We just had this discussion in ozfortress for the ultiduo cup we just held and it was about 75:25 in favor of xbow being allowed simply because the medic might as well be a spectator without it and the gamemode becomes slow as all hell.

It's undeniable that being able to arrow up hurt players allows teams to start pushes faster and that can't be a bad thing. Plus, does anyone actually want to play medic without the crossbow? It's about the only enjoyable weapon the class has. Without it you're just a no aim healbot who has to hit surfs occasionally. With it, you can make some clutch plays.

There are definitely some absolutely fucking terrible weapons currently allowed but the xbow is fun, well skill-indexed, and adds to the game. The only real reason people could want to remove it is because they want to play 2009 tf2 again. But that's never coming back.

I actually have the most fun trying to play kritz on razor thin advantages. As for being a healbot, medic is about positioning and timing more than anything else. I don't think he needs to be about having "clutch aim" to be a rewarding class to play.

I took a year or so off, and I came back to a world of hard-earned 30% advantages evaporating in front of my own eyes. I don't think it's fun if you call a good series of holds/pushes to build a strategic advantage, just to see it go for nothing. It actually allows losing teams a cheap way to create a stalemate that lasts for 5 minutes. Rewarding bad play isn't fun.

Medics used to be able to figure windows down to a matter of 2-3 seconds - and now they are no longer able to measure a game and plan accordingly. Nowadays, counting uber and telling your team that you have 8-10 seconds to push is a death sentence if the enemy team had any time to arrowbuild.

Sometimes a fun weapon actually makes things worse.

Flip side of the same coin: It hurts pushes because you could damage the flank classes heavily and be ready to push off the damage, but they can just get arrowed without having to leave the flank and whelm their medic so it's like nothing happened.

A great example being Gullywash, trying to push into mid.

I also feel like people are greatly exaggerating how "fun" the crossbow makes medic to play, nothing can make that class fun. Don't look at the bow through rose-tinted glasses of all the great times you got those sweet long range heals.

What are you talking about? Lone medics plowing down everyone with syringes and making it out alive is the most clutch thing I've ever seen in tf2. Syringe plays were great to watch (I'm not a medic main but I'd imagine they'd feel great to do too) when people actually played with syringes. Way better than any crossbow play I've seen imo.

But in any case, if your favorite thing about medic is the mechanical skill of xbow DM, maybe you shouldn't be playing medic and should play a class that actually emphasizes DM.

looks like you've never seen indust arrows

He had better needles then he did arrows.

frontier justice is completely balanced and actually underpowered in most situations

it's so situational that if you run it anywhere close to full time you'll get smacked the fuck down 99% of the time

you're just a slow scout with 3 shots per clip and if you miss any you're dead

surely you've had time to learn to track ubers in a post xbow buff world?

how is rewarding the team that's taken the risk of and time to arrow build 'rewarding bad play'? surely you're the one who made the bad play if you didn't take the possibility they would arrow build into account, or didn't arrow build yourself? and then made a really bad play by pushing off an advantage you didn't have in the first place?

this is a first person shooter

if you don't like aiming you probably shouldn't be playing it

I do like aiming, and playing medic is just about tolerable with the xbow although it's still my least favorite 6s class

LOOK AT THIS SHIT HE USED TO DO!!!!!!!

Is it really a risk if no one sees it? I haven't played much of the current meta (like a couple scrims at most), but nuze and I talked about the details in the meta, and really, the only actual way to be able to punish arrow building is if you can spot it and sack then. If that's accurate, that really kills the flow of the game, because it removes consistency. Building with a basher scout was already a relatively tough thing to do even at higher levels (there's a decent amount of memes about it), but medics like indust refined that skill into strong advantages.

I'm not going to deny it adds mechanical depth and fun to medic. But it seems to be at the cost of consistency in strategic depth of the game.

Instead of just talking about it, why not try it out for a bit?

do u want people to play or what

#159
I didn't explicitly say sack, when we spotted it at GA it was a full team push with uber advantage because we knew they weren't on vacc after seeing them build, the timing was close though

And the other issue I haven't seen mentioned, yeah we could try it out for a season, but is the pre LAN season really the best opportunity to do this? Are we that adamant about this change as a community (we seem to be divided) that it warrants completely changing the meta and forcing all the teams that will compete at i61 to adapt? And what if people really don't like it and then teams switch back to the current whitelist?

Again from an analysts point of view I would love to see how the meta changes and team/players adapt to a more vanilla whitelist, but from a competitor's point of view I'm not sure I would share the same opinion. I'd love to hear what top eu/na/au teams and players have to say regarding this.

Instead of talking about doing something that was done for at least three straight years (when was xbow first allowed in 6s?), why not try it out a bit? That doesn't seem to make much sense. Plenty of people played 6s without crossbow, hell top medics still used to run overdose or stock over it sometimes a few years ago. If you're specifically picking on crossbow's uber build, then even I have been playing this game long enough to remember how it was before that was a thing. And it wasn't much different.

I do remember quite a lot of people being happy about the change because it actually rewarded medics for hitting good crossbows rather than punishing them with a ~2% uber disad for every crossbow they shot. Is that what you'd prefer things to go back to?

I remember F2 was slow at moving to xbow, but lets be honest, he was a fucking beast with needles.

This is correct. Arrows are a very fun weapon and the crossbow heal mechanic does have a place in the game, just not in its current state.

