The most mind boggling thing in all this is no one has said a thing while teams are panicking deciding to play? We don't even know if this whitelist will be used. Ban the quick fix, ban the solemn vow.

can we have a community blacklist to avoid scrimming with teams that use quick fix and soda popper
sonny black don't fail us now

before you read my post please respect that I am just playing devil's advocate because i see some holes in what you're saying.

there is no concrete proof, but there is secondary / circumstantial proof.
1. valve reads tftv (among others, like /r/tf2)
proof: jill posted in the forums once (whether this is enough is not part of the discussion)
proof: b4nny and slin (& i think sigafoo too) confirms this is a reality when they went to visit valve headquarters.

2. b4nny has had influence in valve's balancing
proof: he has said that he had been asked to submit ideas for weapon changes and etc. he also had an anecdote about preventing the reserve shooter from being buffed.
2a: whether you think b4nny is the right person doesn't matter, he is a point of "data from comp" used to make changes.

1. this is not wrong, but why is this right? valve didn't promise when they update things. b4nny has seemingly supported the idea that they like to release their weapon balances and changes in major updates instead, so with the pyro update supposedly on the horizon, doesn't reason favor that they are waiting to ship all their changes then instead of now?

2. regardless of whether point 1 was right or wrong, we also know that the TF2 team isn't very big. Therefore the pace of their work will be somewhat slow. so is it not possible that valve is just slow, rather than they are ignoring us?

i'm curious what your opinion on competitive being in the game means, because if they don't care what exactly was the reason they put it in then?

One thing I noticed from the meeting is that many people (not you saam) are still vulnerable to this delusion that maybe somebody does have contact with Valve and maybe they really do know some secret plan nobody else does. It's a seductive idea, but it's just not the case. They make all the right noises when people visit them but it's always couched in non-committal language, which is totally fine and to be expected. They're not going to prioritise stuff that the vast majority of their customers don't want.

The current situation is that if they see the popularity of a competitive format really taking off they are ready to support it, just as it always has been. The only way that messing with unlocks pleases Valve is if it produces higher participation and it's just a non-factor, you're not going to sell ESEA more easily to non competitive players because of it.

The favour they've done us in creating the MM system is they've given a player who is interested in playing competitively a way to single themselves out and wave their hands that they might be interested in the competitive community. Finding efficient ways to leverage that and bring those people into organised play is really what will grow the competitive side of the game.

hello can we have this one http://whitelist.tf/etf2l_6v6_s17

thank

Valve have always looked at online communities. It's not that the competitive scene contributes nothing to unlocks, it's that it is not the priority. If it's not the priority core unacceptable unlocks that nobody is advocating to even test will never be changed because they're too important to casual, the most popular game mode by a huge margin.

It requires Valve to lead a change that both they and a lot of their customers don't want to make. When it comes to certain problem items they're just not going to do it

i agree, valve needs to be less vague about what's going on with comp.

unban base jumper and then turn the ground of every map into lava so we just play dogfights

There is absolutely no proof Valve cares about what we think. The people who have talked to Valve are insanely optimistic about this game and thinking that b4nny or slin would have made some insane leap in logic from what they were told to what they heard isn't a stretch to me at all. If Valve wants us to ruin our scene so they can rebalance weapons and support the game then they need to fucking come out and say it. This reading between the lines bullshit is just stupid.

Until I hear ANYTHING from Valve I consider this a moot point. b4nny is not a reliable contact with valve.

Pyro update was announced nearly 6 months ago. The only thing that tells me is how incompetent Valve is considering Hardass Johnny basically made a really solid pyro update himself using sourcemod commands

Is it too much to ask for any form of communication before we make drastic changes to a format people have enjoyed for almost a decade?

MM was the bare minimum amount of effort they could have possibly put in. They had a 6 month beta with feedback from a ton of invite players. They used all that feedback to put swiftwater in. Since then they've taken out Snakewater and put Swiftwater in. Nothing about their laughably poor development of MM shows they are willing to listen to the comp community; it really shows the opposite.

