From a competitive standpoint a stagnant meta is actually a good thing. Yeah it may be a little more boring to watch, but if you want to have the highest level of play possible so that the best teams win every time, then you want the meta to be as stagnant as possible. A stagnant meta allows players to actually practice doing the same thing over and over so they can get good at it and perfect it. If we start bringing in other weapons then the game turns into who can find the broken strategy first instead of who is better at executing/the actual game.

Look at sc:bw, the game was played with the same units/meta for multiple years and was extremely popular because it had such a high skill ceiling for execution.

In game lobbies will help grow tf2 for sure, but the idea that the meta is stagnant or that it is actually a problem is just silly to me.

Also I think if we actually want to start growing comp tf2 we need to stop identifying 6s and hl communities as different and merge them into 1 competitive community. This will probably never happen, but the current division between the two communities is nothing but harmful to both.

People who can't understand/dont care about the pitching mechanic and meta think baseball is boring. If you understand/like it, every pitch means something and can be exciting.

Gamers who can't understand/don't care about the uber mechanic and meta think TF2 is boring. If you understand/like it, every moment means something and can be exciting.

Shout-out to the guy who embraces the same attitude that keeps people away from this game.

I think the whole point is to prevent the game from having godawful unlocks that you have to counter. It just gives more people a voice about which weapons have problems so that valve can fix them. I can't imagine this ever hurting 6s in any way. If they somehow manage to change one of the currently whitelisted items in a negative way, you could always just ban it in the league and play a bunch of these lobbies, banning it each time to show valve your disagreement.

Maybe having a highlander style with some of the 'less OP' classes having a class limit above 1 and allowing teams to play around with more strategy in regards to rolling double engineer, spy, pyro or something like that. alternatively, you could balance the classes seen as OP for their insane strengths and see how that goes too, although I could see that being a problem. And maybe doing 8v8 so that teams are atleast forced to rotate their classes atleast a little bit throughout their games.

the point robin had in mind was that competitive play and pub play differed too much -- in korea everyone played iccup and other variants so 1v1s were the staple from which KESPA and other organizations grew. This idea based of changing the meta based on pick-bans and balancing ala dota is something that no one has done before but I think Robin is making a smart executive decision as in this could be the make or break for TF2 as a largely successful competitive game.

If they included a spectator mode which has the spectator wallhacks plugin that TFTV uses for casts, that'd probably help, too.

I think you're asking too much of pubbers to figure out good classchange strats. You'd see the same thing you see in the average valve server: 2, 3, even 4 spies with not a single medic or demo.

if they gave us more stuff to use in the stv (like ammo count, current weapon out, similar to what csgo does) that would be awesome

you can't hold their hand forever, no one is going to go into competitive without atleast learning a teeny bit about the meta and who cares? those people aren't going to be playing on a high level, and if they're happy about that then let them.

Not a whole lot of items are banned in HL, honestly; UGC bans like, what, 16 weapons? Sure, I guess this might help balance the weapons for Highlander players and probably just improve the game for most players overall (which is cool), but that specifically doesn't really matter at all to 6s, because the reasons why weapons are or aren't banned in either format are often fundamentally different. No matter what kind of data Valve extrapolates from this, this is not going to change many or any 6v6 banlists to any relevant degree.

I dunno where you got that I thought this would "hurt" 6v6—if this helps 6s in some way, cool. It is, however, uninteresting and slightly disappointing to a 6s player who has been playing this game for a long, long time, and generally has no interest in HL whatsoever.

Actually most Koreans played team games (2s,3s,4s) and still do. I get that 6s and pubs are entirely different, and it's a huge problem, which I think highlander can solve, but the point I was just trying to make is that a stagnant meta isn't/shouldn't be a "problem" that's holding tf2 back.

Like I said I think the new lobby system will be nothing but good, but also trying to balance the hundreds of weapons of tf2 is just too big of a task, and trying to include them in 6s wouldn't really do anything other than piss off a lot of 6s players.

