Major Update Speculation V35 - A Distinctive Lack of Communication - Games

scout just shouldn't get free mini crits The old soda popper taught us this

[QUOTE=housejojo06;51478005]Can't you just put "valve" in the tags box then select "don't include"? Or is that not a thing anymore?[/QUOTE]I just checked and you can add tags to "don't include." The problem is that this is only applicable to the internet section of the server browser and none of the other categories. (History, Favorites, Friends, Black listed, etc.) [QUOTE=geel9;51478082]I, too, love to jump to conclusions.[/QUOTE] Please keep in mind this thread is named "Major Update Speculation." The entire purpose of this thread is to speculate leaks, teasers, and other miscellaneous things that may be related to or included in the next major update. We haven't really had a whole lot to speculate on lately but the complete removal of quickplay a few weeks back and now this new server browser information are likely related to internal changes in preparation for a major update.

I could get over community servers being beaten while they're already down if valve created a reason to play casual or competitive but I just don't find myself enjoying either. Casual (while better than it was at release) still limits your freedom to come and go as you please, makes it hard to get on unpopular maps (because you have to be matched into it), and they still haven't taught people how to play their game so it's not like there's any more competition in casual besides the occasional 2-3 topscorers who happen to know the game back and forth. Don't even get me started on why competitive matchmaking is a let down. I get why they made casual, I'll never understand why they thought it couldn't coincide with a community-centric quickplay. Maybe it just wasn't worth the headache.

I always disliked the original Valve pubs because there was no sense of investment. People had no incentive to stay or work together and the server is still pretty much the same, organization-wise, when you first joined to when you leave an hour or two later. Autobalancing pretty much reset your progress because someone on the other team decided to quit. In fact, a lot of games were probably won because the top-scoring players would leave suddenly. Scrambling failed to do anything significant besides resetting the game timer, again causing people to leave or attempt to switch sides. At release, Valve tried to fix that with Casual Mode. [quote]Now, instead of jumping randomly into an in-progress game, you'll be matched into an unranked 12v12 game with players of similar skill. This means no more auto-balancing—you'll be playing a match from start to finish, with actual winners and actual losers.[/quote] It sounded like a step below pure competitive yet more organized than a basic pub. * Players of a similar skill * No auto-balancing * Start to finish match However, community outcry led to the removal of stopwatch mode and abandonment penalties. So Casual has become neutered and fails to meet any of its original goals as something between a no-investment pub and a super-serious Competitive match. Auto-balance is still removed, but at the expense of lopsided teams because the abandonment penalties were removed. The current iteration still doesn't address the problem of friend-stacking (pub-stomping) that seemed to be the core feature of the mode, playing against players of a similar skill.

I still think removing stopwatch was hella dumb

[QUOTE=rolfum;51481237]I still think removing stopwatch was hella dumb[/QUOTE] So was removing Quickplay and Replacing it with Casual They should have Kept Quickplay and added Casual

[QUOTE=TomatoGuy;51481313]So was removing Quickplay and Replacing it with Casual They should have Kept Quickplay and added Casual[/QUOTE] Casual is just a stupid bastard child born out of competitive and quickplay mix. Since the TF2 team wanted to make the game more competitive, we have what we have now. Quickplay was flawed, but i'd take it over casual anyday. As for competitive, this [U]game is not competitive for everyone[/U] and [B]doesn't need to be either[/B].

I'd be interested to go back and see if I am being ranked with players that are more of similar skill. I'm much, much better now than I was when quickplay was the deal, so it's difficult for me to tell if that's more the case now than before. Generally most players seem at least okay ish.

