Highlander is going to have to die if we want to make it clear that 6's is the gamemode Valve needs to support imo.

I believe 6 v 6 remains the way to go especially since it's used ingame for competitive matchmaking. The real issue is getting weapons and maps sorted to a point where viewers understand what's going on, and yet doesn't alienate them because their favorite weapon or strategy isn't going to work. Another huge hurtle is getting players not to only use one class. This seems to be a major mental block for pubbers who decide a main quickly on 2fort and rarely deviate.

lol hl

6v6 is definitely the place to start

From my perspective, valve probably wont support competitive until weapon bans are gone. Class limits and poor class representation are also kind of a hinderence. Both of these bring attention to poor balance on valves part. On a lesser note, its worthwhile for them to adjust the game mode or classes just to make stalemates less of an issue.

However its pretty much entirely on valve to fix these things in a way while still keeping competitive play fun, as well as not harming pubs, which i think is a worry for them (though considering a lot of banned items are infuriating in pubs as well means this shouldnt be too hard, but with MyM they pussyfooted around a lot of balance changes).

A more posititve perspective is that aside from game balance itself, most shit we need is in place. Comp TF2s production value is spectacular considering its size and reliance on the community. A lot of players have left, but a good portion of them are still in esports and very well may return if theyre given the chance to actually develop something out of it. So if valve is actually prepared to start supporting the scene then all we have to do is just roll with it. Its just taking too fucking long.

omg this is exactly the thing im confused about, if tf team wants us to unban weapons why dont they fix them first? if they're gonna make shitty unbalanced braindead unlocks and expect the community to say "well we wanna be wesports so we'll unban them"

i really do hope the team are eventually gonna do something because with the amount of players just straight up leaving because they're not giving the support they should be is pretty upsetting

A year ago everywhere from reddit to the steam discussions thought HL was the best gamemode and 6s players playing 6s was dumb. Some people in those places still think that but for the first time you can actually see pubbers who've never played competitively say that 6s is better and more natural. All the stigma about "6s is just tryhards" or "6s doesn't even use every class how is it tf2" are going away, and those were always the biggest hurdles for appealing to pub players. Viewership's increasing pretty well just by a combo of competitive players being more active in other communities + valve's increased support of competitive.

As for classlimits, I think it might've come from reddit but a 2 class limit on offensive classes and 1 on everything else sounds fair, easy to explain, and isn't really any change from what's been used for years. If the classes were reworked heavily a classlimit of 2 on everything might be possible and make more sense, but currently double engies or double heavies on last (especially since you can just swap classes whenever you want then) sounds like absolute hell.

Actually that came from here and got repeated over on reddit a lot i'm pretty sure

It always has and always will be a numbers game

remove spy, engie and pyro from the game.

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this a really good example of what not to do

Man, fuck valve. Dangling their support over our head, just out of reach, saying "if you play how we want you to play you can have it, but we're not gonna tell you how that is." This community has spent 9 years trying to make this game those things, seemingly despite valves best efforts most of the time. Its pretty asinine of valve to think that they know better than the hundreds of people who actually play and work to iterate the game.

I don't know if I agree with sigafoo's assertion that competitive TF2 never took off because "6's players are toxic and not very open to new players unless they need to add to the ESEA prize pool".

As a player who is fairly new to comp, I liked playing HL (ish), but 6s is just better. It just is. And do you know what, it IS good to watch.

Valve reads these forums and others, they must know that that is the case.

If Valve wants to put any money into comp (and imo it could benefit them and us), they should know that 6s is the format to push. People moan about classes being relegated to the periphery in 6s, but so what? Why does every class have to play a starring role? Imo it works great as it is and some classes are all the more exciting because they rarely see the light of day.

