Patrick "Jimmy Breeze" Harvey considers how the Team Fortress 2 community considers itself

This column is the sole opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Heaven Media Ltd or the opinion of any affiliates.

I'm probably going to be exiled from the hallowed digital halls of #tf2.europe ("Europe's Elite Invite Channel") and single-handedly ruin their wet dreams of Team Fortress 2 being taken seriously as an e-sports title by writing what I'm about to write on a reputable e-sports site. But I want to see how many synonyms for the word "piss" I can fit into the second paragraph of my first Cadred article. So here goes nothing.

Team Fortress 2 contains a weapon that can only be described as a medium-sized jar of piss that you throw at people. The purpose of throwing this jar of urine is two-fold: a piddle-soaked enemy takes more damage than usual and you can relieve teammates who happen to be on fire by extinguishing the flames with wee-wee. The weapon is known as "jarate", which has something to do with the skilful throwing of pee jars being a martial art. That's part of the game we play. Sounds wild, right?

Thankfully, for those of us who can't abide the dishonourable art of jarate, none of the four main classes have access to the weapon and the one class that does rarely uses it. You don't see it too often in games. It's a special moment, like a 22 year old nerd's first kiss. But that hasn't stopped it becoming the best example of what's wrong with having a developer like Valve support your game in ways you don't personally agree with.

You've ruined everything. EVERYTHING.

For the record, I'm not particularly overjoyed that a weapon like jarate features in our beautiful game. In an ideal world, I'd be working at Valve designing the new weapons myself, and we'd all be hurling decanters of shit at each other instead. Everyone has their own vision for the game when it comes to what weapons and maps we should or shouldn't be playing with. We could spend all day "debating" tweaks to making the weapons better suited to competitive play. But that's not the point.

TF2 is the redheaded stepchild of competitive gaming. The closest thing we have to a pro player is a Portuguese guy who doesn't live with his parents and has a real job that stops him from playing beyond his very reasonable bed time. TF2 isn't going to pay the rent. And most importantly, the game itself doesn't fit into, and in fact even resists, all of the e-sports conventions we're used to. It makes no attempt to mimic what most competitive FPS games are about, namely a crack team of elite counter-terrorist agents taking on a motley crew of mostly brown skinned people trying to blow something up, all equipped with a range of aim-centric weapons in an eternal cycle of neat sub 2 minute rounds. We have demomen, pyros and spies fighting over Dr Evil style doom lasers and the gold in them there hills.

The proposition that something like jarate stops people playing TF2, or is the difference between LANs and MGOs supporting it or not, is as silly as jarate is itself. Look at the game you're playing. Either you get TF2 or you don't. And I think that's partly why those of us that do love it, those of us who find the art direction innovative and appealing, are so dedicated. TF2 is the cool band that hasn't gone mainstream (yet), the foreign language indie film that makes no sense to those that can't be bothered to read subtitles. We are Emmerdale to their Coronation Street. If Emmerdale was awesome.

Emmerdale is alright when you get into it.

The endless whining that has plagued our message boards and the decision making process of our hard working volunteer admins has done nothing to help our cause. All the circlejerk cartel forming and new league scheming does nothing but fracture our already fragile scene. The great irony is that the people warning about how Valve's continued interest in TF2 will divide our community are the very people who end up helping to break it.

I think that beyond jarate, the crux of the issue is that most of us that play the game to a reasonable standard spend an unholy amount of hours not only playing, but thinking, talking and arguing about it too. And we find it difficult to reconcile those hours with the we're-never-going-to-be-taken-seriously inferiority complex we have because of the way TF2 looks.

Instead of being self-conscious, inward, self-pitying and prone to navel-gazing (an utterly devastating combo of adjectives that hit the nail on the head about both my own and TF2's painful adolescence), we can't be ashamed of what we're playing. That might involve embracing jarate.

This man plays Team Fortress 2.

Rather than obsessing about the negatives, let's focus on what's great about our game. Isn't the fact of a fantastic developer supporting the game you love one of them good kind of problems? The fact that TF2 is very different from other e-sport titles should be a strength. Think how many bland FPSs have come and gone because they all look the same and all try to do exactly the same thing as each other. As we've been discussing, TF2 looks very different from other games, but let's not forget that it plays very differently from everything else too. We need to demonstrate that to people. We need to put our best foot forward and make good stuff happen by uniting our efforts towards common goals, not rage posting at ETF2L admins. If we don't take ourselves and each other seriously, jarate or no jarate, how can we expect others to?

So where do we go from here? How do we make that good stuff happen? Well, for my next article, I'm going to be introducing the world to the sandman (kidding). Thanks to the hard work of a few people generating new opportunities with, for example, Valve, we have some great plans in the works. And Cadred generously supporting TF2, although I'm sure they regret it reading this, is part of our great enterprise too.

Let's take all the angst and fighting on message boards and Steam conversations in game. Sign your team up to every league going. Translate your Badlands canyon strats into plans to rob a bank so you can get your team to i39.

If we don't concentrate our efforts on working together, we won't have a pot to piss in, let alone throw at the people we most hate.

All you have to do is play the game that's in front of you.