[QUOTE=Upgrade;51481120]Scrambling failed to do anything significant besides resetting the game timer, again causing people to leave or attempt to switch sides.[/QUOTE] I personally have found that quickplay produced much more balanced matches than casual. If matches were unbalanced the game had many systems to attempt to balance the teams; one example being the controversial autobalance feature. The TF team recognized that being down multiple players could significantly skew a match and Autobalance helped minimize damage of unbalanced teams(I.E. 12V9). Casual starts a match even when 10+ players are still connecting. I have played countless casual matches where 6+ players on red are still loading in during setup time which prevents the red team from setting up a solid defense. (Leading into a steamroll and possibly more players on red leaving.) I have also played plenty of 12v6, 10v4, 11v5, etc. matches. Being down a significant number of players allows the enemy team to set up a strong defense, make a game winning push, or get multiple ubercharges ready over the enemy team. (One gorge match was a 12v5 (with blu having the 5 players) for around 8 minutes and red was able to set up multiple sentries near blu's spawn and get multiple ubercharges. Even if casual does find 7 players to join blu the team still has to ready a solid offense which could require time setting up a strong push along with missing time due to a unbalanced match that played out before they joined. Another system was vote scramble. If it was blatantly obvious a match was imbalanced (Red spawn camping the blu team for 3+ minutes with no casualties for example.) players could initiate a vote to scramble the teams. Casual doesn't give players the choice to scramble the teams; it forces players to finish an unfair match or disconnect further damaging the quality of the match. Another tool to balance teams was allowing players to voluntarily change teams. Allowing this did have some downsides (Stacking spectate was so infuriating before it was restricted, waiting to join the winning team, etc.) it allowed players who wanted a balanced match to join the losing team in an attempt to balance the match. Casual restricts players from changing teams to promote "actual winners and actual losers" and in a 12v5 match it can be fairly obvious who the "actual winners and actual losers" are. Yet another tool was auto scramble. If a team won 2 rounds in quick succession it would scramble the teams in an attempt to create a more balanced match. Casual kicks you into a queue screen to find another match entirely. Quickplay gave plenty of options to players who wanted a balanced match. What options does casual give to players in an unbalanced match? You can disconnect from the server or rate the match quality horrible. Those options don't help improve the quality of the current match. They just force players to find a new match and hope that it is balanced and stays balanced for the entire match at the expense of making their previous match even worse for remaining players. Casual promotes "actual winners and actual losers" and, in my opinion, players who want balanced matches are the losers while players who enjoy pub stomping with friends are the winners.

With the introduction of Casual pubstomping was made incredibly easy. You and your friends get reserved slots and are FOR SURE on the same team once connected, you get to roll them with no issues whatsoever. Speaking from experience. I am disgusted with myself yet I still do it.

Why does abandoning a comp match add a bot to your team but not abandoning a casual match? Most second rounds end up being a 12v6 due to the ragequits, and then half the time, the players left on the server leave because they don't know about or can't be bothered to wait for the players getting matched into the server. Also, when a player quits, a bot should take control of the character until the player rejoins or the bot dies. After dying, the bot reverts to the stock loadout. That way, the players remaining on the team don't have to wait for the bot to walk from spawn. Sure, half the time the bots wont even be aware of how to use the weapons if they function differently from stock, but having the extra meat-shields the instant the players leave would be much better than them disappearing completely from the battlefield. There could also be a way for players joining a game in progress to take control of a bot already on the field until death or going to the spawn room. This could also lead to a sort of minigame where two opponents can start a game with two teams of bots and hop between controlling the different bots on their team at key moments.

[QUOTE=chandlerj333;51482306]Why does abandoning a comp match add a bot to your team but not abandoning a casual match? Most second rounds end up being a 12v6 due to the ragequits, and then half the time, the players left on the server leave because they don't know about or can't be bothered to wait for the players getting matched into the server. Also, when a player quits, a bot should take control of the character until the player rejoins or the bot dies. After dying, the bot reverts to the stock loadout. That way, the players remaining on the team don't have to wait for the bot to walk from spawn. Sure, half the time the bots wont even be aware of how to use the weapons if they function differently from stock, but having the extra meat-shields the instant the players leave would be much better than them disappearing completely from the battlefield. There could also be a way for players joining a game in progress to take control of a bot already on the field until death or going to the spawn room. This could also lead to a sort of minigame where two opponents can start a game with two teams of bots and hop between controlling the different bots on their team at key moments.[/QUOTE] That would require Valve making nav meshes for every map in the game, and knowing the TF and CS:GO teams, they just use nav_generate and are too lazy to tweak it by hand. Thus, retarded bots. I'm not against the idea but I doubt it would be implemented in any satisfactory way.

[QUOTE=Snowshoe;51482364]That would require Valve making nav meshes for every map in the game, and knowing the TF and CS:GO teams, they just use nav_generate and are too lazy to tweak it by hand. Thus, retarded bots. I'm not against the idea but I doubt it would be implemented in any satisfactory way.[/QUOTE] I'd still prefer retarded bots on my team over literally inanimate volumes of air.

