TF2 General Chat and Speculation Station V6 - Year of the Guard Dog SURVEY IN OP - Games

Was there any info recently about updates or so? I don't follow TF2 news really, but curious if somethings up.

Medals were supposed to be distributed last week but I guess they were delayed. Things confirmed for the update: Some competitive medals Increasing the amount of medals that can be distributed past 1,000 for Titanium Tank Fixing the broken building spectating in casual Fixing the broken spectator presets in casual

Summary: Medals were supposed to be given out this week, but the TF Team did not update the game. This either means they forgot about it, or something prevents them from uploading them. Confirmed medals/medal updates are(in order of their appearances): 7vs7 One day EU Tournament medals(unsure about this one, they might just resuse them but no medals were distributed yet even though the website confirms it should be this week) - Medal Cap increase due to Titanium Tank stuff and Journey to the East medals. Eric has answered to an email saying a few casual bugs related to spectator cameras will be fixed in the next update. Interesting is that he specifically said itll be fixed in the next update, which might imply it is already fixed internally. That's about it really. We'll likely get a patch next week. Maybe. Who knows at this point, I think it's the first time the TF Team goofed up about medals.

Also b4nny talking about upcoming fix/balancing update. And the Community Sparkles will be displayed on first person after an update.

I can't wait for that update next october!!

In 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niPlHl88j1E

I wish he could see the "real" competitive and how interesting and deep it is. Maybe he would be legit interested in the game, someone like him could bring alot of people in.

I couldn't disagree more. Maybe the way he presented his argument is flawed but simply shaming someone for constantly disagreeing with you isn't very fair. Being tired of hearing people disagree with you doesn't make it right to try to shame them into shutting up.

this is obviously on a per-case basis and this case is it

Nothing tempts me to support random crits more than seeing the way people respond to ASIC

P sure it's not a case of disagreeing but how they're disagreeing

Opinions are opinions and differences of opinion are fine. What isn't fine is when ASIC literally discards entire opposition to rebut with "well this twitter poll supports me" or similarly-vacant argumentation. He's had more than enough chances to hold a conversation like an adult and has blown each one using the exact same rhetoric. Until it devolves into people just telling him to shut up. This isn't a matter of him being shut down over having a different opinion, this is a matter of him showing a lack of capability to get remotely near the subject with any sense of tact or making any actual attempts to support his case and instead just questions people's rationalizations. It's to the point where it's become an unspoken rule to just not respond to him in the first place (which of course doesn't seem to be working). If that's how you feel, put forth actual effort in being devil's advocate. The results would be a lot different than what ASIC's brought to this thread time and again.

The only reason people beat him up rather than attack his argument is because his arguments, argument form, and motivations have been so completely and thoroughly debunked over the years he's been making them, that they no longer hold any relevance and are essentially bait/trolling. For that matter, you cannot make a substantive arguement by continually asking nebulous questions of our opponent and then addressing thier lack of a clear answer instead of providing logically forceful points with which to support your theories. This is several fallacies at once and, people are tired of hearing it, and we haven't gotten to the individual merits of his points about random crits, which are ill-informed at best.

Say whatever you want about random crits, but there's no worse feeling than outskilling someone by a long shot and then he just accidentally shoots a crit at you and kills you then taunts.

Or a Soldier (with full health) ambushing me at low health, but we both die because I hit a pointblank crit grenade to him. Happened to me this week. This situation is impossible to argue against.

It's even worse when you make some sick play and outsmart somebody but the moment is ruined by the final blow being a random crit. You would get the frag anyway, but it doesn't feel as deserved because of that and person on receiving end can't truly appreciate your efforts and learn from it. It's so frustrating when you hit a smooth pogo or manage to dodge everything that comes your way on low hp to win 1v1 when you had disadvantage only to see "random crits are fair and balanced" bind in the chat.

The only "crits" I accept is flaregun and gardener. That's how fair crits look like.

I'm curious, if random crits were removed, what of the weapons that use "no random crits" as a downside, like Eyelander? Would they require tweaking or are they balanced enough in their current states?

No random crits for "on kill" weapons like the eyelander are mostly there to avoid unfair gains for the user, rather than to balance out the weapon. The longer holster/deploy time on top of the -25hp are fair downsides already.

I don't think anything would change as all weapons which can't deal crits are already good enough, besides caber and axetinguisher.

I suggest we give the random crits melees consecutive 3 hit crits to give the crit animations an use, and let the no random crits weapons have no consecutive third hit crits.

https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/705g65/in_gears_of_war_90_of_first_time_players_dont/ That tweet and Reddit thread had some interesting discussion. I'm sure many of us have been playing this game for so long, we forget what it was like when we first played. These are the two major reasons I can't advocate for the removal of random crits from casual: Hooking players is important for the longevity of the game. If not for random crits, what would improve player retention? It may be keeping casual casual and fun for most players. If you yearn for competitive gameplay, the competitive mode should be the answer to that once it gets figured out. I'd say good community servers too, but they're a rarity these days. Hooking a player is probably one of the most important things a game can do. Some games go as far as giving new players silent buffs, or try to prevent new players from getting matched against skilled players. Not all players have the time, interest, or even skill necessary to develop the skills to play competitively, which casual should accommodate for to some degree. It seems there's a notable population that enjoys playing games, but doesn't enjoy playing online, so they prefer playing with bots.