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lol did he really say that? im legit curious since i didnt feel like watching a 3.5 hour video.

thats exactly what he said

although it might be an unpopular opinion, i think that attack/defend maps, like gravelpit in 6v6, is a good way to include almost every class. in gravelpit, during the earlier seasons of ESEA, we saw more strategies that included the use of all 9 classes (like fulltime heavy or pyro holding C, etc)

i think that if valve's goal for competitive tf2 is to have more class diversity while maintaining 6v6 as the official gamemode, they need to reduce the number of 5cp maps and use more payload/ attack defend maps that can support the use of classes other than scout and soldier.

of course, this would completely change how comptf2 is played today so its probably never going to happen.
but if class diversity is the one of the few in game reasons why valve is hesitant from supporting tf2 as an esport, then its a necessity for the sake of this game's life

I don't understand why its implied that valve wants us to find the gamemode they find suitable as, like people have said, 6s was found to be the best game mode after years of play. Considering 6s is in the game as MM, why would valve not state what they wanted the format to be for prize money support like they do with csgo majors?

https://youtu.be/tOQ8NZ7SSfU?t=10684

bonus stamp: https://youtu.be/tOQ8NZ7SSfU?t=7181

dont you know the pinnacle of strategy is hitting comma and changing class to hard counter a melee weapon.

im happy as a clam that valves showing no signs of supporting HL cuz the meta is really so far outside anything typical for TF2. friends i got to watch comp had very little issues following 6s despite being solely pubbers because the concept of playing the optimal class for a situation isnt really hard for anyone. but show a pubber a hl game and just see how long it takes for them to ask why theyre healing the sniper so fucking much.

in hl you get to give classes their OP shit to compensate for them being garbage half the time. in 6s you have to limit the shit on scout, engie, or heavy because theyre actually spectacular classes when you have the luxury of not being forced to run them in areas they suck at.

I love his later part of: "6's community is toxic" which leads into "Oh to counter my argument I realise not all of the 6's community is toxic" which is promptly followed by him pretty much outright generalising the entire 6's community as toxic yet again.

Thanks for the links.

Another thing I'm curious about is why do a lot of 6s players play HL? It seems there are a lot of 6s players who have some experience in HL and some are even playing in UGC simultaneously with ESEA. Do they just like trying a different format?

a lot of people just like as much tf2 as they can get my man

Incoming wall of thoughts and text

When you think about it, getting into higher level competitive play outside of matchmaking takes a decent bit of grinding certain skills.

• Learning basic air strafing inside the source engine isn't exactly something that develops overnight, especially if you have people that all their time in tf2 have just played in low gravity all crit trade servers
  
• To top that, if a player wants to play any sort of aiming/hitscan class, they will need to learn how to adequately track, which also doesn't come very easily
  
• Not only that, but some of the most cherished weapons that people love and have played with all their time in tf2 and think that it's the "best weapon combination in tf2 and will make even players like b4nny quake in his boots" may not be allowed. This one is on valve for fixing though, since we can make thread after thread here about "how certain weapons should be changed" but we can't change certain weapons if we wanted to without major hinting, suggesting, rallying, and rioting. And even then it's still up in the air as to whether or not our suggestions and efforts are going to be in vain.
  
• Matchmaking also has a number of blatant things that need to be fixed to help newer players get into competitive. It was a huge flop at release (to say the least) but progress has been made since.

But on my (and many others') opinion on things such as the right gamemode to attract a lot of attention/viewers, it's certainly 6v6 in 5cp maps with one or 2 koth maps in the mix as well. I personally would like to see some other maps possibly modified (such as fastlane or maybe coldfront) to better suit competitive play so that we don't have to stick to just the small number of maps that longtime fans are so used to seeing. Stopwatch cp isn't going anywhere in all honesty, we saw that with gravelpit in the old times and how it eventually got booted out of the map pool since teams didn't want to play such a unique gamemode.

