An admin adds a Team MCP server to the Default team marketplace and tells the engineering channel that the server is rolled out. Within an hour, several developers reply that its tools are missing from chat. What best explains this?

The principle — A team marketplace is a distribution channel, and distribution is separate from installation. Admins add Team MCP servers to the Default marketplace so teammates can install and configure them in the Agent Window, the IDE and the CLI. What each developer actually ends up running is decided by the plugin installation mode: Default Off means they find it and choose, Default On installs it but allows an opt-out, and Required installs it and blocks removal.

Why the key is correct — Adding a Team MCP server to the Default marketplace does not install or enable it for every developer. The server appears in Customize as something installable; the developer installs it, configures it, and in most cases authenticates with the provider before any of its tools appear in chat. The announcement described the admin's half of the job. If the intention was that nobody has to lift a finger, the installation mode is the control to change, and Required is the setting that matches the announcement.

Why the others are wrong — Nothing about listing a server pushes it to every machine, so an editor version is the wrong thing to investigate. Team MCP servers are available to cloud agents and, once linked to the marketplace, to teammates locally as well. And access is granted to the whole team by default; narrowing it to selected organization groups is an explicit choice an admin makes afterwards.

Remember this — Available is not installed. The installation mode decides which of the two your team gets.

Sources — Cursor's Plugins documentation.