Where people have been open about what they saw and heard at Valve I think Valve have always clear - if the players show they want it by participating in numbers they will support it. That's always been the requirement, get the numbers, get the participation, get the engagement.

If over the next couple of years as the player base slowly turns over MM in the client gets a foothold and becomes a significant presence then we might see that getting more support. That they haven't boosted numbers with item incentives tells it's own story, they are being hard on the game mode and demanding it proves itself on it's own merits.

Get yourself up there and have a chat

Unban market gardener, i'm not good without it D:

In game matchmaking was dead on arrival. Just like most of valve's 'new' shit. They release something in a buggy shitty unfinished mess and then move on to making some new shitty ripoff gamemode that no one will ever play rather than fixing the problems they already have.

Valve hasn't given us anything except a big 'fuck you'.

Why do my scrims/season get ruined so valve can test and balance weapons?

I don't know where valve is getting their data from, but I do believe it's from popular youtubers, for example muselk made a video where he got a godlike with the bison, shortly after bison was nerfed, I don't remember valve ever balancing a weapon for comp players

back when wee booties demo was a thing, I remember someone (I think b4nny) suggested only having the movement bonus apply when a shield is equipped, and eventually it became part of the game

it shouldn't have to take someone traveling to valve HQ to become informed that the tf2 team is listening and reading comments/suggestions

If they add some nice-looking skin that drops only while connected to comp MM servers and has a chance to drop that's proportional to the player's rank (i.e. fresh meats get a 0.5% chance to get the skin as a replacement for a random item drop, while death merchants have a 9% chance of getting the skin drop instead of a random item drop, then ACTUALLY do seasons and reset people's ranks and maybe change up the skin but IDK look how popular australiums still are even after all these years) their MM system will populate with people who are actually trying to rank up even in its current incredibly sub-par state and they can do plenty of their own weapons and map testing.

This will literally take maybe a few hours of their time (maybe even less because you can just outsource making the skin to the community again!)

But no I guess we still have to put in 9 hours of unpaid time a day to put on a show and get half a dozen new people interested in competitive, in the vain hope of trying to grow Valve's game for them (which is their job! Taking financial risks is how businesses work and succeed!!!).

This game is so old now that most of us are old enough to have jobs, college, personal projects, and charity/volunteering obligations, we barely have enough time to play the game, let alone do Valve's job for them. Can we at least be given the choice if we want to do their work for them? ETA: inb4 hurdur then just don't play teh game because.... that's the exact opposite of the point.

https://clips.twitch.tv/b4nny/FaithfulRavenDendiFace
i think we all got baited

http://ci.memecdn.com/4564619.jpg

I've always thought TF2 should just be like the Smash bros Melee scene: play the game you want to play. Stop trying to pander to valve because they don't care. They never have and never will, so stop trying to include incredibly broken shit in a perfectly optimal format. Ruining the game for the people who've been playing it for years doesn't help anyone.

No, this was the stated intention from the meeting- specifically for the Quick Fix, Solemn Vow, and Soda Popper. The plan then was to test them in scrims and then each league would decide on their own whitelist based on that, with the hope they would agree on a universal global whitelist. I'm confident (hopefully rightly so?) that they'll choose to keep the quick fix banned after the results of these few days.

Note: of course, it's up for debate whether the whole community should be subjected to testing these weapons in scrims, and whether the whole idea of the whitelist expansion is worthwhile, but I digress.

wait so people are quitting because they might have to scrim with the quick fix for a few days????

It shouldn't but it does so if you want to know that's what you gotta do. Ymmv

Everyone knows the product is crap, doesn't mean there can't be one miniscule potential positive from it, even if no one is going to make use of it.

put me in charge of the whitelist

and people said i was killing tf2 when i allowed the fucking liberty launcher???

To be fair back then ETF2L still had standards.

You're the Neville Chamberlain of TF2. B4nny would hold your head down the toilet and you'd give him the Short Circuit.

mge oighuv's counterjump maps are finally true tf2

https://www.iaml.com/sites/default/files/field/image/4705.jpg

Ouch.

Edit: I can only hope that there is a Winston Churchill of TF2.