go back to over.gg u sheep

It's not completely out of the question. Valve have to consider what opportunities there are in the current environment, things are very different now to how they were when TF2 was released and it's presence in the current world, streaming, esports, etc is very low. They could take the time to develop a new IP like Blizzard did or they could revive TF2 which still has a very large player base.

Some things they've done seem encouraging but lack of activity on other fronts, particularly gameplay, is baffling.

http://files.gamebanana.com/img/ss/sprays/57822f12c76a8.jpg

I completely agree with you and so does Valve. They see the opportunity for TF2 to become a competitive game, and that's why they spent two years developing the matchmaking game mode. While everyone wants to see tournaments right away, I don't think that it's reasonable to expect Valve to support these large-scale tournaments until their competitive game mode is fully fleshed out. I don't think that 6v6 no class limits is the final version of the competitive game, but once the final game mode is figured out along with their map pool and new class balancing then the game will be much closer to the final product and will be able to support tournaments.

There's no point in hosting a $100k tournament and driving players into your matchmaking game mode only for them to play it and find out that the game mode sucks. The matchmaking game mode has to be developed more first, which is why I'm urging people to be patient.

You're looking at things the wrong way.

Here's where you're right:
1) They haven't contributed to our version of competitive 6v6 TF2.
2) They shouldn't try to control our game since they aren't contributing to it.
3) They need to communicate with us more if they want to control our version of competitive 6v6 TF2.

Here's where you're wrong:
1) They're not looking to contribute to our version of competitive 6v6 TF2. They're making their own version.
2) They're not trying to control our game -- they're creating their own game mode and they're not shutting us down.
3) They don't need to communicate with us since they're not trying to work on our game mode.

Don't look at this situation as them trying to merge with us. Look at it as them trying to develop their own game mode. WE have no right telling them how to do their jobs although we think we do since we have thousands of hours in the game. They've been more than respectful in listening to us but we don't have control over them and we have no right to try to control them. WE still have control if we want it since we're already trying to grow our own grassroots scene (but it's not working).

You have two options. Support them, or don't. If you choose to support them, I offered you solutions for doing so. If you choose not to support them, it doesn't really matter. They'll keep on doing their thing without you.

I get that you're echoing the sentiments of many people in the community but we're way too self-centered sometimes.

I don't think you guys realize how bumping OW is getting.

Your last line is a huge contradiction to the rest of the paragraph. We will have 0 control. At most we're just beta testers for their latest experiment. I also think it's incorrect to stay that most people are trying to grow the TF2 community; most people have accepted that it's going to be in the same place or worse, and have for the last few years. Our version of the game is a "finished" game mode developed over years of refining and testing out unlocks, class limits, maps, etc. If they push a new mode, it will almost certainly disrupt the current community because people are going to drain to the "official" mode (since it's getting official support). It is 100% valve's duty at this point if they want to push something new over what the community has worked on for years. They should get feedback from their base because the new base is what's going to grow the game, not us.

Overwatch has the benefit of developers having some focus on competitive from the start. Whether or not OW will last the test of time is one thing, but it's going to be way bigger than anything valve will offer for at least a year or two. There's really little point in coming back right now to a community that's been stagnant for years vs a popular hot game that's already been working with players in the comp scene. Valve is at least 7 years late.

So mrslin you say "The competitive game itself is in a better place now than ever before. We finally have developer support!"
Then you say
"1) They're not looking to contribute to our version of competitive 6v6 TF2. They're making their own version.
2) They're not trying to control our game -- they're creating their own game mode and they're not shutting us down.
3) They don't need to communicate with us since they're not trying to work on our game mode."
What have they actually done ingame to help our competitive scene ? Besides fixing some map stuff like stairs clipping ?
On this bridge that your creating are you representing valve or the competitive community ? Because you keep telling ppl they´re wrong yet you contradict yourself more than once, and most people seem to disagree with you, i don´t get it

I see where you're coming from, and I agree with you that valve developing their own scene is aids, but that doesn't change that there is a comp scene in tf2 that is bigger than ever before.

OUR scene isn't growing, but A tf2 scene is growing, that's probably what you don't understand about what slin's saying.

what tf2 scene

the 300 people playing matchmaking?

you understand that when they're playing tf2 they're not necessarily playing it in a way that is tracked by Steam hours, right?

