TF2 Random Critical Hits: A Fair and Balanced Discussion
669 replies, posted
To all the pro-crit people, see the long post (by ithaca74) on page 13 with the buttload of Winner ratings, I want to see the view of people FOR crits against that post.
The Sandman finally losing the stun mechanic attached to it is proof that they'll willing change things after ignoring it for years as well. That weapon in upon itself was hated from the day it was put into the game back with the scout update that added the scout achievement items to this game.
Having them nonexistent in casual (the flagship game experience that's advertised) is literally the only thing people are asking for. Removing the code isn't necessarily useful.
If you want to run a community server with them on as essentially a luck mod, go ahead, that's why they exist.
i might make a server where it has ASIC's dream vision of vision
you need to roll a crit if you want to shoot, walk, or place a building
Why should I answer this question, when you outright stated that you refuse to answer my questions?
As someone who doesn't mind crits all that much (Played with Crits enabled all the time back in the heyday of TF2); I can't honestly defend their inclusion in the game play. To the people who don't mind crits or even enjoy them, keep in mind that your experience is not reflective of the entire playerbase & crits as they are are a tiny, tiny element of Team Fortress 2 that can be sacrificed at this point as it doesn't really add much to the game.
I know I'm not saying much all that much new; but I wanted to chime in as someone who doesn't hate crits as much as other people do.
That wasn't exactly my reply. I'm going to quote (what I think are) the relevant bits.
I believe that some confusion probably arose from how "Why should this happen" and "Why is it good for this to happen" can have the same meanings sometimes, but not all the time.
Some examples:
Q: "Why should I go to jail?"
A: "Because you did a crime"
Q: "Why is it good for me to go to jail"
A: "It it is not good for you, it's good for other people".
Q: "Why should I donate food to this beggar?"
Q: "Why is it good to donate food to this beggar?"
A: "Because he won't starve if you give him food".
In that specific case of Ussain Bolt vs toddler, the better player (Ussain Bolt) will always win.
But if you are speaking generally, the better player doesn't always win. Not all gaps of capability are as far as Ussain Bolt vs toddler. Some are Ussain vs an other professional sprinter. Yes, he is the world record holder for these sprints. But consider that Ussain hasn't always gotten 1st place in his international competitions, even though he has gotten it most of the time.
In the example you brought up, the lower skilled player didn't outplay the better one. Strokes of luck don't always negate skill, but it will do in some cases.
You said that no one benefited from that, but I don't see how that is the case. The better player died, so sure he didn't benefit. The worse player did benefit in that case, he won a fight.
im not even sure what youre trying to say but ill just say
ok bet
You guys (speaking in general here) were accusing me of things from the beginning of the thread. Even, before I was actually in the thread.
Now, what does it mean to have ran out of arguments. How do we gauge that?
Ok, people with awful debate skills. Listen up.
Please make all accusations, complains, insults, and other bizarre statements about me in your designated containment thread: https://forum.facepunch.com/f/tf2/bsoqr/ASIC-Thread/1/
So you're saying that teams can be unfair only up to a point where the skill gap is very small? If thats the case and if the supposed less skilled players won the match then it would mean they happened to be more skilled than the supposed skilled players.
Usain Bolt has the fastest sprint record but he didnt win 1st place every time because other sprinters was preformed better than Bolt did in the race, and not because "the better player shouldnt always win" thing. The fastest sprinter will win the race whether if its Bolt or not. You said yourself that Bolt will always win against a toddler.
First, luck should never negate skill. Thats like the worst form of luck you can have in a competitive environment.
Second I explained why no one benefits with random crits which has nothing to do with who won or lost in the fight but I'll assume you ignored that or didnt read it. I know the less skilled player didnt outplay the skilled one because I said pretty much that right before the conclusion.
If all you care about it who wins or loses you should play a much simpler game like rock paper scissors and not TF2.
No. Learn to actually articulate thoughtful arguments.
💡This, denizens of the internet, is what's known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias where people of low ability have imaginary superiority, mistakenly viewing their own ability as greater than it is. This has been observed to include the projection of personal lack of ability on to perceived opponents as a defense mechanism💡
You know facepunchers, I'm still not sure what to think of this.
