Valve's Steam.

I bought the OrangeBox without actually buying plastic. I really like this model of purchasing games : I save a box, the profit hopefully goes mostly to the developer and I can have my games installed on multiple machines without much fuss. The game is permanently mine. I don't need the box.

TF2 is a great game, I'm enjoying playing it even thought I'm not really that great with it - I'm a perpetual noob.

What I don't like about Steam is the update system. You want to play the game and bam you have to wait for the download. I basically have to make sure that I update the game before I want to play. Which isn't how I work. Since steam is running all the time, why can it not detect that the server has a new version of one of the games. Steam should give an option to just update stuff in the background like XP does.

After playing WoW and other MMPs for the last couple years, I forgot how janky the player matching is in TF2. It's basically a crap shoot, of players that are loosing jumping from server to server until they can dominate someone. I don't play enough to have a coterie of friends to play with so I have to put up with the vagaries of what there is on line. I just spent a few hours playing and this is a pattern that I noticed : that those on the losing side jump out. You basically end up with an unbalanced game, where your side always looses. The default server utility is ok. I can spend some time looking for a server that is running normal maps (a lot run home made maps which besides the potentially dubious play they represent, it takes a while to download them.) When I want to play, I just want to jump in, play for a little bit and jump out (thus the perma-noob skill level :))

Otherwise the game is fabulous, it's really balanced, it's pure rock-paper-scissors but with more than three axis of conflict. Each class has depth of play. All in a humorous package. I read somewhere that Valve purposely made TF2 light. I think that was a great idea. People can take these games really seriously. So far I've played with "radio" on, where you can hear other players talk. So far no jerks.