posting once in forever as a quick note:

alias +dignity "slot1; +attack"
alias -dignity "-attack"
bind mouse3 +dignity

unless valve realizes how letting people take opposing ubers is not a very good idea, you need a bind similar to this as medic, on something that you can hit almost immediately once you see trouble, or you're otherwise going to become an active detriment to your team. even once you get to the beginning of the switch-in animation, you'll only drop your crossbow

if you dry push a team with full Uber ad and they kill your medic, suddenly they have a huge Uber ad, the ad they picked up from your med and the ad from the spawn timer

Well of course you time the uber from when he spawns + 45 seconds - the time left in the medigun. It doesn't matter when he picks it up - you can assume they picked it up straight away. If you're right then they have the max uber possible, if you're wrong then you've overestimated their uber and you won't get caught by it anyway. I don't get it, what's so hard?

But you can't take them both along with you all the way to last. So in any situation you lose here, you would have lost anyway pre-update (i.e. you're very close to your last and only one uber away from losing the round).

What about that freeze time that's been happening in lobbies? When the round starts everyone stays with their kills and pts they got during pregame, doesn't freeze till the second round.

That's something to do with the config only tf2center can fix?

no, its on valve's end.

Now that's just repeating what I was trying to say in my first post. Let me try to explain better why this is a bad thing.

This type of uncertainty promotes passive play and adds to the stalemate.
As in, if you start counting given that they picked it up straight away you're assuming the worst case scenario whereas they will have a massive uber advantage. This would normally encourage a team to play far back and passive. As opposed to now where you would be more likely to try and dry-push, hold more aggressive, or contest their push as you are always able to know when exactly they have their uber. That type of certainty in information should increase depth and usually liven the game more up as teams should be more keen on going for plays according to that information (i.e. dry pushing because you know for sure they dont have their uber yet, or pushing as soon as you get your uber because you know for sure that they wont have theirs in time, or back out earlier because you know for sure they have their uber before you do).
Making that information be iffy and unsure should make high level games be played a lot more safe and passive, which is the exact type of thing we should be discouraging as it only serves to slow the game down.

This is the problem.
You assumed they had full uber so you played passive, chances are you were wrong and chances are you were right. But you played far back enough so that it didn't matter in the end, risk was eliminated and now you both are at a full uber stalemate.
You see?

Regardless of how dreadful our pug team is, I think this clip demonstrates how broken this new update is with regards to mediguns:
http://plays.tv/video/5597dfb05100763620
Even with the barely existent coordination of a team in tf2pickup.net we managed to have 2 ubers ready to push last. If a real team did this then it's pretty much impossible to lose a last push. Even if we completely fucked up the uber exchange in the first push there would still be an ubercharge that could be used to block second.

The only way this addition of dropped weapons could be unfucked is if
- Weapons from a previous life disappear when u respawn
- The timer for it to disappear is massively reduced.
- OR there is a reduction in the amount of uber in picked up mediguns (100% gives 50% when picked up)

The last option might actually increase the pace of games since it just accelerates uber advantages and kind of eliminates time in which you are stood around building waiting for uber. But then again it completely fucks up counting ubers and removes that part of playing medic.

I don't know the best way to unfuck this but Valve feels some compulsive need to fuck with the metagame of tf2 and we kind of have to adapt to it somehow.

Assuming you count uber according to the worst case scenario you still have a good idea of when they get it. It still opens up windows where you can choose to push and kill their med before he gets charged.

Either you kill their med your own survives you've won,
either both meds die which is good for you since you didnt have uber advantage to start with,
either they pop and you lose players/your med and lose a capture point,
either your team pussies out and respects the other team's advantage, and then still risks to lose said capture point and med.

In half of the cases the team with uber advantage has actually more to lose than the team without.

This new array of choices does not render medic less fun or interesting to me.

