https://youtu.be/FPlP6b7dObM

Am I missing something here? The team that chose to play for round resets lost the game 3-1, it didn't work. If the shorter round timer promoted slow play, then the more proactive team would have lost instead. Snakewater has always been prone to this, remember this?

it doesnt matter they lost, its that an intercontinental lan had some of the worst gameplay it couldve had. it doesnt kill the game but it does prevent it from growing which isnt much better. its frustrating too because the ideas easy to understand, its just the game doesnt revolve around only mids, and even when european teams lose them they just immediately go for another round reset and are hellbent on it.

its not a good way to play the game and i think theyre just lucky they live in europe - its hard to strat against teams youve never played before and probably wont again, and eu plays the game completely different from na in more ways i can count. despite that, i still think real froyo or g6 wouldve 5-0d everything if they showed

sane part, though product and gully were really entertaining to watch

delusional part, please don't post this a 3rd time in one thread

What? Imo even snake was a very interesting game, because froyo had some interesting attempts in breaking the stalemates and eventhough the execution failed multiple times I still find it interesting how froyo tries to tackles this kind of playstyle in General. I can't even count the times i've watched the insomnia i63 froyo vs se7en Games, just because how interesting the NA vs EU playstyle is.

So yeah I think this kind of playstyle will always be a part of tf2, but imo its only lame for the spectator if both teams just sit and do nothing, which was not the case. Its also not like froyo only went sniper vs these holds (which is the lamest strat to watch imo). The only thing we can do to disincentivize this playstyle is to ban the banner(s), because banning pyro or replacing/fixing granary, snakewater, sunshine seems unreasonable or not doable. I'm still very interested to see if banners will now be used more in NA and how they tackle this ingame.

This GF was far from optimal viewer wise, but also definitely not 'some of the worst gameplay' that there could've been. Also I don't think this prevented the game from 'growing' cause as stated in comments above, wG's playstyle was far from optimal even to an untrained eye.

my guys have literally never watched quake or any arena shooter in their lives

So there have been LANs in NA with the reduced round timer that were great to watch, and then there was one international LAN where one team decided to try playing slowly and they lost what is possibly the most important international event of the year. Do you really think this will be an enduring problem and that there should now be a kneejerk reaction to change the round timer back to ten minutes? You're going to change the game because one team went all-in on a strategy that didn't even work? Until teams actually start winning tournaments playing slowly, it makes no sense to blame slow games on the round timer. It's just the result of a team trying out a strategy that involves slow play and they'll stop playing like that sooner or later if it keeps on failing. If people really insist on changing something, start by banning Battalion's instead of overreacting and reverting the round timer.

after yknow it's different

its not crazy, nevermind "delusional." now u didnt give me anything to work with and i feel this is ur own way of getting ur upfrags or whatever, but ill give you my reasoning and if ur an honest person i'll hear out why you disagree.

so after making this, its a bit long and not rly organized so ill just put the button here for anyone that wants to see my reasoning but it reads almost like my notetaking yknow.

EU moment

tf2 will always be slow when a win means more than anything, youve seen it literally every lan the past 5 years

I agree that the grand final definitely wasn't boring and that both teams delivered a good show, but the highlights that the average viewer aren't the little nuances that froyotech showed when trying to break a nearly unbreakable hold. The back and forth team fights, display of amazing mechanical skill and round winning clutches are the highlights that remain in peoples minds and not "oh the timing on this double sacc was really outstanding", so I suppose grand final just lacked those historic moments that people remember for years to come, but it definitely was not a "harmful" game for TF2

disagree. theres a lot more factors going into this than just "this team wants to win." and its like i told mustard, the metas undeveloped. i feel like for every idea we think we understand, theres about 2 unknowns, even on core aspects of the game like what weapons to use. till recently people werent incentivized to be pioneers, even when going back to more tradition.

we're only in the middle of the story, these problems will be fixed

The soldier plays during G6 vs Froyo at LAN created unrealistic beauty standards for soldier players on par with Barbie. Those few games alone were enough to make two-minute long frag videos for each soldier on the teams.

The Core Problem

The optimized high-level strategy in 5CP is to gain a round lead (the actually hard part) and then play it as safe as possible (which wG demonstrated).
.
Because being passive and holding a point is just easier to do than being agressive and taking one, the length of the round timer doesn't change much about this passivity-problem.

To disincentivise passivity after gaining a round lead, I think more significant changes need to be made.

Potential Improvements

1)
Ultimately, stalemates are a waste of time. If the state of the game is stuck after 5 minutes, why should a round-restart change anything about that happening again? It's trying the same thing again, hoping for a different result, not very elegant at all. The same problem already existed with 10-minute round-timers (see Crowns.gg).

Replacing stalemates at round-timeout with a punishment for the team that owns the least control points could solve this problem.
That would mean that, even if a round times out, the team that has capped the most CP's is rewarded more than the one that has been passive.
I've explored that possibility here: https://www.teamfortress.tv/53629/pc-pointcapture-gamemode

2)
I've come to realize that the problem of passivity is so fundamental, that even the approach I developed above is just a band-aid, even more fundamental changes might need to be made.

I could say more, but I don't expect many people to care enough, if anyone is interested in talking about this more deeply, feel free to add me on Steam!

