Well surely if Valve kept it that way the meta would work itself out somehow, its not like we would just stop playing the game, but my point is that from my horrible experience in that week (both in 6v6 and HL) this is the most dynamic and fast paced meta possible for the game, it's just so balanced across the 3 fragging classes, each one has its duties and strong points, and also its flaws and shortcomings. Messing with any of these core classes is stupid imo. Why would you change what's working fine.

This is pretty much my stance as well, well put

I'm kind of curious now, what main things would you change to improve the balance of the game?

did any of you actually play during the sticky spam nerf? games went really fast and traps were unaffected. sentries were still focused by soldier/spy/sniper/pipes so they weren't broken. the game was fine and nobody gave it a chance

The nerf broke pubs. Sentries were hard enough for pubbers to destroy without teamwork. Then they took away the sentry's hard counter.

LOL wut? I played 4 or 5 HL games on a Plat level and it was atrocious, you literally couldn't push past a certain point, the entry damage in pushes was laughable and a wrangled sticky would take 16 stickies (2 full clips) to take down. A demo was useless.

Also played a few 6s games and mids were horrible, there was no entry damage and mids were really really drawn out because fragging classes didnt have enough dmg to follow up. Pushes were horrible for a demo, you basically had to limit yourself to sit behind and spam pipes and laying a carpet of stickies, any push you lead with a demo was instant failure

weird, because I seem to remember that sentries were almost completely unkillable, heavies getting continually buffed actually countered demos rather than vice versa, and that demos in 6s were frequently bottomdamaging and contributing almost nothing to games, and that sometimes they did more going heavy

Honestly just stop.

smobo youre a nob

I played both highlander and 6s during the sticky nerf.

Highlander was unbearable. Good luck getting a wrangled sentry down when even all 8 stickies won't even kill it. Yea, you could still focus the gun down more, but it still really slowed down pushes. It made highlander payload much, MUCH slower, and made pushing into any 5cp map impossible. 5cp on highlander is already frustrating to win any rounds on, and the scrims we did on 5cp during this time usually ended in 1-0's, or in one stupid case went 0-0 after 2 halfs.

It actually looked like it slowed down 6s. Scouts could stand on the highground without being punished at all since stickies did like 30 damage. Since sticky traps still did full damage, attempting to dry push was made harder because you would not only have to push the enemy out with barely any sticky damage from your demo, your soldiers couldn't jump to gain room for the team because the scouts had completely free reign over the highground.

I agree with you that maybe there could be some changes to the game that could make it more interesting/fast paced to watch, but drastically changing a class' default weapons after 7 years is not going to be well received.

is there any way to use tftrue or a similar plugin to actually test the nerf/any other nerf we think of to actually play test some changes?

because this is just a circular argument where no one is really listening to each other

I think a command was discussed after the nerf.

1. not to stalk you, but i did play against your team in a scrim that week (5 days of scrims and reverted before the next match), and i remember playing a good half against your team, then we restarted to apply the update, and you guys did a lot better (we were both demo, and you're much better than me at it). i looked up logs of this and found that you didn't play 5cp highlander during that week, i looked at sizzling stats too and found nothing.
2. i'm looking at capture times from my high gold HL team from S13 vs. my low plat HL team from S14, both on badwater week:

Nerf round Times:
9:45
9:12
13:46
3:30
7:21
8:50
8:27
12:21
12:20
7:40
7:02
8:10
8:10
average: 8.901 minutes

Normal round times:
10:42
10:41
16:35
9:40
9:50
9:49
7:02
7:02
13:47
11:29
5:45
3:51
6:11
6:10
avg: 9:11

so in my experience nerf averaged 8:54 and no nerf averaged 9:11. sizzling stats didn't work for this so i just used every log i was in that wasn't broken

this is within a margin of error, but i think it goes to show that the nerf did not ruin highlander

I know it was pretty rude of me to call you an asshole a while back (for the record, you didn't deserve it and i'm sorry), but if your response is to insult me whenever you see me, you're just adding validity to it.

Nice, now let's just remove all the weapons and the ability to block points. The game will be so much faster better!

you played on a different team and against different teams so those round times mean absolutely nothing

i'm contesting the point huck made when he said "It made highlander payload much, MUCH slower". At the very least, it stayed pretty much the same while making other classes more dominant.

I believe that it made the game more fun for non-demos without seriously impacting the pace. I also enjoyed playing demo that week with more of a loose rotating flank-combo role focused on pipes.

I think TFTrue undid it (i know SOMETHING did), so I would expect it to be possible to re-do it.

