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

We're in the "Valve Time" now.

lol though they did say they'd remove obvious trolling

Where do they draw the line between dogshit quality games and trolling though?

wrangler will still always give you a superior uber trade on defense regardless of gamemode pushing a last in 5cp where the enemy team doesn't want to push out whatsoever is functionally almost identical to pushing the last point on an a/d map boosting your health pool significantly in defensive uber trades is fundamentally broken, you only need to see players consistently going engi even with the wrangler being banned and waiting in spawn to change once it absorbs the 3 rockets to understand how ridiculous it is to have the ability to absorb 8, and that's the absolute basics of what the wrangler allows you to do you can never argue that a sentry having like half the hp of the entire team isn't dumb

Why would that sort of thing happen in TF2? It's report system is probably going to be similar to CS:GO and Dota 2, which don't really have that problem.

Also, can someone please remind me of this when the update is announced/drops? Anything from an @ or a PM to showing up at my house and destroying my kneecaps with a thick metal pipe will do.

Someone pass the popcorn, I'm expecting a fireworks display real soon.

hold on we really expecting a summer update?

It's not like the game's getting support pulled anytime soon, it's reasonable to assume there will be an update that isn't delayed by totally reworking something only to end up the same in terms of viability.

yes in october

who the fuck knows at this point with blue moon it might be there on fucking christmas, july, or next year

Summer Localization Files Anyone?

Not even close until DDOSes are dealt with (given their record of urgency I don't expect this for a while)

They confirmed Steam datagrams are coming, so it can't be more than a few months.

why does noclip have no acceleration anymore lol stop breaking shit valve

It's a much more fun and interesting take on CTF. It's not so much Asteroid (although the art is amazing) but the game mode itself.

That's what I am wondering; One update note said "fixed several exploits" etc. - does this include the method of ddosing streamers? Tyler has streamed TF2 yesterday and wasn't assaulted. Fixed or the people doing this getting lazy?

ddos can not be solved with an update to the game, either SDR support or some other way to protect the servers or give each server more resources than the attacker has

Asteroid was essentially CTF but improved in every way. Yeah it was gimmicky but at least those gimmicks were well thought-out and directly worked to fix the problems that ctf had. They took CTF's only redeeming factor, the fun of pushing into an enemy base and fighting out with a mcguffin, and made it much better by designing the whole gamemode to actually encourage teamplay. The robots take a little while to kill, encouraging players to congregate in one area. This is how every good mode in the game works. Control points force the team to stay together for a little bit, which means that you're actually working together with your team when you push forward. CTF doesn't have anything like this. There's nowhere to congregate, so you rarely get teamplay. Have you ever played CTF and heard off in the distance "We have taken the enemy intelligence" "We have dropped the enemy intelligence" "The enemy has taken our intelli-""The enemy has dropped our intelligence" "We have taken the enemy intelligence" and thought "golly gee I'd sure love to be part of whatever's going on over there, I bet all those players are having a whale of a time" while you're off in some complete other part of the map in random DM's with people nowhere near the intel? That's because CTF has no such thing as a front line. Even when your team is winning, it rarely feels like you're taking part, because you often CAN'T take part. There's no way to keep up with the scout dashing forward for a cap, so there's nothing you can do to play the object. In asteroid, players group around the bots, and by the time you've hit C there's usually several players with you. This is important, because they also designed the flag room to force teamplay in order for a capture to be successful. You will never cap on your own if even one or two people come from spawn to defend the core. The lasers where any knockback will kill you, the one-way door you can only open with a teammate, the cramped vent that forces you to crouch, these are all designed to make lone caps impossible. This makes turtling engineers way back by the flag completely unnecessary. That fixes a enormous CTF problem, which was that it was the most boring game imaginable for engis, and yet engis were absolutely necessary in order to win. And by relegating the flag to a valuable, but not necessarily vital, side-objective, asteroid also makes defending the flag insufficient to keep from winning. Even if you keep the enemies out of your flag room forever, they can still cap your A+B bots and you'll lose. Turtling is not a viable strategy to avoid losing. So the natural flow of the game is that weak pushes cap a couple of bots, then fall back, while strong pushes make it all the way to the cap room and make off with the enemy reactor core. This makes for a great climax to a push. Instead of having scouts throwing themselves into the meat grinder over and over again, slowly inching the briefcase forward in a braindead slog (which is also prevented by shot-clock in asteroid), you get a few braves souls holding out against a horde of respawning enemies, defending the cap room while your scout steals cores. Then you get an escape that's far more interesting than CTF because you have an actual team with you. High mobility classes can follow the flag-carrier, defending them directly, while slower classes stay behind and try to hold off the enemy team. The whole flag capturing experience on asteroid is so much fucking fun, and despite the four or five ctf variants in the game at this point, nothing really comes close to such a well-done version of the gamemode. And did I mention the detailing? The detailing on asteroid (where it has actually been finished) is amazing. Basing the visuals on 2001 A Space Odyssey was an awesome choice, and it's honestly one of my favorite, if not my #1 favorite, visual themes for a map. Asteroid isn't perfect, if one team is being stomped the game tends to drag on too long because of the robot respawn times and the 300 cap goal, and it is pretty confusing to try and learn the mode to begin with, but it's still a very solid gamemode that leads to a lot of unique gameplay you don't see in other gamemodes. Seeing mediocre, more gimmicky gamemodes like pass time and mannpower completed while asteroid gets put on the backburner indefinitely after it was so close to completion is extremely disappointing to me. Asteroid is already way better than one of the main gamemodes in TF2. It deserves a place in the game. If anyone on the TF team still checks facepunch, PLEASE consider finishing the mode, or at least sticking it as an option in the casual queue for unfinished gamemodes. Not being able to play one of my favorite maps for 3-4 years is a real shame.

