TF2 Chat and Speculation V5 - Merry Skinssmas - Games

To be fair, a lot of skill/time discrepancy between players is mostly caused by the lack of a proper tutorial which teaches both basic and advanced stuff. You're also not given any pointers to guides other than the "new user forum" to ask stuff - the rest of it you've gotta learn it yourself and put it to practice. I could not play Demoman properly for the life of me until +2500 hours of playing, and I struggled a lot landing pipes on really easy targets, not to mention stuff like actually being good at rocket-jumping as Soldier. TF2 needs a tutorial system that not only teaches classes, but also teaches techniques, strategy and matchups (Pyro vs Soldier, Scout vs Heavy, etc). For a lot of us, crouch-jumping is second nature, but a new player that gets stuck in Frontier's BLU spawn, it isn't, and they might not even cross their minds to press crouch and then jump since no other FPS (except Source-based ones, of course) has such mechanic. It's pretty funny to think that TF2's Competitive Mode is getting a remake when probably not even 70% of the players knows every mechanic that TF2 has to offer :v: Edit: Ah, yes, and you only need a premium account and Casual level 5 to get into competitive mode. Barring the premium account, level 5 is roughly, maybe 2 hours of playing, give or take. How much will a new player learn in 2 hours of Casual?

I feel like that while a level restriction to get access to comp mode is a good thing (though it should be higher), you should still have a complete training mode along side it, so you'll have players who know roughly the basics as well as they'll have some more time spent in casual environment first, before jumping on competitive

[QUOTE=Hell-met;52967376]1k isn't alot. most people need 5x that to actually understand how TF2 works when every player on the server is at their peak. Just [I]learning how to dodge properly[/I] need more than 1k alone. so you sure as hell aren't likely to decipher the ins and outs of the random crits at this time.[/QUOTE] This argument is a little bit shaky. I think the way you spend your hours makes a much bigger difference than the hours themselves. Most of my hours past the 1K mark (wherein I was a pub death god and rarely, if ever, actually challenged) were dedicated to competitive TF2, for instance, a significantly more challenging environment that encouraged faster development of skill and game sense. I wouldn't be a fraction of as good as I am now if not for that. I only have about 3K hours, but my grasp on the game is strong enough to play better than or evenly with people who have over twice that amount of time. Usually the cause for that discrepancy is more of their time spent stagnating in pubs or simply plateauing earlier in their career. There's also plenty of people who just idle for hats and shit. The point I'm getting to is, hours alone are not indicative of skill level or game knowledge. They can put you in a general ballpark of where that player [I]might[/I] be in their development, but you gotta look at other things too for a full picture...achievement progress (including if they cheated to get a bunch of/all of them at the same time), what classes they played most, if they have any competitive experience...and perhaps most importantly, actually playing with/against them to assess them for yourself. That part of your argument doesn't work for that reason. But the part where he's speaking as if his opinions are fact is still hella dumb, regardless of skill level. Good arguments here come from people who are experienced and able to explain their opinions in detail, not simple "nuh-uhs!" or contrarian opinions.

It took me 760 soldier hours to be somewhat decent at Rocketjumping. And somewhat decent means doing hard tier maps without struggling. I have no idea how people do hardest tier jump maps honestly, there are just some things in Rocketjumping that are way too hard for me.

[QUOTE=Talvy;52967549]I'm divided, because on the other hand TF2's randomness is part of its design & appeal. Every step towards making the game more predictable does just that[/QUOTE] As long as the players are fallible human beings, the way a match or even a fight plays out isn't going to be predictable. This is not to even mention the dazzling cornucopia of variables in team composition and load-out choice.

[QUOTE=Hell-met;52967376]1k isn't alot. most people need 5x that to actually understand how TF2 works when every player on the server is at their peak. Just [I]learning how to dodge properly[/I] need more than 1k alone. so you sure as hell aren't likely to decipher the ins and outs of the random crits at this time.[/QUOTE] "Actually, you have to have over 300+ iq to understand the IN DEPTH FEATURES and RNG in TF2...." Christ, calm down. We're talking about a 10 year old FPS, not Rick and Morty