This update is so cool for so many reasons but as a novice medic main the ubercharge change really kills it for me. Dropping uber before was pretty bad but now you can easily lose a game over it and yeah sometimes uber drops are just plain unlucky and for them to have such a big effect on the outcome of a round just feels wrong. I feel there's enough of a punishment for a drop as it is.

Also from the point of view of someone who enjoys TF2 as a spectator e-sport. One of my favorite things about watching TF2 games was watching some of the insane uber milks that medics like Mirelin used to do. The "will he drop? ... WOW HE'S ON <30 HP AND HE HELD IT" clutch moments were awesome to see (and I'd imagine to cast too) and these moments were part of the inspiration for me to try play medic in comp seriously in the first place.

Finally I could imagine this making the game quite stalemate prone too. Yeah sure you get rewarded for playing aggressively but at the same time even if the other team has one scout/solly down if the pressure is on (LAN knockout stage, ETF2L playoffs, ESEA playoffs) who would want to risk an early pop or drop? Dunno maybe I'm wrong I've never been in that position before but I know that teams tend to play safe in high pressure situations.

If you and your team are willing to push into ???????????? uber advantages - what I've been saying really won't apply to you.

Oh actually I forgot to mention that I actually spent some time practicing "juggling" 2 mediguns from viaduct spawn to mid and it's really not easy. The weapons fly out at a seemingly random trajectory so it's not easy to catch the midair and it's not like CS:GO/CS:S where you could just spam the weapon drop button. Also I noticed the weapon switch button isn't exactly the most responsive thing in the world and it makes it really hard to juggle mediguns up hills.

Also I tested trying to shoot the medigun with a rocket or a scattergun and that didn't work but this was all pre-update so it might work now, not sure.

Even so, RIP milking ubers if one uber is popped already and ambitious last pushes where you can just turtle and stockpile ubers.

I'm gonna ask Alain if he wants to do some testing with me and maybe we'll post another update video at some point so we can confirm all of this once and for all.

Patch 3 apparently improved the weapon switch button responsiveness.

Weapons aren't ragdolled, and don't react to being shot.

The swapped weapon comes out the right side so if you wanna move it up stairs you need to be slightly away from a right wall and keep swapping. The weapon will be thrown against the wall so you can just look forward and crouch walk while spamming swap.

The swap key isn't unresponsive, just precise in that you need to be aiming DIRECTLY at the weapon's exact hitbox to pickup. Swaps go in the direction you face so if you turn around you're fucked.

I think at this point it's too early to say anything - there's still things for Valve to fix meaning more patches where the mechanics of anything can change again and until they settle down and no more hotfixes are being rushed out and people play with weapon swaps enough it's like pointless to theory craft right now about how OP it is. It's good everyone's pugging and playing, but isn't this still too small of a sample size to really judge how bad it's going to be? I honestly think when people get more used to it they'll just adapt around it and nothing will really change. I guess it would matter in lower levels of TF2 where they don't have the mechanics to be mindful of how they use their ubers and weapons but I don't think balance should be done in consideration of ALL possible skill levels. That's like saying the sticky bomb launcher sucks cause the iron player can't aim with it imo.

tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime -1

Disables all dropped weapons. It needs sv_cheats 1 though.

Just a thought but I know that a group of high level West Coast NA players recently had contact with Valve. Any talk of them discussing this with the TF2 team?

tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime -1

This is clientside though, so you'd have to enable cheats, everyone will then have to do it manually, and then disable cheats again.

has anyone else been stuck on validating tf2 0/0bytes

tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime -1

Depending on its flags it may be possible to have a server plugin force it on all clients.

However, we'd be entering promod territory by doing this, and I think it's infinitely better to let this play out and show Valve that it's broken than ruin what progress we've made with them by splitting off.

tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime -1

sm_cvar tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime 0 works server-side, no need for sv_cheats too. COMP TF2 IS SAVED. Maybe. I believe it does require sourcemod however.

