To this day, Zesty still hate J_Peg, won't let it go and still bitches about comp players whenever he gets to stream himself playing the game and a player kills him

i think alot of tf2 coach/newbie pugs forces newer players to play in a very rigid playstyle,players running sniper's/pyro's near fulltime is completely discouraged and while I agree with that somewhat to kind of give them an intro to 6s, it does the opposite because when I first started playing I played a couple matches in UGC against teams that ran full time pyro, heavy, and sniper and we got demolished

i'm extremely biased about this because I love to play sniper and offclass heavily but when you play low level pugs you get warned/banned for doing things that are completely legal in matches

i think weapons that are banned (i.e cleaver, jarate) are banned for good reason and i don't think changes the game that much for newer players but forcing new players to have the same plays and run the same things over and over again with no offclasses or banners is just setting them up for failure

I think you're setting players up for failure in newbie spaces if you aren't strictly enforcing meta play. In my mind you have to crawl before you can run. The goal of these spaces is to set new players up for success in the 6s community and one way that's done is by restricting the amount of situations that they're going to see early. Being brand new to 6s is very daunting and there is a ton to learn before you can start getting dubs (the fun part). Most new players I have worked with have trouble with the idea of a soldier bomb, or a flank, or holding a door, or even using voice comms. They need a place to get reps in so that they can start to understand the nuances of these simple interactions that better players take for granted. Throwing pyros in the mix is just too much.

Once they have an understanding of the basic concepts in meta 6s, they can start being exposed to the more niche ones. Offclass play is weird, and trying to get the average newbie pug player to adapt to a heavy or whatever in a push is just going to be frustrating.

That said, its obviously not immediately frustrating for that heavy player. They get the cool dopamine hit off the kills/ W/ successful push/ whatever. They however are not learning the absolute basics and will be completely lost when thrown into a more standard game of 6s. These are the players that join tf2center and are immediately mad when the other team just rotates away from them on heavy. It will hinder their ability to find a team, it will stunt their improvement, and make them worse in the long term. It is unfun to be bad.

Off-meta play is super cool and something that I like seeing in league play, but its only ever really fun when both teams understand the implications of what is happening and have the tools that they need to make adjustments. Most new players do not yet have the tools to make on the fly adjustments at that level and will just get stomped by a heavy/ pyro/ sniper for 30 minutes and learn nothing. They leave frustrated and nobody wins.

imo going from pub play to 6s has an inherent barrier of entry getting used to the format, regardless of your level of pub experience. making the entry pug/learning resources more like a pub would make those more approachable for pubbers but doesn't ease the learning curve, it just sweeps it under the rug/passes the buck further down

There it is, it's just a selfish desire to run more sniper. This stance does not come from a place of education, practice or experience. Running an off-class is a team choice, not a purely individual one. I've been told many times by off-class lovers that they were thankful for the experience on generalist classes because even if you are not interested, it's very useful to understand class dynamics and how your opponents will think.

It's also very tough for a specialist one trick because when you start getting countered you don't really have much to fall back on. Not to mention, specialists have a MUCH easier time against bad players so it's very easy to get complacent and stagnate your own growth because cheesy strats can be effective. Those PUG spaces are meant to show you what's realistic and fundamental. They are definitely not setting them up for failure. Allowing anybody to off-class whenever they want, would.

Did your high school history class fail to prep you properly because they mostly covered recent history and local politics?

Why is this a problem for you anyway, are you struggling to climb out of Newbie PUGs on an alt? Newbie Mixes is meant for absolute beginners and TF2CC has 4 PUG categories. Newbies, Amateur, IM/Main and Main+ which have different rule sets. So if you want to run the funny just get good.

As a player that experienced low level pugs and climbed my way out of them, I can say that the reason why it was a good thing to not have offclasses full time is that they are just worse classes. A team trying to push with a pyro and a sniper into last with uber advantage can be very difficult. Even missing 1 scout or 1 soldier can make it much more difficult to push doors, especially into last. It becomes apparent very quickly that its literally trolling to keep offclassing like that, but low level players may know that its very cringe instinctively. I bet if you took a team that rolled out to process mid on sniper, pyro, heavy against an advanced team, they could just cap the point in your face nearly every time because these classes lack mobility or range.

Obviously no one cares about offclassing on last, but offclassing on second and mid is just worse almost all of the time. The only exceptions are sniper and spy. Obviously low-level pug snipers aren't going to be very effective, and if people play spy all the time, it is no longer effective, therefore it generally goes back to cookiecutter being the standard.