[QUOTE=Contra132;52967719]This argument is a little bit shaky. I think the way you spend your hours makes a much bigger difference than the hours themselves. Most of my hours past the 1K mark (wherein I was a pub death god and rarely, if ever, actually challenged) were dedicated to competitive TF2, for instance, a significantly more challenging environment that encouraged faster development of skill and game sense. I wouldn't be a fraction of as good as I am now if not for that. I only have about 3K hours, but my grasp on the game is strong enough to play better than or evenly with people who have over twice that amount of time. Usually the cause for that discrepancy is more of their time spent stagnating in pubs or simply plateauing earlier in their career. There's also plenty of people who just idle for hats and shit. The point I'm getting to is, hours alone are not indicative of skill level or game knowledge. They can put you in a general ballpark of where that player [I]might[/I] be in their development, but you gotta look at other things too for a full picture...achievement progress (including if they cheated to get a bunch of/all of them at the same time), what classes they played most, if they have any competitive experience...and perhaps most importantly, actually playing with/against them to assess them for yourself. That part of your argument doesn't work for that reason. But the part where he's speaking as if his opinions are fact is still hella dumb, regardless of skill level. Good arguments here come from people who are experienced and able to explain their opinions in detail, not simple "nuh-uhs!" or contrarian opinions.[/QUOTE] lets not forget that a good amount of those "veterans" spent a portion of those hours in text mode idling farming weapons when that was a thing.

With the decline of community servers, most of which were populated for their meme modes like saxton and prophunt, I'd value the playtime of people who started playing more recently much higher. It's more likely that a majority of that time was spent playing at least on a valve pub level.

[QUOTE=ASIC;52967201]Why would that sense of enjoyment be misplaced? People do enjoy "perverse incentives". Like spawncamping for instance, it's fun for the people who are doing it.[/QUOTE] [t]https://i.imgur.com/heTEcSP.png[/t]

[QUOTE=qubestf2;52967805]It took me 760 soldier hours to be somewhat decent at Rocketjumping. And somewhat decent means doing hard tier maps without struggling. I have no idea how people do hardest tier jump maps honestly, there are just some things in Rocketjumping that are way too hard for me.[/QUOTE] I have 6.7k hours in TF2, that's not even counting QWTF and TFC times bare in mind and I still suck at a good assortment of things rocket jumping can do lol. I've been trying to improve my pogoing and getting to the front while minimalizng damage intake for quite a while.I still occasional do the rocket jump as well were I don't seem to get any air at all, I only make about a normal size jump out of it while still taking on full damage as well lol. I actually think rocket jumping in this game is more difficult in some regards then it was in QWTF and TFC as well. I'd say online guides and stats can also give people a good idea on how to functionally run a class with low hours as well technically. But then I remember this isn't 1996-1999, majority of the people who play probably don't do research before jumping in Team Fortress now-a-days lol. [QUOTE=VX-79;52968335]With the decline of community servers, most of which were populated for their meme modes like saxton and prophunt, I'd value the playtime of people who started playing more recently much higher. It's more likely that a majority of that time was spent playing at least on a valve pub level.[/QUOTE] Wish playtime, as well as character stats only functionally went up when playing on Valve actual servers... It sucks to want to goof off and have fun, then next thing you know your stats are all screwed up because you joined a none serious server and had fun messing around.

