Team Fortress 2/Audience

Valve-Community Interactions

 * Ascended Fans:
 * The artist that drew this image of the Announcer was eventually hired by Valve as their official comic artist, with the image becoming the Administrator's canon depiction (see Sure Why Not).
 * The unofficial Team Fortress 2 wiki is now the official TF2 wiki, as of June 30, 2010. It is now being hosted entirely on Valve's dime.
 * DrunkenF00l, maker of many sourceOP mods including the Idling program, TF2Item backpack examiner, and among many other acts that ended up making Valve angry at his antics (and banned him twice), is now employed by Valve.
 * Butt Monkey: Pyro and Engineer players find themselves frequently getting the short end of the stick. Pyro's weapons have largely been nerfed, for what some in the fanbase considered trivial reasons. After an highly controversial change to melee weapons that exchanged no crits for less damage was pulled back, the only weapon that didn't have the change recalled was the Power Jack, but the Power Jack was given an additional defensive drawback in exchange. Now his starring role in the greatly anticipated Meet the Pyro is apparently delayed while Valve focuses on making Dota 2 videos. Valve, of course, has trolled the fanbase, claiming they might even make a hundred or more videos, and they plan to continue for quite some time. Though Pyro and Engineer players have received weapons in the 2011 holiday update, they have run out of rage, and now merely weep. Engie players are regularly shafted in terms of new gear; the Engineer skirts the Game Breaker line so very precariously that any new Engineer weapon has to be rigorously tested so it doesn't throw off the other 8 classes.
 * Medics are often chastised by their own team over their choice of playstyle. Many players deem that medics should be nothing more than medigun-toting supporters who should let the other men fight, when in reality medics who contribute to combat directly AND keep the team alive simultaneously are much more potent of a force.
 * Combine this with the fact that Medics rarely recieve updates (the unlocks can be counted on your fingers) and you have a class that is suppressed creatively by both players and creators.
 * Cheaters Never Prosper: Valve has taken many countermeasures to cut down on achievement farming, and have punished people who used an idling program for their stuff by either taking away items gained with it, or taking away items period. Inversely, those who didn't use said program received a new hat. There's already an alternate skin for it in response. They've set limits on item drops we can expect cries of VALVE!!!! from idlers.
 * Shout Out: Hats and weapons from the unofficial Fancy vs Nasty Update, mentioned once in the TF2 blog, have been sorted in the Store under Box of Fancy Hats and Pile of Nasty Weapons.
 * One thing Kytri and the writers seem to agree on is that The Scout keeps birds very close to his heart...

Unofficial Community Maps

 * Boss Battle: A slowly developing trend in Achievement maps seems to be making a hidden boss battle activated by either waiting for the timer to trip the introduction, or doing something out of the ordinary. For example.
 * Cool Train / Locomotive Level: The custom Capture the Flag map Convoy takes place on and within two side-by-side missile carriers racing through the desert (based off Unreal Tournament 2004 map AS-Convoy).

