he'll be back

another factor to consider is the fact that a new generation of players is coming in.
and a lot of these people have never known the game any different to how it already is.
in its earlier days (not even early, let's say 2010-ish), the game still struck a decent balance between cartoony artstyle and solid gameplay. not to suggest these are mutually exclusive, but when you look at the current state of the game it reeks of stale cash-cow.

however, you don't have to have been playing since 2007 to know that the public game has changed a lot over the past few years - people who have started within the past two years and only play pubs are taking the "norm" to be conga taunts, parachutes, trade servers, quickplay and ridiculous miscs.

hats and cosmetics have slowly gotten worse and worse - they've now become monthly meme-fests which are guaranteed money for valve. taking me back to my original point - the current pub playerbase has started into a community where buying all the new hats is more of a common occurrence, and look at my new heavy hat it's a pink moustache!!goes rly nice iwhth my hatWOW this GAMe is So WACKy AND RenDoM XD

I blame Pinion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8egy3tt20tc

http://i.gyazo.com/7de150d5d75156ed631c3d338b78fe2a.png

Seems like they've taken the skill out of the weapons to appeal to new players who otherwise couldn't get kills. When I walk out of spawn and a tide-turner demoknight charges blindly around the corner and kills me multiple times, how could I possibly be having fun?

Usually when you die in an fps it's fair, you know that you got beaten by a player with more skill than you or you made a mistake. In pub TF2 that's almost never the case; the only mistake you made was clicking that quick-play button.

guy that actually got me into competitive, was a decent guy too
oh well

im actually really unsure of the 'cynical and hostile' comment.

even the angriest, rantiest, outwardly rude people in the community are down to help. I don't wanna name names or look in the mirror but I actually have yet to see anyone I would consider 'toxic' by normal definitions when it comes to video games.

You can pretty much go to anybody in IM and above and have an intelligent conversation with them, with the exception of dingo's team.

TF2s toxicity comes from everyone having conflicting ideas on what is best for the community and it leading to arguments, but that toxicity is what drives people to make things better/fix them.

A lot of the people 'leaving' tf2 now more or less need to escape and now is very convenient. I'm not downplaying anything but I think Lange is too smart to be wasting his time trying to make it big with TF2 and he will surely find success elsewhere in his software path.

I dont agree with anyone's decision to go full time into TF2 but that's kind of the point right. This game was never a game you could commit 100% of your free time to. Hit the gym, finish school, get a career path going, and live life.

If you want examples of toxicity and cynicism you need to look at the big pictures. I had TheFragile tell me multiple times to not even show up to GXL because of all the shit I stirred with issues on the scheduling/event overall but he fucking manned up and the event was really successful, and at the end of the day there was no bad blood between us because we both knew we wanted what was seemingly 'best' for everyone.

Theres a difference between 'intense' and 'cynical' and that line needs to be drawn for some people before they start posting that this game is 'dead' or that the tf2 community is 'hostile'.

But again a highlander spy main isn't the poster boy for competitive tf2, I just wish someone with such a deep pub following would get their facts straight before shaming this beautiful dysfunctional family we have here.

I've kind of been wondering why pubbing TF2 became less enjoyable for me in the past year or so and I'm realizing it does go back to the quickplay change like others are saying.

People probably view community servers as breeding mediocrity, but I feel like community run servers help drive a lot of players to want to improve their skills over time, and for many they plant the seeds to progress to competitive play. Some individuals take advantage of that, while others are just happy in their community. Community servers are like a bunch of little islands waiting to be explored. They each have their own customs, their own "community leaders" etc. A community server creates consistency, and players develop rapport and respect for eachother over time. A hierarchy of skill is established, and people most want to impress on those that they respect, so there is more invested in the public games.

