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

Wait, do you really have to win 10 matches to get ranked? I thought it was an error, because usually you just need to complete 10 matches for placements...

No matter what anyone thinks about what direction the Competitive Mode should go, there's absolutely no incentive to play it unless you hate random crits, and even then there's plenty of services who provide the already-established competitive TF2 that is seen in every competitive-related livestream. The real issue about TF2's Competitive Mode, in my opinion, is that it's essentially meaningless. You get nothing by winning other than having a number and a rank increase, which you cannot even show to other people unless you take a screenshot and you tell your friends you're Death Merchant and that's the highest rank in the game. Not only that, but Competitive Mode and community 6s have so many differences, that having a high rank in Competitive Mode only means that you're a pretty good pubstomper, who has occassionally talked to their team every once in a while saying things like "defend" or "cap". It's a shame because Competitive Mode has a lot of polish: distinct themes for each team winning, an awesome post-match podium for the winners, alternative and equally-amazing announcer lines, the animated doors opening and closing (when I first saw that, it blowed my mind), and of course, new lines from the classes themselves. It's very obvious that the Competitive Mode we have now should be a testbed for new, upcoming changes, but why should people play it? Every reputable tournament has awarded medals for participating, making it to playoffs, and winning - why can't Competitive Mode award a medal based on your rank, showing your current MMR, for example? That can't be too far-fetched of a reward; even MvM Mann Up has medals that indicate how many whole tours you've played for each different tour and shows the progress for each, having a distinct cool model to go with it. Even the Dueling Minigame has an evolving badge. Just give players an incentive to play. But an incentive isn't enough, you also have to give players some encouragement to try it out as well. Anytime you load a map you can see the top duel wins between your friends (if the map authors don't show instead in case it's a community map), but who even genuinely cares about duels anymore? They've been practically obsolete for the longest time now, so what about changing those leaderboards so they reflect your friends' competitive ranks instead, for example? I'm sure that if someone saw their friend being a higher rank than them in Competitive (which is basically saying "I'm better than you") they'd be like "I'll show 'em" and try to outdo them, making some friendly competition. Maybe they'd start queueing together seeing they also play competitive. Maybe they start a team together and play tournaments. You get the idea. Even then, Competitive still needs some changes as well. I won't talk about class limits, weapon bans, and the like, but just like CS:GO, players should be able to queue for the maps they want to play - this should give the TF2 Team more insight into what maps the competitive players like. It won't split the people playing the mode as they can still queue and play for every map in case there isn't a lot of people playing, and if the TF2 Team makes another map based in these stats, it will likely be competitive-oriented, which will be good long-term for the game and the playerbase as a whole. If the developers want players to try out a new map for competitive, they could give such players a reward for being nice enough to test them, maybe a badge showing how many experimental maps the player has played in the mode, for example. Oh and bring stats back, those were cool. But that's the gist of it, really. Players should be encouraged and awarded for not only playing Competitive Mode, but winning by having an evolving badge showing their MMR, The mode itself still needs more changes for it to become a thing people want to invest time with, but ideally, it should become a middle ground between Casual and TF2 tournaments, in the hopes that players who enjoy competitive take it to the next level. Hopefully the TF2 Team puts more work into the mode, else a lot of effort would go to waste on their part.

@Contra I have personally seen a fair share of ex-comp players play TF2 MM in the matches I have played. As far as the rest of the complaints go: You are for the second time playing placement matches. Just how in Overwatch at first placements were an ungodly mess when competitive first launched and had horribly unbalanced matches, it's gonna happen here too. Queue times are likely to be fixed soon, and even if not, I seem to be getting matches every 15-20 minutes now consistently, which is still awful, but from my experience with center faster. The limitations you have however mentioned are a valid drawback, and I agree that it's an issue.

Just to clarify - CSGO comp mm doesn't give you out any rewards - it's just that whenever you rank up your profile (something like casual level, although not the same thing), you get a random drop (a spray, weapon skin or, if theres an ongoing operation and you bought a pass for it, a skin that was added to the operation, you can also get skins from operations from before, and this occurs once a week), and even that's not exclusively tied to comp mode, you can get that drop by leveling up during casual game or on any other gamemode Though, perhaps, comp MM should give you like a medal or whatever, that'd be alright

Basically, there is a reason why Jeff Kaplan stated that he regrets adding rewards to competitive. Because the incentive should primarily be to have fun, not to grind out for a gold weapon.

