TF2 General Chat and Update Speculation Station - One of Several Edition - Games

Can someone explain me why this thread got renamed and what happened to general chat?

[QUOTE=Matihood1;52510488]Can someone explain me why this thread got renamed and what happened to general chat?[/QUOTE] We can't talk about about that. No seriously, there no way to describe it without critiquing the mods (a banable offense) and/or predicting incoming moderation (another banable offense). Welcome to your new home comrade!

The main issue with saying "tf2 is ded" is that it's pretty egocentric to claim that. It's basicely saying "I use to like the game but now that i'm fed up with it for X reasons, it's dead to me and everyone else who still plays it doesn't count" when thousands of people still love it, play it actively and contribute to it. Id argue a multiplayer game is truely dead once you straight up can't play it, because the player count is too low and there's no way to play a real match. Tf2 is super far from that point and if nothing happens to the online features, It could still live on for decades, as long as there will be people interested to play it. To give an example of a game that's really on life support but still playable, I got into HL2DM last year. There's only average 200 players playing, but that was enough to play it and have tons of fun, so the game isn't truely dead, because I can still play it and have fun 13 years after it came out. [URL="http://steamcharts.com/app/244630"]Here's what a truely dead game looks like[/URL]

I think people are conflating death with stagnation.

[t]http://harry.tf/pics/2017-07-27_00-57-19.png[/t] whenever people talk about tf2 being "dead" i have to go to battleborn's stats page it's pretty depressing really tf2's definitely different from how it was in 2007 ~ 2011, it doesn't have that same feel as it did back then but it's far from dead lol

[QUOTE=DatHarry;52510511][t]http://harry.tf/pics/2017-07-27_00-57-19.png[/t] whenever people talk about tf2 being "dead" i have to go to battleborn's stats page it's pretty depressing really tf2's definitely different from how it was in 2007 ~ 2011, it doesn't have that same feel as it did back then but it's far from dead lol[/QUOTE] Yeah exactly. Neotokyo is dead but it's relatively old (came out 2 years after tf2 though). Battlborn is barely one year old.

remember that time randy pitchford made a battleborn porn subreddit in hopes people would use it, then plugged it on his twitter? I still think TF2 needs some help but at least we haven't reached [I]that[/I] low yet

[QUOTE=Punchy;52510324]If your pregnancy is delayed that far back, don't get your hopes up on the delivery.[/QUOTE] Your edge cuts me like scissors.

[QUOTE=Contra132;52510528]remember that time randy pitchford made a battleborn porn subreddit in hopes people would use it, then plugged it on his twitter? I still think TF2 needs some help but at least we haven't reached [I]that[/I] low yet[/QUOTE] As sordid as that is, at least he attempted something. Valve would never bother, they'd simply let the game slowly extinguish without so much as a peep out of them.

[QUOTE=Lord Exor;52510510]I think people are conflating death with stagnation.[/QUOTE] I'd say it's more people using "dead" to mean different things, probably not referring to the playerbase in this instance.

[QUOTE=Contra132;52510528]remember that time randy pitchford made a battleborn porn subreddit in hopes people would use it, then plugged it on his twitter? I still think TF2 needs some help but at least we haven't reached [I]that[/I] low yet[/QUOTE] Instead the tf team directly draws the porn and brands it as comics. [I]Hello, naked sniper[/I]

[QUOTE=Matihood1;52510488]Can someone explain me why this thread got renamed and what happened to general chat?[/QUOTE] This thread used to be General, and is now merged with MUS. There wasn't much meaningful discussion going on in MUS, and it instead became more of a general chat in everything but name. General was mostly inactive, and shitposts were getting more common in MUS. The mods issued an ultimatum: update speculation only, or the thread gets closed. You can see how that turned out. So, there was a lot of controversy about this, as well as some strange business with mods changing the ratings on their posts to positive ones for a laugh. There was also some annoyance about how the mods didn't seem to play nor particularly care for TF2. The mods pointed out that ratings aren't anything meaningful and people were overreacting, and that they're responsible for the moderation of all forums, not just the TF2 ones. The new name is a compromise, uniting the inactive General and the increasingly off topic MUS to reach a thread that allows both. And here we are. That's my understanding of it, at any rate.

