And don't get me started on the 6s vs HL argument, because the whole premise is just grounded on something wrong: the idea that one format is inherently better than the other. They aren't, they're not even the same, they're not comparable that way. Yeah, 6s has more powerclasses, and if you play HL you can play whatever you want! Only if you're good enough at it, and have fun with a setup designed to explicitly allow every class -- that's sincere. That's the fundamental difference between the two gamemodes.

6s is about taking how the game plays out when it's not restricted, then restricting it until it works well; the history of competitive TF2 ended up on 6s, ended up on the ESEA ruleset, because that's what people liked. It doesn't have anything to do with encouraging some things or punishing others based on arbitrary personal decision. How 6s works right now is about how people liked playing.

Highlander is about taking the way the game is designed, and forcing that on it. And that's fine. It's fun, it works well, it has a lot of problems because of massive ruleset problems/drama (cough cough wrangler) but overall the idea of "there can [and must] only be one" works totally well, it's a viable alternative to how 6s works and it's probably better for low level play. In my opinion, 6s is better for high skill and HL is better for low skill; and that's fine, different kicks for different cliques.

The idea that you should impose the pros' rules on the not-quite-so-pros is absurd, childish, and reeks of bigotry. Why allow the gunslinger in 6s? So that you can punish aggression? Sure, use it in HL, give engie a job on 5CP; just don't force something into 6s just to suffer the wants of a player: 6s works the way it does for good reasons, those being of all the players of it and its predecessors trying to figure things out and ultimately reward "good play". Who defines good play? Who knows? All I know is that they figured something out on their own. It works, it's great, it's even banned freight; I'm sorry for lying there, rhyming is great.

The same thing goes the other way around. You can't just say "get rid of those piece of crap gloves", because the way that highlander plays out relies on the GRU. Sure, they have problems, sure, they have flaws, but nothing beats empirically knowing "this is wrong". In 6s, the gunslinger is wrong, the wrangler is wrong, but in highlander you just can't compare. In HL, you can get away with using the scottish resistance, the black box, or FaN. Actually, I think Mackey tried using that too, but I don't know how that went because I wan't looking around. If HL said, "set classlimits to 1", 6s would turn into 4s. 4s is fun, I know from experience, and it works really well for CTF of all things; but it's not 6s, and removing two players for no reason but to make this arbitrary imposed rule not ruin the game will literally change the way everything's played.

I think this is the right place to post it, where the OP of that thread can't see. Good choice.

it's hard to watch 12 ppls views at once. tf not 2ez to spectate. there should be a new/different spectator overview mode.

This isn't a response to the OP of that thread. There's nothing I said that would've implied that. The only reason I linked that is to be like, hey, this is where my train of thought started: No other connection.

#4 I agree, there are a lot of problems with the actual spectating aspect of watching TF2. You don't get to see how someone aims or moves as well from third person, but you're restricted to their viewport and rapidly cycling through them to get to the right one is nauseous. IIRC, there's something in TF2 for instantly going to a player, but it's not consistent in some important way and it's obscure too.

6s is "liked" for sure, but I think there are a lot of reasons people tend to like it. Of course, at this point it's simply become habit, but reasons such as stressing individual skill, minimizing spam and "chaos," and making teams of fewer players are very competitive-minded outlooks. I'm definitely no expert on highlander, but when I messed around with it on gorgeousgamers last season (merit pending, considering most of our players didn't care at all) it was pretty difficult to do anything as a single player unless you were demo or heavy. The capabilities of any given class in 6s are much higher, and it's good for spectators. What keeps a lot of people interested in games is being able to watch a good player and follow him, and when a player's influence is taken away it's harder to find that key player you want to follow, like banny. Highlander also seemed sort of chaotic to me, but then again I seem to not be very good at it. It's just there are a lot of things that can happen, with a lot of different unlocks, in so many different ways. It almost seems unmanageable. Then again, maybe I'm just bad. Also keeping teams to a smaller player count allows teams to go to LANs and such with more ease. Imagine sending 4 9-player teams to ESEA LAN instead of 4 6-player teams. A lot more money and chance for some players not being able to attend.

