I feel like we've seen this thread like every month. I'm not saying that as a bad thing, it's good and normal that newer players wonder what is the most efficient way to spend their time. I just think that the answer to this question is less about what activity you should do and more about how much time can you spend on it.

Everyone above me in this thread is right : playing jump maps/DM will make you better at jumping/DM, watching yours or other people's demos will help your gamesense, scrimming and to a lesser extent (imo) PUGs will generally help with everything. I don't think there are like trade secrets like "play nosplash with double your sens" or something, if you look at every player or team that climbed quickly through the ranks, they all played a lot of the game, and I think that the time spent is more important than what you did assuming you were always trying to learn.

So I think my answer to the original question is : whatever you can do the most without burning yourself out. If that is demos, DM or even pubs (I know people who grinded pubs to train and it paid off for them). Sure, in a vacuum it's always going to be more efficient to ,for example, play a jump map rather than a pug if you wanna get better at jumping, but if you hate jump maps you won't get much out of forcing yourself to play them.

I read somewhere than when you ask people for helpful advice, they tend to answer with things they wish they knew back in the day and this is the case for me right now, so sorry about the rant and hope it helps the question a little bit.

I've tricked myself into thinking im cool & hot and so I like my voice now

Alright, Season 37 has been finished for a little while and the playoffs are (finally) over so I thought I’d make a follow-up post on plugins and their use throughout the season. Here’s the first one if you want a reminder of people’s first impressions before the season started

Ranked from least to most important topic, here are my thoughts on the S37 changes :

• Process_f5 felt really good to play, especially as someone with a pretty shit setup. I’m not a huge fan of some minor balance changes made to it, but all in all the Refresh project is something that I think is really good for the game.
  
• Projectiles going through teammates is something that I did not notice at all, but considering that I barely noticed the opposite happening before the patch anyway, I don’t think there’s any harm in keeping it
  
• The Winger seems good to me as of now, it’s still usable while not being as strong as it used to be. Admittedly, I don’t play scout so what do I know, but most scouts I’ve asked seem to agree with me at least
  
• The Solemn Vow is really fun to use, which is kind of a shame because I think it is way too strong. I have not seen many teams use it to its full potential yet, but I feel like it is bound to happen. Faking Uber is a fun and interesting mechanic, and this unlock removes it if one Med looks at the other for like a second.
  
  I think if the effect was only active when the weapon was out, it would be worth keeping (MAYBE add like a slower switch speed if it is still too good), because it did add interesting stuff to the medic class. The ability to direct focus calls is, in my opinion, nice to have on a class that is often deemed a bit boring compared to the others. Having to choose between the Ubersaw and the Vow was also a welcomed change compared to the hegemony that the former used to have and it also meant that if you choose the Ubersaw, you know that you have to justify it so I saw more medics (both in my div and casted games) go for clutch saws than ever before, which was fun imo.
  
• The Medic no longer moving at Scout speed was, despite what I could’ve thought before the change was actually rolled out, not as big of a deal as I thought it was going to be. I’ve found it made the game overall a bit slower and midfights matter a bit more, and while I think there’s room for debate about the place midfights should have in TF2, I don’t think that the game being slower is a benefit
  
  While I’ve just said that the change wasn’t that big of a deal (and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it stayed that way), I still think it should be removed because it could damage international LANs as well as damaging small-ad pushes, which are pretty fun if you ask me
  
• Finally, Gunboats always applying is way too strong to stay in there. It gives a bombing soldier an extra 50-100 hp compared to before and encourages people to just land on top of eachother instead of having to take smarter positions. Sure, having a scout barrel into you and killing you while he lives on 13 hp was annoying, but this is a really overkill solution to it. I’d argue that the 2 soldiers on a 6s team were already the most important pair in any team, but now Soldier is the strongest class by far in my opinion.
  
  To me, this needs to be removed. I don’t even know how this even slipped through, considering that, unlike the medic speed, there was no historical precedent for it as far as I am aware. There has been a couple of people arguing on the previous thread for some tweaks which would make the self-damage taken a more reasonable 40-50, but right now I would take 100 self-damage over 15 any day of the week

That’s all for me, keep in mind that I’m a Mid roamer so I’m not good. I would really love to hear opinions from players in every division, as well as people who don’t play solly.

Lifehack for any aspiring writers : pulling an all-nighter does grant you a large amount of bonus time to do an article on time, but it can also lower the quality of the writing until "shorter" becomes "longer" and division 2 morphs into division 1.