At least bots can aim

[QUOTE=chandlerj333;51482406]I'd still prefer retarded bots on my team over literally inanimate volumes of air.[/QUOTE] Bots getting stuck in spawn and in corners because Valve can't make a proper nav mesh to save their lives might as well be inanimate.

bots actually have monstrous pipe aim, which has always surprised me they always sort of pretend they don't know how to aim rockets or hitscan THAT well, but their pipe prediction is way beyond their other capabilities

[QUOTE=Snowshoe;51482364]That would require Valve making nav meshes for every map in the game, and knowing the TF and CS:GO teams, they just use nav_generate and are too lazy to tweak it by hand. Thus, retarded bots. I'm not against the idea but I doubt it would be implemented in any satisfactory way.[/QUOTE] Also I imagine that the TF2 bots aren't programmed for every game mode and would require a decent amount of work to get working with every map and mode. Getting the bots working with every map and mode so they could be a stand in for missing players wouldn't be a bad idea but I don't see the TF2 team doing it.

In a perfect world, the need for scrambling would have been precluded by the supposed matching of "players of a similar skill". Sadly, there is no evidence that this was put into place. Even at its best, scrambling (whether auto or player initiated) merely swapped every other player without looking at any other criteria. It assumed that all players will stay and not attempt to leave or swap, which of course never happened in actual practice. Inevitably, the teams became unbalanced quickly after a scramble whether through numbers or people wanting the join the "winning" team. Though that's not to say there aren't various plugins on community servers designed to prevent swapping, which make no distinction over whether someone is trying to stack again or is trying to unstack the teams. But since players had nor currently have any incentive to stay and play out the match, scrambling does or would do little to curtail people with less than the best of intentions. At launch, Casual was nearly there at fixing the problem with autobalance, scrambling, and people leaving if only the "players of a similar skill" was added. But the dynamic changed with the removal of the abandonment penalties in deference to community outrage (probably exacerbated with the abysmal performance of the matchmaking service during those first few days). This however was done without restoring autobalance which leaves Casual floundering with half a rudder. As it stands, autobalance is the only practical difference between a match on Casual and a match on the old Valve servers. If Casual is not to be done away with entirely, Valve ought to fix and ensure the matchmaking system performs with more finesse to actually generate evenly matched teams and reinstate some form of the abandonment penalties.

[QUOTE=Limed00d;51482600]At least bots can aim[/QUOTE] I do find it disheartening that the bots kill me more in matches then actual players...

[QUOTE=Kitt Stargaze;51483155]I do find it disheartening that the bots kill me more in matches then actual players...[/QUOTE] ?? they're built-in aimbots. if Mike Booth had not done such an incredible job into giving them believable awareness and learning curve they would stomp anyone with ease. you my friend have never played perfect dark on the nintendo64. now that's where nightmares come true.

[QUOTE=Hell-met;51483285]?? they're built-in aimbots. if Mike Booth had not done such an incredible job into giving them believable awareness and learning curve they would stomp anyone with ease. you my friend have never played perfect dark on the nintendo64. now that's where nightmares come true.[/QUOTE] I actually have lol... I usually just do all shotgun matches with them since it seemed like the easier weapon to deal with the higher level bots with. But it's not just the normal bots. But even say, the spy bots are better then your typical pub spy.

Try launching counter-strike 1.6 , start a bot game and spectate a bot using an awp or scout, I've seen cheaters do worse

Having played competitive for a while, I can confirm that I am relatively sure when our 0 point demoman with 12 damage left the game and was replaced my a bot medic, we had an insane advantage.

They should add bots in place of players that leave in casual like they do in competitive

In one of my recent comp games we had an engineer bot setting up on mid whilst we tried to push Granary last for 15 mins, 5 on 6.

better than him trying to build on your last, like most engies would :v:

I bet there would be loads of people who would do all of the work needed to make bots usable in casual. But will Valve take any of the help? No.

[QUOTE=tekt;51485340]I bet there would be loads of people who would do all of the work needed to make bots usable in casual. But will Valve take any of the help? No.[/QUOTE] Other than engineer bots they're totally usable. I'd even go so far as to say the team with the most bots in a casual match has a higher probability of winning.

[URL="http://gamebanana.com/gamefiles/4134"]Giant bot overhaul mod with various functions, even with a revamped training mode, nav meshes, etc.[/URL] [URL="http://gamebanana.com/gamefiles/4351"]Person still working on and perfecting nav meshes for quite a bit of maps[/URL] Granted it's only two people working on tweaking the bots but the work is out there.

[QUOTE=Punchy;51481003][Casual] makes it hard to get on unpopular maps (because you have to be matched into it)[/QUOTE] i find it to be better than it was in quickplay though at least im guaranteed to eventually find a full hydro game rather than only ever find servers of four other people in the quickplay browser