You stuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuupid retards are back at it again
We don't need 5 pages of you acting like you're the first person to say 'this game is dying haha stop trying to do new things I only want to play badlands with stock weapons haha'

anyone who isn't delusional knows this
like who gives a fuck none of you retards are going to use most of thr weapons they allow anyway - remember how people got into a hissy fit about dh being enabled and op but nobody uses it anyway

ah yes, wtz, the 6s maestro

Valve is supporting comp TF2, they're just slow. Evidence:
1. Anecdotal evidence of comp players going to Valve HQ and them telling us they want to help grow the comp scene.
2. They created matchmaking, which is still a work in progress. It's definitely bad in its current state, but they did make improvements to it since launch and are still showing it way more support than they show other game modes they've created.
3. They put streams up on the main page of the game, which everyone knows are mostly comp-centered.
4. They pushed casuals into a more competitive pub game mode, which includes publicly-shown ranks and hidden MMR. These games are typically more competitive than your typical community server, which is a plus for the comp scene.
5. They've made a ton of balance changes that favor the comp scene over the casual scene.

Obviously some of the balances are not perfect but this isn't vanilla TF2 anymore. We should all hope that one day all of the weapons will be balanced for comp such that we don't even need to maintain a whitelist, and I think that this season is proof of that since we're unbanning more weapons than we are banning.

weapons like the vaccinator are just as unfun as they were previously its just they are unbanned because people think that a dev team that takes over a year to make a horribly broken particle system is good rofl
this is a casual game the faster people stop refusing to accept it the faster that the game can stop having moba levels of dumb shit everywhere

To be clear I'm not saying we shouldn't ban the vaccinator or other dumb weapons. If something is dumb, go ahead and ban it. I'm just saying we should hope that the weapons are designed to be more fun in the long term. In the short term, show Valve your unhappiness with the weapon design by removing it from your game.

sounds like a good way to shut a community up without having to do anything

"work in progress"
"did make improvements since launch"
"showing it way more support than they show other game modes they've created"

if i ctrl+f 'competitive' here
one result on October 20, 2017: Moved the Casual and Competitive badge panels to the main menu
June 3, 2017: Fixed UI not displaying the "Searching..." panel when queued for competitive matchmaking
June 2, 2017: Fixed Competitive match history sometimes appearing as empty when connection to matchmaking servers is lost
Feb 14, 2017: Added new survey questions to the end-of-match survey for Casual and Competitive modes and fixed a bug where multiple surveys could be displayed at the same time
Dec 21, 2016: Players can now set their maximum acceptable ping by clicking the new gear icon in the top right of the Casual and Competitive matchmaking lobby screens and choosing "Ping Settings"
The Competitive maps list has been updated

Added cp_granary and cp_badlands ------------------------ on a sidenote, afaik they were gonna update the
Disabled cp_snakewater and cp_foundry ------------------------ maps list every week
Oct 25, 2016: Removed ctf_turbine from the Competitive maps list
...
and other map updates and some elo updates (which to be honest, no one cares about, because barely anyone plays matchmaking for elo to be effective and it's full of cheaters). so i don't know why you'd say any of the three things you said

that was the very first thing they did after hundreds of people emailed them to finally do it. is this called "support"?

i don't know where you read that there's hidden MMR in casual matchmaking. publicly-shown "ranks" are actually levels that always go up. even if it was a plus ufor the competitive scene, it's a side effect of wanting to get rid of vip servers, all-skin-enabled servers and servers where people slowhack their users

are you talking about the razorback/ambassador changes that favour highlander more than 6v6? should we list all the changes in the past two years and see which scene gets favoured more often? it's undeniable that valve is more on the economy focused side because they know tf2 is long past the way of becoming a big esport, but they are still making a shit ton of money off of casuals, so all they do is -just enough- to keep the competitive scene silent so they don't get spammed with emails.

like we get it you want to be optimistic about it but jesus.. it's not gonna happen. can we just do our own thing and not give a shit about valve?

slin if anything comp should distance itself from casual mode as much as possible because it is probably the most hated thing ever among casual players (and comp players, seriously casual blows). also idk if you've actually played casual but community servers were 100% more competitive and still are.

also the stream thing is hidden when you start the game so nobody looks at it lol

edit: made it more clear i'm talking about in game casual mode not casual players

Balance changes favor all scenes.

This is something I really want and haven't seen any evidence of, either from valve or in game.

