Require and limit medic to 1, and then just all the same cfg permissions as pub servers. I don't mind dx9 being a requirement but they should absolutely optimize it more in that case. Early TF2 beta days I had bordering 300 fps constant on my old, worse PC. Surely they'd be able to achieve the same again if they focused on it (loltf2dead).

Other than that, the usual moba stuff. Stacked teams made the majority of matches unplayable, but I assume those people are gonna get thrown into their own premade-only pool at some point.

Time to add [teamfortress.tv] to usernames bois

It does seem like a lot of issues & exploits stem from the odd choice of round-start mechanics. Lack of freezetime is weird too since it doesn't even match pubs, but really the static jumps we're all used to give the most options to everyone. Most non-explosive classes are either faster or have items to run faster anyway. The only classes disadvantaged by it are sniper/spy/engy, but long-range/cloak/buildings are arguably good-enough tradeoffs for not getting to mid as quickly when you're in a situation where nobody's playing optimally anyway (and really, sniper already works fine on mids anyway).

Freezetime+static jumps is just an easier setup for everyone because you know exactly where you'll be starting the round from and when you can move, and the med can get whoever they want. All they have to do is remove some of the crap spawns, like the ones towards the back of rooms or on the side further from the route to mid, and it'll be pretty balanced for all classes.

I imagine they'll eventually allow map choices since MvM does, or at the very least, gametype. Maybe once they iron other stuff out they'll use that to see what maps/modes people actually want to play?

Very positive experience overall.
I had lost interest in tf2 but played both stress tests until I was kicked out at 3-4am.

Impressed with how quickly games were found.

Going from my normal 130 fps to 40 during fights was brutal. I do have an old GPU so I can't complain too much.
If I'm not allowed disable rag dolls or gibs I'd like to see the detritus toned down. Half the map covered in blood can't be helping my frames.

Noticed some bugs. I'll send Valve an email in detail but the worst was while queuing with a friend we had to remake the party after each match or else he'd be unable to connect to the next game despite being listed in my party and I'd have to play a 5v6. He didn't get any abandon warnings/penalties at least.

Nearly every game was a roll but skill balancing is obviously not the focus at this stage of the beta. Had a good laugh watching my Medic, Spy, Pyro, Engi, and Sniper get lost on the way to Snakewater mid against Zoob and some of his comp buddies. Preventing solo queues from meeting full stacks down the line would be nice or I could see that being essential to get to the top ranks.

It was great to see so many pubbers interested in comp and keen to win. Had a medic every game and even some voice coms (which sounded clearer than I expected).

games were fun, valve's washington servers are incredible.

might wanna check your settings or look into whats going on with your pc. my computer is worth 3/4ths of that and handles dx9 fine 120fps stable.

edit: double posted lmao i need a coffee -_-

You can use conga and go through the doors at the beginning of rounds

it was really fun, but my poor 6970 cannot handle the baby oil doused models of dx9

if you solo queue this is unfun

playing on a dustbowl pub on blu is more fun than soloqueuing

I don't have a lot of friends who have the mobile authenticator so dang

It was hard to balance winning and throwing but it was a ton of fun.
I also enjoy seeing well known players scattered throughout the mix of pubbers.

Queue times were really fast +1 valve

this time i played on american servers as an american, as opposed to servers in madrid, stockholm, or luxembourg. everything was generally lots more smooth for whatever reason :)

if I see one more fucking spy to mid. But it was fun, class limits seem needed. Had no issue with no one wanting to play med. I wish they used freeze time in spawn.

Pretty fun when playing with friends

It's pretty much finished so I think they should just release it when they're done with the campaigns so they can use those servers

Spawn positions still matter with in spawn jumps because if the medic has a far back spawn the demo can't jump as far with his initial jump or he won't get a buff. I completely understand the reasoning behind spawn doors locking.

What I don't understand too well is the enforcement of certain cvars related to graphics. I can see the point when it's related to attracting new players watching streams to the game, but in an ideal esports situation the most watched streams will be matches like on tftv and these are always in high quality in any case. Not allowing people to change things that are common in graphics configs, boost framerates significantly and don't detract from the look of the game too much such as gibs, ragdolls and shadows really don't make sense to force on to me. I can understand more significant changes like lighting effects and dx9 which I can imagine is becoming harder and harder for valve to support.

One of the big complaints people have about overwatch right now is visual noise and tf2 can be made to be very clean with configs. People asking "how do you get your game to look like x" is normally because they want to use these settings, not because they're confused and it detracts from their understanding of the game.

