Wicked. Any agenda for Friday's episode?

I am personally curious about how some orgs recognize TF2 and manage to sponsor it. Maybe a discussion on TF2 sponsors and increasing TF2 sponsorship could be a cool topic to go over. :)

I'm loving the podcast tho keep up the good work guys :o

nice
was beginning to think it died

Great! Can't wait!

Yeah since the old thread is RIP heres all the questions I had after the last episode rewritten so it doesn't sound like a 12 year old wrote them

We are now a couple of weeks into matchmaking. How does the panel feel about the current XP system for rankings, and more specifically, is *someone's* rank something they should be proud of?

As we get closer to the next ESEA season, discussion about the current state of the whitelist is obviously going to come up. What does the panel think *should* happen, and what do you predict *will* happen?

How does the panel feel the community has done in convincing MM players that ESEA ruleset 6’s is the way to play TF2, and how difficult does the panel think it is for someone with 0 non-mm experience to enter into the comp tf2 scene?

How many of the non-sponsored Invite teams could be sponsored, and of those teams, how many does the panel think have actively looked for sponsorships?

Is TF2 competitive on an upward trend, or a downward trend?

Thoughts on the argument that TF2 is not a good spectator eSports? Stalements are a rather large part of 5CP 6's and its just dead time for spectators. Also, do you think Valve/Community should make steps to make TF2 a better experience for the viewers and how?

What do you guys think Valve can do about taking down hackers in the game quicker than what we've been seeing? Considering a large amount of the top 100 global players are hackers

I really see that as a technology issue. Valve will have to tackle that using their engineering resources, and right now I believe that resources are tied up trying to improve the quality of the matchmaking system. Sure there's hackers in the system right now and nobody likes playing against them but I think that system stability is more important for the time being. Their temporary solution of "we'll just kick out hackers that we find or hackers that are reported" will work as a bandaid.

fuck reddit: the podcast

I agree and I think that would work -- if they did do that. I've seen Taylor swift (who is now aliased as something else) on the number one with xrod (bullet) on top 10 for a long time now. And Taylor swift (or whoever their alias is currently) is a very blatant hacker.

Tl;dr It would work as a bandaid if they had people constantly doing hacker checks, rather than a vac wave every few weeks

Edit: Literally right after writing this response I got queued into 4 hackers who are blatant. FeelsBadMan

What I'd like to see for the whitelist, and I've said it on here before, is to do a complete 180 and call it a blacklist. Instead of taking the "Weapons are bad unless they're not", attitude, I'd rather see "We're banning the weapons that are actually broken and or completely unbalanced, but everything else stays"

But isn't a blacklist where you ban everything except the items on the list itself? I get what you are saying but I don't think blacklist is the term you are looking for. Blacklist would be - okay everything is banned except gunboats, kritz, escape plan boston basher etc.. whereas a whitelist is everything is allowed except certain specific items.

edit: ignore this im dumb

you've got it backwards, a blacklist bans certain weapons and a whitelist only allows certain weapons.

Shiiieettt your right. lesson learned im dumb

Will you upload it to youtube?

twitch version: https://www.twitch.tv/slin/v/82011633

no one expected it to be perfect right out the box, no one expected it to be this clusterfuck either ...
the fact that people are abandoning this game its just because most of the ppl that actually cared for this game and have been here for a long time had big hopes for this update, they saw this update as a turning point on valve´s rep regarding this game, only to end up once more completely disappointed, and this update ended up being the reinforcement of the notion that valve doesn´t care for this game and this game is going nowhere.
Asking ppl to remain positive after all these years of negligence it just isn´t going to work anymore.
I guess they should´ve listened to enigma and the tf.tv production crews, instead of completely ignoring them and rely on the input of a couple of people … We all know how that turned out …
I mean this community created and maintained comp with very little resources, managing to fly teams all the way across the globe to compete between each other, why completely disregard all this work and success ?
Testing different gamemodes ? Different rulesets ? How long has this game been out ? Why not support the existing successful infrastructure , instead of going back in time …
This community has always been too forgiving there´s always a handful of excuses ready to be made regarding something ppl don´t like. “Why are they forcing these graphic settings on MM ? Oh they´re just collecting data for the performance improvement update .” Typical for TF2 …
I don´t want to sacrifice having fun playing the game just to support a system that I don´t like, i´ve already played it enough to come to the conclusion that there are better options . truk truk 2016

Well for starters, I'm 99% positive that the department at Valve that handles their VAC system is completely separate from their TF2 group. I'm basing this off of Eric's response to my email containing cheat source code back in April.
Speaking of, there has been about 4 TF2 Vac Waves this year (Big one at end of April and 3 smaller ones after) that all took place only after folks in the community including myself reached out to Valve with information regarding cheats. This tells me that Valve in general is not pro-active when it comes to finding new cheats out there and will just wait until they either accidentally stumble on something or it's submitted to them. This can be further proven with their current system in just TF2 alone where if you report a big exploit to them you get a hat.

