@nuze

I have read most of the posts in the thread, probably not all, but the arguments in favor of the crossbow boil down to "Medic is a boring class, crossbow makes it more fun" and "It gives medics mechanical depth" in general.

If you're truly undecided, I'll ask you when you think it's too much. Would you be OK if, let's say, the crossbow healed from 100 to 200hp (from 75-150)? What if it could overheal players? I doubt you'd be in favor of keeping it then, but the weapon would still make medic more fun, and it would still "reward" skill. For some people (myself included), the state in which the crossbow is right now has gone past that point and has gotten to a level where they think the game suffers from it.

Another point: just yesterday I played a game where I did 400 damage to a soldier in something like a clip worth of shots while he literally stood still and got arrowed 3 times. Even if the weapon raises the skill needed to play medic and better medics are rewarded, 90% of the crossbows are hit on people waiting for it, where your aim really doesn't matter. Coincidentally, those are the heals that make the game so much slower and impede pushing out of damage.

Maps are also balanced around medpacks and ammo packs in a certain fashion. That's why you don't see health packs on granary yard, near lobby in snakewater last or below the point in gullywash. Having free medpacks on demand lets you defend in places where you shouldn't, breaking the intended flow of (especially in old) maps. Doing 200 damage to a soldier who just stands underneath the bridge in badlands mid only for him to get +150 and rebomb you is not something that should be allowed to happen, in my opinion (same in gullywash mid).

There's also the other reasons that I didn't see anyone argue, like the uber building, the randomness aspect of some fights where a magical crossbow gets hit, etc.

Lastly, to anyone saying that "then nobody would play medic", I say that there were medics before the crossbow was even in the game and there will still be people who play medic, because they enjoy the class for other reasons.

if i had a dollar for every time a medic misses a crossbow on me while i'm standing still and i die because i'm standing still like a fucking mong waiting for the med to actually hit me with the crossbow i would have many dollars

if I had a dollar for every time I try arrowing someone and then they just move out of the way before the arrow gets to them and then they yell at me for missing an arrow I would have many dollars

tbh i would play medic more if i had an excuse to try get needle frags lol

I was using fun like it meant depth (because depth is fun). You can replace what I said with depth, or with skill, or with whatever and it doesn't actually change it; crossbow is far from empty when it comes to depth/skill/fun, but it ultimately removes more than it adds in the game overall. We've seen the game become less deep, less skillfun, and less fun imo, as a result of the crossbow buffs.

It might turn out that way, that's one way you can theorycraft it. My personal theorycrafting is that soldiers will get more heal priority again, because they still need health and survivability to have a presence, and losing your tankiest class means the enemy team would have a much easier time pushing in. And without the crossbow to heal them instantly from a long range, you're going to need to buff them up instead. Doubling to make games less stalematey because someone needs to rotate to give them heals, giving more opportunities to push in and meaning you can't just hold forever like current teams can. But at the end of the day, we won't know who's right until something actually gets done about the crossbow and we see first hand what happens.

As for the demo nerf comparison, we know that the demo nerf buffed scouts. No one can really argue it because that's pretty much universally agreed on. The crossbow is a lot more complicated, and we can't say definitively that it buffed soldiers and nerfed scouts, because while it meant we can keep soldiers safe while far away and without rotating, it also meant that we can dedicate more healing time to scouts and soldiers can't try and make plays as much because the enemy flank is locked down a lot more (because they can just heal up any damage with the crossbow again). You could be right that removing the crossbow would be the same as the demo nerf, or you could be wrong and leaving it in is what's actually buffing scouts (just a lot more indirectly).

#211
Yes the majority of the posts in this thread boil down to that but why would you summarise to those two things from a lot of poorly constructed arguments and a few good ones? Why not just dismiss the bad arguments and try to put thought into forming a rebuttal for the good arguments?
I'm not debating about hypotheticals and I'm not saying the crossbow is balanced - if it hasn't been clear my stance is that the crossbow is overpowered but not overpowered enough to warrant the degree to which people are in favour of banning it. I don't know what is ultimately the best option but it is NOT as clear cut a decision as people are making it out to be.

#215
There is merit to a lot of what your are saying, but because of the amount of depth you need to go into to explain the situational mechanics to understand the knock on effects, you are backing up my fundamental point in all of this which is:
There are many many dynamics in this game that are affected by the crossbow and as such it is not as straightforward as saying 'it takes away a lot more than it adds.'

(Also its hilarious to me that #213 gets downfragged despite making exactly as valid a point as #212, if that doesn't highlight the bias then idk what does.)

I think I've said all I can say because clearly I'm not changing any opinions and I'm just wasting my own time at this point. Gg thread.

Can we just put our brains to actually getting item fixes to Valve rather than spending it on proposing the same item fix each time?

#217 Valve established long ago that they don't give a fuck what 6s players think about game balance

#218 better chance than having to create a mod to fix balance and having everyone install it.

As a demo main, i just hate tagging someone for 150, not being able to score the frag myself, and hear him getting arrowed. It's like damage does not matter anymore.

And to all the soldier mains complaining about scouts nothing stops you from either getting good with shotgun or using direct hit.

this game without hats and all the other shit (less maps, less textures, no wasted space with training vids, etc.) would be a manageable download for pretty much anyone, and having it be plastered all over this and sites like tf2c for a while wouldnt be too difficult

.

who said that?

