Build an uber kill yourself, repeat a few times, have multiple ubers ready while defending a point, push out with 3 ready for backup, rofl.

ubercharge is set to 0% if you suicide and mediguns despawn if they arent picked up for 30 seconds

Yeah stop talking now please thanks. It doesn't retain uber if you kill yourself.

ninja'd

This is exactly why it's a problem. Winning mids will always hold a ton of weight in this game. If you lost mid and your medic died, but managed to kill their medic, the round isn't totally lost because you can stalemate with even ubers. If a team wins mid with weapon pickup where both medics died on mid, it's almost like the winning team's medic never died at all. You'll have more time to set up a sentry or maybe even hold second point, but you're still at a bigger disadvantage than you should be.

In a game where losing mids can be unforgiving, allowing a mechanic where you're being punished even more for losing mids seems a bit senseless to me.

However, it's hard to respawn and get to your medigun on mid before it disappears on certain maps. Granary might be the hardest, even if you get forward spawn.

I think they should just have mediguns be like gunboats/charging shields, in the sense that you can NOT pick them up at all. There's just too much bullcrap surrounding this topic, and it would be much simpler to get rid of the debate subject altogether.

TF2Center really is f^%ked up. I thought some of the stories about the admins were exaggerations and it wasn't as common as people made it out to be, but that was before one of the admins decided to pull their bullsh!t on me. I got banned from TF2Center today (I WAS USING ADBLOCK, I GAVE THEM NO MONEY ITS OKAY), and the admin lied in his post. TF2Center itself isn't f^&ked up, as their website has a fairly good-looking design and is pretty simple to use. Its just that the management and admins are amazingly unjust, and the way they give out bans and treat the users are magnificently retarded.

There's no reason to support/donate to these people, that's why nobody is using tf2center.

you're allowed to swear on the internet btw

my life is a (dang) lie

We've been playing the current season with the change allowed in ozfortress - and there's a thread up atm on feedback about it from ppl that have been using the change:

http://ozfortress.com/showthread.php?t=65168

I wonder if it would be worth while to play around with the command to set the life time of dropped weapons more.

Right now we are using it to set the weapons to disappear immediately, but what about reducing the time from default (preventing the chance for a medic to reclaim their own uber unless they die right near their spawn) and forcing teams to move more quickly on bombs/won fights to claim the enemy uber.

I could imagine that if you make the time short enough that even if the case of winning a fight you would still have to place your medic in a high risk position to effectively claim the enemy medigun.

I could be wrong about this, but the command we are using to remove weapon drops doesn't actually remove them, it just sets the decay time for the dropped weapons to 0. So what about setting it to 10-15 seconds (or maybe even less), so that it disappears shortly after the average spawn time, or even more the average spawn time.

We could play with the mechanic, and also provide valve with a potentially viable solution (or at least better highlight the problem we currently have with the mechanic).

does the timer reset if you pick up a weapon and drop it again?

I'm fairly certain it is a full reset of the timer when you pick up a weapon, because you are technically dropping a new weapon which would have a new timer. So you can juggle multiple weapons, but in practice I feel like that mechanic is going to be too cumbersome to pull off effectively in a game (especially if you set the timer low enough that you don't have time to make a push, retreat, and then pick up another medigun that you "stored" a charge in). You'd end up spending more of your time managing dropped guns and less time building and positioning. It's also fairly tricky to get them to fall where you want them, so walking a medigun into a position would be super tedious.

Right now you can definitely do that, there is enough time to effectively juggle 2 or even 3 mediguns (if the situation presents itself where you can get that many with reasonable charge in all of them).

EDIT: not sure if this resets the timer to what is default by valve, or what is set by the source command. That really depends on what exactly that command is changing.

I believe it does not 100% sure

If the medic's dumb he might run in, but in most situations where you won mid, you could clear out the enemy team from mid in less than 15 seconds, and when you can't it's better to keep your med alive anyway.

All this would really change is it'd stop picking up your own medigun, but the bigger issue between the two choices is picking up the other medic's medigun. If the dead medic can't pick it up anymore, then the alive one's no worse off if he doesn't take it, so it either does nothing or snowballs just as hard as before.

