Just when I thought this update couldn't get any worse, I find out that votekicking is bugged now so you can't kick the cheaters from your team in casual.

GG.

I played those mixes and I have to say that I liked the map a lot. We played the alpha version so we had that ridiculous sniper sightline on top of that ledge, but that seems to have been adressed in the beta. However, there seems to be another couple of very long ones:

http://imgur.com/vPah3ZV.jpg

http://imgur.com/htBOjHm.jpg

http://imgur.com/v8V8qvv.jpg

http://imgur.com/WY0E0vT.jpg

I think the biggest problem with those is that 3 of them punish you for pushing from the best place, which is (your) left side. The other exits have a very pronounced height disadvantage and are extremely easy to spam from a safe distance.

Dolly talked about the idea of moving the sheet of metal like this:

http://imgur.com/iCVL44J.jpg

However, this removes all the visibility of the point you could have when pushing out and it still doesn't give the medic a safe place to retreat to, as you can see here:

http://imgur.com/PcfRGrB.jpg

It also gives the demo extra places to trap (both sides of the sheet).

I personally would like to see this:

http://imgur.com/J1wbNDB.jpg

. As you can see, it lets the medic have some sort of cover while enabling sick jumps and surfs that soldiers are going to love. It still doesn't address the sniper sightlines, but those could probaly still be fixed some other way. It also doesn't let soldiers stand on top of it for easy spam of the entrance. They can still stand on it, but they have no way to leave safely.

Something that I noticed is that soldier bombs were really hard to stop. This could be because of the lack of cover but it's also because they can jump so high that shooting at them doesn't do much. They jump from a higher place than scouts are usually at and they go even higher than that with the jump, obviously. I know the pipe on top of the middle in product can be annoying when you hit it with your head, but I think doing something like this in this map should be considered.

And another minor thing:

http://imgur.com/nbX8hUX.jpg

This roof is clipped and you can stand on top of it, but not on the other side's roof, which isn't clipped and screws up your jumps from underneath it.

I would also like to hear why the yard in front of the spawns is so big. It seems unnecessary to walk that far away just to enter another lobby.

Good luck with the map!

I also think that Bonk can be potentially very broken, especially in some maps like Badlands. As it is now, it's rather easy to backcap last, but if your team manages to coordinate to push out he can kill anyone that's hiding if the other team is mostly wiped.

I don't want to imagine the pain of trying to push out of last in that map, finding one or two scouts hiding somewhere in the many spots in lobby and having to wait 8 seconds to kill them, by which time the entire team has respawned and is on spire. And you're not even guaranteed to kill them for free, because they might get a pick unless you send even more people back.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't make much sense. If I have 40% advantage and ubers take 40 seconds to build at minimum, that means I have 16 seconds to push and kill a medic before he gets his uber. If he can build uber in 30, that goes out of the window and I will only be able to push with advantage when I have something ridiculous like 80%.

In fact, I've seen many examples of teams building in last to defend against an uber and they were the ones who were being succesful. It probably had more to do with the fact that attacking players weren't really used to arrow building and forgot it was a thing, though.

Speeding up uber building actually makes stalemates a lot easier to achieve because it only means that your time window to push with advantage is smaller and the uber duration/build ratio is higher. The longest stalemates are always during uber vs uber. So making uber building take less time would probably make the game slower and not faster.

The crossbow is an exceptionally overpowered weapon if you take into consideration what the syringe guns are supposed to do, which is shit damage to maybe sometimes kill a player that is almost dead anyway. The crossbow does that and has the possibility of burst healing 75-150hp, which is almost always better than getting any healthpack in all the maps that are in the rotation, plus it also can do ridiculous amounts of damage at long distances, plus it also builds uber. And the arrows are invisible and they piss me off when I get hit by one.

The only reason it's allowed is that medic mains need some happiness in their lives when they do something mechanically skillful and I kind of agree with that, but saying it's not overpowered is a big stretch.

