put rando in charge of the whitelist

I wouldn't want or be expected to be trusted with that. The point is that communicating secondhand leaves far too much for interpretation.

man these replies from the dudes who settled on the whitelist after the meeting sure are deafening!!!!

randoMouse, make tf2 great again

Whoops, accidentally posted the wrong chatlog. Here's the right one!

http://i.imgur.com/Ps9PxeU.png

THANK SWEET MERCIFUL FUCK

http://imgur.com/a/mdZQQ

qf sv and sp are all gone

yay

PRAISE THE LORD TF2 IS FUN TO PLAY ONCE AGAIN

so um

what was the point of 'allowing' them in the first place???

i have done it once again.

Testing

some people were unconvinced that they were broken and wanted first hand xp I guess

Keep in mind tri saying its gonna be banned is a result from an ESEA-I meeting and not a 3rd global whitelist meeting so its a probably decision to have all of it be banned regardless of what a 3rd global whitelist meeting would result in.

every1 please say thanks to cat for making this thread and getting the unlocks rebanned

to test them to see if they actually cause problems, and to generate feedback. Whether or not this is worthwhile is up for debate but you already knew the answer to this

That was a quick fix

I see where you're at with this but I'd like to counter with the following:

1. A team of competitive TF2 players went to Valve's headquarters and confirmed Valve is creating a 6v6 matchmaking system.
   
2. They created that system and then asked competitive players to join as part of a beta test.
   
3. They then launched the system and have continued to make changes that are in line with competitive play.

I'm not going to say that they care about what we think, since they might have done all of that stuff on their own without us, but I mean... absolutely no proof? Come on now. I know everyone didn't meet the developers and it's sort of your word versus ours but... no proof at all?

There's also plenty of anecdotal evidence of competitive players talking directly to Valve developers so I feel like a lot of you guys are exaggerating. They've even posted directly on these exact forums.

Even after we found out they were making 6v6 matchmaking, we found out it took them years to build it. My bet is that they're just slow and people are upset that updates are not being rolled out faster. If you want fast updates, your game should be the size of Overwatch, a game that has a team 100x bigger and has the justified popularity to be such. They post patch notes on the regular, they release developer video updates, and they are very communicative with the community. That is no accident but we can't expect TF2 to be the same when it's not as big.

But they did nothing with the beta testing at all. All they did on release was give it a new look. It wasn't until reddit, whose opinions they seem to value more, started bitching and moaning that changes came, and even then it wasn't fixed for a long time, and STILL isn't fixed. I don't think that any of that proves that they care about us.

That's not true Tmbr, as a person who participated in the matchmaking beta I can confidently say that a lot of the feedback went back into the game. For example, we asked them to limit ping.

They implemented this on December 21, 2016:

It took forever and a half, but it happened. Again, I vote for slow and not uncaring. If we as a community decide that Valve is moving too slowly with their balance updates (when they've already promised to rework heavy and pyro) and if we decide that we can't wait any longer, then fine. But I believe that they're caring and most people are just ignoring the writing on the wall.

Is it really that worth it though to cater to Valve if they don't make these changes until we complain? I mean, I get that they changed things we asked them to, but was that not what the Beta was for? It took a full year for them to add that since the beta, and was that not one of the Beta complaints?

Did they make it because a group of 6v6 players went or did they make it because every game has matchmaking and it's the thing to do now? Also don't forget they said they wanted to put in game lobbies in the game three years before it came out so it's not like they worked all that fast.

They may have asked competitive players to join but they did fuck all with the feedback they got. Seriously since release look at what valve has changed about meet your match, they took out snakewater and added badwater ffs.

Again, I haven't seen anything from valve since closed beta to suggest they have any idea what they're doing, and I'll say it again that if Valve wants us to tank a season to get feedback then they should tell us directly.

Whoa limiting ping that's a big change, what about zoom sensitivity (got allowed but also took an age), net_graph, gibs, ragdolls, almost every command that gives fps, what about disabling viewmodels or even just a high limit on the viewmodel fov, what about map selection, what about dealing with hackers running rampant at the top of their leaderboards?