Doesn't change the fact that they clearly show a lack of game knowledge. B4nny had to convince the devs not to BUFF the reserve shooter. What game are they playing where the reserve shooter isn't horribly overpowered?

They still have very poor knowledge and understanding of their own game.

got ninja'd

Ok so you're saying to support Valve we should be open minded to their ideas, give serious consideration to the rules they're making in their version of the game and generally play their MM system to give them feedback or whatever. But they're not doing anything! Why would I use my precious time tonight to play MM? I've already played it a bunch and have made my conclusions. In fact big threads have been made where people outlined all of the many issues. To Vavle's credit some of the technical ones have been fixed or are worked on, like massive queue times, but what about the gameplay itself? Who cares if I can quickly play the game if it's a bad game? It's seriously way more fun most of the time to queue for casual and most people, pub and comp, have realized this. And why do they think our years of experience don't amount to us having a great sense of what works and doesn't? I've pubbed since 2008 and played comp since 2010. I've played with all the classes and weapons. I've seen games with 3 heavy med combos, with 5 engies defending, with tons of demomen stacked, etc. Thousands of hours--God damned years. Seen it all. I'm not saying we dont have our biases, we all do, but our experience is objectively massive and it is relevant. Ok, well, if they actually changed stuff and worked on it then I'd keep playing MM to assess the changes and keep up my support. Don't get me wrong, I do care, and I wish my favorite game of TF2 to succeed in all ways and on all levels. But it just doesn't looks like they're doing anything. Or maybe they're working at sloth speed. Maybe if they communicated with us and told us "Hey folks, we are working on roughly [these] things, but it is going to take a long time and there's no real ETA on that" that would be very reassuring. Well it certainly seems like they aren't doing anything at all. Do you want me to go play MM right now? Why? I've already done it enough. It's crappy and not too fun. The only thing worse imo is Mannpower. I'd rather play pass time or tc_hydro in most cases than MM. Are they really gathering data right now? They could say "hey for the next 6-8 months we'll be gathering data on played games. It may look like we're doing nothing but we are indeed on course with our little developmental roadmap". That would be very reassuring! Meanwhile MM is in a shit state and is turning off x amount of people per day from the idea of a competitive 6v6 since they can only know what they have experienced while using it which is usually a trash experience. So as was mentioned earlier in the thread, with the way things are right now, the current state of MM is inadvertantly hurting TF2 overall. It would have been better if matchmaking wasn't released in this garbage beta form but instead later when it was more refined, even if it was still not out today.

But now to get to the really sad part which was mentioned a few times in this thread already. We all know FPS games are on the decline, especially arena shooters. I really recommend everyone who seriously cares about the issues in this thread to watch Thorin's video ( https://youtu.be/f2to9Pb0DOM ) where he talks about why Quake can't be #1, or big at all, ever again. It's moderately relevant to TF2 at large and extremely relevant to our competitive TF2. TF2 has Quake as its heart and soul so the links are undeniable. I'll summarize his main points here but I implore you to listen to his speech. It's long but worth it. First, Quake was a big esport back in its day not because it did something right but because of time-and-place circumstances and how it happened to work out. It was a pioneer of some of the esports concepts and it was more or less the only choice. Secondly, and most important, is that these games are really fucking hard. They have an immense skill ceiling and that means it takes a ton of time and effort and dedication to work on it and improve and most people are not looking for that when they want to videogame... so our breed of extra-obsessive, objective oriented and frag-oriented gamers is a minority and becoming more and more so - both on a mentality/philosophical level as well as the environment of games today and how it doesn't do much to foster new blood into becoming the types of gamers that we are. People want easy-to-get-into and casual experiences and all the newer games do that well and are designed to do it well-- somtimes at the cost of the high level gameplay being less nuanced and "hardcore" (OW). The good thing is that we have a strong casual player base which is something other arena-FPS based games often don't. But the way of playing at the bottom (pubs) is obviously different and at odds with how we play at the top. TF2 is this weird halvsie thing if you consider both pubs and comp. I wish there was a great way to reconcile these halves and I guess that's what is in theory being worked on but I'm not sure that it's possible without ruining either the top or the bottom or winding up with something that doesn't appeal to either end. I wish badly that large amounts of people would come around to enjoying intense competitive FPS gaming but it seems that, at least for now, that's not likely to happen. Not with mobas, fps-mobas, and much simpler games like COD and CS available for people to consume. But yeah, listen to Thorin explain it.

