iirc monitor scaling nonnative aspect ratio/resolutions leads to about 0.2-0.5ms of input lag. Probably not what you're noticing though.

Also I remember reading something awhile back that if you're on windows 10 you should go to the process file

so hl2.exe -> right click -> go to properties -> compatibility tab -> make sure "Disable Fullscreen optimizations" is checked. May/may not fix your issue.

Depends on what you consider an active IP but pretty sure Garry's Mod is just as bad or possibly worse.

As to how this is being doing this is either a simple DDoS attack, or a client that's sending/pulling a lot of erroneous data that causes the server to put way to much power to / causes a memory loop. If it's the latter it would likely get picked up by a lot of AC server plugins and get whatever client that's doing it auto-banned.

Really hope Valve actually ups their game though. Just simply banning bots/people isn't enough if this is the route they choose to go.

I always enjoyed watching mgib play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H51WkqWg6_Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLR6t87P0zk
*I would link more videos he posted but it seems he unlisted them all in favor of using his youtube channel for his music now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09ZLf_lQYaw

also if we're going for players that haven't been around in awhile alot of people in these videos are probably good candidates

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_6HDqddS64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2n3mE7gOO8 (it's amazing this video is 720p 60fps despite being made in 2009)

https://i.imgur.com/BL60sMG.png

*fixed

-edit-
it has occured to me the link may have been hidden to prevent it from taking up so much space, so I downscaled the image.

because I'm borderline autistic

https://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/8/82/248Tyranitar.png

https://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/3/35/227Skarmory.png

https://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/4/47/181Ampharos.png

High Ping still holds an advantage due to prediction especially in scenarios where the defender can't fire back at the peeker. If a Medic with 90% uber is standing still, and a 200 ping sniper peeks them by the time they notice the sniper it's to late cause the sniper shot at a standing still medic. Peekers advantage doesn't exist in the super specific scenario where both players are watching the same corner/wall whatever and it's about which shot registers first, but it does exist in the scenario where the peeker is peeking a player who is unable to fire back at them and their only option is to move. Basically people aren't usually moving like spastic idiots when you shoot after peeking with a high ping.

If they play against NA players on NA servers with any form of regular practice i.e. Scrims and Matches vs the amount of experience NA players who play in NA only get with having to play against ~200 ping players. Obviously this doesn't apply to players who play only within their region.

SA players who play NA will get roughly ~10hrs/week of practice at 200ms ping where basically all of their opponents are sub 100ms ping.

While NA players who play NA will get roughly 30min to 2hrs tops / week of practice vs a small handful of players who have ~200ms ping.

Also my argument is that high ping players who practice at high ping tend to make good entry frag players on HITSCAN. They get boned in basically every other way vs low ping players. They are more likely to be the 1st frag of a push, they're more likely to lose otherwise even 1v1s, they can't dodge projectiles as well etc etc.

High Ping is mostly disadvantagous, but it does have advantages especially for hitscan.

Having 200 ping means you can peek and scope, and most likely shoot by the time anyone on the other team reacts to you and starts to adjust, but the reverse of this is true if they're peeking you in which case they will have the advantage. If you and the opponent are peeking at the same time the opponent in theory would have a slight upper hand, most players in NA are not used to playing against high ping opponents; while high ping players in NA are probably used to playing opponents with sub 100ms ping.

This is largely why a lot of SA players seem to be brutally effective in NA when they play Scout/Sniper as they're used to playing with high ping when the opponents are not used to playing against it, add in the peeking advantage and you get Brazilian and other SA players being particularly good at getting entry frags.

-edit-
correct word usage thank you jetz.

If you still want to use a replaced explosion effect you can try this one.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lpqxcjszoqzrjrk/explosions_muzzle_flash.vpk?dl=0

hope that one doesn't cause you microstutters.

Microstutters are caused by major fluctuation in frame times.

I'm going to cover a bit more than what would apply to you just incase anyone else finds this thread.