I sent them two emails within the past month regarding multiple topics all related to cheating in TF2 such as current cheats out there, ways I've discovered they could be detected in-game, and a few ideas on how to deter cheating on either the client or server end. Neither emails were responded to regardless of how many folks on the TFTeam were CC'd.

This could mean that either implementing any of those concepts are major changes that aren't worth the hassle (as noted in Valve's Communication video) or it could just be impossible to do this late into the games development history; Or it could just mean that they don't have time to do any of those changes. In either scenario one of the things I proposed for helping sort out cheaters from Competitive Leagues was a client-side AC plugin that could be signed by Valve. This would have required very little work on Valve's side of things since all they would have to do was whitelist a small handful of files leaving the rest of the work to the community team making the plugin (Handful of TF2Stadium folks and myself).

The most frustrating part about my attempts at communication and the communities attempt to get some sort of response regarding cheaters has been Valve's complete lack of response. All they really need to say is "We know, we're aware; We're focused on fixing other aspects of matchmaking first before we tackle that subject" but the lack of response almost gives off the vibe that they don't care. Even reaching out to Jill on reddit I was given a general response on sending the tfteam an email directly which clearly hasn't worked.

I can only hope that they are working on it and are just planning on surprising everyone in an upcoming patch.

So FaceIt's official stance on their playercount is that they're in beta,and they don't expect it to be popular right now. Will this hurt them long term?

Despite the efforts of man, ESEA still has massive barriers to entry. Is a ladder system with small tournaments the potential 'evolution' of competitive tf2?

As a follow up, every season there is a fear that ESEA drops the game. What would you guys say to someone whos debating between committing to ESEA and just pugging if they think that the league might not exist next year?

Thoughts on the Ronin BM drama?

Thoughts on Keven showing the Rando tweet(http://www.teamfortress.tv/post/629888/poor-sportsmanship) in front of 1500 viewers, and how that represents the scene?

Is the continual drain of talent to overwatch likely to continue through next year?

Mr. Slin has told me repeatedly he hates new players. How do you convince someone who only wants to pug with the top% of players to queue into a pool of mixed skill levels.

So far, we've yet to see 1 balance change post-MYM. Is this a sign that balance changes will continue to come in bursts, rather than waves?

Why does mr slin continue to deny his foot fetish?

I liked Tagg's idea about diversifying the game modes played in competitive sixes. Or at least having a look at it and seeing if it can be done.

As he said, payload lends itself to various defence points in which it's more possible to use the offclasses.

This communication problem with Valve is the stumbling block to everything. Maybe we need some sort of collective effort from the well-known figures and high level players, to try and really push and get through to Valve in order to establish future communication, a bit like the Barons Revolt and Magna Carta...

Next episode is tomorrow at 10:30pm eastern! We'll be recapping the grand finals and discussing TF2esports :)

Talk about cheaters in MM, the recent update regarding reporting said cheaters, and what Valve could possibly do to improve the state of the game to maybe make cheating more difficult

Is it important for the future of tf2 for every region to be using the same rule sets? If so what region is using the better rule set or is there a rule set we haven't disscovered yet?

yeah we discussed this one a bit last time but i think we ended up basically saying that TF2 can't decide on the ruleset it wants. you think it'd be obvious (current ESEA rules) but i think if we unban all of the weapons then there's room for adjusting the class limits. bottom line is that we don't think that the optimal ruleset has been found yet and it will take time for valve to balance the weapons in a way that makes ESEA players happy.

in my opinion the first step though is for us to take a look at next season's ban list and reevaluate in such a way that we unban as many weapons as possible.

Could we get another one of these podcasts any time soon? :0

what happened to this

Dicuss Different gamemodes? a/d and payload perhaps.

ESA LAN is kinda important too

thoughts on the future of esea tf2?
will we actually be able to get there to be 9 invite teams?
possible return of esea lan/future of NA lans sans gxl?

which continent had the best group of spldiers at the same time
this question is also for scouts and demos