couldn't agree more with you guys. I'm having a blast with this game so far.
The classes and abilities are plenty of varaety and seem to work so well witth each other in terms of team work and balance. There doesn't seem to be an obsolete class, and thats a work of good balancing.
I've been spreading the word to my friends IRL, and making them play it.Seriously this game itself is worth $44.95.  I don't even know when I'll start HL and ep1 which I havn't even played.

The only problem I've encountered so far is on ctf_2fort if multiple engineers are camping in the briefcase room with their Sentries. It becomes stalemate and nothing progresses.

stalemate on 2fort is pretty fun anyway...lots of sniping and pointless kills...that maps definitely more laidback in my opinion anyway. Capture maps are much more hectic.

Yeah, good luck getting those guys through the base though...

Heavy-Medic combinations are excellent for clearing out the base...but it's very hard to get them all the way down to the Intelligence room.

Heavy + Medic should lose to a good engineer in that room, even if they use invulnerable. The engineer has more ammo than the heavy because of the dispenser and should be able to keep up with repairs pretty easily unless the heavy gets a bunch of critical hits.

gah...I really need to practice at this game (I really suck right now)

My favorite classes are the spy and heavy.

Does anyone else think the demoman is just a weee bit overpowered?

Penny Arcade gives a helpful tip that I hope most TF2 players should realize hehe.

Yeah, I saw that one.  ^

I just got finished winning a few games as a spy.  Spy = frustration for defending engineers

Haha so true, so many people just keep plugging away at the heavy /sigh...

Anyways I just got done playing on a server with team damage on and it completely confirmed my suspicions that it sucks awful. Aside from the morons who don't know and kill you repeatedly when you are retreating to grab health it completely gives the spy free reign to just own engineers to a point where I personally thought playing an engineer wasn't much fun. I tried playing on both sides of the equation for a while and at my skill level at least the spy has a huge upperhand where as before the engineer has a pretty solid upperhand but it was something you could overcome with effort.

Anyways, I also noticed that you can get your stats from the steam client and copy them:

Bwa ha ha ha! I am drunk with power. 

Just went 47 and 0 in a 2Fort game on D. In the waning years of the TFC scene (which I fully left only 10 months ago), there was basically no one but me and other players who had been playing for nearly a decade and were, like me, either professional or nearly so.

And now there's an actual crop of fresh meat again. I normally prefer to play only top-level people on private servers... but after a long draught of new players, this is amazingly fun. 

Yes, I'm bragging about how good I am at this game. Yes, it's changed enough that I definitely have a lot to learn still. Just cut me some slack, okay? I've put way, way too much of my life in to these games, and I'm aware that it is, essentially, wasted time. Feeling good about it for a week is a bit of a release from my usual depressed attitude about how much of my life I've twiddled away on this keyboard of mine.

I'll post some screens soon of me destroying people, just so I can flaunt it for a bit. <3 to everyone, see you out there, game's great so far.