Valve doesn't make medals. All they do is take medals that have already been modeled and put them into the game. They don't even do it just for highlander. Those stupid pan tournaments have in game medals.

I am certain someone in the community would be willing to make medals every season for freemium.

FUND IT

soon enough, our inventories would be full due to medals

http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/284/922/0e3.png

Hell, why limit to ESEA? Look at how DOTA2 happened to successfully fund one of the biggest-prize pool tournaments in esports. Valve can pull some pretty amazing stuff in terms of competitive TF2, the question is mostly "how deep are they willing to go with it", more than anything else.

lol

hey this is jaeger from team loaded and welcome to another tf2 tips and tricks

People still see Robin as the head of all things TF2 but he's a dota man now

IIRC the real man in charge now is Eric Smith

Regardless of what hes doing now, he is still the father of the entire Team Fortress franchise.

I think people forget that Robin also wanted to see weapon bans and statistics from those bans. The real question is: Would Demoman still be overpowered without the default sticky launcher? As an "OP" weapon, it would see bans for a couple months, during which demomen would use the Scottish Resistance - a much less powerful weapon on a still dangerous class.

After seeing the sticky launcher banned consistently, Valve would nerf it and you would have fewer problems with the demo class.

Simply nerfing demo wont do anything but lower the demos skill ceiling. The reason 2 is not aloud is because spam crossing spam covers demos weaknesses and 2 demomen allows you to lock out 2 chokes.

Also by the same logic you should nerf medic which his also just dumb.

We've been over this too many times to count, just stick to the chess analogy that demoman is effectively the queen of tf2. Powerful, yes. Retooling it for a 2cl would fundamentally alter how 6s is played or would just continue to dominate the entirety of a 2cl league.

So from watching cbear attempt to jump, I've learned that he likes the idea because it effectively creates a middle ground that will allow for players who want to transition into 6s to do so.

The problem here lies in the laxity of the rules, items, and the way the classes are balanced inherently. You have someone playing this way (the proposed new way) long enough for them to get confident in playing. They come in, see our ruleset and limits and go "Wow they use none of the items, I liked it better the old way, this is boring". Those who do subscribe to the 6s we play now if the middle ground comes to pass would have probably liked the idea of 6s regardless of the existence of the middle ground. It falls into Tagg's prophecy of a community schism based around those who sit in the 6s middle ground, those who play HL, those who play what would be traditional 6s, and those who play pubs. We'd be much better off (as it has been said time and time again by countless others before me, including Tagg and Lansky in cbear's stream ever so recently) getting our name as a group put out to the TF2 community as a whole

to get players into 6s or even HL.

Creating a middle ground is fine and all, but it doesn't truly create an effective bridge to 6s. The HL to 6s bridge works because its the same mindset and gameplay with a different strategic take. Although I do agree that doing the same thing over and over with the same strategy gets REALLY stale (lookin' at you Dungeon Defenders and The Showdown Effect), having a goofy 6s funhouse with 2 of everything and all unlocks just feels like it would create yet another subgroup of TF2 instead of actually exposing them to the way 6s and HL are played. Speaking of the way HL is played, maybe THAT could be the focus of the changes. I remember during the period between T:A and pubbing NS2, I was talking about my past to the crew that stuck around from T:A and I got comments that HL plays like "fucking molasses" even though they like all classes "being allowed" in play. The "stupid unlocks" also ended up being a negative point.

tl;dr - A middle ground will inevitably create more problems than it would be worth if it is too much unlike 6s and drive people away if it is too much like 6s. The best option would be the long-talked about outreach programs, specifically a Valve-supported one in which our streams, matches, and scrims will be put in the forefront of the average player's mind. I think instead of putting the resources into that middle ground, it should be put into class and item refinement

. This would improve HL quite a lot, maybe alleviating the long boring matches everyone dislikes sitting through.

you've missed the mark

the idea isn't to create a new stepping stone into the current 6v6 format, but rather to replace it with something better entirely, to the point where the officially supported 6v6 lobbies are both the competitive and (semi)pub format

will it be better immediately without any rebalancing or effort on valve's end?

possibly/possibly not, but their intent to do something about balance has already been made clear in the original sal/extine thread

He did, but he's not going to be the one implementing all these changes unless he switches back to the tf2 team. Admittedly I have absolutely no idea what power he holds over the development of this game now, but I estimate that it isn't as much as it used to be.

Personally I feel like they should just change the "start playing" button to "Play Now" and after clicking it give the user the choice between highlander and 6's. Highlander allows one of every class and 6's allows two of every class. Let the picking and banning begin. Keep the utility of making groups in tf2 so you can play with your friends. Also possibly to make it faster to find matches instead of either picking highlander or 6's, have check boxes, similar to dota 2, for 6's and highlander so you can be queued for both. They can support these servers right away by making some of the current valve pub servers ready for this format while also adding more servers.

Pretty sure that removing 2 stickies from each demo's clip won't somehow make it work to have twice as many of that class on the field. One demo can already lock out two chokes, with two demos you could lock down an entire map. The game won't be fun if other classes' contributions are limited to dying in a four-demo spam crossfire. The fact is that the current demo limit stems from poor balancing / testing on valve's end; if they want it changed they're going to need significant balance changes to the class.

Honestly, I can't see any reason for people to keep overthinking this.

They're trying to do something that gets as many pub players into the game as possible. How do you do that? Integrated competitive. What form of competitive? The closest kind to public servers. What competitive rules? Dynamic weapon whitelists, standard stopwatch/5cp/AD/CTF. It's meant to be as open ended as possible. Wait until it gets implemented before discussing it, I would suggest. For all we know, given how few specifics have been confirmed, it will be all we want and more.