I'm playing free to play games that can only dream of reaching the level of life TF2 has. Speaking of free to play games, Gigantic is surprisingly fun if anyone is looking for something to survive the update wait - I wonder if we'll get another TF-related promo, even though the game doesn't really have a character that resembles a TF2 one.

[QUOTE=Fluury;52510592]Speaking of free to play games, Gigantic is surprisingly fun if anyone is looking for something to survive the update wait - I wonder if we'll get another TF-related promo, even though the game doesn't really have a character that resembles a TF2 one.[/QUOTE] Yeah, and the guy who made [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1dJvrqN_5Q"]Bad Medicine[/URL] worked on the animations and trailers of the game, so i've been looking for its release for a while.

[QUOTE=Fluury;52510592]I'm playing free to play games that can only dream of reaching the level of life TF2 has. Speaking of free to play games, Gigantic is surprisingly fun if anyone is looking for something to survive the update wait - I wonder if we'll get another TF-related promo, even though the game doesn't really have a character that resembles a TF2 one.[/QUOTE] duuuuuddeeeeee!!! i've been looking for a game like this for the past few months. You are awesome. I think i found my fix until the update hits. hopefully this doesnt end up replacing my tf2 addiction.

[QUOTE=Loth;52510561]Instead the tf team directly draws the porn and brands it as comics. [I]Hello, naked sniper[/I][/QUOTE] "Officially Licensed Life-Size Nude & Honey Covered Zhanna Poster only $19.99 in the Valve Store" A man can dream...

also seeing as nothing got announced tonight and if it get announced tomorrow it would be the ever-rare friday update, I'm gonna go ahead and call it: we august now if we're lucky it'll be first week august, but at this point who fucking knows how long it'll take

Does Competitive mode offer a markedly better experience than Casual? I played a few games of casual this evening and generally found it to be in line with most pub games from 2 years ago.

heads up, most likely my last post here for a while.. i'm just so disappointed in the TF team, that I don't even know if I'll be able to play the game a ton anymore. i'm so burnt out, and sick of the bullshit communication, and the bullshit thats in the game. no one wants to play anything except 2fort swiftwater and hightower. i miss quickplay. i miss CC. i miss pubs. I miss the old BfB. I miss updates. I miss even monthly patches that didnt mean shit to me but hey at least i got to see that someone was actively sitting at a desk seeing the game and going "im going to fix this shit". i miss gun mettle when people where happy and not being driven away from the game. I'm sick of pumping money into this fucking game when i cant get any simple communication. I've spent so long anticipating this update and i dont even know if it's coming. for all I know jill jumped ship and said "fuck this im gonna go do something." see even if everyone left the TF team, we wouldn't know. since there is already a lack of communication we'd just assume they were working. for all we know no ones even on the team. it's been over a month since the last patch. PATCH. the last patch just added fucking medals. is it so hard to just add shit and appease us? just fucking do something. i've lost all respect for the TF team, all patience I had for them, and all my passion i had for this game. good luck to you guys, but I can't do it anymore. i just can't.

[QUOTE=Archimedes;52510852]Does Competitive mode offer a markedly better experience than Casual? I played a few games of casual this evening and generally found it to be in line with most pub games from 2 years ago.[/QUOTE] If you're willing to sit through the long wait times and you can somewhat carry matches then matchmaking is actually pretty fun. I'm rank 9 on my main account right now with almost 200 games played. It's actually not as bad as other people make it out to be. I have my fun own playing it and I wish other people did too.

[QUOTE] the last patch just added fucking medals. is it so hard to just add shit and appease us?[/QUOTE] I mean, medals that get added are either community charity event incentives or comp medals. I find it actually super cool that they would patch in items charity reward items, or as rewards for the comp leagues. There's no reason to get mad over medals getting added into the game.