Universities in Spain, and pretty sure around Europe, give licenses for educational versions of software like Autocad, Photoshop, and even Windows.

Everyone just pirates it because it's easier anyway lol. They require you to install a program to download the licensed Windows copy... that only works on Windows.

I'm studying Architecture and, although this might be very specific to my university and my age, you need to do a lot of work with Autocad and Photoshop, maybe with some more 3D-oriented programs like Rhinoceros or rendering software. Right now, I use exclusively Photoshop and Autocad to make plans. Some time ago I tried others but, like everyone, I kept using the programs and the method that lets me create the plans I want to make.

I don't know how this is in England, but it's possible that she will have to use BIM software like Revit, which I haven't used too much. What people told you above is more or less true, but in general, a GPU with CUDA can help you with Photoshop quite a bit. I haven't rendered absolutely anything in years since I do all my images with Photoshop, but I would think having a good card will also make it much more bearable.

Autocad isn't meant for Architecture and, even though it has improved quite a while since some years ago, the plans that you end up using -cartography and such for urbanism classes- tend to be complete crap and will make you want to end your life unless your CPU can stand it. Trying to process hundreds of hatches and splines is a nightmare when each command takes several seconds to process.

I would say an SSD is really important, not only for the QoL but also because some Photoshop files end up being really large and it has a file cache the program uses to improve the time to apply filters and such. And, even if it's only for opening files, I consider it a godsend. RAM is also really great. Photoshop will eat as much as you want to give to it, and Autocad... Well, it's Autocad.

Apart from this, other programs -for example for structure calculations- that I've had to use have been really awful and my friends were having a very bad time with their PCs because their CPUs weren't very good and tended to crash really frequently.

My most important advice is that she makes sure what she's going to use and plan for that first. Tell her to ask people in the senior years of her uni, they'll know better than me, probably. All of this is useless if she will use Revit 90% of the time. Plus, if this is anything like my first year, she might not even use Autocad at all, like some of my friends did.

And don't get a PC that's too big. It's a bad idea.

What's going to happen with the weapons that this list still bans? Are we eventually going to add them to the whitelist? Even if Valve never fixes them?

If, like Slin says, the point of this whitelist is that people are vocal about the things they don't like so Valve takes a look at them, I really can't understand why there are any banned weapons. How do you want Valve to fix them, if you imply we're not giving them feedback about those broken weapons? Let's be real, Valve knows why they are banned. They simply don't agree with our thoughts or they still haven't tackled some of the weapons.

Great, they will now get feedback for the Natascha, the same exact feedback it's had for years: stuns are not fun and inherently stupid in TF2. Imagine they now decide to respond to us and fix it. What about the Sandman? If your logic is that we need to use it in a high-level enviroment in order to find what's broken with it, then it will never get fixed, because this council decided it will not see the light in competitive play.

The real question is: why is this whitelist better than the previous one? Because it has 10 fewer bans (compared to the last ETF2L whitelist)? How is this exact situation going to improve the communication with Valve? The bans you guys decided on seem completely arbitrary, much more so than the previous banlist, to the point that the Atomizer was almost allowed.

PS: to be fair, I lied: I understand why there are banned weapons: you don't want to deal with shit like the Sandman or the Crit-a-cola. But you're calling for a BIG change. If you really want to commit to it with weapons like the Natascha, then you should be coherent and do it with all weapons.

Will we hear the justifications for the weapon bans?

I really don't understand the logic of "if people find weapons are too powerful, then Valve will fix them". It's not like we didn't know these weapons (and others) were overpowered before. When has Valve looked at any competitive scene and decided to balance their weapons because of it? When everything they've done lately is buff Medic and Scout, which are arguably the most overpowered classes in the game. They haven't fixed the Crit-a-cola, they haven't fixed the Atomizer and they haven't fixed any of the other weapons that this whitelist is still outlawing.

