This is pretty silly and all but it's making me more hyped for i58. Nothing like a good beef between players to spice up the competition.

instant respawn koth_harvest 24/7 is essentially my life

or playing medic in a pub to find the guy that installed the game 5 minutes ago and pocket him

Tried one lobby on stadium, it seemed fine. I like that it's individual ready-up instead of a team-based one, makes it easier to avoid accidents where you start the game but a couple people are still afk. The look is pretty good too. Of course overall it can't be a huge departure of tf2center because that site in itself is good, PR and the admins were the problem. Although I've personally never had any major issue with said admins, I have friends who did and sympathize with them, so it's nice to have an alternative.

Hopefully open source means not only that it's easier to keep that PR aspect in check, but it's also easier for new people to join the project and add functions and/or fix bugs, because in theory anyone can jump in at any time. Good luck guys.

Jon has it right. From my little experience playing MM games you do eventually want a somewhat balanced class composition to win, even with no class limits. The fact that comp players can stack a team of 6 gunslinger engies and win against random people doesn't mean gunslinger engies are OP, in the same way that friend stacks can run 6 meis in overwatch and win in random MM queues but mei is arguably the worst character in actual comp (at least before that buff).

If anything having no restrictions should highlight some problems with class balance that Valve can then look at. Maybe in the future something like classlimit 2 all around can be introduced, but I think for now it should stay like this to gather info, and certainly not make it more complicated than classlimit 2. a) you can't have it be league 6s b) you don't want it to be league sixes, you want it to be something semi-casual and palatable to pubbers that is still fun to play. We know league 6s is the optimal way of playing 6s but the point is new players in MM who realize these things will then want to play in leagues and then you guys can welcome them and show them how much more fun it is with your rules.

Any way of boosting FPS a little bit besides just turning the in-game video options to low and sillygibs? In last week's stress test I was getting around 30-50.

^ the grand finally

hmm I tried to ready up a mm lobby on a local server to test it out (with bots and mm_servermode 3) and it always crashes tf2 with 12 seconds to start the "match" (when it's supposed to show that little pre-match screen with the teams and all). Tried the same thing with default hud and flamehud and they worked. Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you for your work once again.

edit - it works fine after the newest update, yay

Is it normal that the matchmaking button doesn't show up anymore when you're not on a stress test or have a beta pass? I thought you'd be able to see the menu and rank etc, although not playable.

As a side note I find it quite impressive that over 83.000 people are in the tfcompetitive group already. That's a lot of potential for this scene to grow.

I'm actually really enjoying all of this, including the crossbow and kill sounds. Can anyone confirm if the kill sound activates on a dead ringer spy? If it doesn't we'll have to add it to the long list of bugs in that item.

[edit] it doesn't. I guess they will look to that eventually but for now last kill sound means confirmed kill.

There were people who used the danger shield in 6s when it was just +25 health. That is already a very good upside when you can get buffed to 225 and be really hard to kill by anything but a charged headshot or backstab.

If you really want to capture the "spirit" of the old croc-o-style set, might as well just add the bullet resistance stat to the sydney sleeper - it makes you a little less useless if the enemy team has a sniper, but a competent enemy sniper is still able to kill you because he can quickscope + noscope/bodyshot you, while you have to gamble on a full charge bodyshot.

No, at first it was just WHOA MATCHMAKING HYPE~~~ but how many of us are actually playing this? New players should be excited, pubbers who wanted to try competitive but always felt it was too daunting should be excited, the high level sixes scene should be excited for the hope of a playerbase growth and maybe that e-sport dream, but for the run-of-the-mill player that has done comp but not at a invite/prem level, matchmaking in itself isn't a big deal, you'll probably spend a few hours ranking up and get bored and go back to pugs.

Competitive-oriented improvements to the core game are a big deal for every single one of us, though.

guess no beliefs will be had today.

To be honest I'm starting to care very little about matchmaking itself, I just want the quality-of-life updates that hopefully will come with it. Performance, bugfixes, rebalancing, that's the real shiznit there.

It's reasonable that valve want to get a wide assortment of players into this matchmaking beta, not just comp players. So that guy who only plays valve pubs as engineer but has heard of competitive and could be interested in trying it is just as valuable, from the point of view of testing the system, as a prem player. They will want to see how everyone adapts and how the progression system works with a wide array of skill levels - if they only wanted feedback from the best players they wouldn't even make this steam group in the first place, they'd make beta invite/prem 6s only.

As far as balance changes and meta that's a huge can of worms that I'd be really afraid to open if I were at Valve. But I assume (i.e. hope) they're still working closely with the few comp players that are in on things to analyze those issues.

as far as the update itself, it's clear they're trying to push pyros to use their flamethrower to burn more, instead of just airblasting and switching to the secondary to do all their damage with it. I would love that idea if the flamethrower was overhauled as said in other comments, but like this, they're rewarding W+M1, which I don't like, as well as making the obvious flaws and weird network behaviour with the flamethrower more evident (try being a pyro with 20 ping compared to say 80...)

Since a LG flamethrower is unlikely I would be happy with some bug fixes to the one we have, so it's a little bit less dumb.

(btw the update is not a nerf to pyro at all, so no hopes and dreams are ruined unless you can't adapt your precious muscle memory)