there are more situations where trash time happens than at just 4-1, and the trash time is still trash time even if teams are trying to win rather than trolling, as it has no effect on game outcome. the map score is 1-0 whether teams carry on playing seriously or not, and the concede plugin does a better job of removing that in all cases than having everyone keep playing a futile match until someone reaches 5

The problem is if you just turtle hard, you will not get any opportunities to punish the attacking team for sending a sac. If you get a heavy and and engie on your second to defend it, the opposing team can find the gun, spam it down, and double sac onto your med/demo. If they fail? So what? You are not pushing out of your second with a heavy and engie. If the attacking team cant get anything done with constant uncontested double sacs, then that is a team problem. Similar problem with turtling last. If you never countersac or make any plays, the attacking team will likely find some crucial pick in 4 minutes, especially if they never get pressured by the defenders. I also think resetting to mid isnt a bad thing, considering mids are often the most exciting part of the game

https://i.imgur.com/jpRLhjV.png

me when i see five heavies in my gorge pub

Need more abilities like uber and kritz that you can push off of.

additional banner slot for soldier, maybe increase damage needed to fill

I think the existence of sniper and spy in general promotes stalemating. Too often I feel like teams are content just to send in a sac or two and when that doesn't pan out, they come up on sniper or cloakndagger spy, devolving the game into a "pick n' push" scenario. There's not a lot of inventiveness. And in a sense, fair enough, the goal is a dub not making it entertaining for ~50-100 people on a twitch stream. But I'd hope that teams would try to work picks off the flank and using that advantage to gain more advantages instead of immediately defaulting to an offclass.

When CappingTV ran our "no offclass cup" in January, a lot of stalemates, when there was one, resolved themselves by just taking an exchange or outright dryfight. Because there was no option of coming up a pick class, you either had to get creative with your sacs or take fights and make them work in your favor. It, at least in my view, made for some very exciting games from both the Prem teams and lower division teams (this game in particular sticks out in my mind due to the 20 minutes of coast-to-coast action). Mind you, we were also running the Gunboats Always Apply change, meaning soldiers had better control over the flank and the sacs could be more effective, but the point still stands. When faced with no pick classes, team fights and coordination became all the more important.

Of course, the format wasn't without it's problems. Last holds in particular really showed the importance of defensive offclasses - a lot of teams could just win mid and then take that to last if they got the med. If we were to re-run the format it'd be interesting to try it sans pick classes, but with defensive classes enabled.

How you resolve that while keeping sniper and spy is an interesting question. I'm in favor of the sniper getting a nerf (not just because I'm a med main), as the concept of sniper in general never felt right to me for TF2. In a game where most of your fights take place at close-to-mid range, a class that can oneshot you from across the map always felt like weird design (inb4 "just don't stand in a sightline"). Maybe something like a quickscope headshot only does 125 to start and ramps up? Max body shot is ~140? I don't know. That still doesn't solve the issue at hand but can help fix it. No more Sheep-esque heroics though :-(

tl;dr i hate sniper

45 minute stalemates on granary be like