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

Why play ranked if you don't care about the integrity of the matchmaking

200 hours requirement is very very very good, believe me. Back when lobbies had no hour req, it was fucking shitfest.

On a completely pointless note I got 10k on my degreaser so yay come make me feel insignificant with your ridiculous counts I know some of you will have

I do care about ranks being legit - and once again, just like in Overwatch, ranks matter. Even with rank "boosting.". CS:GO allows you to party up with friends and the ranks once again work just fine, if you don't hold your weight you will not earn a lot in Glicko. Being able to play competitive with friends is incredibly important, maybe not to you, but to a lot of other people. Even right now in Valve MM we sometimes play with a rather weak guy who has a rank, while others top score and he is bottom scoring not carrying his weight, his MMR gain is so small it doesn't even matter in the whole scheme of things. Boosting is a non-issue in Glicko.

I'm aware of that. A minimum hours requirement is a necessary evil for 3rd party services. This is also the reason why competitive will always be a niche mode. Assuming official competitive mode is still not a thing: if someone wanted to play a competitive class based shooter where organization and coordination between teammates is important, what game do you think he will pick? Probably not TF2. TF2 in Casual mode is everything but a competitive game (and we can all agree with this, i think) and its "competitive side" is not only unknown by many but also totally inaccessible. Anyone with less than 200 hours on TF2 has absolutely no way to play ranked or unranked 6s. They have to play that dumbed down version of the game with 6 engineers on a team and 6 spies where the objective is mostly to not play the objective. For 200 hours. (Or, alternatively, there is MVM and custom modes) But yeah, casual is definitely the best thing to master all the 9 classes. You can learn how to demoknight, how to use the parachute as soldier, how to do sick trickstabs and how to put your sentries on last.

you make it sound like it's a bad thing. and no, clueless players are not welcome in mvm.

It would indeed be a bad thing if players had to have at least 200 hours to play mvm

to play mvm you need a decent grasp of basic TF2 and you'd be amazed how the big majority don't even reach this level

The game has absolutely no MvM tutorial besides that intro video when you load into the map. A casual F2P might see the option and get into an MvM match, get kicked, and not want to play it again. I know there's tutorial videos/steam guides but MvM is niche compared to the main game.

hence why you need to play alot of PvP. upgrades come with either a little advice or common sense (faster reload = faster shots ready = more pew pew)

How can they play a lot if they're getting kicked for being clueless? (unless you meant Mann Up in the first post)

ya i meant mannup solo queue. though if you have friends that are new too then you can form a group of 3+ to play mannup as a learning ground

Is TF2PL suppose to be a community driven competitive format? Sorry, I'm not familer with it. Feels like it sort of goes against the whole point of competitive if it doesn't allow people to party up. Your goal over all is to try and win as well, and forcing RNG players seems to go against that. Random's is liek adding random crits into matches because you never know what your going to get... One game you might get decent players, the next few you might get demo knights, stacked team of spies, afks, abandoners, ect. It's all basically RNG... I've always stated on other games, as well as TF2 that if your playing comp and want to win you should be utilizing everything you can to better yourself in your matches. This includes finding groups of people who you work well with and play well with in order to better your changes of winning. Not to mention it's usually a shit ton more enjoyable to play with friends in general.

CSGO on faceit has a feature, where if you play duo-queue, 3-man queue etc, up to full squad, you get matched against people who also are in duo-queue, full team queue etc, you could apply the same for TF2PL, but i'd imagine that it would take a lot of time to find a match with that setup

isnt the default matchmaking also aiming to do that even in casual and only not doing it when wait times are too fukken long

I don't blame you for not liking TF2 center, but you can't take your experiences on one third party system and assume that they are all like that. I don't know why your friends think TF2PL's matchmaking is as unbalanced as valve MM. TF2PL's beginner queue is mostly steel-silver/low-mid open players who are at comparable skill levels. The system typically tries to balance by number ranking, but it won't have a good idea of your actual rank unless you play enough. Perhaps your friends tried a couple of matches and gave up? In my case, I find spending 20 minutes setting up is far more worthwhile than hitting the queue button on valve MM when you don't have to deal with all of valve MM's flaws. Anyways, I'm glad you brought up that valve isn't happy with the current comp metagame. It reminds me that valve cares so little about the competitive community that they don't realize why the metagame was introduced in the first place. Yeah I get it. They want us to play without weapon bans and class limits. In TF2's current state I'd say that the 6s community can agree that valve can piss off with that idea. I mean, have you ever wondered what the true TF2 6s meta would be like? I'd imagine that it would be a combination of vacc/qf medics, heavies, and perhaps some flexible classes that ends up being infinitely lamer than the infamous quad tank of Overwatch. This completely defeats the purpose of 6s in the first place, which is to have fun. As outlandish as it sounds, people play 6s for fun and stroking their egos is actually the secondary objective. That's why players sign up for ESEA, a paid league, every season. These people pay to play competitive TF2! If the 6s community were to bend over backwards to support valve's idea, no one would sign up, and you'd kill the community in one stroke. I know I said "in TF2's current state" earlier, which can imply that valve can make TF2 6s into a mode where all weapons and classes can be unbanned and have it still be fun. I mean, they've been doing just that on Pyro. Except after over 1 year in development, Pyro is still a niche specialist. They've done jack shit with Pyro with over a year to work on him. They have to do this for Pyro(again), Heavy, Sniper, Spy, and Engineer too? Valve can collect all human knowledge of TF2 and it won't help them if they don't have the manpower to even make one class into a generalist in a reasonable amount of time.

