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

What do you mean "counter pick central"? Are you suggesting that we'd lose depth because the game would become a rock paper scissors? Because that doesn't make any sense. If anything a specialist system does far more in the way of making the game into rock paper scissors, because some classes are only useful against very specific threats. Right now, if one team picks a heavy, the other team picks sniper and immediately wins against the heavy, because that's a straight up counter pick. Meanwhile, you look at somebody like soldier, and there's no clear counter pick to put him down, because he's the most general generalst around so his weaknesses aren't as extreme. The more specialists, the more hard-counter situations you run into, because specialists inherently are very powerful against specific enemies and very heavily countered by other specific enemies. Regardless of your opinion of the specialist generalist debate I really don't get how it follows that more generalists means losing depth to counter picking.

changing any of the two will require everyone to either rethink many of their jumps or relearn all the jumps the know

Alter self-damage to be proportional to the change.

What are you thinking of in specific? That seems like it would be a rather significant change.

If everyone is a generalist, no one is. This theoretical land of equal viability amongst all classes could only be reached by thorough rebalancing across the board turning everyone into specialists, and in that light, yes, I think the meta would boil down to counterpicking to a worse degree than what we have now. @mountaindog I straight-up dislike most of the changes you just proposed. Aside from the ones that are awfully vague (fix weapons? what does that even mean?), changing the sentries when pretty much every map is designed around how they currently work is a fuck-awful idea, and so is pretty much everything except the basic Spy and Pyro fixes. Maybe the Heavy changes are fine. You need to leave the rest of the classes alone. What I want to know is, what is your reasoning behind changes like this? You have all of these radical ideas for changing the way that classes are played on a fundamental level and how competitive TF2 is played, but where is the experience that justifies these ideas? You've said yourself you don't have any non-lobby competitive TF2 experience and that you've been relegated to maining Medic due to weak hardware for most of your TF2 career, so where is all of this coming from? What do you want for TF2, and why is it better than what we have now?

I played heavy in high HL and I never had problems with Snipers lol

What a compelling argument. I guess I'll just have to throw what I said out the window.

What is your favorite Last area for Payload maps?

Badwater's last point. There's really nothing else to be said. The rest of Badwater is pretty good, but its last point is by far the most enjoyable and most balanced (except for Sniper sightlines) I've played.

https://hackerone.com/valve I think this also applies to TF2.

Did you know that headshots can be avoided by calling for medic/using the incoming voice command, making your hand go in front of your head in most cases for a second? I say most, because sometimes the hand is not always in front of the class you're playing as, meaning you'll have to tilt your view left or right slightly in order for it to cover your head (depending on the hand they use to perform these animations, which is usually the left one, meaning you'd have to tilt your view slightly right). This is actually a much faster method, albeit a more complex one, to avoid headshots, because when it comes to crouching, you need to press the key and wait the whole duration for the game to consider you as crouched, which will then play the crouched animation, and reduce your bounding box correspondingly allowing you to crouch through some tight areas. You can also jump and mash crouch in-game to swing your hitboxes up and down, but this stops working after the third crouch press, which won't allow you to crouch at all until you land on the ground, but Heavy cannot exactly use this and most of its snappiness has been fixed up until this point. Also, depending on the class and weapon held, sometimes rotating around wildly while looking up can also be a good strategy - if a class is hunched over, like a Pyro or a Demoman, their head will spin around their center which will make it harder to shoot at. Their arms will likely be raised up, too, which, if looking ~90 degrees away from the Sniper, they might cover your head as well. Doing this all the time isn't feasible since it is disorienting, but if you need to get through a long sightline, it might be a safe choice. Hopefully this helps people who think that only crouching is the only prevention against headshots. I have a soft spot for Barnblitz and Swiftwater's last points. It also helps that they're single-stage maps so I get to play them a lot and there's a lot of ways of attacking last and win the game, or various spots to defend from, which makes them fun for me.

This is ironic.

Is there such a thing as a temporary VAC ban, or any other punishment less severe than a VAC ban? I was looking at some of the options in the F7 report player menu and there's a whole chat category with stuff like "language, adult content, inappropriate" in it. Given how aggressively foul-mouthed the community is, I find it hard to believe that any of these offenses get punished at all.