[QUOTE=ASIC;52967313]If at all, it is going to teach them that RNG/luck is on their side the same way facestabs or the enemy jumping in front of a train does. It's not something that is going to occur often enough to make their playing strategy rely on it.[/QUOTE] Yeah, and I kinda wish it was. In Nuclear Throne, the player has to collect ammo boxes to be able to progress safely. To spice things up, the devs added a 30% chance of the crate being an enemy that bites you. Players were ok with this - they learned to shoot all crates before collecting them. The devs didn't like this, so they lowered the chance to 1%. Now it catches people off-guard and is frustrating as fuck (which was the goal I guess). [img]http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/critHitChanceGraph.jpg[/img] It kinda works in a twisted way in the context of that game, but TF2's random crits are exactly as unreliable and exactly as frustrating for one of the same reasons (they kick in 2-10% of the time), and it being an actual competitive game, it kinda detracts from the experience. One of the bad parts is actually that the chance never gets high enough for you to be able to make good guesses and strategize around them. Melees are an exception, having up to 60% chance of getting a crit, which means if you get within medic's melee range, you can count on being critted on due to healing counting as damage done in the context of crit chance, keeping it capped at max value all the time. That's actually somewhat preferable, since the chance is so high that you can sorta count on it and not risk stepping into a medic's melee range. The main issues are that it's static, and you can never run into a situation where the medic's melee chance [i]isn't[/i] 60%, and it's still kind of a fuck you out of nowhere. [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qfFEP_-LkI[/media] The other problem with crits is that they are output randomness, i.e. the aforementioned fuck you out of nowhere. Each time you fire a gun, there's a diceroll that determines whether it's a crit or not. This is the far end of the output randomness spectrum. There's no way for anyone to be able to tell when they kick in, or why they kicked in (except maybe if you know the chance scales with damage done, but again as I said that never gets high enough with guns to be even semi-guessable). It doesn't reward skilled plays, it doesn't introduce any interesting decision-making. It's just a kind of deus ex machina that resolves conflicts every now and then (usually though you just rocketjump or randomly spycheck with it). When it does kick in, you usually feel bad for the other guy. It's not even funny like when he dies to a train or own rockets, it's just sad. Must be confusing as shit to new players too. So I'd overhaul random crits to be more along the lines of input randomness. Instead of rolling for a crit before firing a gun, they'd be rolled for [i]afterwards[/i]. If you successfully roll a crit, your gun would gain a crit particle effect and your character would say something dumb like "luck always beats skill". The next shot wouldn't be a crit yet, but it'd get the gun glowing. Only then would you actually score a crit upon firing. If you didn't fire off those two shots within a certain timeframe (like 2-3 seconds), you'd lose the crit. Rapidfire weapons would have this entirely time-based, sorta as they already do. Naturally, you wouldn't be able to roll a crit while the gun is glowing, so you can at best get two or three per clip if you're super lucky. This way both you and your opponents would know in advance when you roll a crit, kinda Tetris-style with the upcoming block being shown and whatnot. You also wouldn't be able to run into a guy and crit him right away, random crits would effectively become almost exclusively a finishing move. When you're fighting someone and they roll a crit, there'd be a new counterplay going on - his gun is starting to glow, can I afford to go offensive and kill this guy to save my skin, or do I run for the hills? Similarly, the guy who rolled can also hope to survive long enough to be able to fire off the fatal shot, guessing how his opponent will act, having the same information available to him as well. The second part is the random crit chance itself, and making it more transparent and exploitable. First and foremost, it needs to be higher at its highest, and lower at its lowest, to make it be less of a noise and more of an actual mechanic that you can use to your advantage and make good guesses. Crit chance needs to be perfectly clear to as many people as possible on both teams. Here's one way to it, as an example (there may be more, better ones): crit chance exponentially increases as your team advantage decreases. [img]https://i.imgur.com/7WzjwFZ.png[/img] Other than practically eliminating random crits from team fights (unless two thirds of your team are dead, the chance is lower than the current minimum of 2%), there would now be interesting decision making when you're the last man alive. Do I wait for my team to respawn and push with them, or do I try my luck at wiping the other team with random crits that I'm very likely (but not guaranteed) to get? Conversely, the other team knows exactly how many people on your team are alive, so they have to decide whether to risk chasing you down or let you go. This would be quite useful in MvM as well.

That's actually really interesting, I never considered random crit chance increasing based on teammates alive. Maybe instead of teammates alive being a flat number, make it a percentage? That way games won't be so awkward if there are low amounts of teammates.

Or instead of even more RNG than the game already has, you could just use crit gimmick weapons or the medigun that grants them if you want extra damage in fights to finish the job. Plus you can store those, always guaranteed.

[QUOTE=Hell-met;52967351]you are quite clearly a dota2 player and you are still new to tf2. while this is not a bad thing in itself you voice your opinions like facts. this is going nowhere.[/QUOTE] So what exactly is wrong with what I said? How does this stuff affect the point of what I said?

[QUOTE=Drury;52968424]Yeah, and I kinda wish it was. In Nuclear Throne, the player has to collect ammo boxes to be able to progress safely. To spice things up, the devs added a 30% chance of the crate being an enemy that bites you. Players were ok with this - they learned to shoot all crates before collecting them. The devs didn't like this, so they lowered the chance to 1%. Now it catches people off-guard and is frustrating as fuck (which was the goal I guess). [/QUOTE] It's 9% percent actually and in all honesty, players still shoot all the crates, especially with the mimics making loud hentai noises. While I like the idea you had, it's still stupid RNG, making crits more expectable doesnt solve the fact that they are still unreliable and that the enemy will have defeated you not via skill, but via luck.