A lot of people have brought this up over the past few months so I want to point out that b4nny clarified on stream that the tf2 team were actually intending to nerf the reserve shooter, but he thought the changes they suggested would be a buff, so he explained why. They then decided not to make those changes.

Valve doesn't care about weapon balancing right now. Who cares if a weapon is overpowered in 6v6 if the final competitive format is 7v7? 4v4? 5v5? What if a weapon is overpowered with class limit 2 but not with class limit 3?

Sigafoo understands a concept that most people in the competitive scene don't. Nobody at Valve cares about weapon balance right now because the final competitive format has yet to be finalized. Valve will address seriously broken shit like shooting your Pomson 6000 through your own dispenser but triple jumping is a non-issue right now.

To quote myself:

I get what you're saying but in order to refine the game they needed player feedback so unfortunately they had to release the matchmaking game in its current state. Now that people are playing it they can collect user data alongside feedback from the forums and make adjustments. They've already adjusted the major problems regarding queue times, local servers, abandonment, and initial concerns regarding hacking. There's obviously more work to be done and the biggest class balance changes are still to come.

You're missing the point of the video and how it applies to TF2. TF2 isn't Quake. TF2 isn't some ultra hardcore professional esport designed to push your 1v1 skills to the limit. It's a casual FPS game that is easy to pick up and play. It has mass market appeal and likable characters. And it's difficult to master.

Sure TF2 isn't Overwatch but many, many players talk about how Overwatch is a game that is missing something. You need a game that is derived from those kinds of quake/arena FPS shooters but is easy to pick up and play without diluting it and removing the things that make the game fun. TF2 could totally be that game, but it needs developer support.The developers are offering us their support as we speak, and that's why competitive TF2 is in a better place now than ever before.

If you don't like matchmaking in its current state then fine! Honestly the matchmaking game mode was garbage when it first released and we all knew it. The competitive community knew it, Reddit knew it, and the developers knew it. But they also knew that it would take time to refine it, so they're working with us to make that happen by letting us play it and provide open feedback. If you don't want to help out that's fine. If you do, awesome.

The problem is that it's impossible to trust that the developers will use any feedback that we could give, because they quite plainly haven't learned any lessons from successful matchmaking systems, even those that other Valve employees have made. For competitive matchmaking to work, it needs to follow the competitive format that already exists, if there is one. Every matchmaking system that has been successful, across genres, has either been made in the image of a competitive scene that already existed, a la Starcraft and DotA, or has been made to create a competitive scene where none existed, like in Overwatch. With matchmaking being neither the loosely driven chaos that pubbers are accustomed to, nor the well established gameplay that serious competitive players are accustomed to, it appeals to nobody, and is doomed to fail. I sincerely hope that the design goals of the TF2 team can align with the goals of the competitive community, but quite frankly, we've all been burned before, and our collective faith is running short.

LOL valve will make this executive decision with their excellent matchmaking client that has all of these features:

- Games with death merchants playing against players on their first placement game
- A whitelist with every item allowed
- A lack of class limits
- Maps with varying sizes, chokes, and playstyles

You might as well say they shouldn't care about anything in the entire game without actually having a foundation of how many players are allowed on each team, and what each class' limit is. Unfortunately, matchmaking isn't indicative of anything. You cannot use this chaotic sandbox to determine anything. With what basis will Valve say we should play 5s instead of 6s? What is the actual benefit of 7s? Does anyone earnestly believe that a modern eSport will be 7v7? Add an extra player for that extra bit of clutter and inconsistency, while removing the necessity of players to switch classes, because you almost have every class covered when you spawn (given the limit would be 1). In what way does this add any depth?

Everything that's being said is just absurd. These decisions can't be made by Valve on the basis of matchmaking pubs. Countless games with 0 indepedent variables gives you 0 input. Multiply 0 as many times as you'd like and it's still 0.

Yeah that's definitely a flaw here. I think Sigafoo recognizes this and is trying to motivate top players to try out that 7v7 format, but I'm not sure how well it will do. I hope it's fun to watch.

Valve, when they're ready, could always do the same thing. They could put up a really small prize pool or reward players with an in-game medal, and then have them compete. They don't need the top players in the game to play it with high level strats, they just need to see if the format is competitively viable.

