this can only lead to good discussion that definitely wont lead to locking it

someone needs to stop shounic from making thumbnails

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B4nny is the trump of tf2

TL:DW:

Glitches, OPness and being released = good reasons to ban items

Not evaluating items that have been changed/Not wanting things to change = bad reasons

Theorycrafting doesn't work, items need to be tested

Resisting developer's idea of the game can create large barrier to entry

b4nny welcomes what he sees as a push by valve to balance the game (starting with pyro)

Grant, buy a mic pop for the love of god

I agree with b4nny on almost everything except that fact that valve cares/knows what they are doing. There is so much retarded shit that could be fixed extremely easily that they neglect time and time again.

-No placement matches in competitive.
-Horrible map selection
-You still join games in casual that are literally completely over.
-Even to this day, when you respawn, you can see your teammates through walls AND ENEMY SPIES. If you respawn, you can instantly notice when someone is a spy near your spawn. If any of them actually played the game as much as they say they do, they would have noticed.

You realize it's literally impossible to fix this, right?

What are you going to do? Make the outline not show around spies? Great, just look for the dude without an outline.

Having Spies to not show an outline is better than them showing it. Because the outline gives their position away completely, and while not having an outline when they should gives away their disguise, you'd still have to see them to realize they are a spy.

You should not be able to see them through walls. No outline would be better.

I think the intended function of the feature in general is to give new players an idea where their team is, so they can join the fight where it is needed. If that is true, then Spies could theoretically just be neglected, they usually play further behind the enemy lines than other classes do, making them less relevant for this feature..

So why not just exclude Spies from being shown through walls? It's a stealthy class after all and I believe this fix would rarely ever make a huge difference.

trump actually has power

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiLnd8fOnvM for people against this argument

I just want to point out that at the beginning of the video b4nny's medic was on fire and b4nny wouldn't put him out

He didn't see the spy through the wall, because you can see that he went through the door not looking at him, but then he noticed him when he was already out. If he would've seen the spy through the wall he would've just prefired before even exiting the door fully.

Remember when Sal made this thread? Highlander lobbies??

Well we've got 6v6 in game lobbies and we didn't do shit. Stubbornness works. Stick to our guns and unlocks will eventually come into line. Just another 3 years....

That's a 20 page thread that I'm not reading, but man, Robin's comments make things so much more clear as to why things are the way they are.

They literally want(ed?) competitive to be the exact opposite of what I think everyone is here for. They want wins to have more to do with the weapons picked than the skill of each player and team. Un fucking real. What is with this mindset!?!? If any real sport started being more about what clothes and shoes the players are wearing as opposed to how well they play the fucking game, they'd be stupid as shit and lose their audience. Why do people want esports to operate on such a superficial level?

anyone who watches matches carefully at all levels will see theres crazy potential to out play the enemy by strategy alone, which is pretty amazing for a game that is mostly dm and movement. Part of the problem is tf2 is a game of chaos which makes it harder to cast and see what's actually going on. Also abuse of the current rules and timelimits can lead to a stale meta. As long as off classes and unlocks remain viable and interesting in their intended situations there's no problem, and theres great potential to keep games fluid and interesting.

What they really want is for the items they release into the game to be used by competitive players so that they can see what they do with them, what strategies emerge, etc, and then use that to decide on the next set of changes. Most similar games have a moving metagame stimulated by dev/player interaction in this way that can result in very big changes in the modes played. Look at Overwatch, the Tank meta lasted for a few months there, that was like multiple Heavies in a 6v6 TF2 game. There's not a lot in it for the devs to see players ignoring new items en masse, but it's their fault (well, Valve's fault - I doubt the dev's are the same now as then)

If they hadn't introduced whitelisting then we wouldn't have the situation we have now, but at the same time that was a tacit admission that they had no intention of listening to competitive feedback. It said: we'll let you play the game you want and stay stuck in a rut, but we're doing our own thing.

I honestly don't think they have much focus on what happens in the existing competitive scene at all. I'm sure they're much more interested in what goes on in their MM games and how they can improve that mode over time. The thing to bear in mind is that their timescale is completely different to ours. They have all the time in the world and surely they intend to use it.