The difference is that OW didn't need incentives to kickstart their competitive. TF2 is a decade old and carries a casual stigma that will never fully be gone. Incentives are almost a necessity to populate a competitive mode. (Not that it can't be done without)

Fair enough point, however im personally struggling with finding an incentive that wont cause more trouble than good. Having the incentive be something of value that you can trade will cause cheaters to run wild in it, while something without might not be good enough. ------------------------------ Also, that STAR_ TF2 stream was absolutely awful. Not because of him; but because of the same fucking people that keep Ddosing other TF2 streamers. Imagine being away from the game for so long, coming back to it just to get ddosed by some no-lifers. What can even be done against this from the TF Team's side, or Twitch's?

TF Team needs to double up their server protection to prevent server overload. That is a "harder than it sounds" statement, but I heavily doubt it is out of their control. Twitch needs to pursue legal action against the group in question, some names already are evidenced to be a part of the attackers and they should not be allowed to roam free. Valve should also pursue this route but I know they won't because they can't be fucked to, mate.

Doesn't dota have these steam relays or something that were(?) coming to tf? I thought they should help with ddoses. Speaking of, we kicked a hacker on a server today and I think he started ddosing the server, because everyone was lagging but ping was okay.

Server IPs shouldn't be reported to players connected via matchmaking. The lack of ad-hoc connections removes any relevance of having that information accessible to people doing something as innocuous as peeking at someone's steam profile and checking what the Join Game button generates a link to. Preventing reporting to players themselves in the case of someone spiting the server if they get kicked out, as well. Dunno if there's a way to entirely mask that information, but something should be considered an option without having to resort to marking your profile as private if you wanted to stream.

Valve's lawyers' only concerns are defending the company and trying to convince people crates aren't gambling.

The ideal solution would be the TF Team integrating the Steam Datagram Relay to all official servers, securing players and servers from DDoS. Maybe also create an official streamer mode, hiding names from the death notices and the scoreboard and preventing some commands from being used like 'status' (which would show the server's IP and player names). None of this will probably happen, but considering the main menu shows popular TF2 streams, maybe they should? It might not take long until someone DDoSes some grand finals match from a high stakes tournament and becomes a legitimate issue competitive players push the TF Team to fix.

Can geel or b4nny message up jill about relays?

I'm pretty sure they know the problem, without us having to messege them. It will just take time for them to fix it, as always.

More that we don't know if they're even considering it, I mean it's likely, but you never know. Steam Relays are dope, ddos protection and better ping

maybe in 2019 we will get to enjoy them, only to have them fixed by 2020.

The comp queue seems to hasten a bit the more games you play, last one was like 5-15 minutes.

I have been queueing for Competitive for 90 minutes so far. In that time, I could've played at least 15 casual Rocket League matches, or play two DotA2 matches, or watch a movie. I can't believe there's people with enough patience to queue for this...

I played seven comp games today and lost them all.

I'm a medic main but this is disgusting, medic should absolutely be able to be quick scoped at all times. Maybe not so much for Highlander but adding something like this will only further stalemate syndrome of 6s.

Is Crusader still OP/the most used Medic weapon? Because if so, it's obvious it's because it has both long-range heals and a high DPS enough to warrant using it. If you want it to be balanced, either nerf its healing further, or nerf its damage so at most it's doing ~35 damage max range.

Crusader's is in the same boat as ubersaw in that it's not really busted or anything but it just completely outshines the other options. Besides maybe still reducing the uber gain more with the healing it provides, just buff the other syringe guns in ways psychopath mentioned.

Loss eight today in comp, suspiciously good sniper on badwater but apparently they had 2200 hours.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/912417222204993230/8634A0BE54AAA9F9C887E427CD559C589BFA6C35/ Gotta love that snowball effect thanks to auto-balance lol... At this point we just sort of goofed off because there was no point in playing any more... People getting force swapped just ended up leaving themselves till it got to this point.

They could make the crossbow do 0 damage but the long range healing capabilities would still make it the go to primary.

Probably a bad idea but what if Crossbow healing decayed like overheal?

a natascha-like syringe gun that deals zero to none damage that used to slow down attackers so you have more time to retreat sounds cool

This is just a shot in the dark. But what if the bolt did a set amount of healing regardless of range, but then applied a sort of slow regen effect for the rest, meaning that in the middle of fights it would still be fairly easy to overcome the person hit with the dart. Say like it does around 40 health per hit, then tosses a regen effect that's on par with say... a Lv 1 or 2 Dispenser for the remainder as a sort of buff.

Having literally no form of non-melee damage would be a step towards making it a choice rather than a necessity to run the weapon.

Same. I just accidentally rated him a Bottle instead of checking to see who rated them what. I also heard from a guy in a game today that people will hack accounts with items and hours and use them to hack. I was told by said guy that it has credibility vs. a 10 hour f2p account but I don't know how much truth is behind the statement.