The more I think about it the picking of weapon bans could be a pretty cool/good thing for highlander, I just don't think it has a place in 6s.

You should probably count the number of items available in TF2 if you really want to implement this. Think about scrolling through a web menu with EVERY unlock that is currently available and can be clicked on. Sounds like a nightmare to me.

I got that from where you implied this would degenerate the game into a godawful unlock-fest.

Do you think it's best for 6s to have a small range of available weapons? Would it be better or worse for every weapon to be a perfect sidegrade so that nothing needed to be banned in 6s? That's obviously an extreme scenario, but what if the atomizer was changed so that you didn't need to ban it as a result of this lobby system telling valve to change it? Can we agree that balanced sidegrades have historically been a very good thing for 6s (gunboats, kritz, etc.)? I disagree that weapons can't be balanced for both formats.
I think it's closeminded to think that this can't help 6s. The players will get into HL and may look for an even more competitive format, and 6s is much more accessible once you know HL. This will eventually lead to a bigger whitelist and a bigger league for 6s IMO.

but it's not, DYE follow staircliff? like the koreans playing it? i played iccup although i was awful, it was a cool experience though. the most people played in terms of team was 2v2 but as it was never nurtured outside of a couple tournaments around mid 2000, it was only a pasttime between 2 friends who played competitive. most koreans definitely don't do that though, everyone still plays iccup solo ladder. americans do play those teamgames alot, but that's because we're all super casual.

edit: if you're talking about SC2 most koreans definitely play only 1v1 mostly, the queue for teamgames take forever on a korean account. but I'm getting offtopic, just love to gush about starcraft. but as semibalanced as BW was with 2v2, SC2 hardly is due to the immense strength of early game now that BW did not exactly encompass.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=154789

Welp, that was my idea of a solution. If you have a better one please share! That's what this thread is all about: getting things done.

All I've heard from Artosis/khaldor/people in korean is that everyone that plays bw in pc bangs over there plays casual no rush 20 maps. I wasn't actually around for bw days but all I've heard is that now a days 90% of the koreans that play bw only play team games.

And bw is also still more popular in korea than sc2

edit: staircliff = starcraft?

I don't have a solution, because I think the current system (a community agreed upon whitelist/blacklist) is more than adequate. Trying to overcomplicate competitive play with a really redundant ban/pick system is just absurd, especially when the game people are playing currently works just fine.

http://teamfortress.tv/forum/thread/8961-highlander-pick-ban-system
To keep all the new pick/ban game-mode related suggestions and discussion easier to pick out.

What I'm understanding is this pick/ban system isn't being suggested to replace white/blacklists but to highlight which weapons are consistently highlighted as a problem so valve can attempt to fix and tweak those items (and if they're REALLY successful in buffing and nerfing issues you may not need a competetive banlist at all)

Not necessarily for all games. The Dota2 meta changes all the time, and it seems like that is the primary game that Robin is using for comparison.

Dota2 has over a hundred heroes and a very rough estimate of the weapon count is probably around 200 weapons, so it doesn't seem like it would really be that much more complicated.

Whether or not a pick/ban system is appropriate is an entirely separate issue. I'm still unclear on what exactly the desired outcome of that is going to be.

I'm making a lot of Dota2 references as it certainly seems like that this new Valve interest in comp TF2 is influenced by the wild success of both pub and comp Dota2, and I'm thrilled to see that they are considering HL as an option, even if lots of 6s players don't like it as much.

But why ruin perfectly good pick up games with this kind of system? If they wanted that kind of feedback they should just implement some sort of voting system on a webpage titled "Which weapons are bad for competitive play?", not force people trying to play a competitive game to sit around trawling through a list with 100+ items on it in order to figure out EXACTLY which items they don't want for that particular scrim/match/pug.

Even setting up that website isn't even necessary, because we have that cumulative data established in our whitelists, setting the tone for what items are too powerful or have aspects which make them annoying to play with/against.

The remark about godawful unlocks was more just general bitching about what Robin said about the TF2 metagame. Ugh.

