turtling in the video that slin made was done on default classes as much as it was done on offclasses and the removal of heavy/engineer does nothing to address the "problem". If people dont want to push nothing is going to force them to, end of story. the problem, at least in the match that brought this discussion about, was not that every push was a fail push due to defensive offclasses, but rather that there were no pushes at all, as neither team wanted to accept the risk associated with pushing the next point. implementing a shot clock might increase the number of pushes (and thus fail pushes) from the team who has the advantage, but it also will reduce the number of pushes from the "defending" team since if they park the bus they can simply force a midfight, which does nothing to address the issue at hand.

also removing offclasses just so pushing can be easier is not a valid point to be making. giving the attacking team a sure thing victory by removing the defense's best chances at success is just silly.

Just want to emphasize that a shorter cap timer actually encourages stalemates because the winning team can just park the bus 'til the next midfight and the losing team is forced to push in on short notice. Longer time allows for trying to make plays on the flank or with the combo, or suiciding until you get a pick. Watch what invite teams do in this situation.

Just wondering if this was part of your stream fight with Seanbsly

Yes, it's from when broking was complaining about the game being boring.

One 30 minute game isn't really aimed at making the attacking team push, it is aimed at making the defending team push. If you're two down in a 30 minute game, you're going to have to push sooner or later, because you need to allow time to win at least two rounds. However, in the current ESEA format, there is less urgency to push in such a situation in the first half, because of course, if you fail to push out and it remains 2-0, you always have another 30 minutes to claw back the deficit.

???

If I was defending last I'd be quite happy to wait for 3 minutes until the 'shot clock' ran out so I could just go to mid without doing shit.

I don't think tf2 is a perfect game, I think it could be improved substantially. Even if slin's idea with shotclock is swept under the rug, something else can surely be done to increase the pace of the game.

Perhaps a new game similar to slin's idea, without heavys engineers and pyros. From a spectator's standpoint these classes don't really bring any interesting strategic gameplay to TF2. I don't necessarily mean we need to change 6's, I just think we should explore different avenues. We have the power to change the game, testing things out is not a bad thing.

I still enjoy playing tf2 I just don't think the game will ever grow substantially if we don't tweak some of the rules. TF2 can do better than 5,000 viewers at ESEA lan.

i think, along with the rest of the community.

but i feel that stalemates bring out the best in a strategic team. having the time to think carefully and converse with your team about how best to gain ground and ultimately win the game is, as a roamer main, the most enjoyable part of a match.

that being said, there is no reason that process should take more than 3-5 minutes, and so i would support limiting the time a team could potentially use to stall the game.

if it gets to 5 minutes and you're not trying to make something happen and are holding extremely passive and defensive spots on second because its "high risk" then you're just as guilty of parking the bus. you need to actually take chances, take risks, if they're holding so far back on mid then start clearing saw/lower, start moving forward clearing the traps, they can't stop you from coming except with really long range spam so just take it slow and spam them back and either they'll come into you or you get in. letting the clock run down for the half not attempting to push and then complaining about stalemates is dumb

and by not attempting to push i mean you just have 2 scouts on fence and the heavy sitting in forwards. imo the other team is at a disadvantage to push in that situation.

I think that the round time and timelimit are more akin to the play clock and game clock in American football when it comes to parking the bus, but I don't think we need another long-winded metaphor description.

Unfortunately, the problem with trying to test a shorter round time limit is trying to simulate it realistically - people play much differently in a low-stakes scrim or PUG than in a playoff-implications match, as has been mentioned above. However, if there is interest, I can whip up a plugin that can change the round time limit to something else for such purposes.

I have nothing to contribute when talking about this topic since the things I was going to say have been stated in prior posts.

However, if we do consider thinking of changing match settings, there should be pugs or scrims in place to determine what would be the perfect time to set the timer to.

thanks mile for clearing that up. I purposely made the video broad like that because I didn't want it to seem like I was attacking the other team for employing a legitimate strategy.

couple things guys:

1) again, as I mentioned before, better map design does not fully solve the issue of parking the bus because the team with map control can simply CHOOSE to not push. a shot clock robs them of choice.

2) it's not an issue of whether or not bus parking is legitimate under the current rule set. I'm asking if the rule set needs to be changed to discourage bus parking. bus parking only happens under very specific conditons, and the stalemate timer hardly ever goes into effect, even if it was shortened.

to address points made by others: parking the bus ONLY occurs when the winning team holds middle if all other things are equal. sure the team holding second is incentivized to hold and turtle, but it's important to note that they're ALREADY trying to do that and ALREADY incentivized to do that. by implementing a shot clock it would NOT change the behavior of the defensive team. again, I don't see the behavior of the defensive team as a problem anyways because they have no control of the match at this point.

what a shot clock does is change the behavior of the team that is parking the bus -- if they don't push, they lose their advantage. teams want to keep their advantages, so my hypothesis is that teams will choose to push out of those bus_parked situations. this effectively breaks bus parking strategies, which I had previously assumed were boring and cheap.

the entire premise to the video is that bus parking is cheap, boring, and dumb. if you disagree with the premise and would enjoy playing a game like the one featured in the video, then there is nothing to fix. however if you do think bus parking is ridiculous, you should take action. after all, we have the power to change the rules to make the game more fun for players, shout casters, and spectators.

how is it cheap? its not unstoppable, just not fun to employ/play against.