Fair point about generalizing third party services for TF2, and as I said I'll give TFPL a honest try today to see if it fares well with me and report back, however the fact that I can't queue with more than 1 fella is already kinda off-putting in all honesty - will still try my best to be as unbiased as possible towards it. As far as the rest goes; Not really. The "true 6s metagame" being vacc/qf meds with heavies licking their boots might be the meta for a high skill area, but have you ever thought how the meta would look like... for lower skill tiers? Just how the meta shifts in Overwatch where Bastion reigns supreme in low-tier yet is incredibly niche and requires a lot of coordination in high tier, the same goes for TF2. Setting the 6s meta limitations on low-tier players is not required, and while shit like the Shitfix and Vaccinator 100% deserve to get their shit kicked it because these are cancer everywhere it isn't as black and white as you make it out to be. I'm pretty positive they know why the current 6s metagame is the current 6s metagame, and I'm pretty positive that I also know just *why* they dislike it; Could be that a competitive gamemode where only 4 classes are represented most of the time isn't too appealing. Also, using "fun" as an argument is rather shaky given it's entirely subjective and for all you know people actually find it fun to play against pyros or prefer it over fighting scouts. Who knows, you however can't bend a gamemode over your idea over what is fun and what isn't. Except the quickfix and vaccinator. These are objectively not fun alright

New Vaccinator rebalance: -Get rid of the passive damage resistance -No overheal -No uber build when healing full health players

tbh the party limitation wasn't a relevant downside to TF2PL for me, mainly because I can't convince my comp friends to actually play Competitive Mode with me

Let's not go making weapons useless, now. Vaccinator is problematic because it makes it far too easy for single players to win 1v1 encounters, and is far too good at defending a point, leading to stalemates. But it isn't good for pushing a point. Removing its defensive capabilities and not giving it anything in return will make it completely useless.

The Vacc is impossible to balance for comp in the hopes of unbanning it, the bubbles are pretty much ubers unless you're fighting multiple damage sources.

Valve can set whatever limitations on their comp system as they please, whether its prolander or none at all. I'm talking more about removing limitations on community comp. Looking at tftv forums you can see that the majority of players dislike playing with the offclasses full time. Its why you see posts like "ban pyro from 6s" getting 100+ upfrags. If these people don't have fun, then they wont sign up. When they don't, do you think that the people who enjoy fighting Pyro/Heavy/Engineer will? I haven't even mentioned weapon bans at this point, but you get the idea. So I can't speak for all of the 6s community, but I think my opinion stands in line with most of them. My overall point is that if valve shouldn't ever expect the 6s community to remove their limitations in TF2's current state. Why should the 6s community bend over backwards and compromise the main reason they exist for a developer that ignored them for 8 years, added a half-assed competitive mode, and only for a premise of prize money? This means the only way for valve to support TF2 is to either bite the bullet and support it with its current meta, keep rebalancing TF2 so that the community allows everything, or not support it at all. At of this point I think they're working on option 2, then after a few years they'll switch to option 3. It's not a big deal if valve doesn't want to support community comp, 6s has been going on for years without valve. I'd like to go full circle to my original point yesterday now. What I hate about what valve is doing isn't that they don't crap out prize money, but that they've been working on bridging the gap coming close to 3 years now and they have almost nothing to show for it. Pyro still isn't a generalist, and valve MM hasn't been attracting newer players very well. It has around 500 players, which is higher than before Blue Moon, but still nowhere near Casual's numbers of 15k players. I'd like to think the reason why is because valve comp simply isn't a good mode.

How to nerf vac instantly? Give it a cooldown on changing resistances. Right now you can swap it so fast you pretty much get a uber.

How about we don't nerf vac?

RNG teammates in a matchmaking system is actually ideal. It makes you the only consistency in your games that matters, and so you can only rely on yourself to climb. Statistically you shouldn't be more "unlucky" than any other person in the rank you're in. If you actually are good and deserve to climb, you will. If not, you won't. Having friend queue with you means you might climb when you don't deserve to because of them carrying you through all those games. You can't be carried playing solo queue at all unless the matchmaking system in itself is heavily flawed and abusable (see how a lot of Mercy mains got to GM by abusing how OW ranking worked)

If Valve starts throwing money around for tournaments and says "You guys have to use X format" do you really think the comp community is going to say no to Valve?

Yeah, I'm one of those people. After Blue Moon, I'll take fighting Pyro over Scout any day.

Is this because Heavy mows down Pyros with ease, while Demo and Heavy are both much more vulnerable to Scout?

To be fair, Scouts of equal skill have exponentially more advantages in fights than Heavies. A bad Scout can just walk back and forth, a mediocre one can utilize his jumps and double jumps, and the good ones? Well, let's just say jumping over the Heavy's head is basically uncounterable

What folder is the custom server content (For example- maps, sounds, and models) downloaded into? Want to save some hard-drive space and get rid of the files that have I've accumulated from custom servers over the years.