The idea of banning the crossbow should definitely be tried. There's several advantages to banning the crossbow:

1. You can actually capitalise off just doing damage to the other team in chokepoints. Doing 250 damage to the pocket in choke is a 10 second window of advantage without crossbow, as it takes 10 seconds for the medic to heal 240 HP.

2. Because you just can't instantly heal up any damage your team takes, it would make uber exchanges viable again. If you push with 300 HP against a team that has recently taken a lot of damage in choke, you would know that they were weak enough to force a lot of flashing for the other team.

3. There's no longer an inherent uncertainty that can't be accounted for when counting ubers, since there would be no arrow building.

4. The uber exchange meta takes more skill than the sac meta. There's a lot more factors involved, it's more interesting to watch and it's most likely faster paced, as smaller mistakes can be capitalised on.

Definitely ban the crossbow. It is far too overpowered, even if it makes medic more fun to play. Needles do require skill to use, so it wouldn't really lower the skill ceiling of medic, especially a main calling one.

i remember a lot of people being upset with the uber building of crossbows simply because it was more efficient than using the medigun.

regardless its kind of silly to compare the sentiment now to before or even shortly after its buff. There wasnt any precedent for frequent xbow usage until after it gave uber. people didnt adjust their playstyles to the new crossbow mechanics instantly and it was only after the meta settled when people started saying they didnt like how it affected the game.

I said it was an BAD weapon not a GOOD weapon. Of course the weapon is shit.

to clarify, the item is shit in most situations yes, but the idea that u can have a stored crit and walk around a corner and drop a med with one shot is quite aids

Ok so if your opponent is using a shit weapon, you should be able to outplay him to the point where he changes class or changes weapon (assuming he wants to win).

If your argument is that opponents use the weapon and you don't think it's fun, then A.don't participate in goofy/fun games B. don't scrim against teams who bring out those weapons, C. if you encounter it in a match prove you're the better player and beat them while they are playing suboptimally.

i mean whats the point of even allowing them in the first place when they are gonna be used as epic throw weapons

For experienced players, yeah. It doesn't really matter whether they're banned or not because they should never be seriously run anyway, or if they are for some reason, you are able to win against it without much issue.

For new players who are still trying to figure out how to play against a completely regular team, you can't except them to be able to outplay extreme gimmicks (even if they're suboptimal at higher skill levels). I've seen tons of new players stop playing because "we could beat them if they weren't abusing dumb shit that shouldn't even be allowed" or "these sandbaggers were so obnoxious with these bad unlocks, they only used them to tilt us", it's probably the #2 reason new players quit from what I've seen (after lack of organization/time, but you can't really solve that in a day like you can the whitelist).

New players are the ones who are actually affected by aids unlocks. One of the biggest reasons we moved to an open whitelist is to try to appeal to new players, so I think we need to seriously look into the fact that it just ended up alienating them.

i have no proof but im almost certain that it somehow has a bigger hitbox than stock
someone that knows what theyre doing should test it out

keep the iron bomber so demo at least can like defend himself cus stickies are shit post nerf

this is exactly what newer players do. I've personally have never seen it ran but my point was that weapon being unbanned is just stupid cause literally no one would use other than to tilt people. I've played long enough and at sufficiently high enough level I don't HAVE to deal with it, new players on the other hand are screwed and will do exactly what you suggested and stop playing.

The crossbow killed the concept of a passive roamer. Why hold flank with spam conserving your Crit heals and keeping the enemy team from making a flank play when anyone you hit with spam will just get arrows and all ur work is basically useless. At this point there's no reward for playing a conservative roaming playstyle because the XDbow exists.

Quick strawpoll, I just want to know where we are in terms of support/against

https://www.strawpoll.me/12837097

I feel that both the current whitelist and the whitelist you have in there are to extreme. I'm fine with the weapons that are slight downgrades, or sidegrades it's the retarded troll weapons and ones that are OP / unfun need to be banned.

Quickie Bomblauncher is a slight downgrade that is useful in a couple situations, Tomislav isn't that bad to play against, Widowmaker doesn't matter, Ambassador is a good sidegrade, etc.

Shit like the Holiday Punch, Frontier Justice, Pomson 6000, etc NEED to go.

I'm still on the fence about the xbow though.

Probably should've split "no" into a few more options. If someone said "The current whitelist is way too open, but I don't think it should be that strict either", they might pick the same as "the current global whitelist should actually unban more" which are pretty different views.

The thing is, though, why bother keeping downgrade weapons? It seems counterintuitive to me. Where do you draw the line between a "slight downgrade" and a "troll weapon?"

Also the crossbow thing I polarized on purpose. I understand that it's more complicated than yes/no right now, but I just wanted to see which way people leaned if that makes sense. Just a strawpoll, nothing official.

I gotcha. In all fairness, I think the "No, I think that a strict whitelist will do more harm than good" option covers those bases fairly well since this isn't an official survey. I would be sure in an official survey to include more options as you suggested. What I'm really looking at here is how people feel about the crossbow, since that seems to be the most important/debated unlock on the table right now.

Yeah the no option is pretty restrictive, i don't feel like theres an answer in this that reflects my views..

While in the topic though, popular opinion isn't a good measure of what to do when it comes to difficult decisions. It's good to get an idea of how the community is thinking as a general trend but the reasons behind those opinions can vary a lot.