[QUOTE=Fluury;52968605]It's 9% percent actually and in all honesty, players still shoot all the crates, especially with the mimics making loud hentai noises. While I like the idea you had, it's still stupid RNG, making crits more expectable doesnt solve the fact that they are still unreliable and that the enemy will have defeated you not via skill, but via luck.[/QUOTE] Not necessarily, you can work around it. 2 shots can be enough to kill a guy in this game, the third shot being a crit doesn't change as much as it may seem. It just puts pressure on you to end the fight or bail. That's the ultimate goal at least - if it turns out to still feel unfair, it can be made to be even more predictable, or even outright not a crit at all but something entirely different if we want to go that far. Point is that randomness doesn't have to be a fuck you, it can introduce new dynamics to a battle.

[QUOTE=Drury;52968424]The other problem with crits is that they are output randomness, i.e. the aforementioned fuck you out of nowhere. Each time you fire a gun, there's a diceroll that determines whether it's a crit or not. This is the far end of the output randomness spectrum. There's no way for anyone to be able to tell when they kick in, or why they kicked in (except maybe if you know the chance scales with damage done, but again as I said that never gets high enough with guns to be even semi-guessable). It doesn't reward skilled plays, it doesn't introduce any interesting decision-making. It's just a kind of deus ex machina that resolves conflicts every now and then (usually though you just rocketjump or randomly spycheck with it). When it does kick in, you usually feel bad for the other guy. It's not even funny like when he dies to a train or own rockets, it's just sad. Must be confusing as shit to new players too.[/QUOTE] I don't really feel bad for killing people with them, even when it's at the "deus-ex-crit" levels.

This discussion was basically over in 2013 when valve said: [url]http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=11024[/url] [I]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. [/I] Random crits are the furthest thing from that, and valve knows it. Jill said so too.

[QUOTE=C. Blades;52968652]This discussion was basically over in 2013 when valve said: [url]http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=11024[/url] [I]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. [/I] Random crits are the furthest thing from that, and valve knows it. Jill said so too.[/QUOTE] I don't think tournaments would be lost over crits working as input randomness.

[QUOTE=Drury;52968682]I don't think tournaments would be lost over crits working as input randomness.[/QUOTE] You never know, a single Crocket will kill literally everything except a Heavy.

[QUOTE=Rajikaru;52968715]You never know, a single Crocket will kill literally everything except a Heavy.[/QUOTE] But if you know that it's coming, you can deny it completely.

[QUOTE=Drury;52968716]But if you know that it's coming, you can deny it completely.[/QUOTE] A bombing soldier can fire a rocket right before landing, making it impossible to dodge, which he'd already be doing to try to bomb med. Scout could also oneshot med, so could a crit grenade at mid-close range, or a crit shotgun shot from soldier/engineer/pyro. There's no dodging any of those, and they could all cause med to drop uber. That alone is enough to turn a match around. Not to mention the potential for a team-wipe if a soldier happens to get a crit on a group of enemies.

[QUOTE=Drury;52968716]But if you know that it's coming, you can deny it completely.[/QUOTE] Easier said than done.

[QUOTE=Hell-met;52967376]1k isn't alot. most people need 5x that to actually understand how TF2 works when every player on the server is at their peak. Just [I]learning how to dodge properly[/I] need more than 1k alone. so you sure as hell aren't likely to decipher the ins and outs of the random crits at this time.[/QUOTE] So by ins and outs do you mean the mechanical aspects of them, or how they affect the game strategy? What exactly am I not going to actually understand?

