Yes, other gaming communities are toxic as well (CS:GO, Dota, LoL), but it's a different kind of toxicity, it's mostly just people blaming other people when they're losing, here it's 6s players being toxic towards non-6s players. Someone who enjoys LoL has to put up with the toxicity or stop playing. Someone who enjoys TF2 doesn't have to put up with the toxicity of the 6s community and can just go back to pubs and that's what people will do and it prevents growth of the comp scene.

Also, all of the memes like "lol hl" or remove pyro or "lol spy/sniper/engineer mains", which are inherently mocking non-6s players, and the excuse is that it's just a joke, don't take it seriously? Well guess what, it doesn't matter if it's a joke or not, if an outsider sees a bunch of these memes, he's gonna perceive the community as toxic. Assuming that I have a problem with these because they personally upset me is kinda funny, because after all I agree that 6s is better, but it wasn't the memes that convinced me, it was me trying to play both formats (and I was initially turned off from 6s because it seemed like it was full of toxic elitists). Newbie mixes and such are nice, but they all need the player to actually be interested in the first place, and chances are a new player is going to stumble upon some toxic "meme" mocking his favorite pub class way before he finds newbie mixes, or even thinks of joining a team.

And I am not trying to say that Valve doesn't support comp tf2 because of the toxicity, they don't support comp tf2 because it doesn't generate enough viewers and pubbers don't care and this is due to multiple factors, but toxicity is one of them. And to be fair, the community seems to be putting in some effort to reduce the toxicity, but my main point still remains - if you think the toxicity is not there/isn't a problem, you are delusional.

Here's some wank material

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iywaBOMvYLI

I don't understand all this "HL needs to die" talk... you can play both formats at the same time, they're scheduled on different days :)

but then, it would generate more viewers and pubbers would care more if valve supported competitive tf2. catch 22

lord knows I've been a critic before, but to say it can affect TF2 on a large end scale when just about every popular e-sport game is an infested hellhole, with communities that have ramifications a hell of a lot bigger than "your format is shit"? that's just straight-up delusion

TBH Valve can fuck off at this point before they ruin anything else. We have had a working competitive TF2 format for almost 10 years now. If Valve can't figure that out then they can keep there money.

And HL can just go die already. I have been saying for years that HL is a waste of effort and only serves to spit the comp TF2 community.

Seriously we wouldnt have 90% of these problems if someone at Valve actually PLAYED TF2 or listened to people who did.

Fuck 'em.

Pretty sure shitty memes get quite a lot of traction on tftv too

HL divides the competitive community despite being a straight up worse format.

Probably an unpopular opinion but here it is: 6's Matchmaking was a massive fucking bone for Valve to throw us. We need to keep trying to play it and give feedback so they can continue to update it. One of the most important feedback issues is weapon balancing. I think one major thing stopping Valve from backing current 6's stuff is the long list of banned weapons. The new global whitelist is a good start, allowing a few of the more toned down unlocks. But we need to just drop that shit entirely. It'll probably be a really frustrating couple of months or whatever, but I'd consider this "growing pains." I think they're using game data to adjust weapons, and not looking at whitelists posted in competitive website forums, and reading through league admins justifications on why certain things are banned. My primary reasoning behind this assumption is the Sydney Sleeper. We've had that shit banned for YEARS and it gets buffed? I think it was so underused that they assumed it was bad, or maybe banning it mid season 5 years ago was a kneejerk reaction and the gun actually isn't THAT incredible, it's just frustrating to play against when a team plays around it well.

Another major issue is class limits. I don't honestly know if the current league limits are a good idea anymore. I personally think current 6's is fun to watch. If we remove class limits and unban all weapons, it probably won't be very fun to watch... At least in the short term. Again, I would hope that there would be a reaction from Valve to add a class limit 2(didn't Blizzard do this for OW?) We may in fact just have to put up with playing "their" format of 6's, until they realize how flawed it is, and adjust it into something more enjoyable.

Maybe I'm completely wrong, who knows what their actual decision making process is. My current thoughts however are that if people want competitive to grow and want developer support, then our community leagues and websites that support competitive shouldn't remain so different from the competitive mode they've given us.

