So your idea is to bring casual players who enjoy pub tf2 cuz they play 4fun and force them to grind and tryhard comp 6v6 tf2? I think it will not work.

No the idea is to clear up misconceptions about comp -not to indoctrinate them into thinking a certain way

i think of uncle dane and solarlight, because uncle dane is just a casual player and seems pretty chill
while solarlight is a competitive player and is insanely good on demoknight, a lot of casual player back him up and somewhat can relate to him that he's cool and while i am pretty sure most comp players do not appreciate playing against a demoknight in 6v6 setting (also demoknight on high level won't simply work because experienced player will able to counter play it), solarlight kinda makes tryharding regardless if on casual or competitive look fun
i could give the same argument for swipez as a spy main as solarlight

ps: under no circumstances do not invite cringetopia moderators to talk or you will end up with a giant waste of time for everybody, these are the type of "people" who call comp player comptards

Game is just super different and the pubbers complaining are far less invested than you would think. Its mostly kids who are having a laugh and being wrong on the internet without thinking about it very hard.

It is annoying to see someone be really ignorant about something you care about, and getting kicked from a late night pub for having a badge/ going positive is frustrating but the stakes are overall pretty low.

If effort is to be expended addressing this whole thing it should just be done in places like tf2cc, newbie mixes or tf2center. Make the environment welcoming and fun.

A huge number of players are getting filtered anyways, try and think about when you first got into 6s. You are probably still playing despite your initial experience. The game is super niche and involves a lot of getting stomped and roasted. The players that stick around are ones that are actively seeking out a faster, more skillful experience and weirdos like zestyjesus are probably helping push people to the scene in that regard. A pubber watching one of these videos is going to have 1 of 2 reactions. They will either jump on the bandwagon and mindlessly shit on 6s because they don't care and wouldn't care anyways, or they'll be intrigued by these mythical comp players that are supposedly so good they're ruining pubs and making youtubers cry and want to be one.

Yeah 1 game wouldn't help him see the light, but I do think it would serve well as a means of starting things off in a less confrontational matter and raise interest in newbie mixes which is the best noob onboarding process our community has. Just zesty saying a few nice things about his experience would be pretty big and help give the impression that the comp community isn't completely toxic and that there are helpful, community minded people involved. It could also lead to some good jumping off points for discussions about why x is like y in a natural, friendly way. Pubbers have a hard time even imagining what it is actually like to be in voice comms with your whole team and what that actually entails, so having zesty bring up how the coach suggested rotating around process mid would help the casual audience see that even if there is less class diversity than casual, there are other appealing aspects of competitive play that they will never get out of pubs. I don't think we will ever convince a large chunk of casuals that 6v6 is "real TF2", but we can try to convince them that it's fun in its own right.

i feel it necessary to ask why we need zesty jesus' sign of approval when he's been caught dropping slurs left and right all the time and generally is not a very good guy

We're not looking for anybody's seal of approval
Literally just clearing the misconceptions the casual audience have on comp matters and letting them know in a discussion

idk man ngl i think misconceptions like this will always exist
look at literally any game ever and you will see people valiantly champion being as good as you can while an equally large segment of the community raves against tryhards taking the fun out of their game
like the same way pubbers dont understand why you would ever play the game competitively i also genuinely find 0 joy in pubbing
i know we're all on a forum for a dead videogame we all still love for some reason but trying to convince people who think comp is the devil to give 6s a chance is like trying to convince my racist uncle not to be racist

I think Zesty's attitude towards comp players is a bit over the top, but if I look at the main reason why this whole thing pisses him off I can at least slightly see where he's coming from.
I think his most important argument is that while Meet Your Match was supposed to be an update that would help the comp scene and make comp more accessible (of course we all know how it failed miserably), it also fucked over the pub scene, and the core game for that matter, along with it. So by Valve trying to give the comp players what they want, pubbers who couldn't care less about comp were victim of an update they didn't even care about in the first place.
His theory is probably that, had Valve not listened to comp players and actually put out normal updates like they used to do, the game would not have been in such a bad state (since the bots also started appearing a bit after MYM to put salt on the wound). I'm not sure how it would've turned out though since Valve released a few stinkers before MYM update.
Looking back, I think what would've helped more is if Valve addressed existing comp organizations more often, or found ways to connect players to them easily such as a reference on the main menu or smth I dunno.