I guess the main question is would the changes noticeabley impact the pacing of 6s since I'm trying to make a reasonable nerf for all formats without affecting them too much in a negative manner. Just to re-iterate what they'd be since the video is on lock on my laptop:

Identical Radius to that of a rocket (once trap mode enables stickies return to their original radius)
Slightly brighter sticky trails (doesn't effect traps)
BellCurve Damage System (Mid-range damage for stickies is unaffected, but stickies gradually deal less damage in non airburst ranges. I even made an annotating suggestion a slight buff to the initial reload speed on the Pill Launcher) This one doesn't apply to buildings or the kritzkrieg.

Thanks for the discussion I guess.

Just nerf it already jeez.. then these scout mains can stop bitching and wreck shit on mids like they've always wanted.

my opinion of these changes:

radius: would possibly be acceptable in terms of limiting raw dmg on say a mid fight, but would make demos even worse in 1v1 situations, as demos don't just use pipes to fight off bombing sollies and +forwarding scouts as some people seem to believe, but use stickies as a deterrent- this nerf would make that more difficult and you'd see more scouts and soldiers going for high-risk high-reward plays, only their risk would be lessened

brighter sticky trails: would be great if it could be implemented without killing everyone's fps. idk if it can though.

bellcurve damage system: I really don't like this because it punishes a more difficult aspect of using stickies.

honestly, I think the only really viable nerf would be to reduce stickies from like 8 to 6.

why should demos be good at 1v1s?
using stickies at point blank is hard, but it doesn't justify making them basically a second RL when you've mastered them. Especially since almost every problem with demo has to do with the fact he doesn't really need a team to win the game on offense or defense if he's good enough. nerf engi/heavy then make demo have even shittier close range abilities than now and pubbies wouldn't complain about him because they'd actually be able to kill demo pub stompers without being on their skill level, even when they're in the range where demo is weak

I think with a minor pipe buff (like 100 minimum damage + slightly better reload time) a sticky nerf would be a lot easier to swallow.

edit: sticky and easy to swallow jesus christ

let's nerf demoman by putting lots of low ceilings everywhere so they can only shoot stickies like 3 feet forward

make radius a ramp up rather than instantly a huge radius the size of the moon
and "for the sake of pub balance" make it so that crit stickies do more self damage or something idk who cares

Both of these are really good ideas despite whats been said earlier.

I feel like reducing the overall damage of stickies by like 10-15 percent is good enough of a nerf.

Wasn't everyone, including most demo mains, okay with applying the damage ramp up thing to blast radius and calling it a day?

Wouldn't a foot reduction in blast radius be easier to implement.

Thank you for the most constructive post yet.

I've always thought Demo's OPness was balanced by the fact that his OPness makes him a priority pick.

Demo has more potential, but can't extend to all of it because 4 players on the other team will happily suicide to kill him. So like, Demo Potential = 100 but he only uses 80.

Scouts and soldiers have less potential, but they can extend themselves to all of it because they're less important (and trading with demo or med is worth it). So scout/soldier potential = 80 and they use all 80

So they balance out.

I dunno much about HL balance but I imagine that Demo is still a priority pick and if that's the case then I'd say it's about the same.

The only reason demo is OP in pubs is because most players aren't even sure what class they're playing, much less have knowledge about their jobs and roles and tactics to fight with or against demos.

A shitload of games that are considered balanced have symmetrical sides with dynamic imbalances; chess, quake, tf2, street fighter. The chess community for example doesn't go around saying "queens broken, pawns need a buff", because having different pieces that server different purposes or have different (including weaker/stronger) properties can deepen the strategy of the game i.e. trading knights for bishops and playing open positions or killing the enemy medic and then getting buffs and blobbing around your medic. Demo plays into this system of dynamic imbalances, but this game isn't like quake where dynamic imbalances come from position on the map and weapon/armor pickups so if you remove class imbalances completely it becomes a lot more about execution and tactics and there's less of a strategy to the game imo. Not that that's entirely bad clan arena is highly tactical but strategically its pretty much just "focus fire and don't get killed" or "do damage and don't get killed" tf2 has more options like you can try to get specific picks or whatever to create dynamic imbalances that favor you. I feel like if demo was really overpowered he would be the only important player on the team and I don't think that's really true from my experience since i've seen teams get carried by scouts soldiers and demos and the best teams are usually the ones with the best on all classes.

queen isn't overpowered because every player is both a queen and pawn
it's like calling the bottle UP

it's not like in CS where there is a risk of running a certain class if one class is objectively better than all others either since you can keep running that class indefinately even if you're being out DMd and losing every round

getting carried is a function of skill difference, not class, and even then demo scales the most with a high skill differential since he has 12 rockets and his only downside is they're hard to aim if the skill level is even

if you want to make the game balanced for HL/Pubs, without ruining 6s, you'd need to make it so there's no free wins (there aren't any in 6s) by nerfing defensive heavy and engi stacks, and nerfing the ability of individual demomen to win with basically no contest from lower skill players because demo is so powerful if he hits shots