"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- There is no way to write your own TF2 updater (for servers), because it has its own unpublished protocol.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.
Pretty much "I CAN'T BREAK THE GAME :("
You're not supposed to alt-tab out of startup. Do you seriously need to switch windows in that 5 seconds it takes to start the game up?! How about you pay attention to the game you're playing? Yeah, the modification of the game is admittedly limited, but quite a bit can be done through SourceMod, and when it comes down to it, for anything big, there's always total conversions. Yes, the game stops when it's loading, every other loving game out there does this. The GUI is fine, doesn't the player list even scale for different player counts? The server can update itself. Use -autoupdate. Point is, yes, we get it, you know how to program. Now get over yourself.
"you get attacked in 3 seconds this game is so great modern shooters have stuff like story lol wtf is that im a maniac who thinks if you dont murder somebody in 3 seconds of booting up the game then the game sucks!!!! lets rip some stuff up!!!"
As John Carmack said in his
excellent commentary over Wolfenstein 3D, he made a point to just a few presses of enter to get to playing the game (sadly he broke the trend with RAGE with the on-rail section). Honestly, I'm completely tired of current singleplayer shooters stopping me to tell me just why I should be shooting the colored men. Which makes me realize, Doom also has that going for it. Enemies weren't just some ethnicity, they had some legitimate designs behind them.
