As far as community servers are concerned, every time Valve does something that could breathe life into community servers they simultaneously release something that incentivizes playing on official servers. The release of Meet Your Match took all of the official servers out of the browser, but they added a casual and competitive ranking system that you can only get points for in official servers, so the likelihood of even opening the server browser for the average user seems to be much less. Quite a lot of communities have shut down over the years, mostly I hang out on trade servers, and a steady population is really hard to come by. Most people will only show up to trade if there's somebody to trade with, and with so many old traders moving out of the system their old favorite places just don't have the warm bodies to attract new users. I imagine it's much the same on every unoffical server type, your community is your lifeblood, and if it thins you have no real way of getting it back.
The bottom line is all about signal to noise ratio, with the valve official servers it's all signal, you're playing TF2 straight up. With community servers it's almost all noise, so it's much harder for anybody to tell what is going to be happening when they load into the map. You could be on a friendly only server where if you start trying to play tf2 you'll get banned, you could be on 2fort without an objective to cap, you could just be on a crap server with ads every time you die. It's hard to find a good community server that matches up with what you expect out of a non-official game of tf2. There's no perfect solution to our problems, it's not like Valve is going to put in a quickplay system for trade servers, where you match a bunch of people who all want to trade hats, stranges, robot parts, and unusuals onto a random server with "trade" in the tags. Even if they did it's fairly likely that the community servers themselves would find something in it that they hated, some way in which the system was worse than ever before. It would be nice if we could put a string of text, perhaps in view game info, that better explains what you can expect out of us as a server? That would at the very least increase the signal each server is putting out, so that you will be able to get a peek at what you're in for once you do connect. We know in our heart of hearts that Valve is never going to actually endorse us by having a "Community Server Spotlight" section on the blog, that Valve will never really care about what reindeer games we play in our own backyards, and that a better mousetrap doesn't mean anything if people don't know it's out there.
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