Hats are dumb. Am I the only one that uses the no hats vpk thing?

ive used that shit for longer than i can remember

because this is an anti-crossbow circlejerk thread

because like half of the arguments being used for the xbow are garbage in this thread lmfao like med mains crying that without xbow med would be sooooo boring
also arrows are one of the easiest projectiles to hit, most of the skill doesnt even come from the medic, but from the teammates' positioning and movement
besides people aren't even opposed to the concept of the xbow, i think a long range heal weapon is fine, but the way it's been implemented has been awful. i dont disagree that the xbow does bring some excitement factor and have some upsides for the game, it encourages teammates to play more aggresively and riskier, because they know that they can always be arrowed, but i think that is inherently flawed. tf2 isnt a game that rewards this type of gameplay, and usually, this style of gameplay does not work in lower levels of tf2 and comes as a detriment when they try to use that style of play.
you could make the argument that being detrimental to lower levels of tf2 doesnt matter and that top level tf2, teams such as froyo and evl are the only things that matter, but the fact is that tf2 is a game 6 years past its prime and is dying quicker than before. if leagues leave the lower divs out to dry, you would just be pissing off even more players, and making even more people unsatisfied with the game.
overrall i feel like the downsides (more randomness in counting ubers, bursts of heals in short range, and making other medic primaries obsolete) outweigh the potentially more aggressive style of tf2 it lends itself to.

http://68.media.tumblr.com/a780dbb14ba5dc710a2ecde5b8e90d16/tumblr_neaowk3Bwx1r2qkzbo2_r1_1280.png

anyway let's watch the EU cup this weekend and see how it goes.

What time is this at? Etf2l says first round starts at 19:00 today but I have no clue what timezone they are defaulting to. Will it be casted somewhere?

Starts at 19CEST

Honestly I just think crossbow heals too much at close range, that's where the damage is. If it ramped up from healing 25 to healing 150 rather than 75/150 it would remove a lot of it's power while keeping cool mechanics like arrow building and hitting long range arrows.

https://clips.twitch.tv/EsteemedGenerousLapwingArgieB8

We heal for 500 in 7 seconds, with pretty close range arrows. I'm not in favour of banning cbow btw, I think people are overreacting for the most part although it does feel pretty retarded a lot of the time.

From playing the whitelist cup, I'm having so much fun with the crossbow being unbanned. It opens up a lot of pushes based off of damage and makes spam (soldier and demo) much stronger.

Can we step back from the crossbow for a second and look at how stupid the market gardener is?

Why should a soldier be granted a pick for swinging once? If you have a soldier flying right towards your med, there is not much to do unless you have scouts. It is either hitting a nut airshot or watching your med get picked.

Shit is fucked.

!!!i agree
from a medic's perspective it was way funner too

Well there's your problem, its the same as a normal soldier bomb but it has even less chance of working.

Based on playing the no xbow cup, I think it should be banned next season. I'm just a scout though, did any sollies/demos/medics have any problem with it?

I think it's more important for new players to be able to use any weapon rather than not get shut down by a bad weapon.

Let's face it, if you get destroyed by a bad weapon you would get destroyed by a good one too - and you deserve to loose for not being able to beat it.

It's not as black or white as that. When you're new and don't really know much about how the game works competitively and neither do your opponents, really dumb stuff can destroy you. You can do well against completely meta setups because that's what all your practice went into, even if you're not flexible at all. And then you can get completely dominated by a natascha heavy + degreaser pyro + dr spy because you have no clue how to deal with something that completely goes against everything you know, even if a more competent team would just outplay them because they have a better understanding of what to do.

I think it's not really reasonable to expect that from new players. There's a good chance they joined competitive because we keep telling them "competitive is so much less chaotic and way more clean than pubs, you don't ever see these garbage unlocks and retard strats." But at low levels with our current whitelist, that's not really the case at all, and the worst part is that some of them work. What they end up experiencing is often closer to an organized pub, and a lot of them will just go pub instead after they see that.

Did they deserve to lose? Maybe, that depends on who you're asking, but whether they win or lose and who deserves what isn't the issue here. The issue is that they're going in matches and playing this chaotic game that's hardly like competitive. They don't like it and would much rather be playing actual competitive. But they can't, because the dumb strats allowed by the whitelist are often more effective just by being something the other team has never even considered, even though it's no fun for anyone.

It's just a lot of extra work to put on new players, when there's not really any reason to justify it. High level players don't have to deal with this stuff, the game isn't changed whether they're banned or not. Low level players are the ones who do face it, and they certainly don't want it. The only solutions for them are to:

1. Get better, which they'd do anyway with or without bans, so it's not an argument either way.
   
2. Practice against those unlocks, which is a lot more work for something that'll get invalidated pretty quickly since they'll only ever see those unlocks when they're still low level. Not to mention it's really aids practicing against a specific gimmick weapon in the first place.
   
3. Quit playing. Which is what a lot of new players do, since the competitive they're playing is nothing like the competitive we play and say is fun, and we basically just lied to them.

It's a "no different" at best, "pretty shit" at worst. Or, instead, we can just change the whitelist and make all of that completely nullified, and not have to deal with it at all. We didn't see any benefits from opening the whitelist, and instead every good thing that we'd thought would happen ended up backfiring, so it's not like we're losing anything by doing that.

It baffles me how people have come to the conclusion that banning crossbow makes the game faster. The defending team will always trade damage more effectively than the team trying to push.