Thanks for letting me know, ive had a pretty poor string of mistakes pushed recently and while its annoying for me, its always extremely fast to fix so no one should hesitate to reach out about it.

Not a top player but not a fan of removing the railing on launchpad on last as it made it much more holdable.

This one is really late, it was stuck in writing hell for a bit and then I just forgot about it. It's my mistake, apology to alv and his rodents

here is the original quote provided by mak, I had to reject it because I don't like sharing the spotlight, but I will still post it here as I respect the work that has been put in https://pastebin.com/dKrRkcv2

It has been a month since ETF2L has announced that (among other things) the medic speed buff would be removed for Season 37. Now that everyone has had the opportunity to play with it, I'm wondering what does everyone think, did anyone change their mind and such. I'll start :

• My first thought is that after the very first few days were gone, the game did not really feel any different. It's definitely not as big of a deal as I thought it would be.
  
• Losing the midfight is definitely more punitive now. From a month of scrims, I think I've seen Medics survive a lost midfight less than 5 times. Whether that is a good thing or not is up to debate
  
• Something that I do miss is pushing on tiny (>20%) advantages. I don't think it's impossible but it is much harder and on wide open points like Snake last for example, I feel like it is not worth it.
  
• People who advocated for this change often said that it'd force medics to have "more skillful positioning" and unless by more skilled they meant more passive I'm really not sure of that.
  
  Also here are some quick thoughts about the other changes
  
  
• Process f5 feels quite good to play, and I'd encourage other leagues to have a look into that map.
  
• The Winger is still very viable
  
• I'm honestly still not a fan of Gunboats always applying, I feel like it sometimes gets Soldiers out of hairy situations (like a bomb into 3+ people) where they don't really need that. Remove it to allow for "more skillful positioning" :)
  
• Projectiles going through teammates is something I never noticed so I guess its a good change ?
  
• The Solemn Vow is really fun to use if you have a Medic that knows how to use it. I don't think it's OP, and I think the Ubersaw still has a place in the Medic's arsenal but since Medics tend to die way less than other classes I expect to see people stick to one of the two options and never switch in-game

That's it for me, keep in mind I'm a Mid roamer so I'm not good, I'd love to hear playing classes more directly impacted by the changes and from higher divs schime in.

Yeah like as someone else who gives up a portion of their free time to do things within the community, I understand wanting to pay people who are involved in the scene. Ever since I started writing for tftv, the idea of remuneration for staff is something that I've never really see discussed, everyone accepts that we're doing this for free (probably at a loss if you factor LANs in even). The closest I got to remuneration was an editor offering to paypal me some money because they accidentaly deleted an article I did and I had no backups (save your work, people !) and getting a press pass at i65 which allowed me to get a free sub from Subway.

So Kritzkast trying to send some money the way of the casters and producers is something that is good I think, we've had pretty high-level coverage for such a small scene and it makes sense that the people behind it get some sort of reward.

I just think that restricting vods isn't the best idea for it, it might be the most effective for getting money but people have been watching vods for free for like 10 years and so taking this option away from them is gonna catch a lot of flak. Also if uploads to youtube were actually faster the whole thing wouldnt be an issue but that is currently not the case, there's at best like 5/6 days of delay, and in the case of tournaments like the lockdown throwdown where a lot of TF2 is played in a short time and needs more editing to be released, the wait times are counted in months (for the anectdote, I've watched all of Lockdown 1 on youtube when it was released and 2 months after its end the final was still not out so I had to spoil myself by asking Dummtm who won because I wanted to reference it in a preseason article). Until those things aren't fixed, youtube will still be a very sub-par option.

its because Ascent as a brand has a bone to pick with me. I suspect it is due to the fact that I send about 70 messages to both uberchain and ma3la; begging for quotes.

turtles because I'm also slow

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/438009619323813899/747441018009288834/unknown.png

source

it looks like the i63 fragvid vanished as well so if someone had a copy somewhere I'd be a taker.

I like the smooth sound of the original because my brain is also smooth.

I have no clue, and the liquipedia article lists Ascent as his first invite team so I went with that. If you follow NA TF2 a fair bit, I'd strongly recommend you update one of the wikis when you're bored. The ETF2L website (apart from the snap) has a lot of info that I can easily dig up, but my NA co-workers simply don't have this luxury and have to slog throgh VODs and logs to find similar information. Support the news staff, update the wiki.

also i was too busy finding Taylor Swift lyrics I could sneak in the article to check