Low level players don't often know how to exploit the disadvantages of having these classes, but you can still bet that the team with the cookie cutter classes will win mid more often than the offclass team. If they can win mid more, they will generally win more. It is not a question why they teach them cookie cutter. It is because it will win them games. TF2 isn't really a game of class counters on 5CP. You play the most damaging, fastest, and highest ranged characters if you want to win and press your advantages.
If you are at a disadvantage, then the offclasses can be used effectively in very clear criteria. The offclasses themselves other than sniper don't really require any skill to be used effectively. A heavy or engineer setting up on last, a pyro airblasting the uber on maps like gullywash, a spy backstabbing a medic, or even a sniper sitting in spawn watching an angle, these all don't require much teaching or learning to be effective.

It isn't like I or most players still playing today discovered that this class composition is very effective. TF2 players from the stone age of competitive realized that it is powerful and fun to play, because soldier, demo, and scout are actually very full of skill expression, and very good at killing enemy players without also blowing up.

I share my opinion on this and everyone else is respectfully disagreeing but you have to make it about a divisions or my selfish desires

I agree and respesct ur opinion, i think mine is just more personal sentiment than anything cuz I've been open and playing game on and off for a couple of yrs

I think this podcast channel could be a pretty good place this discussion to take place, as most of the people mentioned are active there.

What I'm about to say will come across as inadvertently stupid. But here goes anyway, zesty (I think) said that 6s isn't the best gamemode because TF2 is built for 12v12. I believe he said that there should be a 12v12 format. My thinking was why not just give them that? Worst case scenario it dies and we show prove why we have a reason for class bans/weapon bans etc or it thrives and gives casual players a very easy route into learning competitive TF2 norm while still basically playing casual. Maybe they just stick with 12v12 but atleast more players are playing on etf2l (or rgl). Idk it seems to me like if that's what they want then give it a try maybe some casual players will stick around, maybe it just straight up dies (not surprising) but we prove why we have such formats. Idk probably a stupid idea.

if the competitive tf2 community had unlimited resources perhaps this sort of experiment could be valuable, but I don't think the additional strain on an already niche community would be worth it, especially since the body of empirical evidence about competitive formatting already points to 6v6 as the ideal.

Pretty much every format up to 16v16 has been tried before including everything in-between. If you want a more recent example, look at Faceit clan wars and what a dumpster fire that was. You know who else disliked Faceit?

Why does a competitive format need to be exactly the same as the base game anyway? TF2 having so many drastically different ways to play, community modes etc is one of the dope parts of the game. Is their utopia really just Valorant where every mode is the same (I sure don't). I honestly really enjoy that I can play 6's scrims and then goof off in pubs or go play jailhouse. I think many players do.

I think it's also important to note that the word fun and whether it's enjoyable or not is noticeably absent in that type of argument. I don't think we need to make up formats just to have pub players learn that those formats are bad. I actually think most pub players are more open minded than we think. The Newbie Cup has received thousands of applications over the years and the vast majority of players are understanding, especially when you sit down and explain.

I think our energy would be far better reserved for making the scene a better place than a fundamentally and emprically unfun gamemode.

6v6 already takes 50 years to gather all the players in a server

The failure of FACEIT (more specifically, the competitive 12v12 clan wars I played in with comms) is already an example of why competitive 12v12 with no restrictions does not work. He of all people should already know why incentivizing groups of comp players to "tryhard" on pubs leads to degenerate tactics and awful matches, because he was the biggest complainer when FACEIT 12s were a thing.

At lower skill levels it devolves into ubering the Phlog Pyro to wipe out uncoordinated players and turn a 12v12 into a 12v5 or worse. Can't imagine it would be very appealing to pub players, even. The only reason pubs are enjoyable is because most players deliberately ignore the best strats, goof around, or they're simply too bad at the video game to abuse stupid unlocks.

Edit: Oh lol someone already brought this up, I can't read

this looks fun, right?

ur mistake is thinking zesty jesus is a thoughtful honest actor and not a 4chan US elections truther that figured out a way to make a bit of extra money on the side via agitating

Ah okay i didn't know if it had been tried or not. Also not saying that I think it would be fun but thought might add to the discussion.

faceit would've been so cool as a modern esea/tf2center-like 6s website where people can just hop on and play 6s with actual matchmaking if it wasn't completely squandered as a shitty 12v12 comp-lite that pandered to an audience of pubbers that had zero interest in it.

who was this for? like, seriously? 24 player pubs with prizepools? what did you THINK was gonna happen? i cant think of anything that would have incentivized degeneracy more than faceit.

if he wanted that why wouldnt he make it? why would we have to make it? and how would that help him like 6s? and why do we want that again? baffling post

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