Your logic is way off. You compare the weapons used in the game to the clothes of the players playing it? That makes no sense. It's not like Robin said he wants people to use different unusuals. Robin wanted a more counter based playstyle. Like in Dota where you pick a counter to the other's team composition or buy different items based on the builds of others. It's not like Dota requires no skill at all simply because you counter things with certain picks.
They run a rescue ranger? You run a direct hit. That kind of stuff is what he wanted to see.
Sure, it's not how we ended up playing competitively because it's just not how we enjoyed to play. But it's not like that was too much of him to expect. He envisioned that for TF2. We simply took a different route.

To quote batman, B3nny is the hero that tf2 needs

Poop

legalize gay unlocks

Yeah, my bad, I was trying to think of a sports metaphor, but I guess there isn't one because something as stupid as a counter system doesn't exist in real life sports. You either play better or you lose. Sure, games like Dota require a kind of skill, but it's not exactly an interesting one to watch in action. "Oh, they picked the right heroes to directly counter our team? Welp, guess we're fucked!" Watching Overwatch matches and knowing how the next two minutes are going to play out because one side went for a dive comp while the other went with quad tank is boring as shit. And then the rules constantly change and the meta shifts; things that once worked no longer do, watching old games starts feeling like a waste of time, and mechanical skill and teamplay get less relevant. It's about who spends more time in scrims doing what would have once been stupid shit to see if it works now.

Again, I don't understand why this system is so prevalent in esports. Honestly, I feel like it just makes bad players think they can beat good ones if they just read the meta thoroughly enough, letting them direct their salt at other people even when they play like shit. Or maybe people really do just like not knowing what the fuck is going on since the rules are different today than they were yesterday.

The problem is that in order to have any semblance of strategy, you first need to have an objective. Valve doesn't have such a direction for the competitive game, or it at least doesn't befit the game engine on which the game was built(e.g. stun weapons in a game in which the importance of movement is baked in at an engine level). Valve's TF2(no class limits, no weapon bans) is a mess of conflicting design philosophies which make any attempt at strategy a futile exercise. This also makes it really hard for new players to be attracted to the game, because they might for example notice that the game has fluid and creative movement, but then another element like the Natascha or stun-locking Pyro reflects do a full 180. There is no use in periodically introducing "a new meta" to a game which has no basic design objective; you will need a game before you can create a metagame(which is what the competitive community has done where Valve has failed). And if their idea of a design objective is a lottery of item and class selection, they have no clue what the word "competitive" means and are utterly incompetent.

There are so many thing's wrong with this paragraph i don't even know where to start...

"They literally want(ed?) competitive to be the exact opposite of what I think everyone is here for."

Yes. Because the game is almost a decade old and most of the progress competitively speaking was only made in the past year. It's only recently that they decided to urban a bunch of weapons that were previously disallowed with the Global White list. Weapons like the CM5K and the Rescue Ranger were finally allowed to shine. Just the other day i was playing FaceIT and got a 2K with my sentry wile defending last, ran to mid, got a 3K with the RR itself, and then built a surprise sentry on the enemy's last resulting in another kill. How many times have you seen an Engie Coast-to-Coast push? I know there's probably a large quantity of people seething in their rage at the mere thought of an Engie pushing into last with lvl 3s but that's the kind of plays that (at higher levels) make people in the crowd go crazy. Trust me, people LOVE unorthodox strategies.

"They want wins to have more to do with the weapons picked than the skill of each player and team."

...

"Un fucking real. What is with this mindset!?!?"

What's with the mindset of clinging to an out-dated meta that has proven to result in sluggish games that stalemate and has a vary narrow appeal? If this were any other E-Sport, Soldiers and Scouts would have been nerfed heavily by now. I went to ESA and had a freaking blast, but i can guarantee for every 2 minute perfect round roll, there was a 10-15 minute stalemate where absolutely nothing happened (personally i think that's an issue with 5cp itself as a gamemode, but that's beside the point (No pun intended)). Something has to change.

"If any real sport started being more about what clothes and shoes the players are wearing as opposed to how well they play the fucking game, they'd be stupid as shit and lose their audience."

Did you literally just compare running Black Box Roamer to using different shoes...?

"Why do people want esports to operate on such a superficial level?"

