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

Not enough being found/unboxed these days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSTshcVPd9s

What's the point of those bots?

Spiteful way to ruin a server even after being kicked out Stalking a streamer (or really anyone) and make the game unplayable in official servers unless they mark their profile as private Being a general cunt to everyone in the server, not just to 1 team

They were made because cheaters got really upset that Valve are fixing the ddos issue.

Geel tell Fiskie to fix your site

I'm hearing and seeing about these lag bots, but I have not ran into one yet. I guess I'm lucky

Also the way skins show the regular weapon texture seems to bug with weapons that have blood like the Backscratcher and makes a grid texture

A guy just demanded me to pay him 10 more keys for his rocket launcher just because it has some halloween spell on it. Like, what the fuck lmao, do people really care about the halloween spells so much? I know they're impossible to get and apply anymore, but 10 keys for a spell that you can only use every full moon is abysmal

Now that roughly a month has passed ever since the Competitive refresh has made it's way into the game, I decided to make a write-up of the new Competitive Mode, it's issues, and possible solutions to said issues. A little bit of background; I am not the biggest Community Comp guy you'll meet in the field. Played some TF2center, played some TFPL, played in some weirdo leagues ages ago but that's about it. However I have played [new] Valve Competitive for... probably more than 60~ matches now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of what the mode's biggest issues are. I am Executioner 3. Chances are I'd be higher, but currently I get 0 MMR for every win, so I quite literally cannot climb. That's an issue we'll get to in a bit, though. So let's dive straight in instead of making funny meme images and 2 sentence long criticism! Maps: Currently, Competitive Mode has a decent amount of Maps in it. However there are some which are not fitting in the slightest: The two rotten eggs, Turbine and Swiftwater. Turbine does not fit Competitive Mode because not only is it a bad Competitive map, with gigantic sightlines, awkward gameplay spaces such as the vents and no ammo packs in the main area, forcing you to retreat to your spawn if you run out of ammo, but it also runs Capture the Flag. Capture the Flag in it's current version will not function in Competitive. There are other big write-ups about this, but here are the main reasons: Defending the Flag after it has been picked up is essentially impossible: The Timer is incredibly long and just touching it resets it, causing endlessy delayed defensive sessions which are unenjoyable for everyone involved. Apart from this the Offensive Team which gets the first Cap essentially always has the upper hand, making the map a worse version of the infamous "Whoever wins 5cp mid wins the game lol". Apart from this Turbine is absolutely awful and horrible for the general reputation of Competitive Mode; People think it's a joke fun casual map, seeing it in Valve Comp just makes people laugh and not take the Mode seriously - for good reason. Turbine is a good pub map to screw around, but not for real play. I know the goal is to collect data on how CTF fares in Competitive, but I personally believe it should be obvious as to why it doesnt work. Swiftwater is there not because of Payload, but because of the map itself. Payload itself is a controversial topic for Competitive 6s, I however believe that other Payload Maps such as Badwater have proven to be decent, and actually somewhat enjoyable. Swiftwater on the other hand is simply too large. Games can take up to 40(!) Minutes of pure stalemates. The gigantic Map size causes Teams to often heavily scatter, especially in low-tier Skill regions making the map unenjoyable. As far as the rest goes, other Maps could be optimized; Viaduct is a popular candidate, with the lil door found in Viaduct_pro making an incredibly big difference and also making the map simply more enjoyable and fun. Solution: Remove Turbine and Swiftwater from the Competitive Map Pool, optimize current map to be more in standard with the Pro Versions. 5CP should also be Bo5 instead of Bo2 to ensure the matches actually have some length. Placement Match Adjustments: While I personally only sometimes saw this happen, it does affect the game heavily; Placement Matches are sometimes incredibly inaccurate and only appear to take into account won matches. We played in a party for 10 matches to get the Placements of a friend done; said person would always bottom-score, with extremely pitiful Score and general uselessness. Said person was also the same to Receive Rank 11, which is incredibly inaccurate given the facts stated. There are other great examples (You know who you are, Merc 3 man), but the system just generally needs some fine-tuning. Apart from this, you should not be allowed to be placed into the Top 4 Tiers on your first Placement Matches. These should only be able to be reached via playing a lot - which would also help with the issue mentioned after this, Incentives to play. Solution/s: Adjust Placement Matches to take into account Party sizes, personal score and adjust it so that the highest Rank you can be placed in is Executioner 3. General Adjustments to the Rank System: As of right now, there is no communication with the player when he ranks up, or what the MMR number-zone he needs to be in to rank up. All he gets is a blinking Text on the Screen before the match that he might rank up or rank down depending on the outcome. Another thing is that there is no Rank-Decay, players can just stay in a high rank forever and call it a day. Solution: Add Rank decay for players over Executioner 3. The highest ranks should always be the most competitive, and players which do not regularly play are not competitive or invested enough. Add a MMR-Area in the info-screen of the ranks so people have a decent idea of where they have to be to rank up/rank down. Incentives to play: Obviously the incentive to play should be that you wanna