Yeah, too bad TF2 Official competitive is dead.

I don't like them, but I don't hate them either.

I wonder how people come up with excuses not to kick cheaters I was in a game where each team had one cheater, our team quickly kicked out the cheating sniper after the enemy team calls out but the enemy team refuses to kick their cheater who's a spy with 100+ score (while everyone else had around 30-40) landing consistent headshots on everyone including cloaked spies and has a private profile with rank 2 on casual. Just say "oh hes just smurfing stop crying" and not even worry about it and leave him in the game until everyone on the other team leaves

If there was a setting that made it so that I didn't get random crits I'd at least prefer that if they're completely unwilling to remove them in general; while it sucks more to get random crit'd it still feels bad to kill someone with random crits - any tension or anticipation going into an encounter just farts away with zero feeling of reward. I understand the game valve, I want to outplay the enemy, not just win. The winning bit honestly doesn't matter to me any more, but that's all random crits are for.

Competitive TF2 as a whole has issues that need solving. I'd like to see actual studies and stats. Can't really get behind anecdotal evidence.

honestly I just want to see opposing cheaters be pitted against each other, that sounds hilarious

The foundation laid for TF2, however, is actually anti-newbie rather than helpful. Let's assume for simplicity that the crit rate is a static 5% (the number that a player freshly spawns with back in 2007). For their first shot, 1 out of 20 of those shots are critical. Let's also pick simple numbers to represent player accuracy across skill levels. Let's say a skilled player will land 3 in every 4 shots, and a fresh-install player will land 1 in every 4. This doesn't account for their ability to dodge or position themselves to get the most out of an arbitrary attack, so let's assume they're firing rockets with generous splash damage at medium range. Even with these arbitrary numbers you see something emerging: the better player will get more value out of a random crit than someone in their first 100 hours. Layer on top of that the fact that random crits silently increase in chance with the amount of damage done in the past 20 seconds during which time they can fire about 13 rockets. So a new player firing a rocket launcher skilllessly will be dealing about 50 damage over the course of 6 seconds to unload and reload a rocketlauncher (this is assuming they don't just tape down M1 which makes the reload process even slower or take a long time realigning shots before firing again). At midrange they've maybe killed someone or maimed another, but they're hardly dealing much damage in that 20 seconds with their accuracy. Meanwhile an adequately skilled player is dealing roughly triple the damage and thus are increasing their crit rate 3 times as quickly. Using the old crit rate calculation, the new player has approximately a 6% critrate after dealing that damage. Meanwhile the skilled player has almost 10%. The crits themselves feed into this damage tabulation and things begin to snowball in favor of the skilled player's favor. It wasn't for years until the crit rate itself was lowered to 2% on spawn and capped out at 12% (800 damage) rather than the on-launch values of 5% on spawn and a 20% rate cap (at 1600 damage). Remember that when the game launched there was no indication whether a kill was a crit or not in the killfeed, melee weapons didn't have separate swing animations and only played an extra sound effect to accompany them, the only player who could see crit tracers for hitscan weapons were the user, and there was a bug that made explosive weapons raise crit chances exponentially rather than linearly (on top of both soldier and demo being fucking bonkers overpowered at the time). TF2 at its core is not a game very friendly to new players who lack the will to put their face into the grindstone. Even if you were to strip away all of the added content in the past decade aside from bugfixes and balancing, there's a ton of complexity to the mechanics that are difficult to develop if you refuse to put time into investing in. I'd argue that the casual matchmaking system has made things even worse, since the ad-hoc connections of the old server browser helped foster a sense of community between players as they develop their skillset in parallel and learn from each other rather than the manufactured sense of community that valve MM servers try to push out. That human layer of interactivity is what makes it possible for new players to penetrate into a difficult genre -- fighting games are probably the easiest example to draw comparisons to since you see a lot of interpersonal connections playing together at an arcade or local meetup than you do grinding in quickplay online against nobodies. Random crits do nothing to help get a new player into the experience of TF2 other than bury them. That's simply how skill disparity should be resolved. Jose.Gonzalez.2007 getting a doublekill from a random crocket doesn't help him learn or even appreciate the game, it just annoys those on the receiving end then they go back to kicking his teeth in after 20 seconds of respawn. If anything is necessary to help new players, it's a need for an actually developed tutorial that actually gets them up to speed rather than the sad state of affairs that is TF2's training mode. Giving new accounts a silent buff is also a pretty horrifying decision when you consider how easy it is for people to make smurf accounts for a free game, so that'd best be avoided. PUBG seems to be matching new accounts with bots for their first set of games, but that doesn't seem like a clean solution at all anyway.