Fandom

 * Ascended Fanfic:
 * As mentioned above, a fanart depiction of The Announcer (or, The Administrator) became her canonical appearance.
 * Long before the Engineer Update introduced the Frontier Justice, Nerf Now made a comic about the Engineer going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge after the destruction of his sentry.
 * A mod entitled Vs Saxton Hale paved the way for a similar mode, fighting the Horseless Headless Horsemann in the Mann Manor map for Halloween 2010.
 * Attractive Bent Gender: There are rather popular images of genderswapped classes. Came to a head with two rather popular models that made the Scout into a female, and another that substituted a female Medic. Fan-made voice packs for both genderswaps are in the works. Also notable are ChemicalAlia's mods, especially her Spy.
 * There are lots of images with this for the Pyro, based on the Pyro's official Ambiguous Gender.
 * Boss Battle: THE OCTO-HEAVY
 * Companion Cube: Asking frequent Engineer players about their sentries can yield some interesting results.
 * Complaining About Things You Haven't Paid For: The updates (small and big alike) Valve makes to TF2 are free unless explicitly stated to be otherwise; this includes EVERY update in the first three years of the game's release. Still, the stream of complaints never ever stops.
 * Now that TF2 is free-to-play, people are complaining about things they HAVE paid for! Specifically, people think that this is a huge slap in the face to anyone who paid for the game and that they are entitled to a full refund since the game they bought four years ago is now free. Then again, this is coming from /v/, who are generally unhappy paying for anything, especially anything related to video games.
 * Distracted By the Sexy: Ability to spray images on the environment in a match + Spy class being able to be invisible and backstab enemies + Images of attractive women on the internet = Idea Bulb.
 * This pretty well sums it up.
 * Flame War: Team Fortress 2 is one of the most popular team-based online shooters ever. Beyond this, there is no aspect of the game that is not subject to actinic flamewars. There is no action Valve can take that will not spark flames on the forums.
 * Gender Flip/Rule63: There exist fan-made models of the characters as female. Some are rather disturbing.
 * Het Is Ew: Surprisingly averted. Scout's Mom, the (until now) only canon female in the Team Fortress universe who is in a romantic relationship with Spy, has enjoyed a comparatively mild degree of bashing for a female of her circumstance in such a male-dominated series, in spite of being a very real impediment to the canonicity of Sniper/Spy, by far the most popular pairing amongst the yaoi fangirls. However, it already looks like Medic's wife may not be so fortunate...
 * Although Makani (the Ascended Fangirl from above) draws her own non-canon fancomics depicting his wife and him in a Bi the Way open relationship, while others shrug her off as The Beard.
 * In-Universe Marketing: Community artist Fragimus_Max has set up websites for BLU, which has been hacked by RED, causing pages linking to the support page for the vendor, Spytech Industries, a subsidiary of TF Industries.
 * Jerkass Dissonance: All of the characters in the game (perhaps excluding the Engineer) would be less than likable in real life, but they are all very much adored by the fanbase. The Heavy is probably the best example, considering how much (and many) people love him.
 * Periphery Demographic/Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls: There is an astonishing amount of homosexual erotica out there for a first-person shooter involving people finding more and more creative ways to blow each other into bloody red chunks. Though perhaps that may be part of the appeal, seeing as the classes are basically a Cast Full of Pretty Boys minus the pretty.
 * Perverse Sexual Lust: Every single one of the classes has his respectable share of devoted fangirls and fanboys. Even Pyro.
 * Rule 34: There are fan-made model packs depicting all of the classes in the nude. Naturally, you can find them on FPS Banana.
 * Sailor Earth: Team Fortress OCs are typically the (non-existent) "tenth class", the first female member (though most ignore all the possible Values Dissonance), or the idea that uses the canon characters as a template and build original characters on top of them. The most obvious example of the third idea is Cuanta Vida, where even two members of the same class have entirely different personalities.
 * Ship Tease: Did you think that the comic showing the BLU Soldier and RED Demoman with women was going to stop Yaoi Fangirls from shipping them?
 * Valve also teases Heavy/Medic with the Sniper achievement "Beaux and Arrows", which you get by impaling a Heavy and his pocket Medic on the same arrow.
 * Serious Business: Miraculously averted with the game itself, which takes a Looney Tunes approach to battle, while the official blog rarely misses an opportunity to poke fun at the fans or the TF2 dev team (especially the dev team, who are made out be a nest of lunatics and weirdos). Sadly enforced to the max by the fans, who will break out into Flamewars at the drop of a hat. Literally. Really. The Nice Hats one can get in this game are obtained through a Randomly Drops system, and are base-breaking. More Egregious is the Yaoi Fangirl segment of fandom, where Shipping is also Serious Business to the point of overtaking discussion of the gameplay.
 * Teeth Clenched Teamwork: On a strictly meta sense, as any particular group of people don't necessarily like each other very much even if they're on the same team (why bother, when most people don't play more than a few rounds and you could be autobalanced, multiple times if you're especially unlucky, in any given round?). See also Video Game Cruelty Potential.
 * Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Dark Horse Comics asks who would win; Saxton Hale, or Dr McNinja? The winner is...