The man is so embarrassingly deluded, that he continues projecting his own lack of rhetoric training or argument skill on to the people who disagree with him...
And now has somehow become desperate enough to order his detractors around in... His own containment thread.. That he fails to realize the purpose of...
We are dealing here with a genuine case of mental instability. The ego, the delusion of being surrounded by "enemies", the false presumption of authority, the refusal to react to or even acknowledge contrary or new information, and the aforementioned dunning -kruger...
I'm not being paid enough to attempt dealing with this. None of us are.
Please close this thread and ban ASIC, he contributes nothing to here anymore except using us as a place to spew his completely insane self-validation.
Kaiga, why do you keep making these accusations?
Do you want to convince me that your accusations are true? Do you want convince someone else? Or are you just upset?
Why are you telling me to run and mod a community server to add something which has been in the game for 10 years to compromise for it being deleted, when you could just host a server and use a built-in console command to get your way? Hell, don't even host. Use the 'nocrits' tag in the server browser. And why even bother, tf2 casual is just that, casual. Maybe just add a 'vote to disable random crits' with the f1/f2 menu.
Balance precedes "fun" that only exists at the expense of someone else's fun.
The tf2 team has gone back on bad decisions made a decade ago and random crits should not be exempt from that critical eye.
Random crits on 2fort pubs isn't at the expense of your fun at all, unless you're trying to play 6v6 comp on 2fort.
Critical hits have been ridiculed but ultimately accepted by the community at one point.
If anything, wanting to remove parts of the game that have been in since the launch of the game is being "unable to enjoy tf2 for being tf2".
Random crits in casual is at the expense of everyone's fun. Good community servers with nocrits are rare. nocrits should be 1 for casual.
I doubt that. Casual is a shitshow anyway. When I get home I'll go to community servers and add the nocrits tag, I guarantee I'll find a bunch of good nocrits servers. Also you can just host your own.
Random crits aren't at the expense of everyone's fun, as I've stated time and time again it adds a slightly unpredictable element to gameplay at worst.
What are you exactly talking about with "suddenly everybody is hating on random crits"? The phrase "random crits are fair and balanced" has been around for years.
Casual is what most new players play. I notice they seem to hate random crits as well. And no, my internet isn't good enough for me to host my own server. Random crits easily make a difference between winning and losing. I don't know how many times I've played Medic and died to a shot that I would've easily survived otherwise because it was a random crit. And I'm a decent enough Medic where that makes an impact. Skill should be the only factor between winning or losing, and I don't understand where a person is coming from that says otherwise.
Because you're suggesting we retain an obsolete, outdated mechanic from a time that the game no longer resembles at the expense of fair player interactions, which valve has stated is the intent of the feelings by the players on the outcomes of said combat? (Move those weapons up! Blog post)
Random crits in this day and age are a goofy luck mod. And the people who enjoy them are in a minority that those servers serve. They belong in custom servers where such things are common.
What do you consider a thoughtful argument?
However, there is an issue with your side. Consider this:
This is a reasonable statement. I don't do it.
However, you guys do things that are pretty similar to what he complained about.
I'm talking in relation to the whole "hurl around accusations" thing that is going on.
Some of you dismiss the questions I ask, some dismiss dismiss my arguments. I think this dismissal usually takes the form of something like insulting me or calling my arguments bad, without any other justification.
Valve didn't state any thing about random crits at all in that blog post. We have nothing to suggest that the person writing that blog post had them in mind.
Fair player
How do you know that the people who like random crits are in the minority?
Are you really dense enough to not understand that the following quote applies as an overarching design philosophy and not specifically about 1 aspect of balance?
We want players on both the winning and losing sides of an engagement to feel like their skill is being rewarded. In other words, when someone beats you, it's because they played better, either through pure combat skill, or through their strategic choices in selecting their loadout.
