People taking saam seriously in 2017...

@nuze

I have read most of the posts in the thread, probably not all, but the arguments in favor of the crossbow boil down to "Medic is a boring class, crossbow makes it more fun" and "It gives medics mechanical depth" in general.

If you're truly undecided, I'll ask you when you think it's too much. Would you be OK if, let's say, the crossbow healed from 100 to 200hp (from 75-150)? What if it could overheal players? I doubt you'd be in favor of keeping it then, but the weapon would still make medic more fun, and it would still "reward" skill. For some people (myself included), the state in which the crossbow is right now has gone past that point and has gotten to a level where they think the game suffers from it.

Another point: just yesterday I played a game where I did 400 damage to a soldier in something like a clip worth of shots while he literally stood still and got arrowed 3 times. Even if the weapon raises the skill needed to play medic and better medics are rewarded, 90% of the crossbows are hit on people waiting for it, where your aim really doesn't matter. Coincidentally, those are the heals that make the game so much slower and impede pushing out of damage.

Maps are also balanced around medpacks and ammo packs in a certain fashion. That's why you don't see health packs on granary yard, near lobby in snakewater last or below the point in gullywash. Having free medpacks on demand lets you defend in places where you shouldn't, breaking the intended flow of (especially in old) maps. Doing 200 damage to a soldier who just stands underneath the bridge in badlands mid only for him to get +150 and rebomb you is not something that should be allowed to happen, in my opinion (same in gullywash mid).

There's also the other reasons that I didn't see anyone argue, like the uber building, the randomness aspect of some fights where a magical crossbow gets hit, etc.

Lastly, to anyone saying that "then nobody would play medic", I say that there were medics before the crossbow was even in the game and there will still be people who play medic, because they enjoy the class for other reasons.

They also probably want to use in-game voice communication because they can review possible reports (insults, harassing, etc), since they're recorded in the STV demos.

I think you've got the wrong idea of what I think. I hope TF2 grows because I like the game, and if FaceIt can help it, then I'll be happy, trust me. But I don't believe that killing off sites like TF2Center and PugChamp is going to make people like FaceIt more, nevermind the manners in which that has been communicated. If people end up liking FaceIt for whatever reason, be it the prizes or the format or anything, they'll use it.

In the end, people have "chosen" TF2Center as their way to play lobbies, which saddens me, but there are explanations for that. What b4nny and others in this thread are saying is that those 300 people in TF2C should just completely stop using a site just because there's something new, which might or might not appeal to them.

As for the developers showing more interest in TF2, let's not talk about that. They haven't given signs that they want to embrace whitelists and rulesets, and FaceIt has them. It would be FaceIt having to embrace the dev team and not the other way around.

I don't really understand how you can think people are not going to take it bad when you say not only that PugChamp will or should die, but also that you are going to actively try to kill it, but to be honest, that's erynn's comment and I don't really have any real insight of what she was thinking. Even then, do you really have that little sensitivity? Don't you realize that telling people their time is worthless makes them feel bad? Even if it's true -which obviously isn't.

As for the other reasons, I think your logic is flawed, so let me explain it. You seem to think that this situation is comparable to ESEA/CEVO when in reality it isn't:
- They are leagues while these are lobby sites. Leagues are very similar to each other. They might only change a couple of weapons, maybe a map or two, maybe the winning conditions. The time you put into a league is pretty high because you're committed to a team. You scrim several days, you play several games a week. This makes it rather hard to play two leagues at the same time, since you have to schedule more games, especially if you're in different teams.
- When that situation happened, I believe it was close to the ESEA bitcoin fiasco, which could've been a pretty good reason for people to leave ESEA.

When you talk about FaceIt and TF2Center (or other sites), the time commitment that you make is so much smaller in comparison that it might not take players from one or the other, especially because people like _options_. Some people only want to play one class, some people only like one map, etc. To give you an actual example: how many players did PugChamp/MixChamp take away from TF2Center? None, because people who play in each site are looking for different experiences.

More importantly, b4nny, if you believe that having several different sites is bad for all of them, should we take away the leagues? Correct me if I'm wrong, but your thinking seems to be "If a player plays in site A, he won't play in site B". Don't leagues _actually_ do that? Because if I'm scrimming with my team, I'm obviously not playing in FaceIt. This is an exaggeration, but I hope you understand what I mean by this: saying "all sites should die now that FaceIt exists" (in quite a primitive way) is very far-fetched.

