That's just a meme dude. They work on TF2 for a living and they obviously have to playtest their changes.

You could argue that they don't play comp 6v6 TF2, but that's not their game. They're playing their game -- the game they designed -- which is 6v6 matchmaking. A lot of people have been saying that they don't play their game and that there's bugs that they haven't found but you have to remember that it's a small team working on TF2 and there's only so much time to test out every little thing. They have to rely on the community to find those problems just like how Enigma relies on the community to report TFTV website bugs or how many games rely on bug reports to find errors.

I think the right way is not to ban weapons (and classes), it is to make them balanced and playable and that is what Valve is trying to do, although seemingly slowly. The problem here is that whilst most of weapons we consider broken are O.K. for pubs (i.e. casual) where you have 12 players in each team, they become O.P. in a 6v6 format. Cosider Quick-Fix, for example, or the Disciplinary Action. Having heavy on mid even faster than scouts with a Quick-Fix medic bound to him is somehow different where there are 6 players in the opposing team and when there are 12 of them.

This is a common misconception. Just because pubbers don't have to skill level to do something doesn't suddenly make it balanced. The vast majority of the weapons that are broke in 6v6 would be broke in casual if the players where good enough and coordinated enough to abuse them.

Sadly it isn't, Last time i got to see some TF2 dev profiles they all had less than 1000 hours (granted i haven't seen them in a long time). This is compounded by the fact that they are almost certainly not playing with or against anyone decent. I would hardly call playing against some of the subhumans that inhabit public servers to be legitimate experience that would make you capable of balancing this game.

When Blizzard make a huge fuck up in Overwatch they act - hero limit 1 for example, grossly overpowered heroes receiving regular balance patches another. In other games if they make a fun mechanic that accidentally turns out to be really powerful in competitive they nerf it.

Having decided to make MM Valve have got a laundry list of huge competitive fuckups they made years ago that they're ignoring.

Releasing unlocks that negate a class's primary weaknesses for negligible penalties. Unlocks that remove significant skill considerations from the game, that reward playing stupidly, that ape a mechanical skill for free are all obvious candidates for reworking if they're taking MM seriously. The parachute is totally egregious. The lack of class limits is huge and completely untouched. There are queue number considerations for this, but failing to incentivise people onto ladder in enough numbers is also their fault. Give them a fucking hat.

Yes they have to ensure it remains accessible so a middle road between the hardcore skill intensive format we have and a more widely appealing format they will want so that new players can experience some success needs to be found, but they're not even trying to tweak gameplay and it's been months. The TF2 team isn't that small, it's not 3 people, there are enough to look at gameplay considerations.

I just cant believe anyone saying they playtest all changes because clearly they dont

Examples:
Vacc after tough break did not build ubercharge on proper resist as it said in the description
new rocket jumper model reload animation clipping (while they were working on fixing viewmodels)
Short circuit lag compensation issue causing rubberband

The difference is that enigma doesn't make millions of dollars off of tftv.

You can't compare a dude running a forum for a few hundred regular users as a hobby, because he likes the community and a profit driven multi billion dollar corporation running a game with an active player base of a few hundred thousand if not more players.

You should obviously expect a higher degree of professionalism, dedication and man hours from one of those examples.

And if the tf2 team is as large as you say it is (over a dozen people and not 2-3 interns as it has been speculated/memed in recent years) then it's even more baffling how they manage to take EONS to fix obvious, well known glitches.

Good read guys
cu @ the next thread

Slin you've been an advocate for "it's the communities job to underscore what changes need to be made to weapons/classes" and "valve listen to the forums" for a while and you've been abundantly clear about that, so surely the list of banned weapons, (namingly the ones that have been banned from the get-go and are not banned because it makes a class viable) the constant voicing of the fundamental flaws of weapons and how they don't reward skill and have too high reward for competitive, it honestly should be colossally evident to valve about the what things need to be changed (at least from the voices of the comp community/reddit) like I'm not sure how many "here's the op weapons" threads that get hundreds of upvotes and thousands agreeing with it we need to make before it clicks with valve.

