There is.

TF2 Tightrope, which Thomas correctly guessed as my ultimate intention in the first response.

However, the purpose of this thread is to gauge the support for a mod like that, not to gather information or opinions on weapons (saving that for a later thread) so I would appreciate it very much if we (not you specifically) could back onto that topic.

TF2 beta is supposed to be exactly what this thread is about. Maybe some of the things you brought up are valid criticisms, but most of them were complaints about weapons that are UP and been made OP by teamwork (which is a good thing). Lots of the complaints were about subpar weapons being too strong in the rare situation they may get into. In those instances, it's not really a big deal if the third degree/powerjack crits, or the direct hit hits the scout, or you get hit by the cleaver or something inane like that. If the weapon really needs a fix (like the pomson) there's usually action to fix it after enough complaints.

which doesn't really fit tf2 at all

#33: They're not OP because of teamwork; that's Jarate's problem, and it's not "broken" in my eyes. I have a feeling you have a problem with a few of my suggestions so you're judging the rest the same way.
Most of the broken weapons in the game are "broken" because they counter teamwork with solo shit, or reward unskilled play.

I'm still looking for actual responses to the question and not confusions about promods and junk.

i think you have your answer about support then...

The original question being "Would you support this?" has only been answered by, like, two people. The rest have been going off on tangents or entirely misinterpreting the purpose.

So no.

Well everybody that wouldn't just didn't bother posting or only posted explaining why they wouldn't. But my answer is no.

Why wouldn't you, frkn?

Nope. I have ideas for things that could be done with TF2, but pubs are a disaster now as far as skill goes to the point that balancing towards them doesn't really matter, Highlander is neigh completely fine aside from Wrangler + Gunslinger and maybe the annoyance that is Dead Ringer + Spycicle being a tad too much, and 6v6 gets by completely fine with its ban list approach.

Plus, a community mod would never ever be supported by ESEA, unlikely to be supported by UGC or ETF2L, and thus would either serve no real purpose for competitive games or splinter a community that is already small.

If Valve wanted actual feedback and displayed interest in actually trying stuff out, then I think almost everyone who visits this site would actually try to help out.

hey guys let's bring up the fact that tf2's balance could use a lot of work and get upset when people go on that instead of my overly specific polling question that doesn't seem to have a direct purpose

let's ask three questions and look at people who over-answer one of them but ignore the others for above reason funny

read #41 to understand #39 (its the same point I made twice)

comp != pubs

There's a reason why its the same 5 people responding to you... weapon balance is an issue, but not a big enough of an issue for comp players (tf.tv community) to support "a TF2 mod/plugin".

With that said, the comp community can make a difference and have... guys like cyzer/extine are in contact with robin all the time. Cyzer was even given the duty to hand out invites to the TF2 Beta before it was a public thing...

if someone actually managed to make a successful promod it would only split the community. we don't need that, we need valve to fix the game.

It's not so much balancing towards pubs rather than not omitting the opinions of tens of thousands of players simply because they aren't playing an organized format.

Pubs are needed for this game to be populated, and omitting pubs completely from balancing will just make pubs even more unbalanced than they are now and the game will die sooner as a result.

There's also the weapons that (everyone) HL thinks of as crappy that need changes to, you know. A lot of people would be happy to see half of the weapons in the game be useful, when they are in fact crappy.

While true, requiring a ban list does show that there is something wrong with the game, especially when ~2/3rds the weapons are on it.

Everyone should have a say in how weapons are. Not just listen to one group and the game is suddenly fixed.

The goal of the mod is not to be a promod used for every organized match ever.

What I mean by support is simple things like playtesting, feedback, or blog posts. Things to help spread the word and have people learn that there are more options than just settling for the untested crap that Valve shoves in the game, barely changes once every six months or so, and never touches again.

I believe Valve listens when the community stops speaking in multiple tiny voices and works together to rupture their eardrums.

As such, I feel that, unless we start working together, Valve won't change their ways until the game is on its death bed.

Supporting this mod will cause it to start gaining Valve's attention, and may end up changing a lot of things about the game, just like Highlander did.

HELLO? is this thing on?

I already understand that Comp =/= Pubs, grillz, but that doesn't render it impossible to make the game balanced for pubs and comp without some form of a ban list.

And once again, the kind of support I'm asking for is basically just feedback and spreading the word... comp players don't find balance so significant of an issue that they would even do something so simple? I know that it's far from a guarentee, but at least by giving some support, the chance of Valve actually doing something increases.

you're saying an awful lot about how good things could be and arguing with people who are trying to get more out of you, but you're not showing any understanding of what it takes to make a good "promod", neither in necessity nor in design, not even a feigned bit - you're not saying anything that a handful of people are asking for, you're ignoring the issue with this thread and focusing instead on "hey guys wouldn't it be cool if tf2 was balanced??? hype this so valve fixes the game!!!", which is a load of crap.

