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

I wonder if tf2 youtubers fight eachother nowadays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3do8lRhmy1M

This is not my fault. Probably.

had an interesting comp experience in which two teammates got into a heated discussion over the sticky launcher the guy playing demo on our team refused to use it offensively as "sticky spamming is cancer", to which the other respond with "this guy is a fucking moron" we lost the match

I know this is a response to a week-old discussion, but I was talking with vavlie and he was fairly confident that the highest det jump you can get, without detonating the flare, is 254Hu with a ctap - so I wanna ask the people saying that it's possible if they're absolutely sure they can replicate a 256 surface jump? It's not really of massive importance, but pedantry and all that.

Sometimes I wish that a strange part for deaths while taunting existed, just so I can keep count on all times I've been slayed or stabbed while playing badpipes

I hope that competitive TF2 ends up being a testing grounds for the team at first. They can gather data of what weapons or classes are hardly used and which ones are used a lot, then balancing it accordingly. That's why I don't mind competitive TF2 being unrestricted, it gives them information of what people like or dislike.

If Valve doesn't like 2 scout 2 soldier 1 demo 1 medic, they need to make the other classes useful. And by making the other classes more useful, they make some of those meta classes slightly less useful. For instance: Engineer is buffed so that his movement speed while carrying a building is slightly higher, and buildings' deploy speed from being carried is significantly higher. Also, Sentry Gun health and damage are higher, but turn speed is much, much slower, so multiple angles attacking the gun is the method of taking it down, instead of corner spamming. Those changes (which obviously would need testing to work), would make cornerspamming less effective in favor of using all angles possible to deal with the gun. One team member could draw attention with the uber, and the rest of the team could come in from another angle. Turnspeed is so slow that the gun is taken out without ridiculous effort. Those changes would also make Scout less useful. Higher gun health and damage means that, coming from a choke, it's unlikely/near-impossible the Scout would survive long enough to get past the gun, even with a significant reduction in Sentry turnspeed. These changes also allow a team's Engineer, who just won a last exchange, to push out to second and defend it with a Sentry Gun. Using Gullywash as an example, say he places the gun in a spot that covers choke. Maybe a Pyro or Scout could keep tabs with the Engineer on choke, while the other 4 members can protect bigdoor, until another exchange happens, that they likely win, allowing them to push to mid. Of course, there aren't really many locations on mid a Sentry will work, so he will start getting less useful at that point, but certainly not useless. That's just an example. It makes the Sentry Gun a real obstacle for any single member of the team, but with team coordination the Sentry is significantly easier to take out. These are sorts of things we ought to be talking about. Engineer in this instance would still, perhaps even moreso, be a defensive class, without too much power outside of that gun. But with these changes, he'd be able to play on places besides last in 5cp, and I only made changes to 2 aspects of the Engineer.

as far as i've collected, people is aware of the comp meta of 6v6, but ultimately decide to play however they feel more comfortable. everyone has a main and everyone will feel(and perform) better if they're able to play what they want, however they want. good thing about comp is that ragequitters get punished, so it inherently culls the shitheads who do not want to cooperate.

Do you guys think they should attempt to rework some of the syringe guns so that they're on par with the crazy usefulness of the crossbow? I love the syringe guns from a thematic and design point of view, custom made tech by the medic. I hate the cross bow by how stupid and out of place it looks but it's too good. I hope they come up with some new stuff for the syringe guns, and stock melee in general should have a few unique gimmicks. Scout's bat fires faster but is weak, other stock melees should have similar thematically appropriate stats.

