TF2 General Chat and Speculation Station V10 - It is not dead, is Aliven't - Games

outpost.tf is shutting down geel's monopoly grows

outpost.tf? You mean TF2Outpost?

They are gonna have to get there whenever they like it or not because I'm guessing Saxton has to get Mann Co back somehow

Just because it's actively and widely used doesn't mean it's profitable

I dunno why they don't just make it so that, in the event of unbalanced teams, you get the "would you like to switch sides" prompt and an invisible timer starts up. After 15 or so seconds, if there aren't enough willing volunteers, the server just autobalances whomever in order to fill the slots. Maybe give whoever willingly switches a nice 2x XP boost for the match to encourage good sportsmanship. Of course then, you'd have to introduce some sort of incentive to level up beyond "muh badge change color", and that's a whole other issue... If we got a keyless crate every five levels or so, you bet your ass I'd play even more than I already do.

It were like that Blue Moon Update, everyone liked the system, and few whined about autobalance. Then they for some mindboggling reason removed the voluntary choice, and just killed random people with buildings, full UberCharge to move them to other teams.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s one of the latest casualties in valve’s moves against P2P item exchange and trading. Considering the end user will always be the weak point in fraud and scams, no amount of trade holds, link scrubbing or impersonation prevention will ever fix the gullibility of a naive enough player who unboxed a valuable item. That, and there’s no money to be made by allowing users to engage in millions of dollars in item trading for free, untaxed with valve’s item hosting and services. That’s why they’ve even said in the Steam Escrow blog post that they basically regret the inability to remove trading without a significant backlash, and have since made moves to make trading as inefficient as possible, and drive item transfer towards the steam community market, where valve takes a cut of every transaction made for maximum profit: Escrow, trade holds do nothing security wise as they both do not stop users from falling for social engineers scams in the first place, nor do they prevent item loss, since by the time steam support responds the hold period is usually up and the thieves have made off with your items, if your appeal is accepted at all. The mobile authenticatior doesn’t do any of this either. So to blame geel for this is to misunderstand where this all started, and the fact that his services are profitless to valve, and will likely be the next target of their consolidation of item transfer on steam.

its joke

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tf2outpost/discussions/0/3317353727678568003/ Ultimately the cost necessary to operate this site has far exceeded any revenue generated forcing us to take this action. So yeah, high activity but not enough profit to sustain the activity. Shame, really.

Yeah that's sad. the fate of a great site, probably the reason they can't pay for the site is because of adblockers.

The demise of the O is damn shame. I much prefer its format for writing descriptions of items I'm selling.

Shutdown of TF2Outpost is probably not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things but still makes me sad that an era has come to an end and I'm worrying about the future of TF2 more than ever. The game is declining in some shape or form there is no arguing that, but before this decline is completed, I just wish for closure of the lore/story. Tie up all loose ends and answer the burning questions in our minds with one last TF2 comic. After that, I will accept any fate Valve sees fit for TF2. I know there will be an amazing spiritual successor to TF2 years down the line, I hope that I can get skilled enough to take part in developing it.

It's because people stopped switching over when it was needed every single match/round. People tolerated it at first, but doing it so frequently it just became intolerable. That sadly was expected though, since auto-balance only attempts to fix unbalanced and lopsided matches afterwards. It doesn't try to actually deter people from rage quitting out of matches on a whim, who are the direct cause of unbalanced games. It's funny too, because it's now getting complained about just as much as it was before they removed it now. Because no one enjoys being punished for the actions of others on a constant basis. I've been auto-balanced 3 times in single rounds before, and auto-balance almost always kicks in at least once every single round of a match. The fact that it needs to do this so frequently is proof that even with auto-balance in place, unbalanced games are still very much a problem.

I believe in Medic mains more than I believe in Heavy mains. Yes, yes Lord Exor but has anybody actually seen him play Heavy? HMMM?

Yes. And he is fucking terrifying at heavy combat. The man could give competitive players lessons in aim and tracking.

Nothing is more fun than going full ham as medic and soloing people in pubs. I once took down a enemy demo-medic combo by swapping between an ubering medigun and an ubersaw, by myself, as a medic. When you want the hurting done right, sometimes you have to do it yourself.

there are three entire heavies i've played against that i genuinely fear 2 of them are plat players 1 of them is exor while i don't think this necessarily makes exor ready to hop into plat HL- I don't think it'd suit his playstyle at all- the fact is the man is insanely-attuned to his surroundings and has some truly excellent tracking aim and gamesense

That panoramic FoV doesn't hurt, either: https://i.imgur.com/1gtlms1.jpg While he's been falsely accused of wall hacking before, I think it's pretty clear he has floor hacks: https://i.imgur.com/IY0TMbh.jpg

That's what happens when you try to use Clean TF2 (flat textures) with sv_pure servers. It's not a desirable outcome.

There's a simple fix for that. Load a map locally before you join and sv_pure server. Personally, I use itemtest (small map, loads reasonably quickly) so I can have my custom first person animations (Heavy First Person Animation Overhaul | Team Fortress 2 Skin Mod.. ...why are links so fucked in NewPunch?) You can just type "map itemtest" in console, or add the same to ...autoexec.cfg I believe. I'd have to go look which .cfg file it is, as I made the changes eons ago.