[QUOTE=Square_Rabbit;52510591]This thread used to be General, and is now merged with MUS.[/QUOTE] My bad. I looked at the recent posts and thought this thread used to be MUS. Only after I asked what happened to general chat do I realized THIS used to be general chat. The fact that I wasn't subscribed to this thread didn't help either. Thanks for the explanation.

[QUOTE=gjw22;52510865]heads up, most likely my last post here for a while..[/QUOTE] not to be rude...Who are you?

[QUOTE=Archimedes;52510852]Does Competitive mode offer a markedly better experience than Casual? I played a few games of casual this evening and generally found it to be in line with most pub games from 2 years ago.[/QUOTE] Competitive is missing a lot of features right now; like class limits. It basically feels like a 6v6 pub.

Game Coordinator down?

[QUOTE=DrCactus;52511007]Competitive is missing a lot of features right now; like class limits. It basically feels like a 6v6 pub.[/QUOTE] Issues with class limits have been touched upon for both those in favor of limits, those in favor of allowing free-selection, and even those in favor of selective-limits. Problem is that there's no actual consensus on what's the "correct' mode of thinking. No limits is a clusterfuck when you take into account just how potent certain classes are when en masse (notably Demoman and Medic). When you have a limit 1 on every class you make class-switching between teammates more awkward than it needs to be, even moreso if a teammate is being dead weight and has locked the class out. Selective limits like what the house rule for competitive TF2 is seems unsavory to those uninitiated, and ultimately it's because certain classes simply either are way too viable (to the point where they needed to be limited to just 1) or aren't viable pretty much ever, which is exacerbated by game modes that competitive players focus on which happen to favor movement around the map in order to keep the entire match feeling different rather than fighting over a single hill or the same flag that some other modes and games tend to do.

[QUOTE=Ultravod;52507275]A week or so ago, before this thread became MUS Fortress Forever, I made a very vague post about a change that would affect a small portion of the TF2 community. What I said at the time was it was a race between that event (which has a fixed date, August 18th) and the pyro update. I can now elaborate quite a bit more. [url=http://micsnobs.com/hlstats.php]Mic Snobs[/url] is a small group of community servers founded around the idea of running 24/7 Doublecross. In spite of Valve's best efforts (making community servers an opt-in checkbox in QuickPlay, January 2014, the complete removal of QuickPlay, summer 2016, offering no new mechanic to funnel traffic to community servers except for the server browser,) we actually have a [url=http://www.gametracker.com/search/?query=micsnobs.com]few populated servers.[/url] MicS is very much a "community" enterprise. In our 3 1/2 years of operation, we've had many regulars. All of our servers are all-talk (and at this point, instant respawn) and we have a bunch of chatterboxes who join in the evening. We also have, ahem a bunch of squeakers who throng our * Tower servers during the day (I never voluntarily set foot on them, but I do check the vote logs.) We've had some fairly broad reaching success at various points. Our 2014 Ghost Fort server was hugely popular as we made it easy for people to get their gift drops, and had a custom plugin to reduce PvP damage when Merasmus was out. Remember that it wasn't until 2016 that PvP damage was disabled when halloween bosses are spawned. Ghost Fort 2014 was our most popular server until the arrival of Tough Break and Landfall. Our 24/7 Landfall server was insane, when QuickPlay (and specifically, Gun Mettle) was a thing. It was regularly in the top 100 servers worldwide, and briefly in the top 50. That was when being the top 1000 meant something. 2016 started with a bang for community servers, at least the first half of it. Things kind of went to shit just over a year ago. Post-MyM, it's been difficult to keep our servers populated. Regulars join, but there's no flow of QuickPlay traffic to fill things up. Playing a 5v5 gets boring after a while. We're still the [url=http://www.gametracker.com/search/?query=doublecross]only game in town[/url] for Doublecross (one other shit-tastic shitfest notwithshitstanding.) We're still alive, but we're struggling. The lack of updates to TF2 and (I will harp on this endlessly) no way to route traffic to community servers besides the server browser sucked, most of the wind out of our sails. In 2017, the TF2 community server landscape is one where Skial 24/7 32 man instant respawn (2fort/Turbine/Dustbowl) is more popular than ever and every other community server is a ghost town. We've had the same physical server since May of 2015, and two other ones previous to that. Since our launch in January of 2014, one guy (The Linux Colonel) has paid for the entirety of our hosting costs, out of pocket and with zero donations. He's now officially resigning from that duty. It cost $90/month, so who can blame him? Currently the Mic Snobs staff are exploring options to keep our enterprise afloat. At minimum, we're going to downscale to a less powerful physical server and get rid of our lesser played maps (RIP Harvest, Landfall, MvM, possibly more.) At worst, we're closing our doors. After a bunch of discussions today, I am completely unclear on the future of our community. I am morbidly curious if Valve will manage to release the Pyro update before our current server is turned off. It would somehow be Shakespeareanly fitting if they released it ON the 18th.[/QUOTE] I've had that with my network too (closed on 5th May this year), and I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you might see the same fate as I did. Thing is that if you're not one of the cancerous "free unusuals free festives free killstreaks free everything trade 24/7 minecraft" servers, then your playerbase will wither away sooner or later. Hell, even if you are a "trade 24/7 minecraft_neon" server you still are in a lose/lose scenario. Players seem to only frequent servers they have donor status with !unusual on. Speaking of which, I tried it once on my server and "raked in cash" but quickly realised that it's bannable and removed it. And soon after that (totally unexpectedly) donors started leaving and the server network eventually met its demise. It's a really shitty situation to be in, Valve doesn't seem to do jack shit about it. And even if they do, their detection systems get circumvented like they are in CS:GO (tokenstash or modding the server to patch out the verification module)