Nothing will be able to compete with the Crusader's Crossbow unless they fundamentally change how Medic's other primaries behave or giving him access to perks that the crossbow can then remove. Here's an example Blutsauger: Remove +3 health on hit Add: Apply Mad Milk to targets Mad Milk style healing grants ubercharge. In practice, this would make the weapon stronger at healing when used at closer ranges, since what was normally a +3 would instead become a whopping +7, meanwhile a long range shot would only heal +3. The implicit tradeoff is that it cannot be used underwater to gain health, it no longer double-dips for healing when hitting an enemy already coated in milk, it creates a 1-2 combo with the Neon Annihilator, and it is better at exposing spies. It also would intrinsically possess the Mad Milk upgrade in Mann vs Machine, saving 200 credits to be used on something else. Another side effect would be that using the weapon would build ubercharge, which would dispel some of the stigma of using it to be a combat medic as it'd be productive towards the team's objectives. Rather than bring crossbow down, the rest can be brought up to par by offering something that the crossbow itself cannot offer and opens up interesting plays besides getting long-range heals on people in the clutch. Also every one of Medic's primaries should reload when inactive, there's no reason to run syringes of any sort for self defense when you can be put into situations where you simply never get a chance to fully reload it and are left with an empty drum when you need them again.

remove arc and spread from needles ples

Having rules and restrictions is false advertising? Come on, dude. If you want a pure chaos TF2 experience, just play a freaking pub. @Zadrave Class limits are balanced. It prevents the balance issues that come from stacking too many of the same class (Medic and the entire Defense category), and it ensures that games have some kind of consistency. One Medic, one Uber per team to play around is a key part of any TF2 competitive format to ensure that consistency. @Fluury If you think Competitive Mode as it is actually appeals to competitive players, you're in for a rude awakening. I've only managed to get very few of my friends in the wider Highlander and 6s scenes to play Competitive Mode with me, and I've heard nothing good about it. We get matched up against people so far beneath our skill level it's like bullying an actual child, our viewmodel scripts and performance configs are locked, and the queue times are far longer than anything we experience on services like TF2PL, TF2Center or Mix/Pugchamp. The addition of ELO is a late addition, and something that Comp MM should have launched with. TF2's Competitive Mode is an ineffective compromise between Casual TF2 and Competitive TF2 that fails to capture what makes either fun. @ZMBanshee is right, and so is @Kipados . @Everyone Do you just think that class limits and the current competitive rulesets just spawned out of nothing? There's nothing arbitrary about them. Whether you play 6s or Highlander, the rules and restrictions of these formats were formed after years of testing and experimentation. Competitive TF2 has evolved for years without Valve's influence, ultimately resulting in the two dominant formats that we see today. The most common argument I see against the implementation of class limits in Competitive Mode is some vaguely-defined balance argument. This seems to imply that class limits won't be needed if Valve is able to rebalance the game in such a way that class-stacking isn't overly powerful and all classes are closer to being equal. Do you realize what you're asking for? Rebalances to that extent would change the game to its core and would have to be impossibly thorough...and there's no guarantee that you'll even like what comes out of it. The Specialist/Generalist split is built into this game's foundation. A game where everyone is a Specialist may bring more classes into play at once- maybe- but it'll also result in a counterpicking cheese comp meta not unlike what you might see in Overwatch. Hell, it might actually be worse, because even with Overwatch's abundance of playable characters, a dominant meta is always found quickly and exploited until patches bring in another dominant meta, and so on. TF2 doesn't get that kind of regular balancing, though, so whatever meta emerges from this system would likely be permanent, or at least very long-term. So, you can thoroughly rebalance every class in the game and change it forever...in a way that's not even guaranteed to be any better...or you can just fucking use class limits. Class limits are the easiest solution to the problem by far, and ensures that TF2 remains as the game that we all love at the end of the day. The second argument I see against class limits is that it turns Competitive Mode into community 6s, and that's a bad thing. Two things: 1. It's really not. 2. No, it doesn't. The reason that Generalists are as dominant as they are in 6s is because community 6s only plays fucking 5CP. Competitive Mode already adds Payload and CTF to the rotation. Even with 6s class limits, this changes things drastically for classes that are marginalized in community 6s and ensures more variety. The reason that these gamemodes aren't played in community 6s, however, still needs to be addressed. 6v6 Payload suffers because defenders have a height and player advantage while attackers have to dedicate at least one player to full-time cart hugging, for instance. These gamemodes were built around 24 players, not 12, and need alterations to become playable with low playercounts. I've actually written a whole fucking essay about this, so I won't dive into all of it here, but I do believe that these problems can be solved. My ideal Competitive Mode takes the wisdom from league competitive by implementing class limits, balancing weapons that are banned by those leagues, and making changes that only Valve can to create something better than what we currently have. 6s with more class variety and map variety is essentially the perfect TF2 competitive format, but it isn't possible without Valve. That being said, Current Competitive Mode is simply ignoring the lessons from the competitive community that it was allegedly created to expand, and that is why it's a fucking ghost town. Speaking more personally and emotionally for a moment, Competitive Mode is indicative of a wider problem for competitive TF2: Valve isn't listening. Very little of the feedback given since the Competitive Mode Closed Beta seems to have been listened to, and instead Valve has created a 6v6 pub matchmaker with abandon penalties. This is how Competitive Mode has been for over two years now, and it isn't working at all, yet Valve refuses to change it. And while Valve refuses to change it, while Valve refuses to listen, they take half-hearted steps toward improving it. Congratulations, our competitive matchmaking service finally has proper ELO! ...like every other mainstream competitive game does. Except two years after the mode launched. While Valve is sitting on their hands and refusing to take action, TF2's community-run competitive scene is dying. Many of our best talents are leaving to go play games that can actually sustain them. The amount of players and teams in leagues are plummeting, season-after-season. The people who have been here the longest are burnt out and exhausted. Competitive TF2 is on life support and Valve is doing nothing. We don't have the time or resources to rebuild TF2 from the ground up and create a brand new unified competitive format. It is long past time for Valve to embrace what its community has already done and start building from that.