You might be able to call that a step in the right direction I guess, but you're arguably punishing medics harder for dying since they can't pick up their mediguns again, while all their out of position deaths still give the other medic uber, with no real reason to have any of that in the game in the first place. Setting the decay time to 0 is still the much better option, all that comes from medigun pickups the way they are is bad no matter their despawn time.

I thought it was cool to censor yourself with symbols...

The times I offered as examples are just that, examples. I don't know what time would work best if this was something the leagues wanted to try, gut reaction says that 10 seconds would be the max window that is still viable.

As for your other points:

For mid-fights, chances are if your medic lives you're team will have more charge than what they could pick up. Theoretically you medic could spend the next 30 seconds walking both mediguns forward from mid, through second, and into position for a push into last, but in that time they won't be building effectively, and the other team probably will be.

For other fights, if you drop the enemy medic and then push, yes, it is possible to completely win that fight in 10-15 seconds and then claim the enemy medigun. But this change would also mean that sacking for the enemy medic in those situations is still a viable play for both teams. You can be rewarded offensively for taking that risk. And Defensively you can still suicide at the end of a fight that you lost to kill their medic.

Finally, for medics who die out of position, honestly (and I am a medic main) I feel like it is appropriate to punish a medic heavily for dying out of position. It is even more fair when you consider that if you realize you are out of position and likely to die you can very easily switch to any other weapon, or kill bind, and completely deny the other team your uber percent.

It isn't a perfect fix, I think better tweaks would be a decay rate for uber% in dropped weapons, or a fixed reduction in charge whenever a gun is dropped (which would require medics to keep track of advantages more precisely or risk picking up a gun with less uber than they had before). But we can't make those changes, valve has to. This might be a viable solution in competitive which would allow us to play with the mechanic so that valve has a bit more data to work with should they want to make a change of their own moving forward.

Fair enough, but for:

Losing the round/needing to hold last against an uber with nothing is pretty severe for dying a bit forward/not already backed out when they push, which happens to every medic, even if you'd like to see medics get punished more. Basically ensuring you're going to die if you really go far forward, and losing uber advantage if you die no matter where you are is enough for me.

We already know what's wrong. It's way too severe, and brings in huge problems for next to no upsides. The most meaningful data we could give to valve is that there's only one league that doesn't have it banned completely, and judging by that thread aporia linked, they don't want it around either.

I guess it was more the two fold of being out of position and not switching weapons. Most medics have a decent idea of when they are out of position and royally screwed. They were going to die in that position anyway, so they aren't being punished more for it unless they also chose to die with their medigun out. Outside of an instant kill from a spy for a sniper there is always that window of time where you can react to a bomb and either pop or change weapons.

That said, you make fair points, and I definitely agree, as it is right now the mechanic is broken for competitive play. But I don't think the right answer is to just outright ban it. I'm worried that valve isn't going to see that as our form of constructive criticism of their change, and more as another chapter in a long history of the competitive community rejecting changes they have made to their own game.

The problem with decaying charge in dropped mediguns is that it becomes impossible to count ubers because you can't know if they picked up your gun and if they did, how much charge it had left. Uber counting becomes complete guesswork.

I think my favorite suggestion for tweaking this mechanic is a constant drop in percent when a gun is dropped. Something akin to cutting the built charge in half once the gun is dropped.

The reason I prefer this solution is it becomes a big gamble to pick up any uber, you have to keep track of the uber advantages, enough to know if even after the drop penalty the gun you are picking up has more change than you did originally. Because if it doesn't, then you've not only gained no advantage, but you've also cut your own percent in half as well by trying to pick up the other medigun.

I really like the idea of being able to pick up a different kind of medigun in the middle of a round. There is a lot of potential for creative plays built around that. I'd love to see clutch plays from soldiers running out of rockets but being able to pick up another launcher and get off that last critical shot. I think the mechanic could be so cool in competitive (at least for the spectators) I just wish that we could do more than manipulate the despawn timer because waiting on an update for valve seems a bit wishful (at least until match making actually drops)

if the enemy medic died second with 50% uber and respawned to mid to pick it back up couldnt the response of the medic with 0% be to just 6 man back and force a fight to kill the medic before they got to 100% instead of playing the choke spam game and losing automatically?

This scenario would force the medic with 50 to either back up and concede mid or fight and possibly die, either way fights would be more prevalent and so would point caps.

...

change my view i guess

more action =/= better gameplay

But you can't possibly know if the other team has built poorly sometimes, and what seems to be an educated and good decision can instead punish you because you overestimated how much the other medic actually built, which is not your own fault. This suggestion is better than it is currently, but you should just be able to see how much uber % the other medigun has without having to pick it up.

that wasn't really my point at all though, it changes the core aspects of the build uber and push meta, that doesnt make gameplay worse, it makes it different, so im not sure what youre even trying to say.

It does. I played a lobby where someone tried to juggle a dropped 80% uber medigun and his own from snake second to lobby. It took a long time.

pushing on disadvantage 6v6 is riskier and less likely than trying to hold last with engy/heavy/pyro/whatever. why is this seen as a better alternative? people would do this in all situations without the medigun change if this was a good idea

?

in the current state of the game you have no opportunity to get your uber back.

if I had 0% and the enemy had ~30-60% the risk/reward of taking a 0% uber fight into them would be phenomenal as now I could make a play from behind and come out vastly on top with the enemy dead medics 60% gun.

if their medic went down, the remaining players would just sack your med super hard so theirs would spawn first, and they could grab the charged gun. And every other play where you try to get their medigun would result in your medic getting focused super hard. You'd have to play so far back that you'd probably lose 8-10 seconds of building by the time you actually reached the 60% uber gun. It pretty much only works if you kill their medic and actually take and hold the ground in a whole team fight, and doing that without uber usually favors the defender, making it a bad play without some big advantage.

this is way too hypothetical for my tastes but hopefully what i mean makes sense. basically meds are going to get focused so hard that the new meta would reward passive combo play

@flame

idk if you're thinking of a different scenario than me, but if ur med dies at the end of a midfight that you won ur gonna be close to uber. it sounds like ur saying u want the team that lost mid to instantly push 6v6 through a choke or shutter door with no advantages to speak of into someone who almost has uber by the time you push

am i missing something

the risk is you're almost certainly going to lose the round. the reward is huge too, no doubt but that doesn't make the risk/reward good lmao. that's like betting all of your money against 10:1 odds because the payoff is good if you win

As I've actually witnessed, it's entirely possible to have your medic die late on mid, and because of forward spawning, have the enemy medic come and pick up the dropped 60-80% uber charge that was dropped due to your scout chasing the enemy med down. Now you're pretty much sure to lose the round unless they screw up - whereas before you would've at least been able to get uber somewhat later than they would - because the gun stays on the ground for ~30 seconds, so they've got plenty of time to forward spawn and get the gun.

All this mechanic does is help a team that is winning continue to win. *Maybe* you'll be able to push from a disadvantageous position and kill the enemy medic and take his gun and snowball forward, but if you fail you've pretty much thrown the round away.

It also completely disincentivizes pushing and not popping immediately because if you happen to drop, you just handed the other team a full uber unless you kill their medic immediately *and* manage to cap the point to stop him from respawning and running back up to the gun (assuming he has a decent spawn timer and a relatively advantageous forward spawn position). .

I'm pretty sure there's a capture point between last and middle that can allow you an opportunity to force the other team's uber. I don't think "we have huge uber adv because their med died on mid and we won mid with our medic able to pick up their medigun in time", is ample to win a round.

It's kinda cool for comebacks, but if you're on the receiving end it's a nightmare.

I'm going to quote some of my post on ozfort about this (aporia pasted the link before, but meh):

TL;DR I think just in general it wrongly encourages teams to make rash decisions and can cause you to take really unfavourable fights in hopes of not losing more than you already have/potentially will.

i personally think it would be a perfectly fine thing if the time it stays on the ground was changed to about ~23-24 seconds instead of 30.