Antimoon seems to recognize this as well. There's no established competitive game so the developers are starting from scratch as we mentioned before. So I feel like we're just rehashing this over and over, and I've already stated in my opinion piece that this is where we're stuck right now. Valve has the matchmaking client up and running, they have tried the no class limits / no weapon bans for months, and now they just need to make a decision on where to go next.

You could say "why don't they just use the competitive 6s format that we've been running for almost a decade?" but the problem is that it might not be the perfect format. It might be close, but it might not be the final format. I personally tend to agree with this notion because I don't think you should have some classes limited to 2 and others to 1.

can we have a sub category for these kind of threads so i can unsub from it and never see them again thx :)

I see, they aren't sure of how many players to put on a team. Ok so how about next week we get a patch where they try 7v7 and then two weeks later we can do 5v5 and so on until they get a good feel for this and collect data. Seems like they could do that pretty easily, right? I'll ignore the fact that this is the shit that should have been done in beta ages ago. Maybe they are about to do that or it's in the works but they aren't saying anything so it looks like they're doing nothing. There's no reason for me to think that they are doing anything. My understanding, Slin, is that it's your determination and speculation that the next step is team sizes and not that you're communicating info from the source, right? I just don't think they're in any hurry to do anything. I don't believe pub tf2 is in much decline and that's what matters and that's where the money is coming in from so there's no incentive to do anything. Our comp community is who has the most to lose through inaction but we don't matter. I don't really care if they're not in a hurry if they at least communicated that in some way.

edit: http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=24805 I only now realized that they did post this last night. It's very typically minimal but still has some concrete plans promised. This is definitely appreciated though it would obviously be nice to get slightly more detailed plans about competitive.

You can't change too many variables at once. The beta wasn't for testing the gameplay -- the beta was for testing the stability of the servers and the stability of the matchmaking service. This should be clear to you because it was a closed beta with limited access; they limited access on purpose so that they wouldn't overload their system, and then they ran stress tests to try to overload it. Again, the beta wasn't for gameplay testing purposes. They COULD have tested gameplay during the time that the servers were shakey, but then you wouldn't collect good data since people could be lagging with the FPS settings that they forced, or maybe they had high ping because they were playing from halfway around the world, or maybe people were randomly afking / abandoning / hacking, etc. There's like a million problems that could go wrong there, so that wouldn't be a good environment to test the gameplay.

Now you could ask "why not keep it in beta as they test the gameplay now that things are stable?" Well it's a pretty well polished product now as far as the actual server stability goes, so I don't see a point in keeping it in beta forever. Besides, beta is just a label. The system works the same way right now whether you call it alpha, beta, or full release. You're still going to keep working on it since TF2 is a software as a service, and calling it a beta doesn't change that.

It isn't communicated in writing but if updates aren't coming as quickly as you want them to come out then it's slow by your standards. They don't need to smack you in the face with it and spell everything out for you, you can just pay attention to how long it's taking them to do things. Like you said, they're slow. Okay they're slow, so what? It's not like they're directly interfering with how we run our competitive community, so there's no reason for us to get upset at them for being slow at updating something that is outside of our community.

I'm sorry but I can't agree with your reasoning. Valve doesn't have to "develop the 6v6 game mode" at all. There are 23 Seasons of ESEA, 25 season of ETF2l, 17 seasons of Ozfortress, etc, etc. We have collectively already developed the best way to play 6's that showcases skill and tactics.

All Valve needed to do was pay attention to the comp community and give us the required support.

They did pay attention to our community and what they found was a community with low viewership, low participation, and just a small scene overall. You could argue that we were small because we didn't have developer support, but if you put yourself in the developer's shoes it was possible that we're small because the game mode that we designed for ourselves wasn't very good. They needed to test it out for themselves and find that out on their own.

In our defense, we did the best that we could with the tools that we had, but it's obvious that we could only take that so far. At a certain point it's hard to introduce people to a game that has so many barriers to entry.