Outsiders find it fun to hop into these community servers and get a peak into these little environments to see how they fit in and compare against the 'best' regulars. Regulars of the server get exposure to the highly skilled players that come through, and in having a solid understanding of the skill hierarchy of their server can better absorb the difference.
"Wow, joe pubstar came in and was dominating the best guy on our server by doing x and y, let me add those to my game"

I feel like you lose almost all of that at a valve server. When I goto a valve server I'm not taking a peak into some community, it is just an empty feeling assembly of players randomly brought together. It feels like it misses some element that I've always enjoyed in pubbing FPS games for years. There's no community, no identity behind it, no regulars, so I feel a lot less interested and invested in playing there or competing with whoever is randomly assembled.

Speaking of getting your facts straight, when did I ever say anything at all about tf.tv? Dare I say you are being a little...cynical? Maybe even...a little hostile towards me? ;)

I'm not a part of this community and have no opinion of it, other than a rather sore awareness that I inevitably get down-fragged to oblivion and insulted no matter how helpful I try to be. Despite that, I think this place is very important to the competitive community, and I have a great appreciation for that. No hard feelings.

Are you trying to illustrate my point or counter it?

Anyway, thanks to the people who have offered kind words. I'll miss many of you and have no ill-will towards the rest. Best of luck guys, keep competitive and TF2 thriving for as long as you can.

It was a pleasure and an honor to fight by your side, my lupine friend.

Shut up, rem. I love you.

idk man if i had like 6k hours on one class i'd bounce too

They always come back

I'm gonna second this. I used to love pubbing and I still manage to enjoy it sometimes but it's nothing like it used to be. I used to blame it on the staggering incompetency of pub players but I've since decided that it's not really their fault. Most pub players have never been given motivation to expand and experiment with new weapons and tactics because the game is never fucking updated. There's never any changes to weapons even though more than half of them are pretty much useless and therefore never used. And instead of doing that we get stuff like new taunts and the BASE Jumper which just further encourages the average pubbers apathy to the objectives.

Probably the only time I've truly been pissed at Valve was when I heard Robin Walker say he wanted to see more innovation in comp. How the hell can you demand innovation when nothing ever gets changed? It's not like it requires entire new mechanics, and they don't even have to think of the ideas themselves. I don't see what they have to lose. If a weapon sucks oh well, it sure won't be the first one and definitely won't be the last. One of the best ideas I ever heard was giving the Liberty Launcher increased knockback in exchange for 3 rockets. It's an airshot machine. That's like the funnest thing I've ever heard of.

anyways ya pubs kinda suck now

I was illustrating your point, sorry for the confusion.

Yeah, now that I've actually PLAYED Dota quite a bit since that quote from Robin was actually relevant it only confirms my initial thought that he was completely talking out of his ass. The MAJOR difference between Dota and TF2 about it's "meta shifts" and "innovations" in the comp scene are that they usually happen when there are major gameplay balances to heroes and items. In Dota, these updates happen usually once every few months, so the meta shifts around these changes. Different heroes become popular. 6.82 made Ogre Magi immensely popular in the competitive scene for a long time to where he was in almost every match I watched. In 6.83 that's set to drop in a few days, he's getting a nerf.

TF2 doesn't have any of this. It's impossible to innovate or change the meta when the game itself barely changes at all, or more shit gets added in that's completely useless anyways. The unlock stat changes that got them were kind of interesting for a while, but it seems like Valve just stopped caring about it once again.

That was kind of my point though. Like you thinking I'm being hostile or cynical towards you is what the issue is right, like the people who have known me for 6 years would just be like 'thats just flame being flame'.

I don't have a problem with you or anyone in this community at all, I'm actually quite impressed by the fact you had a consistent following and were one of the few to succeed in streaming this game. I do have an issue on a bigger level though because you telling r/tf2 (an undeniably legitimately sized subreddit) that the tf2 community is cynical or hostile.