No one gives a shit about reddit or twitter polls. Reddit and twitter are a superminority. As is facepunch, steam discussion boards, teamfortress.tv, and literally every other online subcommunity that formed around TF2. TF2 is massive and the only way you'll get an accurate polling of such a large swaths of players is in the game itself. People who visit these subcommunities are already predisposed to have some bias about the game compared to those who play the game and don't delve beyond that. If you want accurate polling, you need way more than a couple hundred votes from a specific sect of a community. Plus you'd also need more specific questions, a broad question that doesn't address anything deeper than surface level might as well not be asked in the first place.
Are you dense? The quote could be applied to other things, but that does not necessarily mean that person writing the blog post was applying it to other things.
How do we know that they were referring to something else, when they didn't mention it all?
You don't need to poll in the game itself to get an accurate response.
I don't remember the exact amount of votes, but these polls had over 2000 votes. I believe that it is a rather good representation of the TF2 community as a whole.
If your population size that you want to get info on is about 10 million, you only need around 1900 responses to get a 99% confidence level and a 3% margin of error in regards to your polling.
Sample Size Calculator
Sample size calculator
The context is specifically game balance. If you can't see past your own ass to realize that a design philosophy will very prominently bleed into most if not all facets of the project being designed, frankly it's because you have no idea how game balance is handled at the developer level. Just because you think it doesn't apply doesn't mean that is the reality of how game designers and developers ranging from amateur to professional actually handle such a task.
I can pull up polls as well that show contrary sentiments in the very same communities that you think are split 50-50 when those results instead show things like 50-30 split against them (with 20 indifferent) or 60-40 in favor of removing them. Point being that polls are relatively meaningless, and I've explicitly mentioned before that polls are useless in this specific conversation. Again, another big issue with polls is that they distill layers of conversation and it attempts to enumerate everything. Numbers on a graph or chart are pretty unhelpful in an actual discussion unless the discussion is about those numbers -- a discussion has nuance that cannot be captured in a poll unless the questions the poll poses are sufficiently specific. Polls can be used to support an argument but they aren't an argument on their own. All pointing at a poll does is make you look like you're trying to pin collective responsibility on other people for agreeing with your perception rather than owning up to the fact that your arguments themselves aren't holding up to even the most basic of scrutiny.
The entire intent is to have a discussion about balance, not a discussion about your personal preferences. If you have nothing to point at as a firm argument that supports a stance in favor of crits, then you're doing nothing but shitposting in a thread that was created specifically to contain your bullshit. If your response sounds anything along the lines of "well they're unbalanced but...." then that's a formal admission of conceding that crits are not balanced. This is not a discussion about whether they will be removed or kept, although it's easy to mistake the two conversations since they seamlessly go hand-in-hand and it is fairly easy to piece together the goal of having a balanced product and the presence of any imbalances that besmirch it would implicitly derive that they should be removed posthaste to rectify that.
Can you see past your ass?
The specific bit that was quoted by you could apply to other stuff. However in context we can only be certain that the person writing the blog post was referring to weapon balance, for a few reasons.
As mentioned before, the article didn't mention anything other than weapon balance.
Another thing is to consider is that the blog post was made in 2013 and nothing about random crits has been changed for over 5 years (well, unless you count the poll they added).
So, how is game balance handled at a developer level?
Ok, show the poles.How many people responded to them?
People's preferences were part of the topic. The reason I brought up the polls is because Kaiga (and maybe someone else) said stuff something like "those who like random-crits are the minority of players". Poll's don't really determine facts, but they can measure popular opinion. So they are relevant in regards to whether random crits being fun or enjoyable, as that is an opinion (and thus subjective).
Why must I make a specific type of argument? What is wrong with just responding to the ones that others make? The latter thing is relevant to the topic of the thread, therefore it is not shitposting.
I'm pretty sure didn't create any bullshit in the general chat thread. I'd say the ones shitposting were are you guys.
"Id say the ones shitposting were you guys"
...Says the user who bumps this thread after four days of it being dead, just so he can continue struggling to validate his own uninformed opinions.
The real question is can ASIC see past his ass.
Are you saying random crits don't fall into the category of "weapon balance"? Is that where we are going with this?
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