Current timeline of potential ESEA Open player:
Be pubstomper.
Try competitive matchmaking.
Make friends, Make a team.
Look for league to join.
Only leagues are VASTLY different from matchmaking.
Team disbands because 3/6 players are Heavy, Spy, and Engi mains. Unwelcome and innefective in current ESEA format.

Tired ramblings but probably fairly accurate.

TL;DR: If Valve hasn't embraced ESEA 6's and sponsored LANS like iSeries after like 5 years, they won't. Unless the format changes.

when you're not actually playing the game it's really fucking easy to say let's unban everything and ditch class limits but when people still in leagues realize they're going to pushing last against 2 rescue ranger wrangler engies you'll kill the competitive scene before valve does anything. it'd be insane to keep unbanning things based on some assumption we've made that valve might possibly be ready to support with prize money because of reading between the lines and dissecting every sentence for double meaning of a few player's valve visits.

I think the vast majority of those involved in the comp TF2 scene are willing to adapt to things if it means Valve are going to get onboard, but the problem is we get no real indication as to what is expected from our side. If they really are making balance changes on weapon usage alone for competitive as you speculate Seanbud, then they aren't doing it right in my opinion. Maps like Swiftwater are terrible in 6v6 for example. Are they keeping it in the pool with the intention to update it based on how matches are played out, or is it just because there's no way of rating how enjoyable it is in-game?

Weapons are banned for a reason in competitive, which is now solidified with the unification of whitelists. There's ample sources of feedback which will help them to determine the best path to take.

we dont need to give valve more feedback about mm, weve already told them everything wrong with it (infact we told them 1 year before it even released) and they ignored all of it

lol we even told them during the mm beta

instead of we supporting valve, how about valve supporting us for a change ? ...

also if valve gave any direct indication that us unbanning everything would result in balance changes and a 100k tourney i would be all for it in a second but they've never said that

well, we now know all the truth about the premiership brits

Yeah this is pretty much it. From b4nnys comments back when MyM came out, it sounded like Valves plan was to release MM with minimal restrictions and adjust weapons and ruleset in response to the what happens in MM. But the reality is that they take way too long to make changes in this game, so until they actually say that they want to see whats overpowered in high level competitive games then theres very little reason to put everyone though that shit.

The biggest risk i can see people willing to take is us having a few online cups, but people wouldnt take it very seriously without a prize of sorts anyway.

The reasoning is so backwards, but typical tf2dev. How about letting an existing community support it's scene by adding a case that crowd funds LANs while taking 50% of the proceedings for themselves, like what happens in their other titles. Both CS & DotA had a huge following before their games current iterations. It's literally nothing but an extra avenue to rake in more funds, it'd take very little time and effort and should be a no brainer. Twitch numbers would grow and so would the number of players playing comp dedicating themselves to play BECAUSE it would be clear the game was supported and had worthwhile LANs.

The disconnect comes from most 6v6 players seeing the game as effectively the Source engines Quake. It isn't hard to grasp/understand once you load an fps config up and disable the terrible viewmodels, while valve see the game as I don't know what the fuck.. some sort of fps/moba hybrid with never ending fractal like possibilities/situations available because of the amount of random and shite weapons they've added. The games dna/lineage is from Quake for god sake.

It has to be as black and white as them not liking 6v6 and thinking they know what's best, nothing else makes sense. Not providing support because twitch numbers are low LOL.

Esports crates "officialize" valves support, and if theyre holding off on that for hype/balance reasons then its understandable theyd hold off on esports crates as well.

Its kind of just an unfortunate side effect of marketting really. Existing players would almost always want patches and support to come out as soon as possible. But if the goal is hype and player growth then you generally wanna push a bunch of shit out at once as a major event.

Valve didn't throw us a massive fucking bone, they took a massive fucking dump on the competitive community by releasing their abomination of a gamemode, which is flawed on every single fucking level. There definitely isn't a lack of feedback, Valve just aren't updating matchmaking to fix these flaws. I am legitimately concerned that matchmaking turns people AWAY from playing competitive, based on the low number of people who actually play MM.

Valve are deluded if they think they can balance the game around ridiculous class compositions when they can't even balance individual unlocks properly. There is a massive amount of gimmicky unlocks that add no value like Neon Annihilator or Sun-on-a-stick. The only time they work is when you actively try to NOT win the game. There's also some unlocks that are overpowered and haven't been adressed in a million years, like the GRU or the wrangler. It's not lack of information because everyone uses these unlocks, it's just sheer stupidity and stubbornness. I mean even Blizzard realised that their game's competitive integrity was at stake so they had to do away with no hero limit, Valve are just stubbornly insisting that their broken balance works.

