Did anyone mention the reasoning behind banning mantreads?
Seems like a downgrade/fringe sidegrade from gunboats so i dont really get why its banned

Possibly the +200% air control? Makes for some crazy airstrafes

The problem with more crazy airstrafes is it gives you more velocity which means if you can't land in an area that lets you slide and negate fall damage you will take more base fall damage which makes random fall damage even more RNG.

Easily the suckiest part of using the Mantreads.

e:

Which I guess if anyone is not aware, random fall damage is a thing even in competitive since tf_damage_disablespread 1 only applies to weapon damage and not world damage.

I actually had no idea about this, good point to bring up. A convar to disable this really should exist, 20% variation in fall damage could put your life in the hands of RNG :/

iirc there's a bug that let's you switch from mantreads to gunboats but keep the air control

the offclasses see a hell of a lot more playtime in pubs than they do in 6s and valve actively encourages it, so that doesn't make any sense. if it was a "basic fundamental" of the game, why is it not really present in the part of the game valve primarily focus on? clearly they do want all classes to be seen full-time, in pub play at the very least, which is why they keep buffing them towards that. spy's speed buff, heavy's GRU, engineer's gunslinger being some clear examples.

the "weird stigma" you talk of arises from the fact that valve has always treated the 9 classes as real people, rather than tools, and in pubs they *aren't* tools, they work as full-time classes. and it seems to be what a vast part of the playerbase actually wants from the game. people invest a large amount of time and money into each class, because they see them as their unique playstyle they identify with, not a tool to win. and why shouldn't they?

the whole point of having classes at all is to let the player do what they find fun as often as possible. theoretically, 6s could just be all Soldier and we could be playing quake right now. the reason team fortress split up into med/soldier/scout/demo is because people enjoy different things, it isn't hard to understand how the same principle applies to the other 4-5 classes.

that feeling ignores two things. 1: valve is in the process of changing the offclasses. 2: in pubs, offclasses aren't anywhere near as useless as they are in 6s.

so why add something to the pub game that tells pub players "these classes are meant to be useless 99% of the time" when it's probably not going to be true in competitive for much longer, and it's already not true in pubs?

So that little snippet is really the long and short of what you wrote. Problem is, pubs aren't competitive. I don't mean that like "pub TF2 is different from comp TF2," I mean that pubs do not foster a competitive mindset. They don't reward playing competitively. Pubs are random, and trying to apply anything you learn in a pub to competitive makes no sense. Pubs are chaos mode. There's no way to keep track of 23 other people; there's no telling what you're walking into or getting your team to follow you, there are random crits and all sorts of other dumb mechanics. Literally every weapon in the game--even the sun on a stick--will find its time to shine in a pub. If you find that fun, fine, you do you. But don't come talking about how any of that makes sense for a competitive environment. It just doesn't.

You may have missed it, but this whole discussion began specifically because some guy suggested that something should be added telling pub players that offclasses were useless 99% of the time, and not to use them.

here is the post under discussion. http://www.teamfortress.tv/45353/december-global-whitelist-changes/?page=9#253

I even referenced it in my post: "so why add something to the pub game that tells pub players "these classes are meant to be useless 99% of the time". If you hadn't skimmed the post you might have picked up on that.

i honestly don't think there'd be much of an issue reclassifying everything as "standard", "turtle", and "pick", except they'd need to swap medic and pyro's positions and that'd be really weird for a while

the problem is that nobody gives a shit in casual so those terms don't mean anything, really

also it's like a million years too late for anyone to forget the old terms

if there was some incentive akin to OW loot boxes when you level up in casual that scaled based off of the in-game exp, that gave you some hats or some shit, or like a .1% chance of a key/strange/[something else people want], maybe people would care, and doing little stuff like this to tell pubbers how to win would actually be worth pursuing.

also, meet your match update killed community servers so everyone is forced to play with fucking full-time conga sandvich pootis

I thought this got fixed a few days after they got released?

well yeah, that's my first point, that casual players really don't give much of a shit how things work in competitive, since pubs operate so differently. so it's pointless asking valve to implement something in the game which tells pubbies what classes shouldn't be used in 6s when it's not relevant to them.

secondly, the only way 6s is ever going to grow, realistically, is by valve providing prize funding (so people can afford to play), and making 5/9 of the classes having a healthy place in the competitive game (so people who enjoy the offclasses, a huge part of the userbase, actually want to play).

suggesting to valve "these classes are shit, please give pub players a message you're writing them off " is counterproductive to keeping the scene alive, and its benefits would be marginal anyway since most people know what classes not to pick by the time they come to 6s.

I didn’t ask Valve anything, Valve doesn’t give a fuck about the competitive community.

I said it would be nice. And it would be. Pubs don’t reward winning, sure. But nonetheless there are people who play pubs, try their best, and are morons. People who think no team is complete without a Heavy, people who don’t build Teleporters on Stopwatch, people who earnestly think Scout and Sniper are terrible and Pyro wins every 1v1. Anyone who doesn’t care can disregard the classifications as I am sure they already do.

Plus, they are pushing competitive matchmaking that actually functions and isn’t complete garbage. It’d be helpful there.

To prove that statement you have to disprove every other conceivable way the scene could grow. Return of LAN. Matchmaking that is competent and not a 100% joke. Newbie Mixes, putting in work to keep nurturing and easing new blood into the game in NA and expanding to other continents. Reaching out to the community with things like Tip of the Hats and Comms vs Pros 6v9 showmatches. Valve making important matches more prominent on the menu or on their website. Shoutouts from popular sympathetic Youtubers.

This defeatist attitude isn’t just wrong (it is also probably wrong), it’s going against what you want. You want to grow the scene while telling everyone their efforts are pointless, which discourages them.

Please show me where the post you linked says “these classes are shit.”

If every class is a generalist then they can remove the labels. There are labels right now, they are just impressively unhelpful and in egregious cases completely wrong.

Also, changing labels would probably take thirty seconds, while rebalancing specialist classes would be a much longer endeavor.

From what I’ve seen in competitive matchmaking, you’re very generous to budding competitive players.

didn't say you did, some guy earlier said it. valve has slowly started to shift to balancing for comp, hence stuff like the atomizer/sandman/parachute changes, just shitty staffing policies are making it take a long time, but if you think valve doesn't care this discussion is basically moot anyway

i admit matchmaking as a service needs to be better.

not to be cynical but, while ToTH is a great thing by the community, stuff like pro showmatches, newbie mixes, youtuber exposure, lans, leagues on every continent bar africa, even valve's website advertising streams and games in the game itself (didn't i58 get a global notification to all players)? have all been tried. to put it bluntly, what matters is money and mass appeal if you want the scene to grow and survive. no amount of newbie mixes is going to make somebody want to competitively play a game which they don't find fun and has no reward, surely you can admit that.

Out of the class mains who would want to play tf2 competitively, 5/9 of them can't play the class they enjoy, which means they either play highlander (dividing the playerbase) or don't play at all. so many missed potential players. asking valve to label 5/9 classes as "specialists" implies to them that we want it to stay that way.

"generalist" and "specialist" class division is a thing in 6s because valve hasn't been balancing the game around competitive, until very recently- but for pubs, labeling a whole group of classes "specialists" is utterly disconnected from what they see. For pubs, valve has been balancing the game so that every class is fulltime viable, and gru, huntsman, gunslinger, spy speed buff etc. are examples of this. "specialist" barely has meaning in a pub. we'd be feeding information to pub players that's irrelevant to their actual experiences.

what i said was 6s. competitive matchmaking is 6v6 but isn't "6s".

-snip