Queue time was super fast, rolled several of the matches. However, I do hate the fact that I cannot disable shadows, gibs, and ragdolls. The amount of clutter really pisses me off.

I was matched to all NA servers, all under 40 ping. I was lucky enough to get someone who healed me during the game, so that was pretty good.

Overall it was pretty decent, and I'm hyped for what is gonna come in the near future.

It's actually ridiculous to me that a company like Blizzard that have never made an FPS before manages to roll out their matchmaking in their brand new game with very few problems with most of the issues being a few choices that the community disagree with that they'll fix later down the line.

Meanwhile Valve have had so much of the groundwork done already with our competitive community having done all of it and somehow the matchmaking is still (from my perspective) a complete shitshow in beta with so many cvars forced, doors not opening for a few seconds rather than not being able to move in spawn and the game coordinator going down a fuckload.

I don't prefer Overwatch to TF2 and I really want TF2's matchmaking to be awesome, so I'm not boycotting anything or trying to say people should play Overwatch instead but honestly whether it's in beta or not I really don't think they've actually done that great of a job so far, especially considering the resources I believe they have. I hope it improves a lot.

except overwatch had the same issue during their first months and stress weekend. the game servers lagged horribly for the first day of that weekend and there were tons of bugs when it came to the matches. blizzard forces a ton of annoying options on as well (ex: sun that makes it impossible to see anything when you're walking towards the first stage in gibraltar and other maps).

this is why companies run stress tests in the first place lol. tf2 mm is still relatively new to the public dude, don't sign off on it just yet.

I haven't signed off of it, my point is more about the cvars and weird choices than anything too. Blizzard don't give you the option to change these things in the first place, so they don't force annoying options in that sense. The competitive TF2 community has done a lot of the ground work for them and they've had 9 years to look and see that many of these things are silly.

Overwatch was also a brand new game so the stress test was not only for matchmaking but the game itself generally. TF2 is an established game that has been out forever, has a matchmaking sort of mode in MvM, a good idea of the numbers of people that are interested, other games that already use these sorts of features and still it's falling short. I know we love the game and we want to praise any progress at all even if some things are a bit wackey but you can't just say it's great surely?

TF2 Matchmaking Beta
Stress Test

What part of that don't you understand? The priority isn't working out the nitty gritty of which commands will be enabled, the point currently is to make sure the servers actually work when thousands of people are trying to connect at once. If you took part in today's test then I'm sure you understand why that needs to be prioritised over random commands?

All I can remember about the first couple weeks of Overwatch Beta was it being incredibly unstable and shitty to find matches for.

It seems like the MM beta for TF2 is in fact better because even though it had the same problems as OW it appears their response to fixing them has been way faster than Blizzard's during the OW beta where they had to wait weeks for updates instead of days.

for me the only issues i had was gibs being turned on since i found that dropped my frame rate a surprising amount
and also we had an issue where we got six on a server but then one guy dc'd or crashed before we readied up and it didn't find another player to take his spot, we couldn't ready up because we had 5 and if we left it meant we got low priority, i assume the latter will be fixed but i really hope they don't force gibs it feels really odd to play a pub and have 100fps then go into 6v6 and have 70ish

Yeah my bad it's completely fine that everything was already made/tested by the community except for server sided stuff and despite that while doing the server stress testing the game had some weird shit. My point is that I don't get why they made these choices, not that the servers were fucked during a stress test. It's the combination of these things. It isn't like they didn't already have all the shit they needed pre-matchmaking to make this mode make sense from the first tests. Whatever.

Ever get the feeling that you just stop talking?

The stuff with the round start and door & alll sucks and is weird but, as a software developer... this is the first time they've actually made serious changes to that system. And they're not cut-and-dry changes, they're kinda weird ones where you can look around but have graphics covering things and the actual movement mechanics difffering from how they usually are -- basically players can do things they couldn't before and can't do things they could before. Unpredictable wholistic changes like that are bound to come along with unforeseen bugs.

Of course, the whole "can do things you couldn't and can't do things you could" is part of why it's not a good system in general and they should just keep it to the freezetime with explosive push.

And I know you weren't talking about the game-coordinator crash from the third stress test but, it's the first test they announced the time of ahead of time and the first that really broke things -- that's probably exactly what they expected when announcing it ahead of time. I'd bet the unnannounced stress tests didn't result in enough actual stress.

Wasn't Overwatch made and ran by a studio of people and TF2 MM is being managed by like 5 people, I know Jill who's working on the project spent the greater part of a day just coding trying to make it function