I genuinely do not think you are "full of shit" or "have no basis" as you said, although I must say I had no way to know if you had any of the latter until now and the tone on both occurrences of that one sentence mostly felt like you intended to diss EU teams just cause why not.

Now for the reasons why I believe you are completely out of proportion on your assumption.

I think most people here are too fast to a conclution. The statement "An agressive strategy is more effective at winning than a passive strategy, because Froyo beat WG" is not sound. Lets say WG executed their passive strategy with a 90% efficiency, and Froyo executed their agressive strategy with 97% efficiency. This can mean that when perfected a passive strategy is better. And the main reason Froyo won is due to that they were better at executing their strategy, not because the strategy it self is better. Froyo is a well established team where multiple members have LAN experience and they have played together for years. Even with the roster mixup they got players who are experienced playing with B4nny and habib. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect Froyo to execute their strategy better than WG.

The idea stated in an earlier post "WG will change their playstyle if they keep loosing" is also a bit questionable in my opinion. In theory it makes sense, however if there is no changes of the value B on a scale from 1 to 10 WG will not lose until next i-series and not change their playstyle. For this to happen WG needs to lose multiple times, losing once a year might not be enough. Between i46 and i49 this happened. We saw the huge ass changes Darn predicted. EU started using gunboats and soldier play started getting more agressive. NA started using quick fix and their playstyle slowed down. I don't think losing i69 will have the same effect on EU tf2 as losing i46 did. I have no idea if WG will think "We lost because we did not execute our gameplan good enough" or "We lost because our gameplan was bad". This will not be an easy question to answer because the dataset is small.

It is really hard to balance the game to make the most effective gameplan the most fun to watch. Maps have to be designed so the team setting up a push can force the defending team to make an opening. However if its to easy its boring. The pushes have to have a success rate high enough for the team to be able to use openings that are given. However the defender also needs to be able to have a successful hold. Failing a push has to be punishing enough for the defendinwever if it isg team to go agressive and gain map control. Ho too punishing teams will wait longer for a better opening before pushing. There are so many elements that have to be balanced. Considering we play a game the developers don't update, and when they do they do not focus on 6vs6, it is hard to make it so that the most effective way to play is the most fun to watch.

Is this the last insomnia lan since i series is BYOC? Also, does anyone know when the next intercontinental lan will be?

I think the way wG played was great on product and snake. the hold last for a reset strategy isn't a bad thing, BUT there is a time and place for using it, and using it while on granary 1 - 0 down with 5-6 minutes remaining, slowly burning down the clock, ain't it.

i don't remember being confused on snake - like tom said, we've seen this for 5 years now

but on gran froyo literally almost wiped like 10 times during the last push and you don't even remotely prod to see if you could get another pick and push second? they literally just waited for froyo to respawn and try again while they were already a round down

does gran really boil down to lose mid = lose the game?

in regards to the ruleset, i've always believed that the old way america was doing it was the best in that it is first to five rounds. it just made the best games and the most sense. its frustrating to play this EU ruleset of 30 mins where there are instances where you are actually just about to win but don't have the time to do it.

i get the whole production problem side of things, but i don't think this was ever a problem with ESEA lans.

speaking of which, idk why we are using this insomnia venue if they're gonna treat us like this and make our players play at 3AM because of a 300 viewer valorant stream.

if we do something next summer, i think we should find a new venue and probably from america's side of things because from a viewers perspective, it would've been a lot more interesting to watch the whole thing if it was the best EU team vs all the american teams instead of just only tuning in when its wG vs froyo. but nothing in between so we can raise money for that

pretty much. unfortunately for stalemates if u lose 1 person for nothing when ur pressuring that's already bad enough not much good is gonna come out of it, at least with chaddie on 1 of the sunshine matches he was trading his life for things that dont matter. 1 person fucking up messes with everything, and thats a guy whos more concerned getting back to bases than adapting to unfamiliar tf2.

the gameplay was artificial. if invite and prem could be merged im sure the very top of prem might be able to stick around at first but its just unfamiliar strats, if theyre solved eu would have nothing left. its a bit concerning, if na keeps moving forward while eu sticks to holding last its inevitable there will be 1 less continent that can give some competition.

bro their game literally has guns with like fish tanks in them i was watching the game just looking at the fishes inside the tank, i dont even know who won i was just staring at those little fishies wondering if they were ok in the gun, but like, what if the gun was shooting the fish from inside the gun? what if the existence of the fish was just to live as essentially as a bullet?

you dont get those deep kind of realisations in a tf2 event

war i was literally saying the same shit in the discord LOL

just add more koth lol

God koth is so unfathomably based.

Also banner is fine lmao, witness didn't risk enough opportunities they had. So they got no reward.

i72 on the big screen at times square

Talking about players weighing down a team based on how they played but completely ignoring 53% acc bottom frag on pocket scout by b4nny in a grand finals.

https://logs.tf/3258218

Usually I'd ignore logs or stats like this, but sometimes when it's so far off what it should be it does show something, it shows that b4nny played badly on scout for a map. People are allowed to play badly as an individual, but still offer a lot to the team. It's not something a spectator can really see, you have to play with and against these players and talk to them outside of game to understand why they do things.

Idk who you are or if you do these things, but if you don't and only talk to mustardoverlord for a view of the game, I would just stop and not even bother trying to talk about how good players are based on them missing a few shots every now and again in a map.