https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcb0mFMtXyE
25:30

He spends most of the beginning of this stream talking about the sticky nerfs from a while ago and competitive balance vs pub balance, but essentially he's saying: If you make an arbitrary ruleset that results in 4/9 classes and 10% of the weapons being used--when pubs see all classes and 80% of weapons regularly--is the problem that the game doesn't conform well to your ruleset, or that your ruleset doesn't fit in the game?

I'm not saying 6s is inherently horrible, but Valve has no incentive to redesign their game around it or to attempt to promote it to pub players who don't understand its restrictions.

then make 2 modes, one for the pubbers and one for the competitive players introduce new players to the game mode, and competitive lobbies for comp. players.

Valve has no incentive to spend time/resources/money on a mod specifically for a niche of dedicated players. We barely have any sponsors and create little impact on their income from the game. You can argue this all you want, but if it was untrue then they would have done it a long time ago.

If we want some kind of promod, either the comp community has to grow exponentially (multiple large lans, waaaay more sponsors, better stream numbers, etc) or some kid has to actually put in the time to make it.

And even if some crazy nerds actually step up to this challenge, (unlikely in itself, there's more slacktivisim/theory crafting on this forum than on Facebook ffs) I don't know the exact specifics but its not like people can just copy the source engine's mechanics to make a new game. I figure that stuff would be copy written and any deviation from the original mechanics would dramatically change the comp format anyway. Also, take into consideration that whoever would create the mod is 1 guy with a vision and it probably won't satisfy 90% of the community. Fuck, 90% of the community is already dissatisfied with CURRENT mechanics (soldier op, scout op, demo op, sniper mains op, every map is bad except badlands, etc). Imagine the nightmare of a community of between 1000-3000 people all trying to collaborate on tf2 mechanics, theory crafting forum threads are already a nightmare with just 600 posts from like 100 vocal people.

The only reason Valve gives any attention to the comp community at this point is because A) its free good press and B) most balance complaints we have are simple patches in a sea of patches they release regularly. They put news stories about the comp community in the blog because it takes no effort on their part and if anyone actually reads it, they can be like "hey look how great a game we made". We're good for making (mostly) balanced and polished maps, we make cool videos that are great press for their game, and we continue playing (some people for 7 years+). It's like free marketing.

Edit: I want to be clear, I'm not saying TF2 is dead or bullshit of that nature, this comp community has been growing and can probably sustain itself for a long time to come, but unless some crazy miracle growth happens, it's just not going to get a lot of support. Be as optimistic as you want, I'd love to see this game have an International and be crazy popular in a competitive format, but I'm being realistic.

Edit2: This all being said, if this lobby system does actually incorporate 6s, that'd be HUGE and would be an indication that Valve has seen enough growth from the comp community that they have decided to throw us a bone, essentially. All I'm trying to say is it seems unlikely the lobby will target 6s, more likely highlander or some kind of Dota-esquee pick ban system.

nice time 2 rank up and troll the steam forums again

Some of the GC messages mentionned in that thread are old, they're in the game since at least 2012:
https://github.com/wheybags/steamirc/blob/master/steamre/Resources/Protobufs/tf/tf_gcmessages.proto

It is correct TFPlayerSkillRatingAdjustement appeared recently though. It has three fields:
- players (a list of players I guess)
- steam_id
- match_type

Sounds hopeful, if we get the ability to make "custom" gametypes (i.e. they officially support HL but let 6s players play in the same sandbox), it may be the inch we need to take a mile.

The thing is it doesn't really take that much effort to support comp and because we are free marketing they should give us a truly fucking big bone, c'mon some people have been around as long as the actual TF2 team, for a relationship this long I would expect some marriage between the two colectives

http://weknowgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/its-happening-ron-paul-gif.gif

What kind of support do you want?
Would a single person here play Valve's 6s lobbies? Think about it: minimal (if ANY) weapon bans and class limits, and you'd be playing a lot of games with casuals before your ranking gets high enough to play each other.

I can't think of any significant support Valve could realistically offer with their miniscule TF2 team that would satisfy the competitive community.

You have the logic backwards anyway: Why should they give anything to the guys who have been playing the game for 7 years without "getting what they actually want" from Valve. Those players are the kind of people who won't quit this game any time soon (I'd know, I'm one of them). The vast majority of TF2 players are people who will never play more than 100 hours. They'll move on to another game unless they're heavily catered to because they're looking for a casual online experience. If Valve is worried about losing TF2 players, the competitive community is the LEAST of their worries for sure. Would you quit the game if these lobbies were only aimed at pub players? We are the only subsection of the TF2 community that Valve has zero incentive to support.

Koobadoobs pretty much took the words right out of my mouth. I'm not saying that Valve won't give us support, you're exactly right in saying we are the most valid people to throw a bone, but they get nothing out of actually throwing us a bone. If they throw us a bone, it makes us happy and they get more free press (which they're already getting plenty), and if they don't throw us a bone, nothing changes, everyone keeps playing the game.

It's wishful thinking to expect them to invest time and money when they aren't likely to see a return on their investment. They're a business, if they decide to give us support it'd be purely an act of charity and they have to actually see some kind of positive benefit for them to justify literally anything that won't immediately make them more money.

