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

TF2PL was in fact made for people similar to your skill level. I don't see how you can contest my opinion of TF2PL making valve MM pointless if you've never even tried TF2PL. There's a beginner division filled with people just like you, and as far as my experiences go most of them are people who want to communicate and win. You are also right on it being stupid to judge by a 2 week period, but historically valve comp hasn't done shit for community comp, and I believe it will stay this way with how mediocre the mode is. Do you really think that the TF2 team will be capable of channeling their casual players into competitive TF2? How many years will it take for TF2 MM to even be on the same level as other competitive games?

just 5-0'd a team on scout in TF2PL 😩

Just wondering @Contra , but would were be any interest on making a plugin that fixes the Spy's problems you mentioned? Some of them seem to be easy enough to be done in plugins (minus cosmetic stuff because TF2 hates attachments).

I've asked before, they put the merch out in an area where anyone can sign. These signatures are not representative of TF2's dev team. Instead, it's representative of who ate lunch in the office that day.

Found out none of the gib models, including silly gibs, have LODs. They aren't the most complex models but please Valve it's free fps for everyone.

The gibs are also incredibly outdated to the point many of them don't match their actual character models (Scout and Spy stand out in that aspect).

the casual player is perfectly used to most of those things actually

Seriously adding LODs to all the weapons and the potentially hundreds of cosmetics that don't have them would improve performance and it would be easier than actually optimizing the game. Just would be tedious for Valve to make all those low poly models. Maybe they could automate the process?

A majority of the community items already have LODs made by their respective creators.

Yeah most cosmetics probably have them, but ~40 of the ~90 weapons that don't have them are community made, did Valve not accept the LODs or what?

From what I've seen they just don't add them, the only add the regular weapon model.

Not disagreeing with you, but adding a LoD isn't always a gain. Remember there's a CPU cost for switching between LoD models and mipmaps, so adding one to a model that only has ~500 triangles or mips to a texture that is already super tiny results in a net loss of performance. That being said, making proper LoDs is not something easily automated. The idea for a LoD is to have the exact same model with fewer vertices. This means that the remaining vertices, ideally, should not change location from reference to each LoD. This is so the machine can simply toss out unused vertices instead of having to recalculate the locations of new ones, even if there is fewer of them. Automated tools like Blender's decimate don't preserve vertex coordinates; they just reduce the polycount by merging existing faces into new ones. So while the performance improvement could be great, the amount of time it would take to do it properly would be better suited to an entire team working on it. When you consider the game's current state (competitive mess, balance issues, etc.), having an entire team of nothing but LoD-makers would hurt the game more than it would help it.

Damn (thought you meant they were already in game) just why Valve? If the contributors already made them, why not just add them? Found that the Amputator and Tomislav had maker-made updates with LODs, the Family Business even got the update but not the Tomi. (Warrior's Spirit has an update too, don't know if it was added, the weapon was updated in game, but the workshop item was updated after that) And that's just on the Steam Workshop, more must have been made and posted on this very site or elsewhere by the makers themselves or other people.

I think it was unnecessary.

I know people that tried out TF2PL. I've got several mixed responses, but you inspired me to give it a go today, so I'll come back to ya later. However the rest stands. If I wanna play Comp with a friend that doesn't have any competitive experience, what is more attractive: In-game valve comp that takes 3 minutes to find a game and requires 0 setup apart from inviting him to my party, or a third party services that requires you to setup an account, download a service and then wait for a match to fill up which (from the fellas im talking to) appear to have the same chance of unbalanced matches as valve MM does? The reason why valve hasn't done anything historically for valve comp apart from balancing and blog posts is because they aren't happy with the current comp meta. Why do you think valve mm doesn't have restrictions? This is another important point: Now that valve mm is only 40% garbage and not 100% garbage as before, we might actually get some valuable data out of that and adjust the MM or whatever on that.

TF2PL is a solo queue system, so it's very hard to get friends into the same match.

https://clips.twitch.tv/scrumptiousflaccidsamosaTF2john How it REALLY feels to play heavy

Better if its solo queue only, party matchmaking ruins personal merit in ranking.

You can play queue with a team though? unless im missing something here https://i.imgur.com/v9IDjRz.png

Wait, you can only do TF2PL solo?! Why does the page say nothing about that? That's a gigantic downside...

You can queue with friends in beginner division now.

thats still a fairly big downside, comp with friends has always been an incredibly big part of it in Overwatch, being forced to play with a single friend is a huge downside people appear to be putting under the rug.

Also, TF2PL has a min requirement of 200 hours. Imagine playing 200 hours of 12v12 just because your friend told you TF2 is a good competitive game and wants to introduce you to 6s.

Git gud. If you want to play with friends, play casual or make a competitive team. MMR and ranks are meaningless if it's done on consistent factors that aren't yourself.

How the fuck is "Git gud" an argument in this situation? MMR and ranks arent meaningless at all if it isnt just you, systems like Overwatch have you partying up with friends and the ranks still work just fine. You shouldn't be limited to Casual if you want to have fun with friends, and this is a factor where TFPL clearly falls flat.

200 hours is the bare minimum I'd expect someone to take to learn at least most fundemental aspects of TF2. It's got a pretty deep learning curve. I have over 2.5k hours and I still can't rocket jump that well because I haven't dedicated my time towards practicing the hell out of it. Complex rocket jumping and sticky jumping rollouts take practice to learn. If you want to play competitively you should be expected to at least know some essentials and not hop in with 0 experience to ruin someones game. Also is somewhat of an anti-smurfing and anti-cheater factor as well.

I shouldn't have to join a fucking competitive league if I simply wanna play competitive TF2 with a friend, not only does it take way too much effort but said leagues are also not available at all times for playing, are we talking about the same thing? OW's ranking system isn't trash at all and works just fine. If you personally find MMR more meaningful solo, you do you, but don't enforce these stupid rules on other people.

Rank boosting is a really messy part of ranked play. TF2PL is a completely community run thing so I don't blame them for wanting to take the simplest route of avoiding that issue.

Rank boosting is a tiny price compared to the gain of being allowed to play with friends.

As a casual player who have only seen the shit side of competitive TF2, playing on TF2Center was the worst time I've had in the game. Teams were stacked and it just felt like a pub with stronger opponents and a "roll or get rolled" balancing. People were toxic as fuck as well, which was a huge red flag for me at the time. Playing on Valve's mm after the blue moon update, was surprisingly fun! Now i haven't played many games mind you ('Cuz School). But out of the two games i had, they were amazing! My team was actually not shit and my opponents weren't either! Both matches were very balanced and although we lost both, it was quite "competitive" so to speak. Queue times for both matches were less than 10 minutes, unlike TF2Center's 15 to 45 minutes wait time! This actually got me excited for 3rd party competitive TF2 and i'm about to finish setting up what i need to do to play on TF2PL within the next few days. With few tweaks and possibly some advertising of the newly polished system, we might see it becoming a real thing sooner than we might expect.