So yeah, while it's not inherently better, when taken into a biased view of "What do we want to see and play at a e-sport level" 6s seems to take the cake over highlander. Not that that's a good thing or anything, just how it is.

the difference between casual tf2 and competitive tf2 is too big compared to other games.

the only difference in casual sc2 and competitive sc2 is skill. same with mobas and cs (plus going from 16vs16 or w/e to 5v5). we have class limits, item bans, and having certain classes being useless in most situations.

your use of CS as an example is a poor choice; medic aside the structural differences in pub/competitive are much the same in CS and TF2.

the other comparisons are valid though

I think everyone needs to relax. Granted tf2 has been around for nearly 6 years and is no where near as popular as other games. However I think only within the past year has the infrastructure and cohesion actually come in place to grow the game. So my message is to just relax and let the growth naturally play out. It must be remembered that competitive tf2 is pretty much entirely community run, so when compared to other purely community run games, competitive tf2 is light years ahead.

I think TF2 just needs better spectating features.

Imagine if we could have one guy live in game, relaying who to watch to the cameraman on the STV, so he would always catch the big plays, plus some sort of quick and easy player POV switching feature.

Of course, that would require cooperation from ESEA and Valve, so I'm probably just daydreaming.

That aside, I find 6v6 extremely fun to watch, especially lately now that it's all converged on the TF.TV channel with awesome casters.

Edit: I showed the comp side of TF2 to a cooworker from my old work who played TF2 casually every once in awhile, and she's loves it. She already knows most of the teams in Invite and predicted matches based on previous ones.

Most of the people I ask about competitive tf2 usually say something about the only interesting part of competitive tf2 is the mid fights.

TF2 is the most popular fps game watched competitively really, I'm not sure why he mentioned it at all.

I think it also explains why quakelive has a way higher proportion of its userbase as active followers of tournaments. I say proportion because the numbers are still terrible like any other fps game, but that's just because the game isn't popular.

It seems more likely that Valve would implement a 6v6 style matchmaking system if weapon bans had more structure. From their perspective having seemingly random items based on what experienced players consider fun or not overpowered or whatever metric we use these days lacks officialism. It wouldn't be a stretch for there to be an implementation of 6v6 fully vanilla, they have a matchmaking system intact for two of their games

TF2 definitely needs better spectator features. It would make things so much easier for casters and much more enjoyable to watch on-stream

I agree that rules should be somewhat focused on making games more entertaining to watch, but the rules that guy proposed are actually pretty terrible and would do the opposite of his intentions and really slow down the game. There honestly isn't that much of a problem with turtling and stalling in right now (in NA 6s at least) and it is definitely less of a problem than in games like Dota 2 and Sc2 (I haven't been able to stand watching Sc2 in ages).

I also think the community already does an ok job of making the game rules more spectator friendly. There have been quite a few cases of unlocks being banned and classes being limited because they ruined the game for spectators. I recall that changing the rules so that winning 3 rounds ended the half was designed to make games more interesting to watch.

As many people have already pointed out, TF2 matches are generally shorter than in any other e-sport. Dota 2 matches last 40+ minutes for each game and are played in the best of 3 format and tons of people still watch them. If there is any problem with the length of TF2 matches, its that they are too short (at least in my opinion).

I think the best thing for the future of this game is for top players to keep pushing the limit in terms of skill and for more teams to try and reach the top level, because TF2 is only boring when the teams playing either aren't skilled enough or aren't motivated enough.

The best way to grow competitive 6s right now is probably through new maps. New(er) maps like Process seem like they really reward higher skill levels on all classes and speed up the game, plus make it more exciting. More spectator features would be nice: ability to do a split-screen easily, or to jump to a specific player instantly, for example.

Also, a lot of the seemingly haphazard rules about weapon and class bans exist for a reason—other options were tried a long time ago!