Regardless of how I present myself I'm just curious where those feelings came from and why you chose those words specifically. Regardless of whether you meant to or not, just typing stuff like that to a large audience puts a big dent in the work of people trying to actively recruit people to our scene (similar to how the melee/smash community did when their game was slowly declining) such as eXtv, comp.tf, and the twitch tf2 community in general.

Valve used to make big changes, but players (pub and comp) flipped out on them and scared them into ever changing the game up again. Even if you didn't like them (do you really think Dota players graciously accept every change?), Quick-Fix, Short Circuit, Sticky nerf were all big Dota-style changes that the community rejected to keep the game the same.

You don't think it's a bit cynical to assume I'm talking about tf.tv? Or hostile to (presumably) dismissively call me a "highlander spy main"? Perhaps I just misunderstood.

My feelings come from interaction with the community as a whole, not any one place or source. I said it to encourage people to be more positive and friendly, which I think is what this game needs dearly to survive.

Thanks for clarifying and the respectful words.

I don't know why this is being treated like a mystery. I've yet to see a thread where stabby is either brought up or posted that he's not mocked for being a spy main. Its kind of one of the points of the whole "toxic community" discussion going on in the other thread

I'm getting reminders of when etf2l told people that you can't use the tftrue setting that reverts the sticky bomb change, during the week-ish that was a thing, and people genuinely telling the admin that they're killing the game

I mean, from a logical standpoint, yeah that dmg nerf was prolly the worst way to go about normalizing the sticky launcher (I believe everyone agrees on a blast-radius ramp up, which would be a logical change that emphasizes skill, always the best option when thinking up changes), but people were calling hell over it, so no wonder valve's a bit afraid to change anything

But it's exactly as you said. DOTA players don't graciously accept every change but that doesn't stop Valve from making them, so that's not an excuse to stop making them in TF2. Besides the only one of those changes you listed that we outright rejected was the sticky change, which was made in complete disregard of the design of the game. Making stickies only useful for traps would be like making rockets only useful for jumping.

The quick-fix was used for the better part of an entire season including LAN grand finals. Valve got pages and pages and pages of feedback, and literally hundreds of STVs and VODs to look at. Clear problems with the weapon were outlined. But there was never any change to it.

Besides, those two events are pretty much the only times in the last 3 or 4 years that Valve made a major change. I'd call them anomalies not regular changes that stopped when people got mad.

i mean those changes were the dota equivalent of buffing a hero to god tier. it's gonna be 100% ban or damn near it, and a month or two later they nerf that hero because oh shit we made him TOO good, but it doesn't break the game because you can just opt to not deal with that via banning.

esea banned quickfix. it's pretty much exactly the same thing except instead of reworking it again they said wow you guys dont accept our item we're done with you!

I actually think that's a fucking terrible idea but I suppose that's a bit of a tangent from the rest of this thread

anyways stabby is actually chill as fuck and I don't think he's ever raged a single time in a team environment, goodnight sweet prince

He never dismissively called you a "highlander spy main," but i understand that with how much we care about our format and wanting it to grow, representing ourselves with a player maining a class we dont like in a format we dont play seems a little counterproductive.

Why do you think that?

TN friends 4ever stabby :)

how does ugc deal with the quickfix if it's so bad? i know the 6s scene is weak but still. and wasnt heavy a factor in the ban too? he's been nerfed since then. i don't really wanna get into this again but i'm just saying. of course valve definitely needs to follow up on balancing, still haven't gotten that fucking sticky nerf.

etf2l is trying out new unlocks and players are telling them the same thing, lol. one of the funny things is 90% of that shit will never get used in a match anyway. give players a chance and theyll figure out counters to the stuff that does get used, anyway. the guy that hosts arena:respawn tells me teams figured out counters to shit like the short circuit, which as we know is something of a task to get pubbers and 6s/HL players to do

I actually took a glance at that, saw people thinking that direct hit will ruin the metagame

I don't remember the last time I saw someone in ESEA even use a direct hit

That's where it all started. Love you, man.

-ts-, baby! :]