To be fair Portugal's play has only been improving from game to game. Yesterday Wales had some good momentum at the start, but as the game went on Portugal got in control and put it away comfortably in the second half. Whoever makes it to the finals will have a tough time.

As far as Germany v France I'm thinking France will win. They've got momentum, confidence and a whole nation behind them. It could be the best game of the whole cup, though.

There is a stream highlights thread and a separate one just for Sideshow's highlights. That should be enough to tell you how good of a stream it has been for this time. Best of luck with your life dude.

Happy for the map makers to get Sunshine, Metalworks and Swiftwater official.

12v12 quickplay MM is interesting, hope it indirectly makes community pubs more populated for those of us who just want to mess around without consequences when pubbing.

I don't think it really changed me that much, but the game and people in it helped me get through some difficult years living abroad, alone and with shitty health. Sometimes you really need an escape.

Portugal did quite well last night, probably their best game so far tbh. Of course it'd have been nicer if they didn't beef a couple chances and actually put the game away before penalties, but at the same time it's pretty surprising how comfortable they are taking the game into those stressful moments, while previous iterations of this team have been almost the entire opposite.

WP to Poland, you could easily have beaten us if Milik had a better game.

I'll be pretty surprised if they make significant changes to any class besides nerfing/buffing of unlocks.

That said, I enjoy surprises.

I mean raymon is great but I wouldn't imagine perm actually getting cut. Maybe some IRL issue preventing him from playing?

The beta was more destined to assess technical issues than anything else, so they probably have been working on the summer update independently of it. I imagine Valve will want to make the release of competitive into something big.

Whether it will be next week or not, who knows?

Considering that Croatia had more goal chances and we didn't get to see Portugal's game plan for if they scored, I'd say it was pretty lucky. The goal play starts with a post shot on the other end.

I was telling a friend that I had a hunch Portugal would pass on pure dumb luck. That friend is Polish. Gonna be a fun quarter final.

Croatia deserved better than this, I'm sorry boys

when are we getting mixchamp in EU btw

edit - about the topic, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot if they ask us to pay for this. Honestly advanced lobbies could be good. It's hard to get pugs in EU these days unless you're a high level player. But paying for them? Eh...

To be fair UGC has been "solidified and legitimized as a free league for TF2" because it is free. While the ESEA paywall isn't that high, it still is there and makes a difference to new players thinking about starting up in comp. People are unlikely to put money on something they're hesitant to commit to, even if it's not a lot of money.

I think highlander has very little to do with this point, although it is a good one.

As one of those highlander players, I would argue that we have our reasons not to play 6s and those reasons are independent of the existence of HL:

• people who just really enjoy playing the offclasses and don't have interest in maining a normal 6s class
  
• people who want to play specifically a semi-casual format because they're interested in objective-focused play with comms but don't want to work hard towards improving in a game (lack of time or motivation etc)
  
• people who just aren't that good at TF2 and would run into a brick wall trying to play it competitively

If HL didn't exist, those people would be in pubs or gone from TF2, not in 6s. The existence of HL only means a nice little niche for us to play that fits what we want out of tf2, but it doesn't remove players from 6s, it adds players to the overall scene.

Honestly this whole argument is like your house is falling apart and you're blaming one little spider in the ceiling for it. The spider didn't do shit. Let it be.

HL attracts a type of crowd that as pubbers would be less likely to jump into 6s.

If you go to your average community pub you will see a lot of offclass "mains" that spend hours in those servers playing engineer or heavy or something like that because those are the classes they like. I'm sure a lot of you guys have been that player before. If HL didn't exist those guys would be less likely to try competitive at all, because it implies learning at least one class that they're not comfortable with or don't enjoy. I'm not saying that's a good mentality, but it would happen.

At least with HL they can get used to the basics of playing with a team and communicating while playing the class they like, so it all makes a little more sense in their heads. And there's also the aspect of 6s being seen as really "tryhard" and unforgiving from the outside, whereas HL is more casual and more friendly in that way.

TL;DR if it weren't for HL the scene as a whole would be much smaller and that includes 6s

I've only watched the Portugal games and honestly I think everyone would play so much better if they weren't waiting on Ronaldo to do everything. Including Ronaldo himself.

Also the team could use a pure striker.