now this is extremely broad
I'm not asking for an essay, just for some key points because I'm curious
"Poor design" isn't actually referring to gameplay; it refers to the way the game as a computer program is made.
Reasons why I think it has a poor design:
- You are practically forced to watch and hear the startup window. Trying to alt+tab out usually forgets up your desktop until the game is finished loading.
- There is no real scripting/modification engine. This is the same situation that Minecraft has.
* Client mods are unbelievably restricted.
- Modifications are hard to make. It's possible, but unnecessarily difficult.
- Server loading freezes up the game, restricting you from doing something else.
- The player list GUI doesn't always properly fit all the information. The GUI just sucks in general, anyway.
- There is no way to write your own TF2 updater (for servers), because it has its own unpublished protocol. Blockland has an easily understandable update protocol and can be imitated easily.
- Servers can forbid clients from running certain commands with the poorly-made scripting engine.
- Bugs take forever to get fixed; for a few years up until a few months ago you could splash people with jarate/milk before the game even started.
- The game has critical flaws: speedhacking shouldn't be possible yet
server-sided code has always made it possible. The response to the speedhacking issue was to restrict client-sided mods (see sentence with an asterisk), despite the fact that it makes no loving sense to patch the client instead of the server.