have a fun, competitive match, but an extra push can be very useful and do extreme wonders on player-numbers. As of right now, many people just end their placements and stop playing because they got their fancy medal. This is problematic as you obviously want more Players to not only guarantee more balanced and faster matches but also just to keep the mode alive. Apart from this. There are several ways to further nod players towards playing some Competitive, and looking at other games for inspiration can be useful, such as Overwatch rewarding players with golden weapons. Suggestions/Solution/s: An in-game cosmetic item reflecting a player's rank would be very cool. Potential ideas could be a Medal which would represent your rank and also count Medals obtained, won Matches etc. to work as a knock-off MyM Stat-track banner. Apart form this, Competitive-Mode specific, untradable drops could be cool, such as a specific War-Paint collections. Making them untradable removes the economic gain from it so people wouldnt just play it for that, and instead simply makes it a cool, personal thing. Other ideas include Season rewards - which could be economic, but then there is.. The Cheater Problem: Cheaters are still very much present in Competitive. Ranging from locking spawn-doors and instantly-capping points to simply aimbot, they obviously ruin games and people's matches. The current VAC System doesn't appear to be fast enough or effective enough to catch them, and it's more than often repeat offenders which try to catch as much attention as possible. Solution: An Overwatch-System akin the one available in CS:GO could do wonders. Apart from this, albeit this is a very risky option, vote-kicking could be enabled in Competitive. This could result in players kicking bad players, but could also enable players to kick Cheaters. Class Limits: As controversial as your usual politic and religion orientated discussion in your average web-forum, we have to tackle this aswell. Playing against 3 Heavy Medic combos is not enjoyable for anyone involved and so is playing against 2 Demos, 2 Medics, 2 Scouts. I am personally against enforcing a strict 6s ruleset, but I can't exactly think of a perfect way of doing this - this is in your hands, TF Team, and just ends up on what you want Competitive TF2 to be. Solution: idk man. Adjustments to the Glicko-System: Even though I have already shot the designated Ponyman an Email about this and have received a heavy explanation, Ill include it for good measure: The Math or System needs to be adjusted so the least amount of ELO gained shouldn't be 0, as it completely prevents climbing and also makes playing the mode... essentially pointless. Now, this issue might be solved when we fix the issue of only people in their Placements playing Competitive, but we will come to that later. Solution: Adjust the System, which is already probably planned. Queue Times: Even though I personally am not feeling this issue - I queue mostly with 2-1 more people at peak times, nets us games in 1-10 minutes - I have heard this is still an issue for a large amount of players, potentially more for NA players? There also appear to be "cursed" players. Sounds stupid, but from my experience that seems to be the case. Some players just cannot find any games, despite them being relatively fresh or not having a rank. We tried this with several players, and for certain friends finding a game in a three-man sized party is quite literally impossible, while with them removed/replaced we find a game in 2 minutes. These players don't have their Ping settings screwed up or are some kind of high rank. It's incredibly weird, and even though all of them have atleast absolved one Placement Match, I have the suspicion that said map must have somehow fucked up their MMR score in their placements..? I don't know enough about this, so let's carry on. Solution: ETA Timer and simply more players. An ETA Timer is incredibly important, and as far as I know is actually already in the code, somewhere. Right now there is no communication if the Player should expect a game in 4 minutes, or in 40. More Players appears is something that will happen once the above issues are fixed, probably. A better and more optimized Matchmaker could also do it, but I know nothing about the current one, so I cannot judge it. The Restrictions: The current graphical restrictions Competitive Mode puts on Users are awful and counter-productive in essentially every way. While I do believe restrictions are needed given how heavily you can customize TF2, the current ones are incredibly low-end PC unfriendly. Given several Competitive-Players run TF2 on low end settings and that a fair group of players run TF2 in general on low-end Systems, this completely makes the mode unplayable for a sizable amount of players. Solutions: Loosen the Restrictions. Already this would boost player numbers and make the mode more liked, especially among the Competitive Community. Misc/Honorable Mentions: A Season System would be great and would also work neatly with the Reward system mentioned above. Level 3 in Casual Mode is way too low to allow a player to play Competitive. Players that have played the game for 3 hours or so are not even close to having grasped what the classes do and how the game works. I suggest putting the Level gate at something like 25 or 50. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Valve Competitive can be incredibly fun when everyone in the game has a decent idea of what the game is and how it works. People communicate, and thanks to the lack of weapon-bans people can play interesting/unusual loadouts or combinations without instantly being shut-down which makes for fun games. However these are sadly incredibly rare for the issues stated above. Communication as to what future plans are, or simply acknowledging the issues at hand would be massive and would make people very optimistic as far as what the future brings. Valve Competitive has the chance to glow as bright as a pearl, for this however we need a number of adjustments - and I really hope they'll come. Thanks for the attention, and if I have missed anything, feel free to mention it!