As for your scenario: generally worse. The balance of 6v6 was largely derived from a era of TF2 when there were far fewer unlocks and the game was a bit closer to what it was in pubs, but with less people. I can agree that the few balanced sidegrades has improved the 6s meta, but in general when you play 6v6 you can expect more or less the same classes with the same weapons they had in 2007 except with different melee weapons and the occasional different secondary. 6s has survived by banning most things not just because many of them are unbalanced but rather that they disrupt the delicate flow. We really are the Smash Bros of competitive FPS; their game is way different from how your average joe plays it and therefore gets a lot of shit, but the reaction time, mind games, and execution of top Melee players is totally ridiculous and really hype to watch.

Anyway, the point is that theoretically perfectly balanced weapons in the most general sense will NOT and in fact cannot take 6s into account. And even if all weapons were magically totally retooled to 6v6 balance, it would become a more dota-esque game of counterpicking unlocks, something I really don't think TF2 needs to be.

I'm not saying for sure this won't help 6s, but I'm pretty skeptical. I just hope that valve's coming out and saying "yeah fuck 6s HL is the only way we will ever support competitive TF2" doesn't have any negative repercussions by making us seem like more of a weird leper colony than we already are.

Because I'm assuming they might not want their input to be 100% experienced competitive players and get a sample opinion of people newer to the competitive matches. As someone mentioned in a previous post, weapons that are broken in pubs are less of a problem in comp and vice versa.

Another thought that they could also monitor which unlocks were never banned [and if they implement the lobby feature ones that were never used] to highlight which weapons also need improvements.

Yeah for all games, if the dota 2 meta was more stagnant that would allow the pros to practice a a style of play more and perfect it. Which in turn would lead to higher level games and a more competitive game.

The problem is unless you actually understand/play the game a high level you don't care about any of that, which is why people like robin and new viewers find it boring to watch.

If you do play the game at a decent level, then you can appreciate all the little things that go into making a player good instead of just watching for "new" or different things, which is why so many 6s players are against new weapons.

The difference between an item in TF2 and a character in DOTA 2 is vast.

First, the characters in DOTA have clearly defined portraits, so you know who or what your clicking on before you do so, allowing you to weigh the various options presented by each pick or ban. Items in TF2 are not nearly as distinct; I mean I often times look at my backpack in bewilderment, wondering what half the items I've accumulated do based purely off the icon.

Second, a character choice in DOTA is permanent; once you have a character on your team someone is playing that character for the entire game. With TF2 items, you have the ability to switch out at will, which leads you to weighing the available options based not only on what item you want someone on your team to run 24/7 (equalizer, ubersaw, boston basher), but also what items you want to run occasionally (kritzkrieg, paintrain, gunboats [if you're memphis von]), what items you don't want to see at all (natascha, those christmas gloves, jarate rifle, jarate, GRU, pomson, wrangler, liberty launcher, that rocket stacking rocket launcher, mini sentries... THE LIST GOES ON AND ON AND ON), what items you think the enemy team is good with that might not fit into the lists mentioned above... I MEAN MY GOD!

Third, you are essentially filling a roster of 5 characters for you and 5 for the enemy team in DOTA. In TF2, if its just a ban system (which seems the most logical given our current meta) you still have 190 items available after (what I'm assuming are) 5 bans from either team. If it is a pick/ban system, then you are reducing the number of available options to 12, which might not be bad (its probably fairly close to what we are currently using), but it just seems fairly counter-intuitive for a system meant to improve diversity of tactics and options, to reject 180+ items in a single swoop.

I have no problem or issue with HL getting a ingame lobby system before 6s, if anything I'm all for that. But for the system that Valve implements to impose an artificial limitation on what items are available, one that doesn't mesh particularly well with the mechanics of the game or with the current state of competitive play seems silly to me.

if people leave these lobby things, there should be a reputation system where we can report people for ragequitting/being an asshat

if they get reported enough, their trading privileges and item drops for the week are suspended for a set amount of time and increases per violation

i think that would be a good fix to people leaving early (unless they use alts, in which case those alts should get banned with enough reports)

So what if during the item banning, kritz, escape plan, pain train, boston basher, and all those unlocks we love are banned? Or will there be pre-set restricted weapons that can't be banned?