I don't, he's been told this a million times directly. There are ZERO items that were ruined to try to placate competitive players yet they will still cite balance changes that were done for the casual audience as being problematic. He blocks people who give him feedback. Even on streams when he does item votes, if his fans pick something different than him his reaction is "wow uh, okay". He surrounds himself with dickriders like Richter.

He doesn't want to try Newbie Mixes and definitely doesn't want a debate. Having a scape goat is pretty convenient. Even if you are not trying to make a social stand just as a general insult or takeaway for issues.

And if we are being honest with ourselves, while MyM was an utter disaster; the base idea lead to the game being in a much better and ergonomic state. Valve's balancing only got better with time, matchmaking is much more convenient now. Quickplay back in the day was pretty slow and defaulted to Valve servers, anyways. The only stinker that still remains is the Ranked Gamemode (I'm not even going to refer to it as "competitive" because it's not). This is a difficult pill to swallow but without MyM Valve may have gotten a lot more complacent than now but much earlier instead of post blue moon.

This thread is an unnecessarily complex thought experiment for people to realize that there is an absence of competitive youtubers that talk about the scene and talk TO other content creators. That requires them to be semi-active in those circles. You have to appeal to normies, they are the target crowd and you need to talk to them in their language.

honestly, this is something more drastic of a situation than we think, we are talking about a stubborn man who has done surface level research on competitive (because he doesn't care about it), has only experienced A 6v6 valve comp match and deemed it bad and never played it again, he always said "TF2 was always made with casual in mind" which is not true but fully believes that, and has witnessed quickplay being taken away from him and only watched (after mym) as the comp players going back to the community 6s, keeping the weapons banned (mostly just base jumper now) even after the nerfs on the weapons. (which is understandable).

All he has seen and experienced is bad along side other games that tried to go for the E-Sport route just going to shit, dying, becoming unfun overtime, or just see toxic people come out because of competitive. He has never seen the bright side of it like, honing your skills, feeling more proud as you win a championship, making friends that push you to your limits, etc.

with the new video about "valve catering to competitive" coming in October I'm sure he has already made up his mind and won't change let alone agree to what you have to say when it comes to misconceptions.

if you are gonna discuss with him about this tho, try and find common ground first and talk him through step by step about each topic, but he might just not take it seriously at all and just try and make you look like the fool.

my solution, is to have an accessable 6s newbie only lobby (only accessible in newbie mixes or TF2CC) with the meta being the main thing but let players play full time offclassing, let them experience the flaws of the classes, that is the best way to teach someone instead of explaining it to them.

Yo if we got zesty on debate, get j_peg on.

I greatly enjoyed pubbing more before MYM came out. It wasn't flawless, but for me casual made things significantly less enjoyable and I'm not talking about the bots. But hey, it might just be me.

The good part about casual is that you can select the specific map(s) that you want to play, which quickplay didn't provide. I got around this by going to the community server list and just join a valve server that has the map I want. Not something a beginner might do of course, but it was still effective.

I don't agree with this. Ever since casual came out, I've had to wait far longer to get into a server, have to wait longer to have the server fill up when it's empty, have this long countdown from the start every time we join a new map and at the end there's the scoreboard and map vote you have to look at and repeat the whole thing again. Adding all of this up results in less time actually playing the game, so I would consider casual the slower version of the two.

I agree that item changes had nothing to do with the comp environment. Even though there were a few weird changes, some of them actually seemed pretty good, and I think Zesty admits this. But it's indeed strange to bring up the odd item changes and claim that comp players are at fault for this, so that's where Zesty definitely goes wrong.