Nobody is suggesting that. They're actually suggesting the exact opposite. Metas change and evolve. Sometimes in vary subtle ways like running at least on Fire-Punch user on team to deal with all the Bullet-Punch, Technician, Scizors running around; and sometimes in massive ways like Deciding on a whim that Lina should be played mid with a Eul's Scepter instead of a Support. Thous subtle changes happen occasionally in TF2. Like when the meta shifted from Shotgun to Gunboats. But thous massive changes seem to almost never happen because people are to stubborn to make the jump. Do know for how long BattleFury Ember Spirit was considered the absolute only way of playing the goddamn hero? But then some idiot thought it would be funny to buy a Veil on him and just run at people with Flame Guard and bursting them with triple Remnant; and now that's wildly considered to be the best way of playing him. Calling these kinds of shifts in the meta "superficial" honestly makes you look naive at best, and ignorant at worst.

this should be good

The bit I bolded is blatantly untrue. Where do you think we got the original whitelists from? Or the match timer, or the class limits? To be fair, I've been been playing for only just over a year, but very little progress has been made during that year. We unbanned a few weapons that were thought to be less broken, and even rebanned your beloved rescue ranger. Saying that these weapons have been allowed to "shine" is ridiculous. All the cow mangler does is dumb down the game by removing the need for ammo management, and the rescue ranger was rebanned because being able to repair your sentry from spawn and then instantly switch classes when it finally dies is insane.

I also seriously doubt you were able to do your "engi coast to coast" solely through the merits of the rescue ranger. If you took your sentry into their last, it's due to some combination of your team hard carrying you and the other team being hopelessly incompetent. The only example I know of the rescue ranger being able to do anything like what you described in an invite game was Ronin vs Bird Noises, setting a sentry up on mid, and that was just to lock in a stalemate to the end of the game. I can hardly even believe you're using a Faceit match as the basis to argue about the ultimate meta of the game.

"Out-dated meta." Outdated by what? I'll assume you're referring to what people love to refer to as the stale meta. As for why we "cling" to it, that's because it's good. It can't be argued that TF2's weapon meta has definitely stopped changing, but I think calling it stale implies there's something majorly wrong with it; instead, the term "stale" is just a holdover from every other esport. I think it'd be more appropriate to call it a stable meta; one where coordination and skill take precedence over experimenting with new weapon/class combos. I'm not really sure you watched the same Rewind I did--I don't recall a single 10 minute stalemate outside of Se7en games, and stalemates that long were rare even there. The meta is certainly not perfect, and there should be an effort to reduce those stalemates, but arbitrarily unbanning weapons that have spent years being banned for good reasons is a silly way to do it. I also think it's important to consider the idea that completely eliminating stalemates should not be the goal. Occasional short stalemates are important for casting analysis, for teams to consider short term tactics, and for viewers to understand what they've just seen; especially new ones. The fights that happen, the occasional offclasses to deal with specific situations in the game (as opposed to dealing with whatever shit the enemy has on their lineup), are all entertaining. They're good.

I also don't think you understand why solly and scout are run so pervasively. Other classes have options in a totally unrestricted meta. Were the gloves unbanned, heavy is completely viable outside of last, and even on mid. The issue is that fighting a heavy anywhere outside of last is boring and annoying, and if you think the current meta is slow, a meta where heavy is frequently run would totally stun you. Scout and solly are the fastest, most mobile classes in the game; putting rules in place that ensure they are run frequently helps minimize stalemates. Were other classes made to be as fun to fight against as scout, solly, and demo are, I think people would be a lot more open to seeing them run more often. Please, Valve, fix pyro.

That specific shift you referred to, I'm totally fine with. My issue is that in esports those types of shifts--where a weapon previously discarded as useless is experimented with and "discovered" as having a good purpose without being patched--are exceedingly rare. Most of the time, the game is patched, the weapons themselves change, thereby changing the rules of the game, and meta shifts develop from there. That kind of change is what I'm referring to as superficial. I'm arguing that TF2 is in a unique (are there any semi-popular exceptions besides Melee?), desirable position where the weapons meta has stabilized, and winners are determined by whoever plays the game with the most skill, as opposed to who abuses the current meta the best until the next patch comes out.