I'm saying that it is unstoppable once you are in the actual scenario itself.

if you want to play it out in your mind -- if you're holding 2nd and it's even ubers even numbers, the offensive team has advantage over you. any push in a situation where you're at a disadvantage is essentially a mistake. any sacrifice, uber exchange, etc only helps the team with advantage, and they're simply parking the bus waiting for you to get bored or for time to run out. catching a player out of position at the high levels of play is extremely unlikely in this situation, and running things such as defensive sniper is only going to further handicap your team.

besides, even if you could do something, I'm saying that if we all agree that it's boring then I think we should make a small change to remove it from the game.

let's go back to what pyour said on reddit and stop banning classes

but on the topic of parking the bus, there's not really anything we can do about it that isn't some ridiculous rule such as "if a team parks the bus for longer than 5 minutes, the round is won by the opposite team" or whatever. it's up to the teams that have to fight against it. the players, in game, are more concerned with winning than pleasing the people watching. if they think parking the bus will solidify their victory and park the bus to do so, then it's only up to the other team to stop that.

Flippers... to be completely honest, WE didn't do anything we could to win. That was all you, sauce6 and I attempted to push in but you constantly said no. YOU wanted to win, personally I didn't even want to kick Freestate's team out of playoffs. I want him to keep going.

Please do not derail this thread. The teams in the video slin made are irrelevant to the discussion.

On the topic of banning classes, I would like some thoughts/reasons from experienced players as to why keeping heavy and engineer in the game makes it more fun or more enjoyable.

because heavy is the best class ever , i am not biased i swear

Paul I don't think anyone has a negative view towards you or your team for employing that tactic. it was a high stakes match, and you can't be blamed for trying to win.

@kirby did you even watch the video? lol

Bare with me cause I am going out on a limb and making this up as I go:

Since Quake was mentioned I tried to compare these kind of scenarios to Quake dueling as it simplifies the matter by having only 2 players. Why does Quake not have complete stalemates, or why does Quake have semi-stalematey situations that still remain interesting for both the players and the spectators?

In TF2, having CP3 can be compared to being in control. Having more round wins than the opposing team in TF2 is the same as having more frags than the other player in Quake.

On most maps in Quake it is not uncommon, and possibly even expected, to see a player out of the lead and out of control make a comeback, regain control, and make frags. Why does this happen? Because being in control in Quake is an active process and requires the player in control to give up positional advantage to maintain said control (circling the items means you will be traversing positionally disadvantageous areas). Also, as the player in control, staying completely passive and defensive between the major items allows the player out of control to gradually even the odds (stacks) by circling the minor items. Whichever the case, there is almost always some kind of possibility for the player out of the lead and out of control to make a comeback (up to certain limits of course). To retain game dominance, the player with the upper hand is forced to take certain risks constantly.

Now compare this to TF2. Being "in control" (having CP3 or CP4) is a passive state. Staying in control does not require the players to sacrifice superior positioning; in fact, the opposite is true: Keeping superior positioning is what maintains the control! Positioning in TF2 is a goal in itself (getting the position on CP5 means you win a round point) and not a means to an end, like in Quake. The means to an end in TF2 are the frags, as opposed to Quake.

With the nature of comp TF2 being about scoring through position and frags only being a means to an end, how can we ever fix this problem? Stalemates are indeed a natural state of the game; they are a result of the scoring meta.

Without changing entirely how comp TF2 works, I think the only solution can be found in changing map architecture. Why, when we talk about stalemates in TF2, the maps we see recurring are snakewater, gullywash and granary? All these maps have no open chokes between CP2 and CP3, and CP3 often offers a huge positional advantage (mostly height advantage) towards CP2.

Especially on snake, if the team in control (has CP3) has good spam on the chokes, its impossible for a roamer from the CP2 team to try and make a force play. Its near impossible for the demo from the CP2 team to do good spam (standing at the bottom medpack near green its hard to get a good spamming position without receiving more spam damage than you deal, and standing in saw room you will already get spammed before you even get close enough to the doorway to get a peek onto CP3. Compare this to badlands choke where the team that has CP2 can lob pipes/stickies through choke with enough room to dodge the counter-spam, and can launch bombers to make a play relatively freely.

So obviously badlands does a better job than other maps (of course, it's the best fucking map), but I propose we should experiment with new maps (or modified maps) that enable teams out of control to make plays more easily. This means that transitioning from CP2 -> CP3 should actually provide a positional advantage instead of disadvantage. The team that has CP3 already has logistical advantage (spawns) and another advantage for simply having a buffer before they can lose a point (if you lose CP3 you still have CP1 and CP2 before you actually are put back score-wise).