I think the goal isn't to convince Zesty that he should like competitive, it seems like a lost cause. But he should at least acknowledge that 6's/comp isn't all evil and bad for the core game. It's perfectly fine to not like comp tf2, but vilifying the whole comp scene is not the way to go. Though of course, I still feel his frustration for the reasons I said above.

I hate people who think valve should just revert the sandman or caber because they think they are okay just because the game is "12v12" or something else in their brain.

They were absolutely broken in my opinion. Like the only item you could argue about is the ambassador maybe since it takes skill to headshot with.

I have spatted with ZestyJesus on this matter a couple of times in public discords (we both have "creator" roles so i think he gives me a response???). I think its a fruitless discussion.

Last time I tried to interact with him his response was "i watch comp so I'm allowed an opinion more than the people who play it". I think if we where to come together as a community and make anything like that the possibility of someone large interacting with us is low. I've been trying to get into UFR for a while as that seems to be the only active TF2 podcast currently with little to no success. I don't think the casual community wants the competitive communities opinion when its easier to blindly hate on something they don't understand.

Gallery of Zesty being welll... Zesty...
https://imgur.com/a/36dvvg3

You’re not going to change the mind of a man who’s made his entire career hating on competitive and all things wholesome. You need to accept the fact that he fundamentally does not enjoy competitive tf2, and the only difference between him and the chungus pubbers who feel the same is that he has a platform where he vocalizes his feelings through zingers and simple argument that are appealing to those who don’t want to invest much thought into thinking about the game for themselves.
At best, you find some common ground and he plays nice before going back to what he was doing before, because that’s who his audience wants as well what as his true feelings towards competitive gaming are. At worst, it devolves into mindless bickering which accomplishes no more than if you were to post in /tf2g/.

If they don’t have a baseline standard to compare it to, shitters playing like shitters with restrictions is practically indistinguishable to them than if they were to just play with no limits.

I feel the need to reiterate Seinfeld’s question;

Why should the community need to bend for him and curate an experience when he’s entirely unwilling to change? The best goodwill ambassadors for the competitive are genuinely creators like Rumpus. Getting zesty to play a round of lower-than-low level 6s isn’t going to lead to a breakthrough. Casual and competitive are wholly incompatible and there’s not really a reason to try and get a purely casual player to play competitive if he’s already holding onto the preconceived notion that it’s boring and bad.

I didn’t think of that with zesty in mind I thought that with the new comp players or people interested in comp in mind. But you are right, people try to fight against unbanning weapons and most of their arguments have little to no knowledge on 6s in terms of how the game flows or how one unban can change the game drastically.

I honestly just think that people are more influenced by a high edit video essays on how “X is broken” and if we make something like that debunking all the claims with evidence the only people who argue against will be the zesty followers.

I am willing to help anyway I can if that were the case

this is the main reason why that matchmaking mode did nothing and actually killed the chance of this game becoming big

this is an issue that should've been addressed in 2012, but no one gave a shit to actually show why people play this game competitively and the attitude was just that they were unaware is why we had less players, when in reality, most players above like 500hours in this game, which was the majority, was fully aware of tf2 centre but chose not to play it because they didn't see it as fun

too late to do anything about this now

the way this game is marketed to the casual players has always been like its tf2.... but we sucked all the fun out....
instead of actually showing them what is fun about it

This is obvious but we should keep in mind that these pubbers who oppose 6s are the vocal minority among the masses of TF2 players who don't care or have no opinion on the matter either way. It's a big enough minority that it probably warrants an effort to clear up misconceptions but like someone already said, putting up more high quality videos or resources for comp tf2 should be a part of all this.

Idk much about ZestyJesus but it probably doesn't hurt to have more than one comp/non-comp content creator in the discussion. As long as there aren't too many cooks in the kitchen.

As of now, the discussion is off
My plan is to gather some common questions/qualms casual players have with comp and have drhappiness or someone explain it in a video - and then we record and upload it to youtube

Can we disclose why the discussion is off or no?