Thermal Throttling

More or less hardware overheats loses some efficiency, probably underclocks itself to prevent damage and causes a massive loss in framerate causing higher frame times. Identifying what is overheating can be a bit of a pain especially with laptops there's a ton of useful tools for finding what is overheating. In the past I've used Speedfan you may want to find something more regularly updated that that though.

Possible Fixes

• Clean your PC with compressed air getting as much dirt, dust and hair out of it as possible
  
• Make sure your PC has access to air. I.e. don't put it in tight/confined places and don't let clutter build up around it.
  
• Add and or Replace Case Fans Installing Case Fans
  
• Laptop users, make sure your laptop is on a flat surface and preferably use a cooling pad.
  
• While rare you may need to replace the CPU heatsink fan
  
• ADVANCED USERS ONLY replace your cooling system for your CPU/GPU with a better one, or clean and reapply thermal paste.
  
• OVERCLOCKERS if for some reason you didn't disable the thermal throttling controls and you're getting throttled your cooling system is inadequate for the overclock you're trying to achieve and you need to backoff or improve your cooling.
  
• ADVANCED LAPTOP USERS you may want to look into ThrottleStop Has a lot of neat features and shows you CPU and GPU temps with some stress test tools plus a lot of other controls that you may not have access to in BIOS. Make sure you readup on what's what before you go to crazy.

Power Throttling

Either A, not enough power is getting to the hardware or B. The Hardware has reached its max TDP (it's a pain to find this, but this doesn't normally happen pretty much only happening when users overclock in which case you just have to accept it and back off a little)

Possible Fixes

• Use High Performance power options / disable low power options where applicable. Win10 High Performance Adjust power settings for Max Performance in Video Card drivers as well. Note laptop users should only do this while plugged into power.
  
• ADVANCED USERS ONLY Disabling C states in BIOS (if possible) Note technically not a true power throttle does cause some latency when enabled though

There's a few more things to add, but most of them are caused by Thermal Throttling in which case see above, weak PSU in which case you'd have a whole lot more than just microstutters going on, or failing hardware which again you'd have a more issues than just microstutters. All of which are usually a pain to determine.

Poor Optimization

This applies to a whole lot of things and not just what game your playing. Closing Background programs and adjusting various performance settings both in your OS and in game can help a lot. You could be experiencing various driver issues Ex. BF4 at least used to have an issue with a lot of video cards if you didn't fully uninstall the old driver before installing the updated driver and it would cause a major memory loop. The game you're playing could be designed in an era that basically every CPU in existence had 2 or less Cores/Threads Ex. Source Engine Games. The game you're playing was designed by people who didn't give 2 shits about LOD models, etc.

Possible Fixes

• Lookup "Perfromance Optimization" for your OS. Any I could link here would be at least partially outdated in a few months.
  
• Closing out of all background programs when playing
  
• Fully uninstalling old drivers and/or installing Updated drivers Display Driver Uninstall tool; Snappy Driver Installer great tool for finding driver updates for most of your hardware. Make sure you use the SDI Lite version and download the indexes and only the indexes first, skip drivers that you've already update manually i.e. Video Card Drivers.
  
• Use FPS configs / Lower settings, or mods/edits that improve performance / disable whatever is causing the microstutter

Workarounds if you're still having issues after going over the above

• Setting a FPS cap just above your minimum frame rate. Frame time can't variate a whole lot if you're already near your minimum FPS. Can also prevent significant CPU/GPU usage and you might notice your minimum FPS is higher since your hardware doesn't get as hot or use as much power. This can also be done by using VSync where your FPS should stay locked at your refreshrate (only do this if your FPS rarely dips below your refresh rate and you don't care about Input lag) GSync/FreeSync (I can't fully explain this, but basically you want your minimum fps to be above the minimum refresh rate)
  
• Adjusting Pre Rendered Frames (Nvidia) or Flip_Queue_Size (AMD) you will need to do research on finding a way to adjust flip_queue_size as I'm finding a lot of material I know is out of date. Note Pre-Rendered Frames is the number of Frames generated by the CPU before it's outputted by the GPU (minimum setting of 1 as 1 frame has to exist to be outputted). Lower Pre-Rendered Frames = Lower Input Lag, but some games have lower minimum and average FPS and microstutters become more visible. Higher Pre-Rendered Frames may help boost your FPS up a bit and will help smooth out major FPS drops at the cost of higher Input Lag
  