It's really well hidden

I volunteer to be shot at by annoying weapons for testing purposes.

can we allow the tide turner please and eyelander i got one from my friend at smissmas and want to test it out in tf2center pugs

Aaaand slin joins the discussion, all we need is some b4nny thoughts, oh right.

there are over a hundred unique weapons in this game that produce hundreds of combinations of loadouts. at the rate in which Valve works on their game, and the quality of their balance changes, how long do you realistically think it will take before a large majority of people agree with any whitelist?

You guys are right, Valve is so slow at making changes that we shouldn't rely on them to grow our scene for us. I'm not advocating that we sit around and wait for them to help us.

What I'm saying is, there's more productive ways to grow the scene besides hating on Valve.

There's two camps:
1. People who think we shouldn't change anything in comp. They're happy with the game being small and hated by the casual community, and they want to continue excluding others to preserve the game they love so much. "The game is fine as is, let us play our game."
2. People who are trying to make positive change to try and make the comp scene bigger, even if it means doing things a little differently than we did it before.

I guess the reason I'm in the second group is because I've tried it your way. I've tried pushing the game forward in its current state, trying to promote the game and get people involved. Running tournaments, casting, talking to ESEA, Zowie, Twitch, FACEIT, Razer, and more. Sure, we grew TF2 from a few teams to a few more teams. But it's still been relatively the same conversation about the game being dead, where are the LANs, where's the prize pools, how come Valve doesn't commit to helping us more, if only we were a bigger game like Smash, etc.

I'm sick of it. Personally, I'm willing to play a game that has Pyro as a viable class. A game that has Rescue Ranger, and Bonk Atomic Punch, and Atomizer. Do I think those things are perfect in their current state? Hell no, so much stuff is broken and the game still needs major tweaking.

But I at least can understand where Valve is coming from. They need to make money, they don't want to alienate the people who play 5 of 9 classes who enjoy TF2 and want to play comp, and they need to grow comp TF2 in a way that is sustainable for both casuals and pros. Is it slow progress? Definitely. This reason it's slow is because there's people on the casual side who HATE comp and there's people on the comp side who HATE casual. But we're not helping them out at all, and all this anti-Valve messaging is really unproductive.

So how can we help?
Valve can't be seen pushing the comp scene so aggressively without pissing off the core casual players. They're enacting slow, small changes to the scene that are gradually pushing those players in the direction of being more competitive. Adding ranks, integrated matchmaking, exposing them to comp via in-game notifications and badges, and slowly changing classes.

We can help them out by finalizing our game mode. We've been arguing back and forth within the comp community and can't decide on the "right" direction for the game. We all want the same thing, it's just about how we get there.

Should we have first to 5 or 30 minutes? Should we continue to exclude Pyro from our metagame or should we allow it to become viable as a 5th comp class? Should there be a halftime? Do we have to have a whitelist?

These are the questions we need to answer. I'm hoping for a world in which the weapons are balanced properly and we don't need a whitelist. It'll take time to get there, but in the meantime let's keep banning weapons and making posts about why certain weapons need to be changed. These are all good conversations.

I would be okay with pyro if this wasn't a thing.

Meanwhile over here in reality, the results promised from your changes have yet to be seen. Not only are player and viewer numbers declining just like before, communication with valve has gone nowhere and they've proven themselves nothing short of incompetent. Updates are riddled with slapdash balancing, undocumented/accidental changes and broken core mechanics. All of which take weeks(months?) to fix, if we're lucky enough to have them fixed at all.

I don't care how hopeful you say the outlook is, how difficult Valve's situation is or if they're just trying their best - as long as the result we get continues to be a half-assed steaming pile of shit served on a silver plate.

But it's all okay now, Mr. Slin has rolled in with the damage control sedative.
I'm sure that essay of yours had enough empty buzzwords of promised hope and inspiration to keep everyone believing its for their own good until the next update rolls in.

Good guys win?

You're not wrong, and I agree with what you guys are saying. All I'm saying is, what's the point of shitting on Valve if we have nothing to show for doing that?

If you're not growing, you're dying. Overwatch will continue to gain market share, and meanwhile our game will continue to shrink as it gets older. I'm asking for us to be more open to making changes to the game in order to try to grow it. Keeping on with the status quo hasn't proved that effective either, and biting the hand that feeds seems like a bad idea.

Rather than putting up walls and making it harder to work with Valve, I'm just asking that we keep the Valve hate out of Teamfortress.tv. It makes the scene look bad and it's not doing us any favors. Let's at least try to be understanding of what they're trying to do.

