Some Baseless Speculation About TF2’s MvM Update.

My conspiracy-theory for the MvM update’s origin:

The original post said:

So my theory is that there is code in the mode that needs to change for some future other TF2 changes, and the changes are disruptive enough that they felt they needed to put something more than just the patch. That is, they are changing some mechanics in MvM, which will be user-facing, and pushing those changes by themselves would feel strange without some content.

What that could mean for TF2 outside of MvM? Unclear. It’s not a theory with a lot of evidence. We haven’t seen the MvM update yet, though they have written the first post and two follow-ups to let everyone know it’s still cooking. Without knowing what exactly they are changing, it’s hard to speculate what needs it might be serving outside MvM itself.

My reasoning is that while MvM has been untouched for a long time, TF2 itself has mostly sat in that same boat nearly as long. It could simply be that folks at Valve looked at it and said, “Let’s change some stuff in MvM.” If that’s the case, why not push their own content? Why turn it into a full community-content update besides?

The answer there: Valve’s people who mostly work on maps and game content are busy on other projects, so any content needed to be farmed from the community. But that doesn’t explain why they wanted content updates to go along with other changes they wanted or needed to make.

So we know their update isn’t primarily driven by a sudden burst of Valve’s own content creators. It’s driven on the code and gameplay side, but they want to fill out the change with community content. At that point, why change it at all?

It could be that Valve folks played some MvM and said to themselves it wasn’t up to snuff, it needed polish. But if it was just balance changes or bot logic or a better UI, they wouldn’t need content to go with it.

It’s also possible that they looked at the numbers, saw that fewer people spend money on MvM while people continue to spend on regular community content updates, and decided it’s worth the trouble to open MvM for community-sourced content updates. But if that were the case, we probably would have seen a more general call for content rather than the wording we got, which specified they wanted to do an update for other reasons.

So my conclusion, my theory, is that they looked at improving something in regular Team Fortress 2, and when they realized how it would affect things in MvM, they first balked. Too much trouble! But at some point they decided they like trouble! So they came up with a cunning two-part plan:

1. Fix things in MvM to clear the way.
2. Add the new changes to TF2 that allows.

What kind of things for regular TF2 might MvM block? It could be anything from major engine changes (up to and including whatever that mysterious Source 2 project involves) to backend or database changes to allow for upgraded infrastructure. I doubt it’s a tenth class, but if my theory is correct it would be some kind of overhauled codebase work that they want to have eventually but don’t need quickly (to account for the long timeline for the MvM update).

My theory for why it’s taking so long is mainly that once they saw all the shiny new community content they all got sucked into dogfooding MvM for the past year, having so much fun, that they forgot they were supposed to push an update. That and reevaluating how Mann Up! works with a community update, given it’s never been done before.

While I never really played MvM, it will be interesting to see what the update looks like. Hopefully it will clear the way for future updates in both regular TF2 and in MvM.