How to avoid the bug when you cannot join either team - class change and team change keys not working

Sometimes during the map restart, when there are many people joining blue or red team, I usually meet the bug when I choose a team to join, but it fails (due to too uneven number of players probably), and when I try to choose a team again, nothing happens - pressing , or . doesn't work - neither class menu nor team menu is appearing, and all I see is the map aerial view with scoreboard. The only thing to do is to re-connect to that server (which is not always possible if the server is full and you're still connected but 'stuck', so no player slot is available).

How to avoid this or how to prevent, or how to recover from such a bug?

Solution 1:

In order to avoid it I suggest to not try entering more than once in the door of specified team, if the first time fails selected random.

Anyway, if it happens that you got stuck, you can easily recover from this bad situation by opening console and write

retry

Retry command force a server reconnection and you access again the team selection screen. Sometimes, on busy servers with many people try connecting, this command causes to lose the slot.

For this reason, as suggested by @Dave McClelland in comments, is preferable use the command

spectate

because it fix the problem without forcing a re-connection.

If you really want to join RED or BLU team and reduce the probabilities to trigger that annoying behavior, I suggest to wait that half or more users on the server choose their own team, and then try enter your desired door.

Solution 2:

I think it may be related to maximum team number on server for MvM matches and also the robots being regarded as opposing team members (auto_balance / team_balance issue related issue [supposedly... :P])

I had this problem non stop every time I started tf2 for all attempted connects to tf2 MvM matches. Normal matches were fine. I have found that by joining servers that have 5 or less players resolves the problem for MvM (for me anyway) if more players join the server (5+) the problem does not reproduce, you can remain on that server with map changes and player increases and the bug does not reoccur.

As the default for server maximum team for MvM matches is 6, joining a game with 5 players or less guarantee's a spot (in theory..) despite how ever many bots / robots their are :) I would say this is a bug that valve should look at, not that I cbf submitting it myself (lol) A simple man with simple goals. Hope this helps someone. If it doesn't, I apologise.

PS: I forgot to add, none of the above commands worked for me. All they did was what they describe.. (eg spectate, retry) with same results. Good Luck!

Solution 3:

Just type in console: jointeam [red/blu/spectate]