Ah, I see. Contracts can only be completed on Valve's servers, which can only be accessed by sitting in Valve's Matchmaking for 20 mins staring at the main menu.

I can't start the first contract.

https://i.imgur.com/nRXfUuE.jpg

It looks like there is supposed to be an "Activate" button below the word "Pyro" which isn't there.

I'm not sure if it's a bug or just user error (I'm supposed to do something else to start it) as I've never used the contract system.

Often it's the dudes who care the most about dm/MGE who end up hacking.

I remember this MGE legend soldier player back in the day (forget his name now) who made some waves when he got VAC'd because he had spent so much time in MGE servers. His story was that after thousands of hours of legitimate practice, he got curious about hacks and wanted to see how they'd affect his play.

Sometimes it's an unhealthy obsession with hitting every shot and not a juvenile desire to be good without practice that drives people to this.

Did they remove the death timers on the portraits along the top with this patch? I thought that was a really nice feature that had a lot of potential for improving coordination in the future.

The viaduct change is super questionable as well. Play-wise, Lakeside is basically a weaker version of viaduct. Longer sight lines, less interesting structures, same choky spawn exits. Optimization-wise, viaduct was fixed by the community years ago, so... what's the thought process here? Force us all to play snowy viaduct at 70fps for a week and then respond to complaints by taking it out of the rotation?

I'm looking for a pass if anyone has one to give out.

i5 4690k with GTX970 sounds better to me than 4790+950. Maybe this is bad advice if you're not using hardware encoding.

-Use X/minute stats instead of totals on scoreboards and for assigning badges. Right now, you can play a short game where everyone on your team plays really well and get no badges, while a long game where people don't do much of anything nets golds across the board. Better to use DPM instead of total damage, KPM instead of overall kills, etc.

-The community has been playtesting and updating these maps for 10 years. Why am I playing on cp_viaduct with the snow and the crazy sniper lines when a better version exists?

-Hopefully the finished version will have either a "Queue for X maps" or a map vote at the start of the round (similar to CSGO). This will allow Valve to look at stats for which maps are popular and which need to be changed.

BTW, I saw someone mention paying for a MM pass in another thread. They aren't planning on charging for this, are they?

Right now, it looks a lot like they're imitating Blizzard (closed betas, stress tests, and forced hype; limiting user decisions regarding UI; hugbox scoreboards; misguided balance ideas). It's a strange path for Valve to go down and I hope to see some of the old Valve design philosophy creeping in as this gets closer to release.

RE: Vsync, the simple way to put it is that if your screen looks like this (google images link) you should turn vsync on. This is good information but it doesn't answer my main question so I'll put it differently:

Let's say you're a competitive TF2 player on a 60hz monitor who regularly gets 100-120 fps according to the game's fps charts. Valve releases a graphical update for TF2 that makes everything look really cool but provides no gameplay advantage/disadvantage. (You can still see the roamer's shadow through the wall.) Turning the new options on your framerate drops to 60-65 fps. It's still above your monitor's refresh rate, so will it make a gameplay difference? Technically you're getting only half of the frames you were getting before. Should you opt out of the new graphics update?

Anyone feel like writing a defense of maxing out framerates in multiplayer games? I've been reading a lot of arguments recently that there's no point in running a framerate higher than 60 if you have a 60hz monitor. As far as I know the TF2 community is the only one that really cares about these things enough to use low-end graphics settings on a mid-high end rig.

Thanks all, the hidden extensions were the issue and it all works. Thanks for the help.

Hey, I got a new HD and I'm trying to remake my class configs. The problem is when I originally wrote these it was before the Steampipe update and now I am not familiar with the correct folder path.

I'm pretty sure the old one was steamapps/common/team_fortres_2/tf/cfg/scout.cfg and the new is steamapps/common/team_fortres_2/tf/custom/mystuff/cfg/scout.cfg (or just mystuff/scout.cfg, idk). The problem is none of these work.

Here are the screens of the two folder paths I'm using and the contents of the cfg:
http://imgur.com/S2tfiP9,L4Rpfv3,4sWaSJS

Specifically, if I type 'exec scout.cfg' or 'exec scout' in console, it tells me the file doesn't exist. When I switch classes it doesn't exec any class config.

What's going wrong?

Hey I don't play TF2 any more but I just wanted to jump in and say this is the perfect opportunity to be more flexible.

Competitive TF2 has been trying for years to get the attention and support of Valve, and the most recent response I remember was that they didn't think the 6v6 format was flexible enough. Rather than creating another league with the same flaws, why not try something new?

Ask Valve what sort of ideas they have for comp TF2 - what does a flexible game mode look like to them, what type of community would they like to support, etc. Even if all but one of Valve's TF2 devs have moved on to bigger and better things (Dota cosmetics), that last dev still has three things this community has always lacked: Valve's ideas, Valve's money, and Valve's support.

TF2 has floundered for a long time because the community insists on clinging to independent leagues. None has ever done much good, and the big one is apparently going to court. It's hard to make a compromise when you think you've settled on the best format, but the opportunity to have Valve behind you is too important to pass on - just look at Dota.

Great thread, but I think you've already hit upon the answer(s). TF2 really is not a game that attracts viewers to a stream.

-It is not competitive, for the majority of players, so they can't watch the best players and think they're learning something. They can't even apply what they see in a stream to pubs, as it's mostly motor-skills/FPS related stuff. Dota streams benefit from the fact that players are always trying to get better, and can do so by watching videos. TF2 doesn't have that, aside from a very small subset of the community.

-Spectator mode is nonexistent. In-game spectator tools and developer support/promotion is almost non-existent. You can't blame Valve for this. They have a right to take their game in the direction they want, and the statistics are behind them. TF2 is for casuals.

-Streams aren't always fun to watch. Shoutcasting and the competitive scene appeal only to those players who have played competitive. That's just a sliver of TF2's total players. There are a couple reasons for this. First, the competitive format is too different from the pub format. Valve tried to address this in the talks with Sal a while back but it received a very strong blowback from the community. Second, there's no means of promoting competitive content to the average player, partially due to Valve not wanting to get involved.

To the best players in the game and the most popular streamers, I ask this: When you think about it, is there really anything you have to teach a pubstomper? Nobody cares about proper pushing and uber dynamics and the relative strength of a scout versus a soldier in different parts of a map when they are playing a pub. I don't think about planning a scout-led uber push when I'm flying 200 feet above Badlands mid, caber in hand.

If there is nothing you can teach to the pub audience, what else can you offer? Aside from learning, people watch Dota streams to see high-skilled play and because they're funny. We have both of those in TF2, but it seems it's not enough.

Edit: Reading the other responses, I've got another point. Comp players here have a very elitist attitude. I'm not saying you're wrong to complain about hats. If you want to attract this audience, though, you have to stop insulting them. Aside from a select few, we all began as pubstompers. You may like to flame these clowns, but it's yourself you're alienating.

Cute in a "You haven't heard of my favorite band" kind of way.

This dude is trash, Dota is a team game. Seriously, they talk about how the rager is making the community bad (which is true) but he didn't have the patience to even wait for his teammate?