I think highlander just has too many people to be viable. First, as others have pointed out, it's just a clusterfuck all the time. At any given moment, 3-4 people on each team are dead, and it's hard to know who to watch to see the big plays happen. Additionally, getting 18 people online for a match is a huge mess. I understand that it is more like pubs, but I still think fewer numbers is better for a competitive fps, as evidenced by pretty much every other competitive fps now and previously.

I don't think I've ever read something as dumb as this in my life. First off, it just theorizes that turning TF2 into a CS based game would create more interest. If TF2 was as boring as this man said, then we'd be experiencing a decline in viewership rather than the explosion that we're seeing. Obviously, a good portion of that is attributed to the growing popularity of twitch and other such streaming platforms but I'd say a large majority of it is because of the interest. Personally, I still find TF2 extremely exciting and there are plenty of nail biting matches. In fact, just looking at the difference between ESEA players and ESEA viewers, it's quite obvious that the large majority of our viewers are from "non-competitive players".

Now that we've seen that his conclusion that people find TF2 boring is absolutely atrocious, let's talk about why his idea is worse than the current state of comp tf2. It's actually pretty simple, even with CSGO spinning it's wheels, I'm 99% it will never return to the popularity of CS never mind reach the popularity that the current "RTS" games are seeing. Even with a "shot-clock" and sudden death, CSGO does not have amazing numbers. Purely by viewers, NA TF2 has more eyes than NA CSGO (just off ESEAtv stats). So no, sudden death doesn't make shit more interesting, if anything I think it would butcher the game. The give and take of the current 5cp-respawn game mode provides for a good amount of action where shit is going ham and a good amount of down time where casters can analyze and banter.

Onto the next point, SC2, LoL, DoTA all mimick this idea of bursts of action followed by lulls in the action and/or stalemates. To kind of rap up why his argument is shit, TF2 is boring unlike mobas -> needs sundden death like CSGO -> flow of game of tf2 is closer to mobas than CSGO.

Of course, I could go into my whole big opinion of why TF2 will never be at MLG but I think I wrote enough.

TLDR Our format is best IMO, evidence shows it's not boring, look at my gotfrag essay

I'm at a loss to understand why games like DotA or LoL attract so many spectators while tf2/FPS doesn't. I had to have a DotA-competent friend walk me through why a play was impressive when I tried watching it. How could people not want to watch TF2, even if they don't play? The concept of "goddamn that guy just shot someone out of the air" or "that guy just killed the WHOLE enemy team" seems immediately understandable to someone who doesn't even play video games.

#17 The reason for their popularity is because DotA and LoL are such massively popular games while the competitive play is the same as public play, so it's essentially watching people who are 100x better than you do the same stuff. Don't know how to respond to the other stuff in your post though.

The rules are how they are because competitive TF2 grew to the state it's in today in a way that allowed the game to be fair/balanced and interesting to watch/play all while keeping the basic core idea of how the game should be played intact. By fair and balanced, I mean rules were placed so that players/teams aren't hindered and the only advantages/disadvantages players have are the team's skill and the individuals skill, though the latter matters less albeit still being a factor. You have rules such as what weapons are and aren't allowed that are also in place for this same reason. Why do you think Natascha was banned? Well, you know the answer to this. It's because it was an unfair and imbalanced weapon.

To further extend my point, I want to bring up one of the many arguments pub players give towards the general idea of competitive TF2: the lack of utilities being used more often. To summarize the argument, "The idea of competitive TF2 is boring to me because there are several classes that sit unused 90% of the time when it's a big part of the game." Remember when I said rules were made to help benefit the teams/players and make things as fair and balanced as far as we can currently see? How "fair" do you think it would be to, for example, run a starter pyro over a roaming soldier? How "fair" do you think it would be to run a starter sniper over a scout? It's not fair to the players in that situation when it highly hinders the player's potential. With sniper, you have so much more room for error when it comes down to shooting. And you hardly have any movement in comparison. And no pyro is consistent enough with airblast jumping, let alone able to land and actually do something useful. What pyro is going to do that just for a SMALL chance they'll pop/drop the medic? A roamer can easily do that for less health AND get out almost as easy. It's literally hindering the player's potential. Don't get me wrong, utilities have their usefulness, but only sometimes.