Valve doesn't like admitting they're wrong, they'll keep pushing the version of competitive they personally want. I don't think weapon pick/bans will happen because they don't want to admit that some weapons are fundamentally unbalanced in competitive, like the old vita saw. They'd rather just balance.

I'm fine with no weapon bans, balancing the bad apples is certainly the better solution. But if Competitive Mode is the version of competitive TF2 that Valve wants, we're fucked. There is no incentive to play it, (other games have in-game rewards and sponsored tournaments with million-dollar prize pools: TF2 gives you a pretty little icon beside your name on the scoreboard) and it offers a far inferior experience to what's available in leagues, and it's well past time for Valve to swallow their pride and that pill and do something about it.

As far as I know the TF team members only play pubs (Jill's screenshots are all pubs with the default hud), and they seem divided on things like random crits. Overwatch proved people can understand a competitive mode with class limits, they really need to listen to the advice of any CSGO or Dota 2 team members when it comes to running a competitive mode, as well as TF2 pros.

Overwatch only implemented class limits because without them the game was severely unbalanced, in a worse way than TF2. If you think having 2 Heavy/Medic combos is bad, try 3 Winstons who can all put up a shield that blocks 2000+ damage, with no random crits in the game, and only have to look at you to do damage. And even then, it was just 1 of Every Hero, and in a game with over 20 Heroes that adds more every few months, it's hard to see why they wouldn't do it.

McCree hasn't been a meta pick in a very long time (76 is still much better overall, with higher DPS, self-healing and more mobility), and his bullets actually have very severe falloff past a certain range. Overwatch may have sorely needed class limits across-the-board, and they may be different games, but that doesn't mean TF2 doesn't need them either. Class limits in TF2's competitive formats solve many problems, balance being chief among them but also aspects like organization or strategy. You can't strategize for several different Ubers in play, for instance. Hell, the TF2 competitive scene did class limits well before Overwatch ever came out. It's just yet another thing that Blizzard took from TF2, just not TF2's main game.

The recent balancing changes are some of the best we've had in years, and resulted in a number of long-banned items being moved to the competitive whitelist. If they keep this up, we could theoretically see more and more weapons becoming balanced for competitive, reducing the need for an official item ban system. The gas passer, for instance, indicates valve may be preparing to change the way other throwable items work, meaning we could potentially see the jarate and mad milk unbanned in the future.

The Overdose might be remotely viable if its movement speed buff was passive. Another crazy idea: Boost Medic's base HP by ...10. He can no longer be quickscoped. Change the Crossbow: -10HP on wearer. Other syringes are buffed. Camping Long Shoot Man can cry.

we getting "good balance", lol are we playing the same game? each and every class still have 3-4 useless primaries, utility items always dominate secondaries as usual, and 10% melee weapons overshadow all the rest completely. pyro is back to being a shitter, heavy still is a obnoxious road bump as ever, engineer relies on copies of himself to get anything done And, of course, perfectly fine weapons continue getting ruined for no reason (latest victim being dragon fury) (yes even competitive players thought v1 dragon fury wasn't really something to panic over)

Do you just think that class limits and the current competitive rulesets just spawned out of nothing? They spawned out of necessity. For most of its lifetime TF2 had been an unbalanced mess that became unplayable in high level play, so the comp community used a bandaid solution in the form of weapon bans and class limits. It was easier, faster, more streamlined and less confusing than using sourcemod to rebalance the game themselves, but had the problem that @Everybody is pointing out over and over - you're gutting the game for the sake of competition. The most common argument I see against the implementation of class limits in Competitive Mode is some vaguely-defined balance argument. This seems to imply that class limits won't be needed if Valve is able to rebalance the game in such a way that class-stacking isn't overly powerful and all classes are closer to being equal. Do you realize what you're asking for? Rebalances to that extent would change the game to its core and would have to be impossibly thorough...and there's no guarantee that you'll even like what comes out of it. The Specialist/Generalist split is built into this game's foundation. A game where everyone is a Specialist may bring more classes into play at once- maybe- but it'll also result in a counterpicking cheese comp meta not unlike what you might see in Overwatch. Do you know what we're asking for? Making multiples of a class not work well isn't impossible at all, and it wouldn't require any "changes to the game's core" either. You could i.e. make Medics not able to heal each other, nerf double heals, or have just one shared uber per team other etc., Dane himself said he'd be ok if cooperative engineering got removed altogether for the sake of nerfing sentryspam. And the problem with specialists isn't that they're too good in numbers, it's that they're not mainable. You can't fix this with class limits nor weapon bans. I actually agree with most else you said, but you don't seem to account for the simple fact that comp won't ever take off if it's literally a different game from what the vast majority of players is playing, and one that is inferior in the eyes of the average player. I'd rather wait for Valve to build a proper comp, even if it means completely undoing the whole (flawed) community comp evolution. I've waited 10 years, I can suffer to wait a few more if it means results.

Of course we need class limits. But 5cp has tainted what those class limits should be. I'm not saying we should allow stacks of 2 Heavy/2 Medic, because that's not fun to fight. What I am saying is that we need to find a set of class limits that allow fun and diversity simultaneously, and for mappers to create maps in gamemodes that allow said diversity (koth, a/d). Here's a sketch of how class limits could work to encourage diversity. First, I'll explain what the numbers mean. Here, there are primary and secondary class limits. Primary class limits are applied to each class. Secondary class limits apply to each of the 3 class areas (offense, defense, and support). For instance, Highlander has a 1 primary class limit across the board, and a secondary class limit of 3, each for offense, defense, and support. There's also a tertiary class limit which simply represents the number of players on each team. https://i.imgur.com/W0xCio7.png Here's a sketch of what I mean. The top set of class limits is Highlander. 1 of each class, 3 classes of each area, and 9 players. The next set is for current 6s, basically. The 3rd set is prolander. And the 4th set is a semi-random set of class limits I'd like to see tried. I think we ought to use this class limit formula to find what really works if Valve does the kind of balancing I want them to.

What do you want out of balance besides reverting everything to v1?

Limiting Offense to 3 and boosting Defense to 3 just makes a slower game, dude. But what's exactly the issue with 6s class limits implemented in non-5CP? What problem are you actually trying to fix that isn't already fixed by simply using 6s class limits in other game modes? Also, the secondary class limit for Support under 6s is inaccurate. Rare as it is, Sniper and Spy have been played simultaneously in 6s before, and there are no rules against it. In fact the secondary class limits don't exist for any of the formats you've listed until this weird new one you've pulled out for...some reason?

That is a very interesting system but i'm not sure if such complexity is necessary.

Implementing class limits isn't gutting the game. It's giving it some fucking rules and organization, which it sorely needs to be played competitively. So you're asking for a bunch of non-intuitive, class-specific nerfs to class-stacking, which will also effect pub play? How is adding a bunch of new mechanics to TF2 (a game already stuffed to the brim with unexplained and obtuse mechanics) a better solution than just implementing some fucking class limits? Also, stacking specialists that aren't Sniper or Spy is perfectly viable when the playercount is 12, and is more effective than doing so in 12v12 because of the significant reduction in spam. Re: your last point Have you played competitive TF2? Like, actually signed up for a league, played a few seasons, gotten to know what competitive TF2 actually has to offer? Because Competitive TF2 isn't a different game from mainline TF2, it's just streamlined to bring out the best that it has to offer. TF2Center lobbies aren't competitive experience. Get on a team and spend some time in the scene before dismissing all that it's done for TF2. Also, if Valve were going to do what you want them to do, they should have done it by now. Competitive Mode has been in this state for over two years, but we've seen no major changes to it. Most of the balance changes we have seen haven't been overhauling the game to better fit Competitive Mode, either, they've been in response to whitelists from the competitive leagues and assorted whining from pub players. I don't think they're willing or capable to do what you seem to want. And finally? We don't have a few more years. TF2's actual competitive scene is dying, and I honestly don't think we have much longer if Valve doesn't get their shit together soon. The fastest, the easiest, I'd argue the only way to ensure competitive TF2's survival, is for Valve to swallow their pride, adopt it, and start working from there.

I didn't boost defense to 3. 6s class limits don't work because it enforces pocket/roamer and double scout. I don't want that anymore. I want meta to revolve around what classes are useful in any given situation, and I want Valve to balance as such. In reality, I want Valve to balance the game such that primary class limits are 2 across the board (besides medic) and secondary class limits are 3 across the board. Also, 5cp enforces double scout/double soldier because of the mobility required to get to mid. Koth less so as the point can't be capped until the midfight is basically over. Not at all in A/D as each team is at one point defending and offending entirely for a round. I was aware the secondary limits for 6s were at least a bit inaccurate, which is why I said "basically". The new class limit format I've made is how I want the game to be played. You have the option of 2 Scouts, 2 Soldiers, or 2 Pyros, but you can't use more than 3 of those classes total, eliminating 2 scout 2 soldier in favor of 2 scout 1 soldier, 2 soldier 1 scout, etc etc. The other 3 classes could be medic engineer sniper, medic demoman engineer, etc etc. It enforces class diversity.

The community's competitive TF2 mind as well be a different game with how much rules they enforce and how different it is from normal TF2.

My bad, misread. But actually, your proposed system is even less diverse than 6s class limits, mainly due to the addition of secondary class limits. Why is that? Well... * Spy is categorically worse than Sniper in every way, and now that the Support category is hard-limited to 2, there is no reason to ever run Spy over Sniper or Medic. * A mandatory 2 in the Defense category translates to full-time Heavy or Engineer. Heavy is the better pick in most scenarios here, and in turn helps ensure a Sniper-lock in the Support category. To the tune of this, It's beginning to look a lot like Prolander... By making these changes, you create a less flexible and slower meta. Category-based class limits are not the way to go.

Spy is worse? Make Spy better. Engineer is worse? Make Engineer better. This is balance.