Doesn't valve's teaming system literally just work like "go wherever the hell you feel like, make up teams as you go along"?

Yeah, he wouldn't have much of a problem switching between the two, especially now that DOTA is a big enough thing where he could probably leave it alone without much changing.

Shit, this might mean I have to learn to pocket if one soldier is the new meta :(

I don't think there should ever be more than one Demoman, Medic, Heavy or Engineer. Could bump it up to seven players, because it seems kindasortamaybe a little less distant from 9v9 I guess?

I agree with more map variety.

Jarate should probably never be unbanned.

None of this is said with a whole lot to back it up, just...idea doodles, I guess.

Highlander tagline:
"Play your favorite classes with friends and strangers in a friendly competitive environment"
6s tagline:
"Play like the pros in the most fast paced and focused format the game has ever seen"

I honestly think 4v4 CTF (2 scouts, 2 soldiers) would make for some really great action. They're the 2 fastest/most mobile classes in the game which makes getting med pickups easier (I mean look at 6v6, the scouts and roamer are meant to rely on health packs anyway) and on top of this I think CTF is the best mode to take advantage of this format as it rewards individual mobility and fast thinking the most.

Class limit of 2 on scout and soldier, all other classes banned. CTF maps.

I wanna try it.

Back on topic.

5v5 tf2 (with a medic) actually ends up being slower paced than 6v6 as heals are more easily distributed. I have played many games where someone has DC'd early on and one guy from the other team has gone spec so we end up playing 5v5 and it is just so SLOW. 5v5 would be faster paced but only without a medic.

This is just making what valve wants even farther out of reach. They want more classes being played, not less classes.

Yeah ok maybe this wasnt the best thread to post my idea, but I've had it for a while and just felt like sharing it.

4 minus frags in like 2 minutes I can see it isn't well received :D

Then you still have Tagg's concern where it'll divide the community, because there will definitely be a good amount of people who still want to play the current 6v6 and have nothing to do with the new one.

I think something like what CS:GO has would be a better idea. Let the league players run their own thing, but have two gamemodes (one a lot more casual and loose, and one that's more similar to what the league players play) that are built into the game.

Then it begs the following questions:
1) If this replacement stepping stone is essentially what comp tf2 was like five years ago (two of everything plus the items that have been added over the years), why are we being put into this corner when we have a system that creates a skill-based and balanced environment?

2) We've proven on more than one occasion that a majority of the unlocks are either game changing to the point where adapting would entail using the same unlock to counter the effect it has, so niche there's no point to them existing, or the rare few that provide enough utility and advantage with a respectable penalty. Is Robin truly this adamant about the usage of unlocks that he is willing to make sure that balance even comes about? We've all been around long enough to know that TF2 hasn't received the greatest treatment over the years despite being the sequel to one of the most beloved team-based shooters of all time, and we're all well aware of how "speedy" Valve is at releasing things. Can we put our trust in Walker to hold up his end of the bargain?

I'm definitely interested in whatever balancing valve may do in the future, but I would like to point that whatever changes valve makes will most likely be incredibly slow to bring to fruition. We all know about the preeminent concept of "valve time", and it seems that while we set up an experimental league or format, it might take valve months (dare I say, years?) to execute on the requisite changes to make 2 of each class a stable and balanced format with enough ties to casual play that it satisfies valve's criteria.

Essentially, I'm all for changing a format if it improves it, but I would be a little bit more skeptical of the change if it is based entirely around "valve will fix everything", especially given their track record with item re-balancing in the past (see the equalizer fix, which many people advocated for repeatedly, but took years (?) to actualize).

The issue here is that everyone that has stuck with 6s so far has been here because 6s /is fun/ and /is balanced/ (for the most part). 2cl seems awfully arbitrary and seeing as literally years have been put into the current game to make it what it is, lobbying valve to re-balance class attributes can not possibly do anything other than tear down what already is. At this point we have maps specifically designed for the 6s mindset as is, and if you really want two demomen on the field then maps have to be re-made to accommodate that or the class has to be reworked in a way that makes it completely foreign to the current class.

That being said, everyone has their own little picture in their mind of what the game is going to look like now that valve has acknowledged our existence and I'm not entirely sure why, because there's literally no reason to believe that they'd be competent in re-balancing classes in a way that supports this new 2cl fantasy while not completely shitting on them in every other format. Cbear can strawman it and say IS 6 STICKIES REALLY THAT BIG A CHANGE? but everyone knows that 2 6 sticky demomen would still completely dominate the game and would make 95% of maps completely unplayable.

I get the luxury of being one of like four people in this community that apparently understands how DotA functions at a competitive level and I can be 100% certain when I say that robin walker is talking out of his ass when he talks about "metagame shifts." Strategies and team composition are a massive part of aRTS gameplay, but high-level FPS play has always been about who is the better player and not bullshit RPS item-based decisions that occur long before you can even see your opponent. Anyone who says "well that's why FPS gets no viewers (looking at you djc)" is clearly not thinking straight. Not every game has to be league of legends and this notion that every class and every unlock has to be balanced for an interesting game is straight bullshit.

Guess what, large sections of the hero select screen (at least at respectable levels of play) in dota are just as useless as The Winger in TF2.

iirc, the reason ESEA doesn't get medals is because Valve doesn't like the idea of giving exclusive items to pay-to-play leagues, not because of the format. UGC 6v6 got medals last season, and ETF2L 6s has had them for a while.