Valve is pretty notorious for being an industry unicorn doing their own thing. They're a privately held company, meaning they have no shareholders to answer to besides their own founders. They make money hand over fist because they own a major distribution platform that maintains a plurality of customers on PC, meaning that angry player feedback has significantly less effect on their bottom line. Valve is also notorious for allowing their developers to work on whatever they want to work on. In aggregate, these factors combine into a company whose devs can basically do whatever they want, without needing to be beholden to any external pressures to do this or that.

Many gamers mythologize this kind of "perfect game development environment" where the devs aren't beholden to shareholders or publishers or politics or whatever else. Well, this can also be a double-edged sword monkey's paw kind of situation as well. Such an environment also makes the devs not beholden to the players of their games either. They can choose whether they want to listen or not, and the TF2 players can choose to take their business elsewhere. The unfortunate truth is that Steam will continue to pay Valve's bills for the foreseeable future, which gives them license to ignore the TF2 players for as long as they want. Unless the players can somehow persuade enough of Valve's developers (and the right developers too - a character artist certainly isn't going to write bot detection code) to drop whatever they've chosen to work on and switch over to fixing TF2, it's probably not going to happen unless something major changes.

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• Spend money on paid DLC and microtransactions if they have any.
• Talk to your friends about the game
• Post about the game and any new content that comes out on social media.
• Engage with fan and official posts on social media.
• Leave a user review of the game.
• Draw and post fan art and/or fan fiction.
• Make and post cosplay.
• Play the game a lot

Basically, what every dev is looking for are players who will spend on the game and players who will continue to engage with the game content outside of the game itself. The more people the game can reach organically, the more likely they'll get more players, more paying players, and more overall success.

PS. Conversely, if you want to do your part to kill a game, just don't engage with it at all. Let it rot, pay it no mind, and don't engage with it even if you hate it. Hate posting is still engagement. The only way to win is not to play at all.

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Got a burning question you want answered?

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• Frequent Questions: The FAQ

After being collectively yelled at on the forums for so long, I've developed a thick enough skin that none of the feedback really bothers me anymore. I don't get the emotional engagement with it much anymore. To me, there's really only two kinds of feedback - actionable and not.

If the feedback is actionable - if it's actually within the realm of possibility to do - then we'll consider it, figure out how much work it will take, prioritize it, and put it in the backlog to get worked on if/when we have time. Actionable feedback would be things like "Pastrylord doesn't feel very engaging to play", "The Buttery Doom ability feels overpowered", or "The Cappucino Plateau is a boring area". These are issues we can legitimately investigate and try to address.

If the feedback is not actionable, then we'll probably file it away somewhere. Some of this feedback is pretty obvious, but there's also some feedback that will never go anywhere. Trying to assign blame among the developers or our business partners for some shortcoming in the game, for example, is never actionable. Asking for a complete redesign of the game (or major game systems) is almost never actionable. Giving us unsolicited content ideas (e.g. posting a design a dungeon for the game you like) is not actionable for legal reasons. Realistically, little will actually come from this kind of feedback - we can't do it in the current game we're working on and we have plenty of our own ideas for things we want to do in other/future games. Never say never, but often say "probably not".

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Got a burning question you want answered?

• Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
• Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
• Frequent Questions: The FAQ