TF2 General Chat & Speculation Station V15 - Buff Pyro plz - Games

Not to turn this into the "let's shit on Overwatch" thread, but man FUCK Tracer. She's the blandest, most free character out of the entire roster, but god forbid they balance her since she's the one the dart landed on, making her the box mascot. TF2 isn't a perfect game in terms of balance, but at least there hasn't been a dedicated push to nerf all of the dedicated counters of a single class into the ground. Overwatch, like TF2 is a game about positioning; position yourself badly and you're gonna get fucked. Unless you're a Tracer main, don't worry, even though a character whose entire gimmick is teleporting should revolve around proper placement, you can just hit the "get out of jail free" button every 3 seconds and regain all your health back. What's that, a Roadhog punished your bad placement and one-shotted you, one of the squishiest classes in the game just as we intended him to? Never fret! Now Roadhog is WORTHLESS. Now jump back in there and remember; don't use taunts or sprays in a way that could be perceived as anything but friendly! Otherwise we might have to punish you... It'd honestly be like if Spy mains complained that afterburn made it easy for the enemy team to see them while cloaked, so they nerfed Pyro's afterburn out of the game entirely. Valve deserves a lot of flack for their approach to TF2 as of late, but if I think I prefer this hands-off approach to micromanaging that tanks the balance of the entire game so the kids who haven't moved onto Fortnite yet don't get frustrated and stop buying loot boxes.

Yesterday I was playing TF2 and Chile had a small/medium earthquake. Everyone on the server began throwing jokes about the event "MY TV FELL OFF" "I'm from the South, what's happening?" "You're lucky guys, half our team quit the match due to the event", then, after everything went back to normal, some players began asking "hey guys, are you ok?" with small conversation between the fights. This game might have a ton of problems, but the community is rock solid, and they seem to care about eachother when it matter the most.

Well Fact of the matter is, there is no pro scene that has 12 players in it of which half of them just installed the game and are victims to really easy to rack up flare damage to fuel phlog rampages. I would know I do this all the time and I feel no remorse.

can any experienced soldier main confirm the decade old bug where clicking mouse1 during rocketlauncher reload at a very specific frame sometimes just cancels the reload without shooting anything at all?

Yes and I swear to fuck I've accidentally taught myself to hit that frame way more than I should.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, but something is off about the Pyro on early promotional material. Like the snout of the gas mask is...narrower compared to what it actually looks like in-game.

SourceMod Discord. Ask away. If need be, ping 404UNF. Think he's pretty much the only mod there who doesn't mind being pinged. I'll provide some answers here, as best I can; For datamining you'll need the program IDA Free and a copy of the Linux TF2 server's "server_srv.so" file (linux binary or some shit). You can view all the function name strings and shit in the engine with IDA. As for coming up with bugfixes, it depends on the bug. With the func_rotating issue, it was discovered pretty quickly what the issue was (spawnflags that were being set that should've been removed on launch in 2007) and from there the fix was simple to figure out; set the spawnflags again on any func_rotating entities in a map to remove that shit spawnflag that was causing things to not render clientside. Once you know about the entities in TF2 and their properties ("entprops"), the various events the game/server has, and a general understanding of (A) how things work in the game and (B) SourceMod in general, it becomes easier. There are obviously some things that SourceMod can't fix. There are things in the engine that SourceMod has no access to/control over. I'm not sure of any off the top of my head though.

Also the art of the Pyro on the box is flipped so its side vent is on the wrong side.

I genuinely don't know why should every weapon should be balanced towards the competitive scene. comp has its own ecosystem where everything works under different circumstances for obvious reasons(you'll rarely ever if never face two sentries for example), but for pubs its generally far from being the worst. even if devs decided by some odd reason gear it towards the comp scene, its most likely going to get banned anyway, so whats even the point.

Because with track records of changes made based around a casual over the years being relatively bad over the years relying on unreliable information giving to them from casual. Valve might as well just delete the weapons out right instead in al honesty. It would probably have the same results as said above and not waste what little mann power and time that Valve has to work on meaningful content I guess. Same goes with making new weapons, why even bother?

Because as a general rule, only the most viable weapons, classes, and tactics are fielded in a competitive setting. Pyro itself is a bad class, let alone the Phlog, which is a noob stomper and annoying gimmick at best. Of course, I agree that there is a world beyond 5CP when it comes to game balance, which is why general class matchups and how well each class fulfills its role should also be taken into consideration.

to be fair, modern heavy is significantly better than launch heavy. they didn't jump straight to nerfing, they did a lot of buffing in early updates first, esp. to things like rev speed.