This only works for animations, i've tried this with flat textures mod and while the textures were different they uhh, looked nothing like they usually do

We need to go wider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOiE0LCu6J0

So, I was thinking about TF2 while at work today, and I came to the discouraging conclusion that its plausible TF2 might already be in full-time maintenance mode. And the reason we haven't heard anything, if this is true, is almost certainly the worst case scenario: Valve management has effectively shut down active development by giving the team behind Jungle Inferno sub-par bonuses, likely because the update didn't make enough profit to meet their insanely greedy standards. I mean, even if this isn't the case, when TF2 development stops, it will almost certainly be because the management doesn't want people working on it. And more importantly, we will never get an official acknowledgement of it, just as we have never gotten one for any other canceled project the company has ever actively developed. Valve, unlike most corporations, has learned that maintaining complete radio silence is more effective PR than spouting obvious corporate doublespeak about issues dear to fans' hearts. Especially in Valve's case, due to their unique corporate structure and infamous reputation for insanely long development times, not saying anything allows them to maintain the illusion that they are actively working on projects that they have actually abandoned, and that they actually give a fuck about anything other than money. I haven't completely given up hope yet. But if the whole remainder of the year passes by without either a significant content update of any kind (including Scream Fortress and Smissmas), nor a single vague hint that an update is being actively developed, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider this a sign that active development may very well be finished.

Nah. ZAM mismanaged it to shit. They ruined it, just like they're ruining every website they own. Their response to falling ad revenue is "make the ads more invasive and more plentiful" as opposed to anything else. Sneeza never would have let this happen.

Team Fortress 2 could use one of these for the new players it somehow still manages to attract https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQweGnO7rwQ Hmm, I meant to link a video of the original hazard course... In all honesty though, when Team Fortress 2 initially released I think a majority of its playerbase was coming from prior Source titles, namely Half Life and the mods. Let 7 or so years pass and now I strongly believe a majority of both the current playerbase and the newcomers have zero prior experience with Source titles and FPS in general, which makes their head on jump into multiplayer the equivalent to driving a car into a stone wall. Singleplayer campaigns are underrated training grounds that will do more than enough to put you at a serious advantage over those who go straight to multiplayer. Wonder if the team would accept a mod devoted to fully developing the training portion they never finished and make it officially accessible through the menu standard with the base game.

I believe someone way back proposed a complete overhaul of both the training section and weapon drops. In addition to adding the missing class tutorials, new players could complete contracts to receive weapons, while random weapon drops would be removed entirely and replaced with less frequent scrap metal drops. (Presumably, item drops would stop being tied to the class milestone achievements too). This would not only allow valve to teach players the basics of each class, but also the nuances of the game's vast array of unlockable items, and it would allow people to unlock weapons in any order they wish, instead of having to either trade for the ones they want, or wait until they randomly drop.

I can't remember where I got it but here's a mod to improve the regular training mode and have it for all classes. This mod actually fucked me up by it having it's own localization file overriding the current one

It had been going downhill for years. Donor had been long-time stated to be a permanent benefit which made the payment somewhat worth it. Then they decided to make it a monthly thing where they offered nothing new to drive people to donate. $5 every month to continue having auto-bump and a few extra trades open was not worth it. The mods/admins banning people for hilarious reasons. People have gotten permanent bans that cannot be appealed simply because their siblings under the same IP logged into TF2Outpost and didn't have their backpack public. Then it shows on their backpack.tf profile, so they are automatically considered untrustworthy. People banned for things 5+ years ago for minor offenses like running from a Spycrab of less than 5 keys of value still being banned and not being able to appeal. Allowing people like AcesGamer (who was actually known to shark and scam less knowledgeable people and actually made a [now deleted] video of how to profit off of these same people) to run wild for so long and get away with so much money. Not updating the site for literally years. I had actually gotten a month ban for "making up C/Os" when I simply said "I have received a 700 pure offer on this hat in recent past so offers below this range will not be considered." Another time a TF2Outpost mod blocked me on Steam (and TF2Outpost) for accidentally sending a trade offer 1 key short and had to send a friend of mine to make the trade offer instead. To address that last point: Original sets of taunts still use their full-color rendered backpack icons rather than the newer white-and-orange versions. Can't use killstreak sheens/effects in search parameters. To this day people put a unique version of the item the kit is for as well as the kit so people can search for the two together and actually find it. Else the trade is stuck in limbo among 500+ other trades of killstreak kits. Cannot search for specific war paints/skins, and their names appear as simply the weapon they are. I'm shocked the backpack icons actually show up properly. Icons for certain unusual effects (i.e. most added 2015 and afterwards, taunt effects, weapon effects) don't show up. You couldn't search for a weapon by whether it was Australium or not for almost three years after they were added into the game, and when they finally fixed it they added a gold "circle" next to them. Sometime within the last couple years they finally made them show their proper backpack icons instead which is incredible. Oh, and there was that time that loading ads on TF2Outpost would slow down the browser an immense amount. Then they fixed it. I'm still not fully convinced that they weren't mining bitcoin behind those ads because my computer struggled to even load the site for a solid year.

Any war paints that fit the Holy Mackerel?