But nah you're right man, ping changes

wtf half my comment got removed.

I also said some shit about people just wanting communication that won't happen. Also some emoji spam that got deleted automatically.

You're the one ignoring the writing on the wall, slin...

Can we ban the cow mangler too while we're at it

and Soda Popper

I'm not disagreeing with you on this point as I even acknowledge that they're slow in my posts. I'm just saying, it's popular to denounce Valve and say that they absolutely don't care about us at all but I think it's an exaggeration. I don't think we should cater to their needs but we can't pretend like they don't exist at all.

If you count the number of outs we have, there aren't that many:
1) Let the game die
2) Grow the existing game as a grassroots community
3) Create a pro mod and modify the game ourselves
4) Wait and see if Valve does anything good

At least it's an option, and you can do it while pursuing any of the other three options.

MR_SLIN, several people have criticized the form in which the previous whitelist meeting was conducted (in particular, that a handful of individuals dominated the conversation). Do those critics have a point, and, if so, do you intend to alter the form of the next meeting, assuming one is still coming?

I don't agree with you on everything; however, I recognize your efforts to do what you believe is right for TF2.

I don't blame Valve for not predicting that Twitch and esports was going to become massive 10 years ago, that would be ridiculous. When whitelists came in we were a small part of their customer base and have remained so, but there's a reason Blizzard have made the huge commitment they have now, and it's been coming for long enough to see it from far away.

For a game that had nearly a decade of market position to be comprehensively usurped effortlessly by a new competitor in a matter of months with the insipid reaction from Valve is shocking. Yes, it's in the competitive esports space, but you work at Twitch, you know what the direction of travel is and you know esports is only getting bigger and bigger. It would not have taken the same resources Blizzard had to throw at Overwatch to make TF2 relevant. It has a different set of problems, but the main one is that Valve, as a company, is not willing to commit the resources necessary to get things done in a timely manner.

You can pin it all on the flat hierarchy or whatever, I have no beef with the specific devs who work on TF2, they can only do so much, but Valve as a company has completely dropped the ball and whatever criteria they are working on just isn't going to cut it. Blizzard aren't going to waste their new market position as the leading competitive class based shooter and every day Valve work at a snails pace Overwatch just tightens it's grip.

At current pace by the time Valve releases 3 updates based on the unlock feedback (this is the optimistic scenario as well) Blizzard will have established a global league with city based franchises, professional players and huge prize pools. This isn't about doing the TF2 devs down, there's just not enough interest in what was (and just about still is) a huge potential growth area for the game within Valve.

The only hope for growth at the moment is that esports overall growth leads to an "all boats rising" effect with TF2 and it generates enough tertiary interest to prop us up for longer. That's almost certainly not going to be the case to any meaningful extent though, it's going to lead to the primary titles sucking everything up and our scene being left behind. To exploit the potential of what is still one of their major IPs in the new esports era they need to fight for it specifically because they've ignored it for so long.

Unfortunately Valve just isn't set up that way and has no experience doing it. They didn't have to do it with Dota or CS, those games naturally assumed their position because Valve hadn't spent 10 years pursuing an anti-competitive agenda. If they come up with something then that's great. But don't expect it or rely on it.

While it's possible that the Quick-Fix was on its way out anyway, it's worth noting, should there be any future discussion in the legality of the weapon, that the Pyro's flamethrower directly counters the Quick-Fix's Uber. [the buff they gave it where it reduces healing on targets hit by the flame particles applies to the Quber as well]

Accurate testing of the balance of the weapon [which may or may not even happen until the thing is nerfed even further] in the future should include attempting to both attack last and defend last against a Pyro.

on one hand valve has specifically stated that with comp MM that they want dx9 to be the standard graphical wise

on the other hand if the game didn't run so terribly there would be less people trying to run the game in dx8 for better framerates