• Getting your Minimum FPS so high it doesn't matter if you drop to it. Basically you have 700FPS and you suddenly drop to 300 fps and never go below that. (this kind of drop would cause only a ~1.8ms microstutter for reference dropping from 75fps to 60fps would cause a ~3.3ms microstutter ) This usually means disabling a lot of graphical options going to the lowest settings possible, and more than likely overclocking.

fps_max non0 can cause stutters for some PCs and not others with otherwise the exact same settings. So your mileage may vary on using that command.

Hope this helps. Can also give you a few tips and pointers to get you going in the right direction for the kind of play you want.

Do you want your game to be on Super Ultra settings, or do you want to try to be Invite level and don't care about graphics?

Are you knowledgeable about overclocking and having the Cooling (and motherboard) that allows for it? If you don't know the answer to any part of this the answer is No.

Have you gone through your OS and use settings for the best performance or best trade-off for you? If No, do this before anything else.

Temp while under load is irrelevant with CPUs like yours, if it reaches a certain temp it will drop it's clock and voltage to prevent it from going higher and prevent damage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/7t4n0g/i77700hq_throttling/dtaad9y/

*added emphasis

As can be seen with this user with the exact same CPU when the CPU is set for 3.2GHz it reaches a thermal throttle at only 67c. You having yours set for ~3.5GHz you're probably hitting a thermal throttle, and even if you aren't on your CPU you probably are elsewhere given the normal design of laptops, and yes even the ones that have the fans and heatsinks like yours. Given the setup of your laptops intake though, you would probably notice a decent benefit just by giving it a couple extra CMs from any surface below it (if you already have it normally sitting on a flat surface).

If you do buy a cooling pad which I still highly recommend btw. You will need to get one where either the fans blow into the laptop or more likely ones that you can adjust the direction either way.

-edit-
also I see you're mentioning that cpu usage is sub 50%, this is normal TF2 will not use 100% of an i7 with 8 threads.

-edit2-
Also just because CPU temperatures are reasonable doesn't mean the Voltage Regulator Module (VRM) isn't being thermally throttled which will cause a power throttle on your CPU.

Other than what mastercoms has been saying.

Set power options to "High Performance"

^this

https://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/ProductImage/34-982-206-02.jpg

I also highly recommend getting one of these.

After putting basically any fps config on a "gaming" laptop, the biggest limiting factor is going to be your CPU temp, as mobile CPUs are designed to not overheat as much as possible so if they reach certain temperature thresholds they will downclock (technically desktop CPUs do this as well it just isn't as obvious due to better cooling/spacing of parts). Better cooling almost always = better gaming performance for a laptop.

+40% to 77% = 117% speed
unless you mean 0.77 x 1.4 = ~108%

"TAS max of +20% extra speed via bhops"
Wasn't aware of the exact number, personally +20% as in x1.2 seems ok, making it a tiny bit easier is more than enough imo.

Now while I personally like having skill based movement, +40% would definitely be way to much, Heavy would be close to scout speed at that point. Maybe a +10% would be ok at most, but even then I think it really should be tied to only specific classes and or items that have a major trade off. Example 1. Buff to Overdose that allows medics to bhop for an additional 10% movement speed. Example 2. Spies can bhop for an additional 10% movement speed while cloaked (cloak and dagger would need a bit of rework otherwise it would drain to fast).
Otherwise bhops would become way to important in general gameplay and honestly I don't think the majority of players would like it, and it would really upset a lot of class balances. Not to mention bhop on scout would be nigh impossible due to the double jump.

Also when I say +10% I am referring to the speed charts on the tf2 wiki here
so for example 2 a cloaked spy would move at 117% speed vs current 107% speed, but only while cloaked and doing bhops.