You also say that I'm talking about what-ifs, but I can also say that about you. You center your entire discourse on "What if FaceIt had a lot of players?", and the fact is that it doesn't. And I would like that it did, because some of the flaws in their system are due to this (the parties being restricted). But your way of making players use it isn't correct.

Lastly, my opinion of FaceIt is the same: if it becomes better, people will play in it. It has the best incentive there can be in a game like TF2, which is money. It has all the potential it can have: TF2 community members working for them, a company behind it, etc. Let the people decide what they like best, let there be options, but don't try to kill off pillars of the community that have existed for years just because something shiny came about. There are ways to go about this that aren't disruptive for either the sites or the community.

It is so very sad to see someone completely dismiss the hours people have put into creating free services for TF2 and call for their death in favor of a for-profit company with a lower quality service than most of them. Because yes, FaceIt has some potential, but their system still has flaws. The community right now expects some things from a lobby/pug site, mainly subs, class picking, being able to pick your friends or your teammates...

What do you think will happen if all these services disappear? Right now, the community has a fallback if FaceIt ends up not being up to standards. If they decide to charge money to play, you can go back to TF2Center if that's what you like, or you can keep playing pugs in PugChamp. But if those don't exist, you're out of luck. And I'm not saying they'll charge money, but their service isn't going to be inherently better than those sites, because those sites fill specific community needs.

B4nny, you're probably never going to get captaining in FaceIt. It's my opinion that they won't ever implement that because it goes against the idea of a matchmaking algorithm. I'm even more certain that you will never be able to pick classes. So are you sure you want to give up that just for the sake of sometimes being able to buy items from their shop?

And how in earth is having more possibilities worse? Does anything forbid you from queuing up in two of those sites? Some people want to play a pug sometimes, but other times they just want to pick a class and go in a much lower pressure enviroment, without joining mumble. I think having the option to play either is superior to not having it.

http://www.teamfortress.tv/post/361056/nvidiainspector-lod-bias-not-working

This happens since a recent update in which they modified how the scoreboard shows connecting players.

I think it's this one: http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=24510.

http://imgur.com/nfy2bDA.jpg

I'm not trying to say FaceIt is bad in any way, I think it's a great addition to TF2. The website works, the servers are good, the rules are the ones the community has been using for a long time and they seem to be working on it. I tried it yesterday for the first time and it's everything we could've asked from Matchmaking and more. You can even win prizes and the prizepool of the incoming tournament is bigger than anything Valve has ever thrown at us.

However, they're asking for feedback and suggestions, and in my opinion, opening the doors to everyone could result in more experienced players giving up on the site. I'm not even talking about bad/mediocre players. I'm not a great player either, but I've been getting players who almost installed TF2 just to play in FaceIt and fight over who gets to play heavy and then call each other bad in chat. I've also seen someone say they'd rather play in TF2C because the skill level is higher in there, and that might be true.

If they decide not to implement it, I hope I'm wrong and the site keeps growing.

Edit: as I was typing that, they bumped the requirement to 150 hours, so cheers.

I understand what you mean, but when is the playerbase going to be big enough? The way I see it, it's the same problem MM has: you try it, the games are awful and you never come back, so it never grows.

One of the devs said on discord that they have a requirement of 50 hours, but that it's not working for old accounts. And even if it worked, 50 hours is nowhere near close to learn how to play the game.

Edit:

He's the captain of one of the teams, he just joined because he plays CSGO.

I don't think you should ban offclasses. What if the game is very stalematey? Then having a player play sniper most of the time isn't that ridiculous. Unless you have an admin review each case separately, I believe it's a bad idea to impose limits on that.

I think a bigger problem is super new players getting into Faceit. I haven't played it much but there are plenty of people who can't even find their way around the map. I just played a game with a heavy who got the same DPM as our medic and it's incredibly frustrating. I'm not sure setting minimum hours played as a requisite in TF2 would solve that, but it'd certainly improve the platform.

I kinda really want this. I don't have much experience on huds other than modifying them a bit to my personal taste, but if I can get this released, I'll try to.

Hedgehog Hero: can u use something like this https://www.ryobi-sol.co.jp/visolve/en/
Hedgehog Hero: something that converts all the colors on ur screen to colors u can see

How are you using this? I can only use it to capture static images and apply the filter on top of them, but it doesn't seem to work outside of that.

Those glasses don't really make you see colors you can't see, they only dampen the frequencies you can see properly, and after some time your brain accomodates and "lets" you differentiate colors better. Think about how, after putting on sunglasses, it takes a while until you see perfectly.

Since colorblindness is very personal and varies from person to person (even between people with the same type), they are far from perfect. Not to mention the fact that they stop working after you take them off.