To be honest I'd like to see something like season themed Casual system. Invasion, Tough Break, JI, Gun Mettle. Where you play the update themed maps, get update themed drops ( hats in this case ) and earn more XP by playing update themed Maps.

If they apply what they're doing with Artifact to their other games don't expect anything in the future to be free.

that's the easy part now you gotta get your team to actually vote yes

They usually do If It's a lag bot.

So does this allow both teams to vote one person off?

Taking a wild guess that it only works for the team you join.

Someone commented on my screenshot here asking me to add them to trade for the Saxxy https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/928179072364875887/5CFBA679F427342F8F3E461569DE6CCF24099934/

c'mon man I can give you a cool laser gun

never understand the wear texture on the skinned guns like why are there scratches did the mercs tries to nail them off or something

Turns out the commentor just wanted to give a "good offer" on something, not the Saxxy.

same reason you have scratches on your old phone

I always assumed since most of the mercenaries aren't generally the most intelligent bunch, they probably just throw their weapons around and store them in empty crates when moving from job to job instead of using an actual gun case

Do people really not have a concept of actual "wear"? It's not some buzzword CS:GO marketing teams came up with.

you care about scratches in a weapon? lets rather question why would you ask for a pizza motif on a minigun.

So i can mod the minigun sound to play the spiderman 2 pizza theme. Now im really tempted do buy that 51 cent pizza polished minigun on the market but im not sure if i want to spend that on a silly joke.

I do, I'd much rather have a FN weapon than FT, some FT weapons look dreadful. Alien Tech is a good example.

I cant remember what wear has that but I do like the blood splatters that are sometimes present on some skins, especially when its a wrench and it's headpart is covered in blood.

to me most of the time factory new looks too unrealistically clean for a weapon, specifically in tf2 where almost everything else has at least some minimal wear and tear, I usually prefer field tested down to battle scarred. there are few exceptions like top shelf weapons though, those need to be fn to look good.

Yeah, the bloodstains are cool, but not when the skin looks like It's been taken out of a meat grinder.

I find myself liking wears on skins applied to melee weapons because it makes sense for them to have a little wear and blood. Since you know, you generally hit targets with said weapons directly. In the case of bladed weapons, I like not having the war paint cover the sharp parts of them as well. https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/911291571501216130/065DC55E62E9206AA6F96824C7F000F04102C6D2/ https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1353527716