I won't give specifics, but basically some of the casual people that were going to take part saw this thread and a lot of the negativity put them off having the conversation.

Ngl the idea that some casual ppl went on this website for this thread and may have seen "pedophile nazi brony" on the sidebar is really funny to me.

No competitive mode from valve means comp can never actually be big. But that doesn't mean it should be shrinking. This is the most fun competitive game in existence. Aside from ease of access the biggest issue with comp tf2 is the moderation. The average 12 year old in valve casual would be permabanned by RGL. Nobody wants their videogame experience to have the same rules and required etiquette of an office job. Especially not tf2 players. This is an almost 20 year old game from a far less moderated time of the internet, which is still one of the attractions of this game. People don't understand just how bad banning people for non serious issues is for the community. One person getting a 1 month ban in the middle of their season can break teams apart and cause far more than one player to leave the community. Most people here have far more fun playing comp tf2 than any other game and are simply forced to wait out bans since there's no other option. New players will just shrug off the ban and and go play a game that doesn't ban them for weeks for saying a naughty words on the internet.(why are rgl bans 100x more severe than any other game?) These new players are gone forever along with any friends they were going to play with and any players that would have been brought into the community via those players in the future. Little things compound to greatly reduce the player numbers and community growth overtime. This can all be simplified as your average kid in valve casual (largest potential player pool) is far less sensitive than RGL admins and moderators. That's just at the surface level. Being friends with admins gives you abhorrent special treatment. What you need to put up with to play this game is crazy. I feel like all the normal early members of the community have moved on to have proper lives, and all were left with is social outcasts that extract far too much of their self fulfillment from power in this community. Sell RGL to blindsfell. I will donate 10 grand to running ads on every tf2 youtube channel. Community will blow up and all the rules strangling the community and ostracizing majority of the tf2 playerbase will be gone. The community needs to be owned by passionate players that want to see the playerbase grow and are willing and capable of making intelligent investments towards that goal. Not by a clique of internet wierdos who only care about having and abusing power in this dying community. BTW b4nny config sucks.

No new players coming in because RGL makes comp tf2 as unfun as possible while making 0 investment towards attracting new players.

you're fat and gay

really funny to type out that monolith of text no linebreaks complete gibberish and then coming back 10 minutes later to post just a little bit more

well that sucks, but they have every right to feel that way so. ggs

The casual community doesn't even know why it hates comp. Competitive tf2, especially 6v6 is just not accessible due to the basic level of skill you need to even function in an open or newcomer team. People act like anyone could come in and pick up the game and have fun, but you can't in competitive.

If you do not understand the basics of aiming, movement and maps/rollouts you will be at such a disadvantage from the get go. If you find a team to scrim with and play competitive in other games you kinda are playing near the peak of that games competitive skill. TF2 is no different, the average open player can pubstomp relatively easily. However there is no transition from pub to competitive.

Valve tried to make one and it sucked and was infested with hackers they did nothing about for years. Faceit not being popular also sucked, as they could have actually had a proper regular newbie 6v6 experience.

Those pubbers you try to convince to play comp who are actually capable (think uncletopia tryhards) are scared to lose. They just don't want to admit it. They will come up with every excuse in the book. However they don't want to lose. They don't want to try to win either, they just want to win. Out of the tens of people I've seen cry about comp players, only one was self aware enough to say that they just aren't good enough to compete and they just want to stomp pubs, but they can't anymore cus of comp players.

Those kinds of people who hide behind a veil of lies and excuses are just pussies as far as I'm concerned and if they read this, put your money where your mouth is and learn how to play 6s by playing highlander lobbies first, then 6s lobbies on tf2c. Prove that you are actually good at the game instead of just crying how comp players ban your favourite weapon, or just admit that you like your free wins.

discussion with Zesty ain't gonna work. His true intentions are discouraging comp from the masses because he fears that the average player will get better than him. It's quite visible from the vids where he got mad about J_peg playing the damn game. Better just to discredit him and not give him a even bigger platform