If they make a lobby for highlander, its possible it could have 6s compatibility since the framework is already there, but even that's a stretch and honestly, there would have to be some guy working at valve that would have to do it on his own time and his only reward would be a bunch of angry 6s players complaining about every bug. Unless of course, the TF2 team suddenly sees some kind of opportunity in the comp scene.

I apologize for the very long, very ranty posts lately, but my assignments at work have reached an all time low. :O]

r u impling that cs is a difiicualt game to grasp?
competitive depth and barrier to entry are not the same
hl requires almost no further reading than pub tf2 and understanding a movie from like 1972

I would play the Valve lobbies and in the long run being it the officially sanctioned system everyone would which means Valve makes more players happy, and happy players play more often for longer periods of time and buy more stuff, plus they get even more free press if they play it right, Dota 2 made headlines because of the huge prizepool if they build the right gaming platform for comp it could make them really rich just because they would be first to market with something people would love.

tl;dr: They do get something in return, but they have to play their cards in the right way to make it financially interesting.

I really don't want to keep arguing this because I'm just saying the same thing over and over again, but tf2 is a 7+ year old game. Why would they spend the extra resources in the first place just so they have to "play their cards right"? Its wishful thinking, nothing changes their already booming revenue if they do nothing.

They're a business and its a gamble they don't have to take. Their model of having community made weapons, community made maps, small but important seeming updates, and plenty of wacky things to buy from the store have made them plenty of money.

A game lobby that would appease a tiny portion of the tf2 community helps them as much as fixing stickies did: all it does is gets us off their back, but changing the stickies is changes lines of code. Making a lobby system is man hours that they don't need to pay people for.

I'd literally spend hundreds of dollars on official cosmetics/skins if they looked half as good as the Exertus uniforms in that SFM video. F2P got people into the game, and interest in comp would keep people here. The more time you invest in a game, the more likely you would be to support the developers/top teams, right? That's how my mind seems to work.

Guess we will have to agree to disagree, yes, this business model has reported them millions in revenue, but how much will the business model of Dota 2 report them if they make it a platform wide push?
The one who hits first hits twice, if Valve makes clear they support comp in all of their games they would build the kind of long-lasting community Nintendo had, we are both talking about business but at the same time have very different points of view as to how Valve should proceed

TF2 makes money catering to casual fps players, Dota makes money catering to competitive moba players. They already have CS:GO for competitive fps players and TF2 is doing just fine covering their casual player base. You can't just guarantee they'll build some kind of amazing community by doing the same thing over and over again.

Also, I dislike your Nintendo example as the majority of their games are targeted at a single audience. PC binge gamers are not a parallel audience to the often-more-casual Nintendo gamers.

However, for the sake of not continuing this argument (since we're the only ones interested in arguing over it), I'll agree to disagree.

You still need something to lure the casual fps players into this game instead of COD, Battlefield and Candy Crush, an Valve games also target pretty much one single audience so the Nintendo example fits in here.
Also this is business there's no guaranteed way to earn money.

implying it'd be one person against 6 heavy medic combos and some engineer

If it works like CSGO MM it will be better than tf2 center. TF2 center anyone can join, so sometimes you have a full team of invite players stacking a team, sometimes you have cancerous assholes who offclass and spam binds, and a lot of the time people don't show up with no penalty. This would put you against people of more equal skill, and punish people who don't join the game, or grief.

so, tf2lobby with a working karma system?

Hopefully we will see a HL matcmakingsystem, but even a ranked 12v12 with class limits of like 2 of each class or something would be really cool.

Ofc 6s matchmaking would be the very best, but that will only happen in my dreams...

C'mon valve, give us all three :)

Someone on the Facepunch forums who has leaked multiple updates so far (and has always been right so far) has leaked a couple of things:

I got no confirmation on any of the information, i just read it on Facepunch myself, hopefully it will be true, if not, here is so conspiracy

First, the following was added on yesterdays update:

"competitive_victory"
{
}

"competitive_skillrating_update"
{
"index" "short" // entindex of the player
"rating" "short" // skillrating
"delta" "short" // skillrating adjustment
}

(from resource/modevents.res)

Second, he said that the following is happening:

Competitive mode
New matchmaking and ranking

that made my dick so hard that it grew two inches and now its 4 inches.

my cock is so h4rd r1ght n0w

If this is true then holy shit I can believe it.

now i can tell ppl in pubs im global elite @ tf2

Lets just hope its 6v6 and/or highlander and not some weird shit they made up.

there'd be nothing wrong with them picking a dumb game mode as long as it works

the game doesn't really work with less than 10 players or more than 16, but any number in between the two could work well enough with proper class limits

Probably to see who the best bumperkart player is.

We actually had confirmation that they're working on implementing a matchmaking update in the Source SDK update last month (which I didn't notice until about last week).

Specifically, CTeamplayRoundBasedRules, which is where round logic is contained, was updated with some very interesting additions marked as "staging". In particular, references to a "rated tournament mode" and calculating a "skill rating adjustment" at the end of a match.

So yeah. It's happening.