I'm not the most experienced player (and perhaps that'll show with the nonsense I write) but I'm struggling to see why you would run kritz/vaccinator in a high pressure situation. If my understanding is correct then if you've popped anything other than an Uber and you get jumped before you can kill the enemy med then whatever kritz charge is left is retained.

So basically the risk/reward looks like this:

Best case scenario Reward: You drop their med and maybe some other players too. You get a free uber (or free uber %) which you can change to. You could also argue about it introducing uncertainty into what the enemy thinks you are using but really who is gonna pass on a free uber in favor of kritz in an important game? This could probably win the round.

Good case scenario reward: You don't kill the med but kill 4 or more players then realistically they have to back out. This is kinda good or bad depending on spawns, positions and how events unfold afterwards.

Bad case scenario risk: They pop uber, most of your team get out but likely some will die unless the other team really fluff the situation. Perhaps the med will die later on after the kritz is over. You can recover from this but it'll be hard.
Worst case scenario risk: They pop uber and some bright young thing "drops" your medic mid kritz. Before this wouldn't have mattered but now depending on how quickly this happens your enemy could get anywhere from almost 0% to maybe 80% kritz if the enemy flank calls your push early and the roamer is sick. This will probably result in you losing the game save some super clutch plays.

This is all assuming your med doesn't drop at 100% but I think the risk/reward boils down to this.

Kritz:
Reward: You get a free uber and basically win the game.
Risk: You give them a free Kritz and basically lose the game.

With Uber it's:

Uber
Reward: You get a good trade and gain an advantage.
Risk: You get a bad uber trade and suffer a setback.

Same applies to Vaccinator but either way, this might be ok for some officials but at LAN or in a final? Is this the death of the clutch Kritz play on the big scene? The risk feels too great at the moment for it to be viable in high stakes situations.

EDIT: Welp nevermind. In the 20 something mins it took for me to write and format this it's no longer an issue... great...
DOUBLE EDIT: Or maybe issue is not kill!

tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime -1

sm_cvar does require sourcemod yeah, so you'd have to install a plugin on every server for it to work, which I don't see happening (not in etf2l at least), so it looks like there isn't an easy fix (right now at least).

tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime -1

But then again I can't remember the last time a change this big was made to TF2. Perhaps ETF2L will go that bit further this time?

tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime -1

It's such a bad idea to be moving away from Valve this early on especially! If we don't like something we have to let them know, and if they listen - good! If they don't, then we should follow them. Not start creating a promod when we're on the cusp of something great.

tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime -1

For the first time valve is going all for competitive and then we abandon what they're working on for a promod-esque plugin, that would be not smart!! Csgo didn't go to a promod version when valve changed the game and added the CZ75, people complained about it and they changed it. Someone should just post on reddit that it should be changed, everyone go upvote it, valve will prolly do it

there are ways to force cvars that don't need sourcemod - you could edit tftrue (I think most of the euros use this?) to force this and likewise esea could add it into their server plugin with relatively minimal difficulty afaik

not to say I endorse this - the update just came out, and everything is prone to change anyways for the time being, but it's certainly something that is within the realm of possibility

whats the cmd to pick up weapons off the ground

+use_action_slot_item, same key as powerups/grappling hook

I agree we shouldn't move away from them right away but it's at least a possibility in the future. I personally can't imagine myself playing med with this mechanic though and maybe I'm alone in that but I just think there's enough pressure on medics to play correctly as it is.

By default it's bound to F

Also another random (slightly not serious) thought: Building 2 ubers in a stalemate is a thing now. You know that time you're stood in spawn on viaduct building with a scout 2 miles behind the rest of your team? Do you enjoy that? Well now you get to do it every time the enemy medic drops! Fun gameplay mechanic!

That could have something to do with a steamvr update or something similar. That has been the reason for that happening to me before.

I dont know if it was a thing before but you can stop autoreload from reloading if you hold m2