Until pubs and comp start playing the same format I do not agree with you.

There are reasons to separate comp and pubs in theorycraft, but having separate "formats" isn't one of them; pubs don't have a format and vary wildly in several regards.

So you believe the fact that comp uses 6v6 or 9v9, while the vast majority of pub servers run a 12v12 or 16v16 mode doesn't matter in weapon balance? I disagree, and if you include the fact that comp uses class restrictions while pub servers normally don't just makes the differences even greater.

There is one thing above all that I want Valve to change about how weapons work in TF2. I've sent them multiple emails about it unfortunately to no response because I really believe it would make it easier for new players to TF2 get into the competitive TF2 community and make doing things such as weapon bans easier.

My suggestion to them was to make it so that when mp_tournament is set to 1 on a server that players on the server then have access to generic versions of all weapons that are not attached to Valve's item server without needing to have them in their backpacks to use them in a match.

There are two things that this would immediately fix, first is that it would make access to items completely fair. Players would not have an advantage for having a large backpack full of every different weapon in the game, or be at a disadvantage for being new to the game and not having every item. Sure you could argue that this is not much of a problem in competitive play but I would argue that at this point if you were a new player getting into TF2 it is certainly something that unless you're willing to spend money is going to take some time to build up, and until that point you're at a disadvantage. In addition I can remember tons of times when we didn't use a strategy involving a weapon simply because oov had crafted his god damned Sidney Sleeper. The second thing that this would fix is those fun moments every season when the item server goes down and servers cannot connect making it so that all of a sudden completely random matches have to play entirely vanilla games.

That's really all I've ever wanted for competitive TF2 was to make random item drops fair in a competitive game. Guild Wars 2 basically did this for their sPvP and I always thought it was an excellent design choice in an MMO to make competitive play completely fair and skill based rather than item dependent. Ultimately this is really the bane of any competitive game that has a cash shop or is item dependent. In my opinion this was a huge downfall of Tribes: Ascend competitively. That and the cash shop in Tribes got so egregious that it completely destroyed my interest in the game.

Am I the only one that gets the feeling that Kave_Johnson is just asking questions to argue? Like this is 2 threads now where he asks our opinion on things first the gunslinger and a now promod only to point out where our opinion on the matter is somehow wrong and flawed.

I'll admit, I do seem a bit idealistic when I talk about my actual opinion, but if you tell me what more you want to know, I'll try my best to explain from now on.

Yeah, totally. I totally want to argue about how you're wrong, and not eventually improve the game through a popular community-run mod.

And it's not a promod. I've been over this and the goal is not to make a modification only for skilled players but rather one that attempts to solve the issues of the game regardless of skill and attracts people who simply feel that the gameplay is suffering from Robin's hat addiction.

#45 Pubs are near impossible to balance for, in order to balance effectively you need to look at the best of the best. Sure, you keep the lesser skilled people in mind but there's little point in balancing around people who can't grasp the entirety of your game on any effective level and will eventually just become better players that will outgrow whatever you design based around them previously (and thus make it broken). Pubs are filled with people of a wide variety of skill levels and objectives (everything from try to win really hard to intentionally gimp myself to do silly stuff)

The amount of items that are actually 'worthless' in Highlander are very few. Many of them are extremely situational, sure, but that doesn't mean they need further balancing. This is already a game of Generalists & Specialists classes, weapons are much the same way.

If Valve wants things to be different they will make it different IMO. Unless I am completely mistaken, it was their idea to make a competitive player only beta and they worked with specific comp players to make that happen. Community feedback is great sure, but it is not actually useful if Valve doesn't care to do anything with it. Let's not ignore the fact that many people did come together and give Valve plenty of feedback united in the competitive beta forum on SPUF and they did practically zilch with it.

Stock TF2 community is already split well over 4+ ways - you have the pub community, the Highlander community, and then 2 different 6s communities who take completely different viewpoints on unlocks to begin with. You can't balance for all of these people very effectively. You can maybe improve it from where it is now, sure, but that isn't really worth the effort of a 3rd party mod that Valve is extremely unlikely to care about. If Valve on the other hand reached out to us, I am quite sure many of us would give them advice or ideas on whatever they want help with.

Trust me, you are preaching to the choir here on "people who wish TF2 was better". I am sure almost everyone on this site feels that way. It should say something that these people are telling you the idea is not worth investing in for them.

Wareya, I think your damage post misstates the effect of combining random variables. Sampling a whole bunch of binomial distributions (i.e. pistol damage with spread) will create a normal probability distribution (i.e. damage spread for about 30 minigun shots), but the mean (in this case, damage output per shot) will not be affected. That means that damage spread vs. no damage spread will have the same average damage output for a pistol shot vs. a big group of pistol shots or a minigun shot vs. a group of minigun shots. Thus, any change in the effectiveness of one will produce, on average, an identical reduction in the effectiveness of the other. The rapid-fire element simply doesn't come into play.