Valve is slowly stripping away those barriers and introducing the larger TF2 population to the competitive side of the game, and that's why competitive TF2 is in a better place today than ever before.

yeah the gamemode was shit that's the reason it has low viewership not the fact that the game is basically advertised and developed as a joke game

then when the devs decide to take on competitive because that's what's poppin' in 2016 and find the game a casual mess, and try to make a competitive mode while keeping all the retarded casual shit in the game and it fails utterly

it's obviously because the format that was found to be the best for competitive play is not actually good and the reason nobody plays it is because its bad and not because it's basically been ignored or unrightfully shat on for the past 8 years

I hear you my dude. I too wish that we could just put our 6v6 game into matchmaking but that's not how they see the future of the game necessarily, and you'd also piss off a bunch of people who don't like playing Scout/Soldier/Demo/Medic. It's obvious that they won't just take our word that this is the best format, but maybe they'll reach similar conclusions after months of playtesting.

You have too much faith on a dev team that had the timer missing from the hud for like a week ...
Every single project they worked for the past 8 years its either stale or dead... doomsday, mannpower, pass the time, mvm, watergate, matchmaking, rd_asteroid, snowplow etc ....all of this while draining down the engine to the point where people had to rely on dx8 and low settings to keep the game somewhat competitive playable and you say they look down at the current competitive state and think they can come up with a better solution ?
To me it really seems as devs they might be really capable but they lacked leadership and that translated on what we see now.

i think the fact that they don't take the word of the people who play the game a hell of a lot more than they themselves do is not a fault of the competitive community.

it's not even that i want 2 scout 2 soldier 1 medic 1 demo in matchmaking or anything like that. i just want a proper ruleset; it's a bit facetious to say that because i don't like the absolute disregard to existing competitive rules, meta, and pace that i want to subject everyone to a competitive mode they've never seen before. but the reason we have the problem of having to explain to pyro and spy mains that their class is trash for competitive is because of that neglect to competitive balance for 90% of the game's life. hell, meet your match could have enforced an ONLY 2 scout 2 soldier 1 medic 1 demo if valve had put together more than a 200 word faq about competitive, explaining WHY things are the way they are OR by balancing the shit classes so they're good but at least take a modicum of skill so the limits make sense

now this is just opinion but:
i got into 6s after being an engineer main anyways, i think more people than you'd expect would be willing to play the fragging/generalist classes once they realize a) how fun they can be when in a competitive environment and b) why they are better than specialist classes to be played at any given time, but why their lovable shit classes can be used very effectively in some cases

The actual timeline of matchmaking should have been:

- in beta, open the client to a sizable number of players once the connection issues and logical bugs were all fixed
- start with class limit 1; is it good? What should be changed?
- try class limit 2; is it better? What should be changed?
- come to a consensus, even using something as shallow as reddit
- what items are blatantly overpowered, especially within the scheme of 1 or 2 class limit? fix them
- come to a consensus, even using something as shallow as reddit
- release the client, sans awful queuing/ranking algorithm, continue to fix the small issues

Instead, as toad up there is saying, there isn't any proper ruleset. You can't expect much balance to come out of a ruleset with no limits on any class, especially when all the classes in this game weren't even balanced for a setting with less than 20 players on the server. It just doesn't make any sense. You can't spin incompetence. You can try to use any angle you want, but that is not the proper way to balance a game, unless you're going to use the lack of limit as a starter and work your way down methodically, limiting each class to 3, 2, then 1. That's questionable though, considering it's very obvious that there needs to be some kind of limit in place, and if a limit is too forgiving, there might as well be no limit at all. But, if that's the case, it too should all have been done in beta, with consistency to the updates. You take too long, you lose interest, and messages become twisted over time, which is why you see the entire forum meming about how Valve never play their game and have 0 hours. Basically, you lose faith.

For sure. What you're saying totally makes sense but I want to put that in perspective.

1) The TF2 team is relatively small. Valve has money to pay developers but if they hire new people, those people tend to go work on other things like virtual reality, Dota, CS:GO, etc. TF2 is a game that new employees work on to get their feet wet and that's why you see so many different projects popping up in TF2.
2) Given that they have a small team, there's only so much that they can accomplish in a short amount of time.
3) The beta could have been longer, but we have to remember that the community was so thirsty for the matchmaking update, refreshing daily and begging to get their hands on it, especially after many Valve visits and B4nny hype tweets.

I think that the TF2 dev team handled everything pretty well given these circumstances, and while they may not be able to satisfy everyone, I think that they've done a good job and that's why I have faith in them to make the best decisions for their game moving forward. People will always want more updates in less time with more content, but they've done the best that they can and that is commendable.