I've raised this before with some leagues, and will reiterate it again. There's nothing surprising in Sal's post at all-- this is precisely what should be expected to get more support for TF2 and staying with the spirit of the game.

If any Highlander league needs a sponsor to run a season with an empty ban list (i.e. not even item sets banned by default) using a pick/ban system, I'm willing to donate hundreds of dollars in cash (or item) prizes to support this new way forward for competitive TF2.

Let's just get it going-- while useful for experimenting, I think pugs and IRC are the wrong route to get the kind of feedback we need to move forward. I'd like to see a competitive league season or round robin tournament using this model. Let's gather some feedback in an organized fashion rather than ask Valve to try to squeeze it out of forum threads, etc.

Yyyaaaoooo.

Chiming in finally. Gonna try and make it short, then write a letter my letter of thanks to valve for another awesome visit.

I read through the thread and a lot of great thoughts that I'm sure will provide good feedback for the tfteam.

Two important things.

This isn't an attack on 6v6 and highlander is currently the best place for a pick/ban system to be tested.

The argument of the TF team has been for a long time that they don't want to devote resources to tuning competitive play when they could be tuning play for EVERYONE. It's a whole lot more efficient and you can't really argue with it.

I can understand why Killing is passionately confused by this but he shouldn't be sweating his job. The nature of 6v6 breaks the 9-class balance of TF2 and necessitates the restrictions of items. The 6s community has considered banning heavies.

6v6 is a much more eXclusive format than Highlander, and it definitely does have its merits. If TF2 ever is gonna have big money prizes it'll be for 6s.

If TF2 is ever gonna have big money prizes, then we need to continue to grow as a competitive community and that's what this is about.

As Salamancer has been stating, Valve is in need of direct ways in which they can accurately measure how weapons are viewed by the community and whether said weapons are unbalanced. The competitive scenario of DOTA gives them feedback on whether heroes need buffs or nerfs. They had a slight Visage buff planned for Dota2 before the east qualifiers because Visage WAS an under-used hero.

If a pick/ban system could be implemented and Valve could gather data like: Pomson gets banned EVERYTIME, then it's much easier for them to see omg this needs to be changed.

One final point to bring us back around on how this relates more to highlander than 6s. Highlander is much more closer to the public game eXperience. It makes way more sense for them to tune their weapons based off of competitive feedback in the arena of Highlander. If a pick/ban system was put into place in 6s, the data would be heavily skewed due to how classes are used.

NOW, let's re-iterate what myself and Sal could use YOUR help with.

Picks/Bans. How many and when? Let's theory craft this shit together.

The Item pool for what can be picked/banned could be restricted for now to ease the shock of eXperimentation and eventual implementation. Do not allow full sets to be completed for eXample. You could also have a list of guaranteed weapons like kritz gunboats boston basher and escape plan, at least for the start.

You could take this idea far enough to decide that banning stock weapons is okay but that is another inital step we do not have to take.

Picks could work like: Each team blind bans 2 weapons from a class and blind picks 2 or 3 available weapons for each class. Could then go into another wild card pick/ban.

Last sentence I swear: If you wanna try dota style pick bans for 6s by all means PLEASE go ahead.

If they don't want experienced player feedback, they shouldn't be asking high level highlander players to implement a pick/ban system in their pugs.

If they are concerned about what items never see play in comp matches (in order to improve them somehow) I don't see what a pick ban system is going to do. I mean, how many items in a typical match will never see play out of 200? Are they really going to trawl through that list and see what doesn't get played? I don't really think so. The number of unlocks used in a typical match (highlander) is probably about 12 or so, give or take (I might be wrong).

If only 12 unlocks are being used in a highlander match, then that tells them something too.