could CND get its own set of cloaking noises? The only way to tell a spy uses it is when they're in perma flicker mode and that's obviously a grave mistake which talented players aren't gonna do. i thought it was really important to know what exact items people use

that is not entirely true, you need to take into account that balance is a beast on its own. even the changes we propose aren't based on actual evidence other than wild speculation so there is no way to back them up without extensive testing, and even our own experience falls short on the ammount of bias that has. again, comp is not the skill ceiling from where casual players rise. there is no natural transition from casual matches to the comp scene, so whatever meta a comp player uses will not instantly translate to the casual meta. the key difference here is that the comp scene works on its own and builds its own rule sets, so changes to the game barely ever affect its meta unless it actively messes with it. any attemp to inject new classes or weapons will require extensive testing on behalf of each mode, and even then chances are that for the most part it will get banned if too overpowered or simply ignored if its useless.

not exactly an argument against the point you raise but I feel like the one class where lack of knowledge about what they have equipped kinda fits is spy, eh?

on one hand, yes on the other, class revolves (heh) around stealth gimmicks

not every weapon should be, but every weapon should have some viability. In comp, the second banana is useless, or rather a complete downgrade, but in pubs it can be one of the best items to have equipped. Sun on the stick and the volcaneo fragment are normally terrible items, but take them to their intended use, medieval mode, and you now have a new playstyle for that class. You wouldnt use the paintrain on CTF, but there are certain items that will always a complete step down from any other item, and thats where you start to have an issue.

??

you have a competent medic on your team, you wont really need the healing effect as much as the tossable item for your medic or other teammates. Small healthkit isnt as good as the medium healthkit. Maybe it's debatable, but hopefully you get my point that some items are meant for casual and that's to a degree okay

I honestly think the Second Banana is a downgrade in general. If you need to eat every 10 seconds, you are doing it wrong. You shouldn't be taking yourself out of the fight so regularly, especially because it takes as long to eat it as every other lunchbox item. The main benefit isn't very useful, and the downsides hurt your team. Never understood why people like it so much, or why there's even a debate as to whether Sandvich is better.

Honestly the Pain Train would be so good on CTF if they gave it a passive move speed bonus when carrying the intel.

absolutely true but then you have the problem engi has where he has weapons that remain not that great in casual, and then they're broken in competitive to the point they are banned, and then it's still broken in matchmaking where it IS allowed, especially on payload maps given of course that you are on the clock. anyone who has played matchmaking against an even slightly competent engi (thankfully these are few and far between) knows the dire nature of things. the same shit is going on with medic items and to be honest I'd argue around 50% of classes have items which are completely broken in MM. You may not see it every time, because most people that play MM are still pretty bad but if this stuff ever took off like cs:gos MM system and players were actually decent because of that you guys would be absolutely screeching. I mean jarate/milk are even broken on pubs, it has been since release, but nobody really gives one in the first place because they're team weapons and are almost never used correctly. the solution is of course to simply ban these items, but when you have valve insisting that everything is fine and I presume planning at SOME point to rework all of the classes in a similar way to they did pyro- that's you have a problem that engineer is going to remain game breaking, and I don't mean that exaggeratedly, probably forever given the current state of update timings. I don't think engi will be changed before development on tf2 stops. in short, my point is that just because something is intended for x use, it doesn't necessarily stop it having unintended side effects. If valve genuinely wants MM to work (which I don't think they do, without going off on a massive tangent,) valve has to take into account the difference that many of these items have in smaller player scales and potentially rework these items. The question you have to ask is whether an item which essentially is a massive splash effect that grants the effect of winning the fight is actually ever going to be fun to play against in a competitive manner, and if it isn't, what can you actually do about it? Unfortunately it doesn't even matter, it's the same catch 22 MM has had from the start. Nobody wants to play it because it's awful and valve don't want to change it because nobody plays it.

mmm i would hafta see more thoroughly about these broken weapons in MM. It's difficult to say, as it's currently very hard to do MM 6s atm

Engineer needs more weapons. A new buildable would be nice too. As long as the new buildable is the TF2 equivalent of this lovely Jackass skit, I'll be happy. Something about being able to put a giant Engineer glove around a corner and thwack passersby just makes me laugh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmXYJOyAGc0

To make it useful for MvM while we're at it, it could make the bomb reset twice as quickly if you stand on it with the pain train equipped.

I'd actually want it for returning the flag faster. Treating the intel like a payload cart and having more people ( up to 3 ) increases the rate it returns. Then maybe reduce it's return rate on it's own a bit perhaps to balance it out?

i would just grab the intel and hang on to it for the rest of the round for my newfound superior DMing abilities

The thing is, weapons that are awful in a competitive section are really good in a casual environment. Spy, for example, does waaaay better when you have 12 players on the other team vs only 6. 6's is not TF2 and TF2 shouldn't be balanced around it. TF2 by nature isn't an esports comp game and they had to ban half the weapons, use basically only one gamemode, and use only a handful of classes in order to make it even function as one.

to be honest it's pretty much impossible to not get killed at some point in this game, so you'd just look like a griefing tool.

honestly thinking about it the thing which makes me worry the most about 2019 is the fact that the smissmas blog post did not include the all famous and usual "weve got some exciting SHIT coming up you GUYS!!" - it was quite literally just "here is the stuff. goodbye." quite literally the only sign of life weve had from the dev studio has been that b4nny confirmed that they responded to his balancing document, thats it