a good reason why we're fine with being on our own. We very much enjoy the ability to regulate ourselves and not be required to be babysat by executives whose views may not align with our own. Plenty of community servers will have rules and regulations you can choose to be a part of if one is sick of certain types of people. Steam also provides more than enough options and toggles to stop any form of attacks on your profile or you if you desire.

For casual which is completely unregulated. It's still completely fine as 9/10 nobody gives a damn about who is in the game. If you get kicked by people who are sexist because you spoke in VC, and everyone said kick the woman. Yeah, is sort of sucks but that's just how life is when you intentionally dive into an unregulated environment. Just queue again and 99% of the time you will never see anybody in that server again.

To be fair, as much as I like decals, almost half of all conscientious objectors have a swastika on them. Some moderation would really help.

Tf2 is 16+ for PEGI

My only issue, In My Opinion, with decals is... Tf2 artstyle.


Look, I'm just saying that if Tf2 scout femboy cosmetics shouldn't be in game because it breaks Tf2 artstyle then I don't think Tf2 femboy decals on your pins and conscientious objectors should be allowed either, or atleast shouldn't be tolerated.

Because it takes away from Tf2 artstyle, I agreed with you about how tons of modern cosmetics have tainted Tf2 artstyle by adding items that clearly don't fit into artstyle nor era of the game. And I just think many decals also don't fit the criteria of artstyle nor fitting the era, I doubt pre 2000 mercenaries would hold signs like this, maybe 2020 ones(there were some Chads in Murican army who had anime waifus on their ships and showed it to Japanese ship) but not the Tf2 mercs, they'd laught at you for using trans or ww2 germany or soviet objectors and probably beat you up.

So I hope my comment was civil, love ya content, but I disagree about decals being fully innocent since some of them can break Tf2 artstyle. Although even if toggle issue isn't added I don't think it's that bad, but again I just wanted to share my personal opinion on the topic

I started playing in 2023 and the old school unmodded feel is part of what I love about it, tbh...

Say, how old were YOU when you first played tf2 huh? Yea, no one cares about rating anymore, BESIDES anything sex related, so no one should stand for it anyways, im not shitting, just making a point.

Even in contious objector in that description say:
We consider to use peace
It does not work,at all

It is supposed to be hippie flag sing but you are the one who put it anyway

I just wanted to say that its just that Im fed up of seeing swastikas so often

I could not care less if someone has corn on their sign, if they die with the sign in hand, I'm probably gonna pick it up

I played a match the other day with a guy called Kanye who had a white hood, skulls on him, and a nazi sign. He got hunted the entire match. 😂

I will not be taking my Sanae tentacle porn off my Conscientious Objector

"subjectively offensive" is the best way to describe it. As long as its not cp, gore or maybe porn you are the problem for taking offence

People when they see boobs😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱

literally 1984

Screw disabling decals, I want them to re-enable sprays

User generated content has always been a community staple and has always been a double edged sword that we've accepted

Wow, it's even worse than I thought.
It's only a matter of time until these people call you "far-right", unless they already have.

Maybe a good slution is to valve to moderate decals and sprays, mark them as nsfw and give you an option to turn tgem off, but no company would do anything like this, especially valve so I can only dream.

common zesty W

pizza? wow so fucking offensive. dumbass
four steps? lmao just one step. nsfw being nudity or disturbing images. you cloned step 1 three times
26 min for just that? fail

The only offensive thing i seen in a objector was a swastica know what i did Just left the server (before that i dominated the edgelord with the Insignia) ik Crazy concept you can leave if you want

Zesty, I completely disagree with you beyond the fearmongering, because this whole video falls apart when you think about the fact that valve, and anyone besides the people who actively do it, dont want this kind of activity in the game. It's not a game meant for this, and over the video your arguments slowly go from good reasonable but not perfect arguments to "It doesn't matter!11!" , and saying this is nonexistent is completely unreasonable and completely insane, especially because you have as much time in TF2 as you do. This is an issue, everyone knows its an issue, and the only people I have seen defend it are people who actively participate in it. You took one argument (Cheese Pizza), then used that to say all of it was fearmongering. You are twisting this way far in the other direction, and I think the video did deserve the 16k dislikes that it got.

Why don't we do the best of both worlds and make a "don't show conscientious objector decals" option. If that's already a thing sorry for being stupid.

I got bullied in tf2 so I'm whining about decals

I would much rather have a game where I get called a slur once in a while than a game where you literally cannot talk, which seems to be the case in most games.

The man who suggested the slippery slope was a fallacy is a villian

the decals arent a core features , if valve removed them, who would care? the 40 year old fatass discord mod pedos?

i think that they shouldnt be removed, but a bit more moderated, isntalling mods isnt easy and not everyone wants to see porn. if they did they did they wouldnt be playing an fps with hats. they should just delete bad images found. ive seen many, and not everyone enjoys gay furry anime porn.

just moderate the decals annd that it. its that simple.