Barnblitz?! That's one infamous last if you ask me; Could you elaborate what makes it attractive to you - it specifically?

Technically game bans, as VAC bans will ban the player from playing any games online which share the same engine with the one they got banned on and are permanent, while a game ban will just ban you from that game just like a VAC ban but is only applicable to that game (depends on how it's implemented, but the support page says it should be similar to a VAC ban in functionality). This also includes trade restrictions. However, TF2 doesn't have game bans implemented, so technically a matchmaking ban is the closest one TF2 has to a temporal ban. The only meaningful report function seems to be the "Cheating" one, since it's the one that the TF2 developers seem to review and handle matchmaking bans for, which only really stop cheaters for 2 minutes before they create new accounts, unfortunately. I don't think Steam Support nor anyone else handles any of the reports except cheating ones done through the "filling an abuse report" feature, considering technically offensive decalable items and sprays have been around for so long (which is probably why none of these are present in Valve's modern games, at least not to the point where you can submit your own decal) and you can say anything without any repercusions.

Mid HL.

Okay?

It's stalematey, but I would say that as stalemates go it's more interesting than most. There are multiple places around the map where attackers can set up a really good nest, so defenders have to send pushes out to take them down.

Better than no HL. Also, I know many Heavies in Silver/Plat who don't have an issue playing around enemy Snipers and staying out of sightlines. They generally don't die until their combo does.

Probably because Heavies in HL should know better than walking into obvious Sniper sightlines in HL maps. I don't have any problems with Sniper either when I'm playing in HL - Because I'm almost always holding an area behind a wall I know the enemy Sniper doesn't have a line of sight to.

I'm not really sure why people put any stock into what Valve thinks about the game? People often state 'well dave riller thinks classes should be more general' and I find it really hard not to say well so fucking what? I am pretty fucking confident that almost everyone here knows more about the actual game than dave riller, and actually valve employees are one of the only players in the world you can categorically prove have very little understanding of the game. exhibit A- release sandman exhibit B- release natascha exhibit C- release pomson Everyone has bad ideas on forums etc, but your average person from here, maybe I have too much faith, would usually come to the conclusion that heavies being able to stop people almost entirely would be a terrible idea in testing, but the idea still came through to release. & this happens repeatedly through tf2s history. how can people responsible for such awful weapons possibly be considered gospel in balance and why should I assume driller has any better understanding of the game

Eric Smith and Dave Riller have worked on the game since it came out, it's just that balancing wasn't taking competitive into account at all until a few years ago

Possibly unpopular opinion, but the last point is my favorite part of Goldrush. It's a choke, but it's such a tiny one that you can't put all your chips on turtling, since the second either team's defenses go down, they could immediately lose enough ground to cost them the match. BLU has to defend their corner since, the second those teleporters go down, they get pushed back to mid and the game is basically over. RED has to watch the flank routes because the second a Spy slips through and leaves an opening for an Uber, the cart is gonna be sitting right on top of the spawn before they know it. It doesn't just turn into Sniper wars and Engineers are actually the supplementary line of defense, rather than the main hurdle you need to overcome in order to put the cart in the hole. Everyone needs to be actively, presently playing because you can get flanked from just about anywhere. It's just one of those points where the winning team is always the one that has better coordination and synergy, rather than mere brute force.

can we trust the lowest common denominator- your average pubbie- to vote against random crits in the poll, or are we doomed to suffer forever? #ASICDon'tRespond

Probably still working on that Battle Royale mode.

*DEAD* Maxbox's Crashbot 4 : Lagbots - Bots will ignore this server if there are only four or less actual people. Why Maxbot name tho?

cheaters are using these gobshite bots to direct hate and harass people they know; Maxbox is a common target, saw some people listing profile links aswell etc. I really hope that ddos protection comes sooner than later because atm you essentially have a 50% chance of getting into a game that instantly crashes

Dave Riller and Eric Smith are probably the two senior most people on the TF2 team so it probably matter a lot what they think since they're probably the ones guiding the direction of the game currently.

8 games, 8 crashbots. fun

I was playing TF2 for a few hours earlier and everything felt slippery and off for some reason I thought it was just me being rusty or having a bad aim day, but it turned out I had my VPN on the entire time oops