You won't have a balance while esea does only 1 map a week and europe does 2.
Pyro isn't excluded, it is the go to class for every team on a disadvantage hold on last or even just holding last. It's actually viable against a soldier heavy team.
Yes we need a whitelist, until the unlocks become balanced then we do.

the game is small and isnt growing because its dated and it has a bad reputation with most people as a bad free to play game.
bobby.gonzales12 isnt going to go on tf2center because now he can use bonk
tf2 players for the most part are really young and they watch "tf2 youtubers" who like to play 10x crit low grav orange they dont make videos about tf2center
even if the game is small if you make it less of an fps by adding permutation upon permutation of unlocks and more of a moba is it worth it
at what point is it the same game and when do people drop it for dota

I don't actually understand why the competitive community is so set on keeping comp TF2 a stale, "perfectly balanced" game. Games aren't supposed to be perfectly balanced, that's just boring, unchanging and practically brainless from a strategy creation standpoint. Good balance comes from having a few overpowered aspects of the game, so that in a highly competitive environment, teams create new strategies over time to adapt to the many different things other teams are doing to take advantage of those overpowered aspects. There's also a case where something may make a class overpowered in one area, but that area encourages a different playstyle which is overall easier to deal with.

People right now are unfortunately delusional that TF2 is going to grow as an esport if we ban weapons and limit classes. It's not. TF2 also isn't going to grow as an esport if the devs balance the game exactly to your liking. Other competitive communities are able to accept new patches and adapt to them, and the games supported by those communities have some of the most popular esport scenes in the world. Our community has this detrimental mindset that we should distrust the developers and instead, as non-game developers, make big assumptions about if the game is perfect for us and our old strategies and then act on those assumptions through bans. This is the one thing holding us back and I hope people realize this and advance TF2 much further by getting rid of this ban system.

??

idk if you've read the thread but literally all the people who say that a certain direction will push tf2 toward being an esport are the people advocating for unbanning unlocks and shit lol.

edit: also other games have developers that listen directly to top competitive players and balance for the pro scene and such their decisions are usually not totally terrible. tf2 developers have a history of making changes that are straight up terrible and only get reversed through massive community backlash (initial demo nerf, bison nerf, that sword that makes you charge longer nerf, etc.)

I haven't seen anyone support unbanning everything, besides I guess MR. SLIN who got a lot of downvotes.

Sure, some things are changed in later patches, but sometimes some patches just have a certain metagame that isn't "fixed" for as long as that sort of patch period lasts.

Hi. I dropped out of School when i was 13. Tf2 is a growing esport with a real chance all we need to do is unban all the weapons

Yeah sorry but shit like the sandman have literally been piles of shit and OP for close to 10 years now. That's not a patch with a "metagame" its just fucking stupid.

We're not 10 years in the past now. Stop acting like it. The developer mindset on the game has changed now and to pretend like they'll behave exactly as they did with the sandman before (when they didn't pay much attention to maintaining good balance) is just not logical.

To what extent has it changed? MyM was a shitfest with a whole bunch of issues that still have yet to be fixed over a year later, the most recent pyro update didn't really fix anything, they just fucked up pyro even more then it already was. So sorry if I have little faith in the Tf2 team of 10 years ago and almost none in the one today but the current Tf team has done little to actually move forward in anything concerning competitive HL, 6s, MM or otherwise.

why do you care about the developers mindset when theyve done virtually nothing in 10 years
this isnt a moba we shouldnt allow engineer heavy or pyro to become "the meta" because it """"might"""" grow the game
its an fps game yes strategy is important but if you allow dumb shit on those classes that make them as strong as the actual classes people have to practice then you are missing the point of playing an fps game
same reason there are class limits; nobody is impressed by multiple heavies or engineers the former aiming being easier than the smg the latter doesnt aim its not fun to play against if u want the game to be a moba go play ow

While they would have the top of Prem/Invite players they could work out with to balance things out legit good, instead what Valve does is literally poking a bee hive with Gaben's dick and hoping they hit the G-spot.
The thing is that no matter how many stings the dick gets they don't figure out they should probably pull it out.

For fuck sake as far as I know Valve does retarded changes out of nowhere with no logic even in a Major game like fucking cs:go, with a team with even less brain(TF2), do you really want their attention? So far it has led to demo nerf, medic's running at scout speed etc. Just utter retard shit.

If you don't know what to do when your penis gets stuck inside a beehive and gets stung a lot, you can ask help from people that know better, instead of keeping swinging it inside there and :thinking: =) Valve does not do this, so please stop this shit.

Interesting analogy