The match timer shouldn't be lowered. There's no reason. Just lower the round timer instead, which he also brings up. I'm not 100% for this change, but I'm not 100% against it. Decrease it by 25% (percentage changes depending on map) and adjust it as seen fit. It COULD make the game more fast paced, even tough compared to a lot of games, this game is already fast paced. It COULD also help with those silly stalemates. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I wouldn't be against testing it, but it's more of a thing that I'd have to see how it plays out than go on and want it no matter what.

Only other problem I have left is not allowing the Dead Ringer. I get it, it's kind of a gay item. So is the Direct Hit and the Demoknight concept. I might be biased about those two though, I dunno. But the Dead Ringer has also positively changed how some maps are played under certain key (whether significant or small) situations. Fake sacrificing yourself for sticky traps on Gravelpit for example. I mean, it's not like by not doing it you're 90% going to drop someone because they walked into a trap, but why even chance it? I don't care if you have explosives to counter it.

His quest for change has a really good reason for it, but his the actions he wants to be made, in my opinion, are not so great.

Once you get past learning the names of the items and heroes and what they do Dota is actually quite a simple game to follow and understand. While the core concepts of TF2 are simple the strategy and teamwork aspects of the game are more subtle and the deeper competitve concepts are less well defined. Even a new TF2 player/viewer will eventually realize the game comes down to more than just dm, but would probably struggle to explain why a strategy is successful or even what strategy is being used. Imagine a new viewer watching a mid fight and then trying to explain why one team won so convincingly despite having the exact same classes and weapons as the other team.

Also, mobas have a little bit of everything, if you think about it. Micro, teamwork, stats, and a fairly low skill barrier (theres a lot of metagame to learn, but not a lot of mechanical skill). Its very easy to follow the action at a high level.

Its easy to see why they have so many players and viewers.

Lowering round timers would make stalemates MORE likely.

If a team is stuck defending on last and there is only say 1:30 on the round timer it makes sense to just go into ultra turtle mode so the round will end in stalemate and you can go into a new midfight with a clean slate.

If sudden death is enabled (which is btw the stupidest idea ever) the round timer will just become a cheap and abusive way for teams that are ahead to consolidate their advantage. Imagine being down two round and having to push into an enemy team turtling on badlands mid on even ubers and if your push fails you automatically lose the round. This of course brings you back to the first option to turtle the sudden death round until stalemate is achieved.

The round timer is almost always completely irrelevant on push maps, so I don't see why it needs to be made relevant as an incentive to turtle. Its especially idiotic that this change was originally suggested because of some poorly thought out shot-clock analogy.

Fucking brilliant

i take some offense, just based on this comment

as someone who does not play comp TF2, but watches multiple comp matches (both 6s and HL) i do not think it is boring in the least.

don't euros play on some dumb timer system that pretty much rewards/incentivizes turtling if you manage to knock a round off your opponent?

It's more of a problem with their scoring system. It's win by five or highest score after 30 minutes. If the teams skill levels are anywhere close, risking losing a push isn't worth it when you have the lead. It's much harder to push from last to 2nd than 2nd to last, and at 30 minutes you're going to win anyways. No point in trying to turn 4-2 to 9-2 because it's not going to happen in that time period. American system promotes closing out a game instead of risk a push for an unnecessary lead.

so naturally when it comes to comp tf2, we should listen to somebody who nobody inside of comp tf2 has ever heard of when it comes to making tf2 marketable

all my l4d friends would sit in mumble and watch tf2 finals with me season after season and think it was awesome without even playing so much as a lobby

this post is dumb

comp tf2 is fun

the only crisis this community has ever faced was double natascha heavies at last, and we survived it. everything else is just fine :)

I could not take that post seriously anymore after reading this: