can't soldiers just hold chokes close if the people aren't invincible

Idk dude lets play some pugs and find out. Could also try disabling engineer i dont think anyone would miss him lol

Spam and traps generate too much value, ubercharge rewards defensive gameplay and popping 2nd, a lack of side objective (think valorant's ult orbs) or a shotclock mechanic means that parking the bus and never taking risks is a viable strategy when you're up a round. Offclass synergy (engineer pyro on gully, engineer sniper on most other maps) makes pushing a well setup last an absolute chore if you're not already running a sniper of your own. That's all I can think of off the top of my head but I'm sure there's more.

-arrows and scout move speed make poor positioning / damage advantage harder to capitalize on

mfs will complain 5 sec into a stalemate then go spend half of every round staring into a smoke b tuns

make every player invincible and not beeing able to cap points. only uber removes the invincibility and makes people able to cap points.
also medic can fly

was this written by an AI

troglodyte take

tbf people were 100% sure about the scout thing (within the last year) before it was actually hashed out in a little gameplay
https://www.teamfortress.tv/55649/med-speed-buff-removal-eu-dmixes/
vs
https://www.teamfortress.tv/58148/closing-thoughts-on-s37s-plugins

of course how else are you supposed to know before you play it, but the certainty was funny

most people in that thread agree with me + what do you mean "hashed out," we literally played like that for like 7 years before the buff was added

anyway you missed half my post, the number of absolute dogshit soldiers in the game now that get caught out 20 times a match just to get arrowed is astounding

im not replying to you necessarily, im replying to mak that was quick to call you a trog. also edited my post before u replied

they werent caught out if they got a bow. Lol !

I once spoke to an Amazon higher-up who at one point was pretty involved with the Twitch/gaming side of things. They said they had watched some competitive TF2, but didn't find it appealing because it was often minutes of stalemate, nothing happening, followed by 20 seconds of unfollowable chaos and then everyone is dead. The instant they said it, images of grueling granary mid-to-yard stalemates from my low-open days (...my only days) came to mind. If you have experience playing the game then the stalemate-breaking doesn't seem as chaotic, but to someone who doesn't know the game, I get that it might not be fun to watch. I couldn't really tell them that they are wrong to think long stalemates followed by short periods of intense activity are common.

I don't think I really have a point to make because one person's impression of whatever TF2 matches they happened to tune in for isn't really relevant for what is fun to play. But I thought it was an interesting outsider's perspective.

I might just be dumb but isn't this the case in a ton of FPS's? Main one that comes to mind is CSGO, where over a minute can elapse with teams sneaking slowly to the bombsite and the actual aim duels being over in a few seconds?

You are correct, however, tf2 stalemates can last 3-4 minutes or more, whereas there is a hard 1:30 limit for the T's to get a plant or wipe the CTs.

I don't play CSGO, but I still feel like I can follow the games to a reasonable degree. I don't have any kind of understanding as to why the players move where they move or throw the grenades when and where they do, but I can still follow what happens. I see the grenade thrown, I see the players move around, I see them shoot at each other. At each moment I can more or less understand whats happening at least on a surface level. But TF2 is much faster paced. In a second soldiers are flying thru the air, explosions are happening everywhere, scouts are rushing in at the speed of sound. It can be harder to tell exactly whats happening. But idk, maybe I haven't watched enough CSGO to be thoroughly confused. I wish I had picked their brain regarding what esports they did enjoy and why.

i think the primary stalemate problem can be solved by setting the round timer to 3 (maybe even 2) minutes instead of 10. this incentivizes the attacking team to keep up the offense if they dont want to be reset back to a midfight.

It is pure theory crafting and probably bollocks but I had an idea to get rid of the "No team has an incentive to push".

You make 5cps with round limit to 3 or 4. You set round time to 5 or 4 minutes. If last is capped, team who caps gains 1 round. If no one caps, at the end of the round timer, whoever has mid wins 1 round.

The incentive to push is now on the defending team because if they sit on last they loose a round. The time isn't too high so you still have urgency to try but not too low so you can still try and think about strategies to push out.
The attacking team could use offlcasses like engie/heavy but they don't have the spawn to insta switch so they are more committed to that class and if they get pushed back they are "stuck" on that class.

Sure, pushing out of last is extremely difficult, but in this game mode, you are forced to do it every time so you might come up with more original strategies.

Actually, i just re read my post and it just emulates koth with a 5cps map...