I do not mean just throwing money at the game, I am not as naive as you seem to think people are in this community are when I watch your videos.

If Gaben puts up a shed load of funds he will have to:

- Greate and maintain a regulatory body that governs the core rules/formats/tournaments/whitelist (basically everything admins do today) and other factors to take into account (There are a lot; ranging from legal to good governance).
- Ensure there is adequate funding for leagues/tournaments/events/community projects...etc to be invested
- Invest in the infrastructure of the game from grassroot level up to professional level, this can be in the form of MM but must also include other bridging services such as functionality of websites, pickup systems, guides, resources, marketing, advertisement and so forth.
- Cost of maintenance of all above aspects if not already mentioned (ie, staff costs, hardware costs,,,etc).
- An achievable business plan in place to cover the costs of the aforementioned points as well as produce profit.

There is a lot more than my brief summation that would need to be done for a game like TF2 to become successful and to make it work it requires investment in the tens of millions.

Like I said though, Valve can produce a perfect MM system, but there won't be the interest to maintain it, think about how revenues are created in other eSports and apply them to TF2's numbers. Trends will not increase under the current infrastructure which is still, with the exception of a messy MM system, maintained by 99% community volunteers, all it takes is for Arie to become Amish and shut his servers down and we lose Serveme.tf and then someone has to step up to replace it or people will need their own servers again, which would affect the size of the community. Or perhaps one streamer gets a new job and can't work, so TFTV casts are reduced by 33%. Or Sonny Black gives up all his possessions to live in the wilderness and ETF2L requires a new head admin to organise the league (oh this would actually be a good thing). But you see my point here -

A community where infrastructure is so dependent on volunteers to survive over the next 5 years as Valve sort their shit out in a game where most believe there cannot be enough interest to garner the sort of financial supported needed to launch the game to the size it becomes even semi-professional...Is not going to happen. The community will continue it's current trend of decline unless some serious cash injection was made so the people who keep it running at a grassroot level can do it for a living (or they replace them appropriately).

Presumably rules and regulations would be arrived at by whatever supposed process will be in place to improve MM by whatever mysterious method. It would be nice if there was any evidence at all that they were actually doing it.

Funding wise and ROI it's mostly a matter of publicity targets in terms of stream views, social activity, etc. Judging from tftv Blizzard have acquired not only their competitive players but their already meagre viewing numbers despite Valve making global in-game announcements for i58.

Hardware and all that stuff just gets absorbed into their massive existing global server operations.

The heart of the discussion is how to keep growing the competitive TF2 community.

No easy task given the age of the game combined with newer games taking existing players.
That said, I do believe TF2 still has the potential to be bigger than it has even been in the past. 2 points of interest I see for growth are inside the community itself and attracting new casual players.

When you compare TF2 to other games such as CSGO and Overwatch the largest and most obvious problem is the division within the competitive TF2 community. Half the TF2 community plays in a competitive pub environment called Highlander and the other half plays in a competitive structured environment 6v6. Some play both but not enough to really matter.
Both styles are so different that you cannot hope to merge them together and the TF2 player-base is fractured as a result. Instead of merging styles, the focus should have been (should still be) to merge the entire community of players into 1 solid competitive group.

The only way to market TF2 to viewers is through the 6v6 structure. Watching Highlander matches is beyond terrible. There is no flow between the teams and always looks like a huge pub. That style will never be attractive to viewers and thus new people will not encouraged to play TF2 competitively.
6v6 matches have a flow and allow viewers to watch the match details in the same way you watch CSGO. This is the market Valve needs to steer TF2 players in order for competitive to really take off.

We have never been able to fold the Highlander community into playing 6’s. Valve had the chance to bridge that competitive divide by going all-in and fully supporting the tried and true 6’s style when they announced MatchMaking. It looked promising when first announced and Valve had all the information it needed to get the best results.