This means that we could experiment with maps being designed with an overall valley/dip style layout, where CP3 is the lowest point on the map, and where CP2 is elevated over CP3, so the team out of control can push with positional advantage. It should also be relatively easier to spam from CP2 to CP3 than the other way around. With this layout in mind, there is incentive for both teams to push. The CP3 team will have a worse position and will draw the shorter straw spam-wise if they keep that position, and will therefore eventually risk losing control of CP3, so it's in their best interest to push towards CP2/4, also just for the sake of eventually getting close to CP5 and actually scoring a point. The CP2 team will be incentivised to push for the sake of already having positional advantage and wanting to get out of their out-of-control (cp-wise) situation.

I hope that some of this makes sense and maybe some smart mapper will take the effort to experiment with these unorthodox map layout ideas.

note: I don't play Quake, I only watch a lot of streams and vods, so I might make some noobish or short sighted observations about its meta.

Complains about a 7 min stalemate at 2nd then proceeds to build a lvl 3 at last. ok.

Forcing the offensive team to push can be equated to "forcing the player that is in control to take a disadvantageous position".

Yes, but heavies and engies are a part of the game. If you want to "solve" stalemates, everything in TF2 6's will have to be changed.

Appreciate the post skeej. You made a number of interesting points.

If there was such a thing as a shot clock, what would be an appropriate time for it?

3 minutes has been kicked around, but I think that's perhaps too short. That's cutting it close in terms of getting two ubers/two clean attack opportunities.

4 minutes is also maybe too short to get three pushes in. It's also short enough that a defensive team might just choose to hold last and reset the round instead of counter-pushing a failed attack.

5 minutes might only be triggered a few times throughout the course of a 30 minute game, but I think it'd still be a quick enough time that it'd be hovering over the head of a team that is playing passively because they have the lead. If it's 20 mins in, and a team starts parking the bus you would have 5 minutes after a restart to try and win a round (or two!).

One potential downside of having a shot clock is that teams trying to game the clock could concede capture points in order to reset the clock. The opposing team, if they realize this is happening, would then be in a spot where they wouldn't want to capture the 2nd point because they wouldn't want to reset the shot clock and would prefer to re-fight mid instead of holding 2nd. Some weird gamesmanship stuff there that's kind of tough to predict.

5 minutes seems like a good idea. AFAIK this would have to be implemented via plugin.

Imo the more you mess about with the round timer, the more people will try and make plays based on it, waiting for it to go down etc. At the moment, stalemates are a pretty rare thing and very few teams use it as a legit strat - if the round timer is reduced then I think more teams would try to delay pushes and stalemate it out to get resets as a default strategy.

Slin great video and I am glad you have brought the problem up. People can talk about banning classes and items but that is no how Comp TF2 should be played. The shot clock timer idea is the best alternative to stopping these stalemates. It will have to be tested and found as a viable alternative but I think it will make Comp TF2 and high stake games much more fun ,not only for the teams but also the viewer.

It will. I've experimented with modifying in-game timers a bit and probably will release one later tonight.

Excellent post skeej and quite accurate for someone who doesn't play Quake. You summed it up well. If you indeed have full maplock, your "route" is much more predictable and therefore you are easier to spam, and are constantly sacrificing positional advantages. This isn't quite as true in Quakelive (the spam weapons are weaker, but the movement is shit), but it is very evident in CPM and QW, which I dueled for a very long time. It is difficult to play passively in the lead and aggression is almost always encouraged.

I don't believe in establishing arbitrary rules like a shot clock; it seems to be a bandaid for the culprit which is poor map design. If they don't want to take the risks, it's not like having an artificial incentive is going to make them any more appealing. It's just forcing it on the players who don't have the incentive to begin with, that just seems flawed to me.

On a personal note, this is why koth is so much fun. As a new player, it seems to me like the quicker spawns for the disadvantaged team always encourage aggression. In addition, the timer itself is so short that any advantages have to be acted upon almost immediately.

I'm really gonna have to go back and read this whole thread later. I've been skimming it on my phone from work, and I thought I'd chime in a little.

On the idea of short round times: bad idea IMO. While it might lead to some more intense rounds and faster pushes, it would rob the game of some of its creativity. giving teams a chance to sac a player and run an off class is part of what makes the game interesting IMO. More importantly, short round times would most likely encourage more stalemates. If a team had a lead, why would they risk going to mid, maybe get wiped, and have to defend last without uber? The smart thing to do (especially on maps with easy to turtle last points) would be to run a really lame D with a heavy/pyro/engy and just turtle last. You would be able to defend with uber, and positional advantage, and if you throw your roamer or a spy/sniper at them on 2nd to force their uber you could easily run the clock and maintain the lead.

this might be a bad idea, but...
the reason CS is so intense/fast paced, is b/c if you save, you lose points. It hurts your team. Something like this could be put into TF2, where if you hit the end of the timer(say 5min or so), then the other team automatically gets the mid point and the 'offensive' team gets pushed back to 2nd no matter where they are. This way, it would be a punishment to 'save' in terms of CS, or turtle/park the bus in terms of TF2.