CS downtime:
A) isn't a stalemate
B) still has things happening, position being taken, info gained, spam damage traded etc
C) can only last for about a minute at a time

TF2 downtime:
A) is usually a stalemate
B) generally has nothing important happening. maps are segmented enough that you can't really take any position without a push, positional info is readily available and largely useless, spam damage can be healed away—even on a pick you can just kill the counter sack/play passive and wait for respawn
C) can last as long as both teams keep playing passively without making major mistakes

Take 2 minutes to listen to a CSGO cast and you can hear the casters talking through what's happening in the first 40 seconds of a round—this player's smoking here so these players can cross to here, they're checking this position, they're baiting a CT push, they're setting up nades for the B execute. The "passive" gameplay here is, even in the slowest and most procedural games, actually pretty active and important

In TF2 anything with permanent impact on a stalemate is immediately followed by the push—i.e. the passive gameplay is only important when it immediately leads to active gameplay

And btw viewers still complain all the time when teams like Astralis or Na`Vi play slow or procedural rounds

Can etf2l just make the game end when one team has 5 rounds btw, and remove concede plugin. 5 round difference is pretty pointless

I do like the idea of this, not so much the fact you gain a point for holding mid because then you just need a strong mid to turtle but I do like the shorter round timers. A lot of teams at the moment seem so afraid to trying anything and even prem teams take upwards of three minutes to set-up just a single sac. Unless the plan is to win off the enemy team falling asleep then it's mind boggling. Setting up plays does not seem to be as complicated as it sounds. Setting up a soldier sac play takes twenty seconds at best (get everyone buffed, spot med, relay information and spam towards medic while soldier goes in) and the faster you are, the more unpredictable you are as a team.

A problem I see with teams on last holds is they rely too much on a sentry, I understand when they have uber dis ad then a sentry is no brainer but if you have equal ubers and the attackers haven't done anything for almost a minute, there is no harm in taking a pyro/sniper and slow pushing. It's low risk/high reward or even a coordinated door spam to distract for a spy. Again these are just examples out of many but they are effective ways to get off last point without needing to just make a bunker with a sentry.
The main point I think I am trying to make is teams shouldn't be afraid to lose a point/round for trying something, it's meant to happen and you only improve off making mistakes then analysing why it went wrong.

this incentivizes pushing out from last but de-incentivizes pushing 2nd or mid. it doesn't really fix the "problem" that a team playing defensively has the advantage, it just makes the team that wins mid the defensive team instead of the team that loses it.

i feel like this benefits the defensive team more than the offensive. if you lose mid you have like 1-2 minutes to push out of your own 2nd/last and win, so it's a much better plan to just turtle last and give it another go next midfight. the reason people don't turtle mid with 10 minute timer is because it's hard to hold last for like 8-9 minutes.

i turtled Gully last for like 20 minutes one time but it required their med dropping like 3 times, them constantly losing players without trading, and 10 of their pushes in a row being 100% grass-fed beef. turtling for like 1-2 minutes though would be completely viable.

The big issue with a 5 minute round timer and whoever has mid wins after, is that it puts a huge amount of importance on mid fights.

Let's say it takes a team a minute to win a mid fight, and another 30 seconds or so to get their spawns and get buffed on second. The enemy team now has 3 and a half minutes to push out of last, cap second, and cap mid. Throw uber disad on top of that, what if the enemy team uses their uber to just pick up some frags and backs out again? Now you've got less than 3 minutes to wait for spawns, organise a push, and cap two points.

I think it would just make for boring gameplay of extremely passive mids and teams !gg'ing after losing the mid fight.

edit: on a similar note I really dislike ETF2L's current golden cap rules, where if the golden cap lasts longer than 15 minutes the round is reset and whoever caps mid wins. Its a decent solution to avoiding hours of gameplay, but there's more to the game than mid-fights and boiling a match down to a mid-fight feels like a cop-out.

.

The Age Old Question Has Come Up Again.

I honestly believe that map design could be a lot more open in general if it wasn't for the sniper class. It's not just long sightlines that 95% of the time won't matter for cookie cutter fights, but it's also the width of doors etc. (Which has already been mentioned).

I would also like to point out this is why there's barely ever been any playable koth maps. They're either too cluttered and wierd, or they have gamebreaking sniper sightlines.

A/D Would just have all the same issues 6s have in terms of stalemating & sniper sightlines (Assuming the map design would be similar), except the defenders have no incentive to ever switch off their offclasses to push forward.

If maps were more open, there would be less reason to have a 10 minute shotclock, and it could be significantly lower (because pushing would be easier).

Sniper needs a nerf if we want fewer stalemates and more open chokes & flanks. I would suggest damage falloff + less charging.

why? it has no negative effect at all lol. no other game in existence continues play after the outcome is confirmed. its like if csgo carried on playing all the rounds after a team reaches 16 lol

What if capping points didn't add back time to the 10 minutes timer

you missed the first part of my post

if the game ends at 5 rounds the winning team would try to close out the game when they're 4-1 up instead of being like 'oh we need to win 6-1 fuck it im trolling'

Tbh the only way to fully stop stalemating is to not let the game have situations where its a viable choice. I have never seen a game pull that off without timer pressure. In our current 5cp time pressure is usually irrelevant, and I don't think forcing more in would necessarily fix the problem so much as introduce other equally degenerate stuff. Koth and Stopwatch have a very clear differentiation between the defending team and offensive team, but in 5cp all time pressure usually ever does is force the team that should be playing defensively to throw and try for a push. I'm pretty much fine with where 5cp stands despite its problems. It feels fun to me.

Koth is probably the only realistic solution if this problem is something you consider a high priority.