As for the "6s players are egotistical and think that their game must be protected" theory, anyone and everyone that still believes this is utterly retarded. I'm not usually one to say things like that, but considering how much people were talking about unlocks like the rescue ranger and the cow mangler when the global whitelist was announced only to see that it hasn't exactly made the largest impact ever on how the game plays at the highest level just blows that statement completely out of the water. Sure the cow mangler is a little bit better than the rocket launcher in full on DM fights since you don't have to worry about ammo, but if you're changing class to go engineer + gunslinger to counter one player with one special weapon in the server, then you've got to really rethink how you look at the game.

I'm getting tired at unloading my thoughts into this so I'll leave my thoughts with one final statement: I'm super happy that we're getting more communication with actual people at valve, but maybe as a suggestion for the future some of the top players could put on exhibitions to experiment with different things in the future, like one class limits and dedicated specialists (such as a top engie, spy, or pyro) show his/her craft for a map so that these things can be looked at with some of the absolute best talent in a certain role. We won't know until we try it, but the door is ajar, and ears on the other side are open to hear.

Sorry for the essay but I had a lot of thoughts jumping around in my mind about this

Please kill hl, so 6s can be more populated even if teams run sniper,spy,heavy or whatever. Right now our community is split up, need to focus on one format. Until this done, we won't get valves attention, hl players have been baby caked for too long. Hl is long and stalematey and boring to watch. People need to realize spy,sniper,Pyro,engi,heavy are off classes and are used in certain sitituations.

HL shouldn't be outright killed, but if it's a question of whether one game format dies or another lives, 6v6 does need to take importance over 9v9. Maybe at some later date HL can be supported, but it's certainly easier (and more practical) to have sponsors transport 6 players to a lan than 9.

I have heard some things though about the reason plat HL is in such a bad spot is because a lot of the gold teams don't want to "man up" and play in plat when all they would really do is get better once people look past the fact that they're no longer the big kid on the street. I've also heard a lot of opinions from others consisting of mid-top gold HL should be forced into plat whether they like it or not, and to get rid of gold and force all the other gold teams into silver.

Highlander is already killing itself, the community that plays it is mostly anti-competitive and would rather suicide their teams than move up to fix skill disparity over time. It's the format that is the easiest for pubbers to get into because they can play anything full time and it's still hemorrhaging players an absurd amount because people would rather act retarded on the forums / elsewhere than boost the population. We're down to less teams playing NAHL now than when I first started playing NAHL 5 (soon to be 6) years ago.

Recently they needed to move a team up into Platinum and a bunch of the Gold team leaders got together and said they'd suicide their teams if they were moved up. Similar things have happened basically almost every season of Gold (just not so publicly) where Gold teams will often kill their teams if they get moved up into Plat and then reform with little punishment. The end result is there's basically no talent moving up into Platinum and actually improving because they're scared/don't want to, while talent has been leaving Platinum for a long while now.

Basically imagine if most of IM got together and said they'd suicide their teams if you moved them into Invite. That was NAHL for the past week or so. It only got fixed because Shotaway grabbed 8 random people and made a team that hasn't even scrimmed with a consistent 9 yet to fill the spot because I guess that's more prepared than all the Gold teams who wouldn't move up.

At current rates there should be very little teams (like ~40-50) left in it by late next year, assuming nothing changes ala prize pool or Valve support. I wouldn't fret about it.

i think the biggest problem with HL is how it's advertised as the "intro 2 competitiv (4 nubes!!)" and therefore causes players new to comp to go there. many of these players are probably turned off by how shite HL is or how toxic they are towards 6s (personal experience here), and might get a negative impression of competitive and ignore it completely. while i can't speak for everyone, my first experience with comp tf2 was like this, and i only started caring about actual competitive tf2 when I saw b4nny's stream on r/tf2, and played a few lobbies after seeing how much better 6s looked. even before i played HL, i had a terrible impression of 6s simply because of the stigma attached to 6s (wrongfully so) by the pubbers, r/tf2, and the sort

while i think this is becoming better now, i believe when people say they want HL to be killed off they really want the negative effects on 6s/actual competitive that it brings about by tricking pubbers into thinking they can play like their pubs in comp to be taken care of