I used to be a huge TFC fan, so I was extremely excited when the FF project started. They took a long time in development, but promised it was because they wouldn't release until the game was uber polished, complete with some sort of "training ground" for new players etc etc.
Well, development dragged and dragged, thens ome disconcerting things came out. Not only were the going to allow bunnyhopping (the bane of any game, which I have always hated), but they were gonna introduced a key you could hold/easy bunnyhopping mode so that anyone could do it. They couldn't understand my objection to this and how stupid it was.
Then a number of other stupid design decisions came to light - the team were hell bent on keeping this game true to the original team fortress games, no matter the "fun factor" consequences. Predictably the community whittled away as the development dragged on, and eventually the forums were populated 95% by "purists", basically elitist fucksticks who looked down upon anyone who wasn't a TF player since the Quake days. Disagreement with the dev team resulted in instaflaming, and no design ideas deviating from the "pure" fortress gameplay would be considered or discussed.
Well, the development took so long that eventually TF2 was released. This game turned out to be so ridiculously fun that I stopped giving a shit about FF. In fact, their community shrunk so dramatically that they felt compelled to rush the release. When it finally did come out, the game was extremely unstable, extremely buggy, ugly as all hell and had a very tiny community. Servers were immediately populated with fortress elitists who felt very comfortable playing what was essentially TFC2 immediately. Bunny hopping, concing, all the shit that we loved back in the day, but we have learned is not really all that fun by today's changing standards.
All in all, the FF team screwed themselves and screwed many of their loyal followers. I wouldn't touch this game if you paid me too. Anywho, bye bye I'm off to play some TF2.