with this medic speed buff I assume that from now on scouts will be the ones to pick medics up from spawn

Playing aggressive scout medic and getting in there enemy face with perma buffed scouts is now even better and safer. I play medic and I recognize this is a Bad Thing.

There's not a whole lot I want to say that hasn't already been said but I can't begin to fathom why they would even consider buffing the Sydney Sleeper without so much as touching its charge rate. That change is just baffling no matter how I try to look at it. The one sniper rifle still banned in ETF2L, one of three still banned in ESEA, and it gets straight-up buffed with zero changes to the reasons for its continued ban.

btw is it just me or does the Matchmaking config seem to apply to the pubs afterwards? I cannot seem to open net_graph on a skial pub after i play some MM

Balance changes across the board were fairly questionable imo but hopefully with mm these changes will be more frequent and better targeted so stuff like this becomes less of an issue.

Core balance changes to non 6v6 classes were generally pretty well deserved, making med more enjoyable is a good design target but indirectly buffing scout by doing so probably isn't helpful (though imo the buff ingame actually isn't as significant as a lot of people are making out).

However, the change to the main menu that makes casual and competitive the default modes is really good, as is the emphasis on community servers for pub style gameplay over valve pubs- something that really kept people playing this game. If valve can improve balance more frequently then I think the game can succeed hugely, there were 1000 people concurrently searching in mm in the nearby region when I last played which was really nice to see. The actual patch itself was underwhelming but the infrastructure at least was sound.

yeah you've had to restart your game after playing mm for a while now, another thing they didnt fix

on its own, medic being buffed isn't a bad thing, especially when one of the biggest flaws to lowest-end MM was that people might not want to play medic, but you always need a medic on your team. the actual issue here is that rather than changes that'd promote newer players trying him out (like a flat uber-rate increase across the board or whatnot) they gave scout something else that's really good as a side effect

MM was always going to start off as a bit of a mess, and the mindset of that was that leagues could always just continue on with their whitelist until it got cleaned up well enough, but this fundamentally changes a lot. idk how one would handle it

People complaining about the shortstop probably haven't tried it. If you got close enough to actually do that to anyone in a competitive game, you'd just be feeding.

The only issue I have is the medic speed thing, and I am not totally against it. I want to see how it plays out first.

what was the default zoom_sensitivity_ratio? Pretty sure it wasn't always 1

what i dont understand is spy is as fast as med. why did spy need a buff? surely the use of spy will increase in 6s after the speed buff

It was

Huh, Sniper feels so much more sensitive when scoped though. I don't think it is my imagination though.

Agreed.

If you're close enough to shove someone while you're playing with the shortstop you're already doing it wrong.

If you're going to constantly be so close that shove makes any difference, you should just be on scattergun, so you can hit 100 damage meatshots instead of 70 damage meatshots.

As far as the shortstop's style of play is concerned, they just lost the +healing buff in return for nothing. Essentially a direct, un-needed nerf.

Reinstalled to try out the MM and do the 2v2 tournament. Needless to say I'm uninstalling again when the 2v2 thing is over.

I think valve has been making good balance changes across the last two updates and this update sets the foundation for what they've been talking about for years: data-based decisions. Matchmaking and ranked pubs will let them collect tons of data around what weapons are used by winning teams and what weapons are used by losing teams. Which weapons are used by good players and which are used by bad ones. Which maps people rage quit (gorge) and which ones people play even when they lose.

Give it time.

p.s. I don't agree with the medic change either. Medic is so strong that you have it in every team comp and in matchmaking sometimes two. I think they've been buffing it because they want people to play it more in matchmaking and these regen/movement speed buffs make it more approachable to play which is ultimately what we want -- more medics in matchmaking.

why dont they just play the game to see that the reserve shooter is more powerful than pre-nerf flares

i mean mm is such a chaotic gamemode with half of the people too dumb to find the quickest way to mid and the other half not trying very hard and playing with random weapons the data they get will be so unreliable

the fact that we've had 3 major balancing updates and the reserve shooter/danger shield havent been touched is just absurd

Legitimate feedback would be usefull if the tf team would listen to it.

balance problems? just introduce some more weapons with silly names :-)

I get that they want to collect data for balancing. But at the same time they ignore the fact that the best players in the world have been gathering data for 9 years and know exactly which weapons are broken and why, and make changes that nobody could've ever predicted.

pls continue to update us on your dA-esque drama episode wherein you intend to leave forever

take best class in game buff it seemsgoodman

they still did not update the voice codec. boggles my mind.

they should just give soldier another flat 10% self damage reduction so you can jump more with shotgun as well

All that shows you is if you want to win you use the best weapons. That doesn't tell you if the person/their opponent/the spectator enjoyed being part of the experience, no matter how balanced it will be when Valve get their precious data. If you put two turds of equal mass on a set of scales, they will be in perfect balance, but it doesn't make your house smell less like poo than when one turd was bigger than the other.

What TF2 needs in order to be a competitive game(not a successful one, just a competitive one to begin with) is direction, not balancing or expansion. There is nothing to balance right now because in Valve's mind, competitive TF2 has no clearcut identity for people to be captivated by and which the balancing would work towards achieving. Quake has fast-paced DM and internalised timings, Overwatch has class-centric teamplay, CS has slower moving heavily aim-based tactics. According to this community(TFtv), TF2 should be about über-centric and movement based three-dimensional DM supplemented by utility class and unlock switching, but if you just take an honest look at some of the classes and most of the unlocks that are in the game right now, Valve has no such precise vision for the game, or at least this update did not show what that vision is.

To the ones that went to Valve HQ(Slin and Geel I think?), I remember someone stating that Valve's update was going to be amazing and that it was something that we were all gonna like or along the lines of that. Something about "they know what they're doing". Now that the update is here, which exact parts were you referring to that was suppose to be great and amazing.

They're not allowed to tell you.

this, but not jokingly, because knowing valve I doubt they released everything they were working on within just this update

Can someone explain the voice codec thing?

Tf2s is a 10 year old abomination, CS has one that is akin to mumble.

Go in mumble with a friend, talk both in mumble and in-game at the same time. Have friend do the same so you can hear him.

Very low quality, and very delayed.

I wasn't aware that could be solved with a codec or that csgos solution was better. Nice to know there's hope at least.