Instead, Valve tried to merge the HL and 6’s styles together for their own purposes and the result is complete failure to see the big picture. The current MatchMaking system does not emulate a true competitive environment in any way shape or form. It is essentially a 6v6 Highlander format with no structure at all.

When a pub player decides to play MatchMaking, and get a feel for 6’s, the current system does not give any new player an incentive to practice and become better at a certain class or role in a competitive setting.
Because there is no structure in the current MatchMaking format, the alternative choice for new players is to just switch classes. They then pick a class they played in pubs that has no real impact on a structured 6’s environment thus defeating the purpose of competitive all together. This is the heart of why Matchmaking is a failed endeavor in its current form and cannot help the competitive community at all.

If Valve truly cares about competitive TF2, it must match the accepted league format for 6’s and adjust the MatchMaking system to attract new players.
Doing that will allow new players to experience the real side of 6’s and will drive some players to sign-up for the leagues and help grow the community.

IMO TF2 has already won over many other games for having a huge variety of game mods and developers.

There were too much TF2 player types to make competitive the first option.

Overwatch has basically 2(or 3) types of players : The competitive, the casual and the bandwagoner because it's based on 10 maps and nothing else

TF2 has competitive (6v6 or HL), casual, the vsh players, jumper, surfers etc...

I'm pretty enthusiast about TF2's future after the recent news either from you or VNN and I would predict some kind of csgo effect for tf2 (~60k to 150k players) if competitive mod satisfies all those types of players.

Imagine a world where you're 1-0 up on badlands. Would you hold for 20 minutes on their spire for a thousand pounds?

The only reason tf2 is fun to play or watch is because nobody cares about it at all. Tf2 will slow down exponentially with the amount of money on the line. That's why it will never be better than csgo or overwatch or even come close to it. At its core tf2 is a completely broken game that favours defence to a huge degree.
You already know this, but still choose to skim over it. In your perfect tf2 competitive world the game is as exciting as csgo at the top level, but the fact is this will never, ever happen without such significant changes to the game that it would no longer even be the tf2 you play.

Even l4d would be a better competitive game to fund, given that everyone played to win, as would highlander, because at least those games are assymetrical.

Given that valves game will probably involve full time viability pyro, heavy, engi, do you even really want to have tf2 be a 'true' competitive game?

Perhaps I'm jaded from having played the game far too long, but I think it's naive to even consider tf2 could ever be a success at this point, given that blizzard has made the quintessential class based competitive shooter tf2 strove to be. At this point regardless of which game is the better competitive game, you're always going to be sharing your viewer base with Overwatch. Given that game is newer and has more players, tf2 loses every time.

What is with this mentality that "the competitive community needs to contribute more"?
Valve has been halfassing this game for years and they've milked mountains of cash out of it. Valve needs to step up to the fucking plate for once. They're not some tiny indie company anymore, they have a monopoly on PC gaming and are worth billions of dollars there's no excuse for this. Have you forgotten this is the same company that just last week reintroduced sprays into csgo with a price tag and a fixed number of uses, that tried to force paid mods on us, that runs a massive e-gambling scene and takes a cut of every profit, that had months of beta testing only to not fix anything, that repeatedly delays every update, (Remember how matchmaking was "supposed" to arrive in august 2014? Remember those comics?) that left gamebreaking bugs and balance changes in the game for MONTHS at a time. Have you all forgotten about the old loch n load and short circuit? What about the sandman that used to be able to stun ubers? Hell as for that matter why does the reserve shooter and dds still exist in their current state? It should be blatantly obvious to anyone who has spent >10 hours in TF2 just how utterly unfair these weapons are. What more is it going to take for to people wake up? Gabe hasn't been the "SAVIOR OF PC GAMING" for a long time now. The Valve that made TF2 9 years ago is not the same as the Valve today. You claim that we should be patient and that TF2 is too big to change overnight, why not work on a new game then? TF3 is well overdue by now but of course we all know that's never going to happen because valve thinks they're above making video games now and would rather work on their VR gimmicks and coming up with new ways to psychologically manipulate kids into buying overpriced cosmetics with their moms credit cards. I will give you that it is a lot of work and there's many things that need to be fixed but whose fault is that? It's not like we realized last week the game is a bloated horrendous mess, it's been a slow decline year after year. Valve has 0 QA when it comes to TF2. Face it Valve only works when money is on the line. As much as I hate to say it people like delfy and sin were right. Valve won't get off their asses until the shitstorm is on their doorstep. You shouldn't be saying "how can we appease you Valve?" you should be saying "if you aren't going to communicate with us then fuck off". Valve has no right to dictate how the game should be played competitively when they've had no desire to contribute since day 1. Not that I'm saying we shouldn't make compromises at times, the format is far from perfect, but this late in the game it's up to Valve to prove that they're up for the task. What they have been doing for the last few years isn't going to cut it anymore. Just removing the config whitelist on comp and communicating with us would go a long way. I love this game to death but at the same time it's infuriating to realize just how much Valve has squandered TF2's potential.