[QUOTE=Psychopath12;52511041]Issues with class limits have been touched upon for both those in favor of limits, those in favor of allowing free-selection, and even those in favor of selective-limits. Problem is that there's no actual consensus on what's the "correct' mode of thinking. No limits is a clusterfuck when you take into account just how potent certain classes are when en masse (notably Demoman and Medic). When you have a limit 1 on every class you make class-switching between teammates more awkward than it needs to be, even moreso if a teammate is being dead weight and has locked the class out. Selective limits like what the house rule for competitive TF2 is seems unsavory to those uninitiated, and ultimately it's because certain classes simply either are way too viable (to the point where they needed to be limited to just 1) or aren't viable pretty much ever, which is exacerbated by game modes that competitive players focus on which happen to favor movement around the map in order to keep the entire match feeling different rather than fighting over a single hill or the same flag that some other modes and games tend to do.[/QUOTE] i think competitive ought to be set up like tf2center or faceit or something. servers shown on the screen, just waiting for people to select the class on that server to join it as that class. the problem then would be how to set up the 6s class selection. would it just be 2 scout 2 soldier 1 demo 1 medic like it's been for so long, or would there be newer, more interesting setups (given pyro's possible rise to 6s viability, as well as heavy's viability in 6s through the unbanning of gru)?

[QUOTE=Blackavar;52511121]i think competitive ought to be set up like tf2center or faceit or something. servers shown on the screen, just waiting for people to select the class on that server to join it as that class. the problem then would be how to set up the 6s class selection. would it just be 2 scout 2 soldier 1 demo 1 medic like it's been for so long, or would there be newer, more interesting setups (given pyro's possible rise to 6s viability, as well as heavy's viability in 6s through the unbanning of gru)?[/QUOTE] That's another issue. The stonewall that is the 6s meta. To an uninitiated player, they feel like arbitrary rules and restrictions set in place for a very specific type of TF2. What many players don't realize, however, is that all of the rules and class preferences are there due to literally a decade of haphazardly feeling around until they found something that was both fun to play and reasonable to manage (12 participants is way easier to keep track of than 18). I can assure you that every single rule and stipulation was enacted [i]after[/i] someone had found a way to ruin the experience for everyone involved by doing it.

[QUOTE=DrCactus;52511007]Competitive is missing a lot of features right now; like class limits. It basically feels like a 6v6 pub.[/QUOTE] That's what I liked about matchmaking though. You could experiment with any class combinations you wanted to try and it's not as restrictive as UGC or any other leagues.