[QUOTE=Mort Stroodle;52968727]A bombing soldier can fire a rocket right before landing, making it impossible to dodge, which he'd already be doing to try to bomb med. Scout could also oneshot med, so could a crit grenade at mid-close range, or a crit shotgun shot from soldier/engineer/pyro. There's no dodging any of those, and they could all cause med to drop uber. That alone is enough to turn a match around. Not to mention the potential for a team-wipe if a soldier happens to get a crit on a group of enemies.[/QUOTE] The situation necessary for a crit bomb to work with input randomness as suggested above: 1st rocket: soldier initiates the random crit after a random rocket that he just fires off somewhere for whatever reason and lets everybody in a radius know that a crit is coming due to a voiceline, similar to a medic's uber 2nd rocket: rocketjump instantly, right away before the timer runs out; gun is glowing, medic's eyes are widening 3rd rocket: the crit finally comes out and gets a pick This requires a fair degree of luck not only with the crit chance (which would be really really low unless his entire team is dead), but also positioning, and the resulting pick has to be a match-winning pick as well. The whole scenario involves such a huge degree of not only luck but also skill that I don't see it being pulled off with any frequency. And if 2 shots is not enough of a grace period, it can be expanded to 3. That way you'd have to fire off your entire clip before getting to a crit with rockets. It might mess up things like loch'n'load though, so making it more of a timed thing might be a better idea at that point. The idea remains - make random crits more of at thing that you can take into account and react to.

[QUOTE=C. Blades;52968652]This discussion was basically over in 2013 when valve said: [url]http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=11024[/url] [I]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. [/I] Random crits are the furthest thing from that, and valve knows it. Jill said so too.[/QUOTE] This quotation is being taken out of context. They did not mention random crits at all in that article. The article was only talking about unbalanced weapons. For instance, let's look at the full paragraph of your quote. [QUOTE]One of our goals as we continue to work on Team Fortress is to support a wide variety of play styles. In order to achieve that, it's been vitally important that the weapons in the game are fun not just to use, but to play against. 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. Consequently, we are always reviewing both real world player sessions and player feedback to hunt down items that aren't meeting this standard.[/QUOTE]

And that doesn't apply to random crits, just because they didn't mention it? They were speaking broadly about their vision for the game, and using weapons as an example of this. If you're going to narrow an otherwise general statement to preclude something that wasn't even mentioned in the first place, you're going to need a stronger argument. [QUOTE=Drury;52968682]I don't think tournaments would be lost over crits working as input randomness.[/QUOTE] I can tell you that this is pretty wrong, partially because I'm a tournament organizer and admin, as well as someone who's played in them. There have never have been any random crits in these sorts of things for a reason, because yes, they do effect outcomes, both overall and individual. It's not just a matter of one key match-deciding play being influenced or not by RNG crits, but rather the effect that hundreds, if not thousands of unpredictable random crit rolls have on player interactions as a whole. That's the point here. Aside from the obvious tide-turning crits, RNG deaths and kills represent a systemic breakdown of otherwise skill based user interactions, all of which which have some effect on what match and ladder outcomes actually are. That, and this leaves the player, who is ultimately meant to be in control of his or her fate, through skill, strategy, or lack thereof, largely without that control. And that is genuinely unfun.

[QUOTE=C. Blades;52968804]I can tell you that this is pretty wrong, partially because I'm a tournament organizer and admin, as well as someone who's played in them. There have never have been any random crits in these sorts of things for a reason, because yes, they do effect outcomes, both overall and individual. It's not just a matter of one key match-deciding play being influenced or not by RNG crits, but rather the effect that hundreds, if not thousands of unpredictable random crit rolls have on player interactions as a whole. That's the point here. Aside from the obvious tide-turning crits, RNG deaths and kills represent a systemic breakdown of otherwise skill based user interactions, all of which which have some effect on what match and ladder outcomes actually are. That, and this leaves the player, who is ultimately meant to be in control of his or her fate, through skill, strategy, or lack thereof, largely without that control. And that is genuinely unfun.[/QUOTE] Why does RNG break down all skill based interactions? Why do random crits leave a player largely out of control of their fate? Why are RNG related outcomes unfun?

[QUOTE=C. Blades;52968804]That's the point here. Aside from the obvious tide-turning crits, RNG deaths and kills represent a systemic breakdown of otherwise skill based user interactions, all of which which have some effect on what match and ladder outcomes actually are. That, and this leaves the player, who is ultimately meant to be in control of his or her fate, through skill, strategy, or lack thereof, largely without that control. And that is genuinely unfun.[/QUOTE] I'd agree, random crits as they exist now do tend to skew results in this direction, but they don't have to. If properly reworked, they can enhance skill-based gameplay and reward both defensive and offensive strategies more than without.

Random crits need to go. Change the system so it's similar to Halloween where you pick up the crits for powerups instead, maybe in the form of Austrailium chunks.