Sorry for the block of text. Just wanted to get that out there.

I am just going to name two things for a reason as to why I think that valve will never hit the mark for MM. rd_asteroid and pl_cactuscanyon. 2 Years. See you guys in 2022 for a working version of MM.

except no one gives a shit about those maps

noone gives a shit about matchmaking either
the pubbers don't care and you play competitive instead

I guess people didn't gave a shit because they had no idea that competition was even a thing on tf2 and they had enough fun playing casual.
Once people know there is a way to play more serious games than those 4 spies/3 engies rosters in pub it should work..

It has nothing to do with us or anyone else caring about those maps (many pubbers do btw) it all has to do with work flow and hitting project deadlines and targets. We all knew valve is shit at hitting targets and keeping deadlines, that is nothing new, but this is just another recent example as to why waiting on valve to take their sweet time and actually do something is not the best course of action if we want to have a working MM by the end of this decade (thats only 3 years BTW)

P1 - A good point, but also to think about is what they settle on and how they intend to migrate the playerbase. If they do not communicate with existing leagues they will find it hard to migrate the playerbase from the league, to wherever they wish to place them (ESL, MM, wheever). Otherwise it's solely down to the leagues discretion if they want to get involved, I think last time I interacted with an ETF2L on the topic they kind of just expected the playerbase for their league to rise automatically without any sort of intervention, after I finished face-palming it did make me realize league admins should be involved in the discussion since they provide the platform the competitive community largely exists from.

P2 - Agreed and well summarized. Fact 2 of the people went to Valve originally have gone to another game in search of a professional gaming career shows their commitment to the project and their belief it will actually work, unless there is something I am missing here. I don't hold it against them but it's telling.

P3 - Maintenance of aforementioned projects would I am sure, involve a new SBU and that will incur a whole new set of staff costs and costs around that. Whatever happens, it means an increased budget.

I echo your sentiments, the idea of cash injection of the size needed to boost TF2's profile to the sought after level is so unrealistic, it's almost absurd we're trying. Keep trying though, it's commendable, even if at best MM will incur the same sort of effect to the game as a previously successful Newbie Cup. Even something of the level of the HCC would be an achievement.

I think Valve is also missing a huge opportunity to host TF2 tournaments and make money at the same time.
Every time a TF2 related item is sold, ask the buyer if they would like a small % of the sale to fund Competitive TF2 tournaments. Not only would this quickly fund the tournament in question but the ppl buying items may get interested in playing in real competitive tournaments. With enough demand, the tournament would be a cash cow for Valve by including an entry fee for all players. Valve essentially gets paid twice and helps expand the competitive community in the process.

More tournaments is a very healthy way to expand the competitive player base.