If Valve wants us to switch to their system, they got to prove that it works first. So far matchmaking has been a complete disaster. This is not our fault, it's Valve's fault because they managed to botch matchmaking on every single level. We can't risk to split the community even further based on the off-chance that Valve will actually help us out, especially since the benefit of doing is so is to attract a very small number of the people who actually play matchmaking. 6v6 without classlimits or a whitelist is not interesting or fun in any way, both for spectators and players. Most likely, Valve are playing the number game anyway, so if we switch, we will probably just die out.

I think you missed his point...

sean check yourself for Stockholm syndrome!

some general replies:

1) if people think pacing issues in 5CP maps are bad enough, imagine how people will react to the same stalemates, but with a slow difficult-to-kill class replacing one of the more mobile classes

2) there is absolutely no way to allow every single weapon and have people handle it, because fully comprehending what it'll all do to the metagame takes a long time. ETF2L had the right idea when they opted to instead slowly bring in new weapons season-by-season

3) even assuming both those things, it's ridiculous to assume TF2 players should compromise what makes their competitive format good enough to please valve. it's valve's job to appeal, it should be the community's job to simply make sure this format is the best it can be for wide-scale popularity. I assume that there's going to be no bans one day, but that's only under the assumption that valve changes the problem weapons, which they seem to be absolutely garbage at doing

my one hope is that the universal whitelist is a direct way to show valve "these are all the most busted weapons, for the love of god fix them already", but given that the valve-discussions from the past year include b4nny having to stop them from buffing those weapons even more, I'm a tad skeptical

not only that, valve added unlocks that are "balanced" for pubs, none of the unlocks were intreduced to appeal to competitive players, so we shouldn't be punished by allowing broken and unbalanced into the whitelist.
doesn't matter how important valve's support is, there needs to be a line. allowing the loch and load was such a big mistake, it's not overpowered it's just broken, I have 80-100 ping and some packet loss so I use a high interp value (30.3-45.5) and even on medium range I don't see the pipe before it's already infront of my face.

To play devil's advocate, it's not valve's fault you have shitty internet; also this means you would have issues with the Direct Hit, Liberty Launcher, Huntsman arrows, medic arrows, flares, charged stickies, and rescue ranger bolts since all those weapons are faster than the loch-n-load so lnl is definitely not "broken" it might be a bit OP but the only thing broken is your internet. Further more the loch-n-load can be seen as helping balance out 6s since it significantly improves demos chances of dealing with scouts. (Personally I feel l-n-l is a tadd op especially in 9v9 and pub formats. since large clusterfucks tend to happen)

hunstman is predictable and has a super slow charge, direct hit is not as viable as regular rockets, medic arrows are not doing a lot of damage.
most of those weapons are slower to fire than the loch and load, and deal less damage.
the loch and load shoots faster than the stock rocket launcher and direct hit + does 100 damage from any range.
when a weapon deals a lot of damage, is spammable (due to firerate) and incredibly hard to dodge it's broken.

dont think LnL is broken or overpowered

Now see that's different you said the LnL was broken because

which would be true of every other projectile I listed.

That isn't broken that's a bit OP. Especially when you consider the stock grenade launcher does all those same things except that it's projectile is slower.

Ok ngl but you are cheery picking like fuck, huntsman is more random then l&l because of how rare it is and the fact that you can corner peak with it, DH one shots anything under 130 HP at point blank range regardless of if it is used or not and xbow does like 75% of the damage that l&l does. Yes it is good, very good, but all the reasons you stated are weak at best, and total shit at worst.

yeah I don't get the comparison. the huntsman is specifically a weapon where it's total garbage but sometimes the game gives you a free headshot for no good reason, any argument you'd make for LnL is doubly so for any other grenade launcher. if anything, the LnL is the most consistent because of how easy it is to get a hit when you use it

It has nothing to do with the format. Those classes are not even viable full time in MM 6s. The issue isn't our format. It's the Autism Bricks level casual community Valve created with there BS.