If the purpose of this whitelist is that Valve fixes weapons, why don't we allow everything? If we're really going to have to do this eventually, why risk ruining two consecutive seasons instead of just one? If this is not the only purpose, why are the weapons that people are complaining about allowed? I'm sure that someone wasn't OK with the Atomizer being allowed in that meeting. Where's the reasoning for allowing it? Honestly, these decisions come to us the same way the weapon changes come to us from Valve, and in the same way that people in that meeting complain about: from nowhere. Not to mention the fact that, apparently, a lot of people were missing from that meeting.

If you want people to take this whitelist seriously, then explain your reasoning for allowing/banning weapons. Then there will actually be discussion. Otherwise you're doing the same Valve does, and people really don't like being kept in the dark.

The ETF2L had a Preseason Cup to test the Pomson and the Brass Beast. From some time ago, the ETF2L has been adding more and more weapons to the whitelist, but in a certain pace and with testing. And now, all of a sudden, you open Pandora's Box and allow tons of weapons without playing with them first.

Personally, I'm afraid that if this whitelist doesn't change, people that have been playing for a long time will actually be discouraged. A no-ban enviroment already exists, and Valve can get data from it: Matchmaking. This makes me think that a lot of people will not take the next ETF2L season seriously, and I honestly can understand them. I don't want to play against flying scouts and parachuting soldiers vomiting rockets from the sky ceiling.

Giving the power of balancing weapons to the "community" as a whole is probably a worse idea than just letting the dev team try time and time again until they find something we're comfortable with. If you've ever read r/tf2, their ideas of balancing weapons are horrible most of the time.

But that doesn't mean that Valve shouldn't listen to people who actually know about the game -where I don't include myself, by the way. I think if they read whatever high-level players have to say about the rebalances before they release the changes, a lot of bad ideas would be reworked instead of weapons never getting whitelisted.

It seems they at least hear from b4nny. Did b4nny know about the speed buff to Medic? We don't know for certain. But it's much easier for them to disregard one singular opinion than lots of opinions from different people. I think the solution comes that way: let them propose their changes and, before they're released, listen to feedback.

I fail to see how the data is going to allow them to make changes that they weren't able to make before. I can see that, in their minds, a weapon that is used a lot is a broken weapon. But apart from that, how is that data going to tell them how to change that weapon? We can see that their intents of balancing weapons are misguided at best. They need to know why leagues ban weapons, not which weapons they ban.

Let me give you an example from this last update: the Natascha. It's a weapon that is never going to be allowed in 6s the way it is now. It started with a broken concept of slowing down players that the team came up with. Instead of admitting that the idea was wrong and try to completely rework it, they keep adding and removing percentages, strength of the slow-down, ammo, etc. The fact is the weapon is banned because of the slowing effect and no amount of data is ever going to tell them that it's completely horrible to play against it -even more if, like it's happening right now, there are better alternatives.

The most they can get from data is numbers and digits, but that's not what balancing in this game is always about. They need to listen to the people that have played the game forever, listen to their reasoning and fix the problems with the game thinking about what these players have told them.

Valve is literally getting input from at least b4nny (see the Reserve Shooter thread). The problem is that either they think they know better than him or they straight up don't want to hear it.

For us, it's pretty obvious they're wrong in lots of aspects, but not for them, which is why things like these happen.

We're reviewing the applications, you can still sign up. You can enter the alpha even if you're not from EU/NA, so don't worry about that. Techno is correct, the whitelist for the alpha site is generated via the steam group.

We're just waiting for our site to be more stable before handing out the invites. Depending on how fast we can fix some of the issues, this could happen very soon!

If you want to see where TF2Stadium at, feel free to join our alpha group and check it for yourself, I just sent you an invite. Please, inform yourself before implying we're dead.

Also, I think you're misunderstanding that TF2Stadium is not Kevin and that Kevin is not TF2Stadium.

These ideas have been thrown around and discussed thoroughly internally. Unfortunately, we have a policy of not confirming anything until it's done, so I can't say whether we're going to implement them.