I suppose with this you mean that that defensive and slow playstyle would prevail if players at the highest level of competitive TF2 were playing not only for fun, but also for money. I personally think this statement is wrong. In a world where that is the reality and top level teams but play to win and only to win
In reality the only reason a very slow and methodical playstyle of keeping a lead and forcing mistakes is considered the strongest is that there is literally no incentive for top teams to put in the amount of hours a proper csgo/dota/ow team does. IMO there are a lot of undiscovered options within the game already that can easily shake up the current meta and break a slow and defensive team (different banners, offclasses and unlocks). Not all of these options in all the possible combinations have been tried by top level teams and not in the scale necessary to find the best synergies and formulate strategies. If there was a reason for the best tf2 teams to put in as much time as cs teams then they would try all of these, otherwise they would have to give up the game after losing the first round with the enemy parked in a defensive hold and I'm sure they would find new playstyles that work even better than what is considered the strongest now. There is a reason i49 Epsilon is considered the best team of all time. Credit is due to Kaidus here, because a lot of my thoughts have been sparked by his opinions and what he has said on his stream in the past.

Despite my view on the above subject i have to agree with Hildreth though, a renaissance of competitive tf2 will never happen, it will remain a grassroots esport as there isn't a half-decent base for a successful esport for valve to invest into.
That said I'm happy to keep playing the game i have loved playing for the past few years with the ruleset we have come up with until the game eventually dies off completely. The only chance for a competitive Team Fortress IMO is a sequel built with competitive in mind, a state of the art game engine (at least source 2), a lot of hype around launch and an infrastructure in place to funnel players into competitive from the start. No casual stigma, no horrible performance, attractive visuals (not for comp players, but there is a target group that judges games by their looks) and devs that play the game actively. We have absolutely no way to predict the probability of this happening and if it will then only far in the future but it would be a missed opportunity for valve not to create it. If they don't I'll be sad but I'll find something else.

yeah why don't people run banners more when pushing last and shit

cuz they take fucking ages to build and you alert the enemies when youre committing to it

i think that the backup definitely has the most pushing potential but 600 damage is a lot

Hypothetical Question:

If a TF2 major appeared with prize pools comparable to CSGO, what do you think would happen to the competitive community?

All the players who are in OW right now would return?
Many old faces from the past would return?

The primary reason they left is because you just can't make any money off tf2. So if there would be multiple tournaments like this per year then yes I'd imagine they'd return. If it's just one valve funded event per year but all other community tournaments are still just around the $10k mark then it might not be worth it for most. Either 1st place at tf2-international or you're still stuck.

The problem is that 70% of the tf2 playerbase doesn´t have the slightest hint of competitive in them. For years they associated the game with a chill casual experience with zero responsibility as an individual player in their team.
Most of these people mindset of getting good at this game its attaching themselves to a pocket medic, creating nests, or put a mini sentry on one side of the map and spam the rescue ranger from the other, etc ...
When casual first came out with the stopwatch on, in their mindset it was revolting that they now had to try complete an objective or actually think from a small competitive point of view on the best way to help the team, and when before they managed to get their killstreaks going and in their mind be successful at the game, now they failed miserably and struggled with the simple tasks of playing the objective.
They cried and raged and like one or two weeks later valve removed the stopwatch, cause you dont want to piss off the hat hoarders that actually support financially the game.
If you cant get them to play casual with a stopwatch you think they will ever be interested in 6s ?
Stop trying to balance things trying to get these ppl to play competitive because at the end of the day they will never support it and you´ll end up allienating the actual competitive community.

A lot of people just conplained about stopwatch because the queue times were atrocius at MyMs release. And with everyone being considered "equal" with the new ranking system, matches were already really one-sided (they still are), and half the map basically wasnt being played every other game. and a lot of people felt that, despite having effectively won, they still wanted to play out the match just for its own sake.

the queue times are still long sometimes for no apparent reason, the rank system its questionable to say the least unbalanced teams still happen all the time and now that there´s no stopwatch most of them just leave the game instead of adapting and trying to help the team. You see it often nowadays its becoming the popular thing to do...

Is there an official count on how many times this thread has been made and if Valve has posted in any of them.