It works just fine for me. If it has no acceleration anymore for you, try writing "sv_noclipaccelerate 5" on the developer console and it should work like it should before.

What I remember of Asteroid was enemy Engineers routinely camping inside the vents, and scouts constantly stealing the cores. I'm guessing they patched this shit out in later versions of the map? I only really played it the initial few months after it launched, and every match was a one-sided curbstomp due to the aforementioned issues.

Like any map, the early version was pretty shit. I'm working on my first map right now and the first version was dogshit, but the later versions are a massive improvement.

The only vents I remember was one of the three access routes to the core... Not much sense camping that seeing as one could simply jump through the lasers, and either way engis camping the core wasn't the end of the world, you could just destroy the bots then.

one could simply jump through the lasers pfffft

I still remember that the first version was so long that it had a prebuilt teleporter in spawn.

CTF but improved in every way doesn't hold to much when CTF is an awful game mode to begin with. The main issue is that it's an alternative game mode, so it has to be good enough for a dedicated playerbase to consciously go to their map settings and check "Asteroid". Otherwise it'll just end up dead in the water with the other alt maps and adding it would be a waste of time. I'd consider the map itself to be "eh" in gameplay. It IS better than CTF, but there are also 4 other game modes that aren't total shit and also tend to encourage team play. And here are some of my reasons why I don't think its a good map. -stupid gimmicks like the death pit in the center and the water in your base. -2 bases, which means that engineers will still turtle no matter what. -yes you can farm the A+B bots but it's a "braindead slog" in your words. -2 bases also forces teams to split into attacking and defending forces. it hurts team cohesion. -lack of health and ammo for the offensive team within the enemy base. -complicated game mode for new players. compare to payload which is basically "push cart". -most of it takes place indoors. not much place for soldiers and demos to roam around. -sniper balconies. -really fucking slow. In the end, the minuscule TF2 dev team should work on something on more important than finishing a flavor of the month map that lacks longevity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDbmIC98BgE

Why is DDOSing even an issue for streamers? For that to happen they have to get the IP of the server that the streamer is playing on. To prevent that from happening all you have to do is set your steam status to offline.

DDOSers also get server info from the names of anyone within the server. It's why bigger name TF2 streamers are forced to use a HUD that removes the name from everyone playing.

That is actually pretty clever.