I personally agree with the intent behind #42's suggestion but disagree with the way to get there.

Sniper on rock is pretty damn powerful, but I would much rather prefer just adjusting the rock's geometry / size so that the spot isn't as powerful (but still an option) and so that projectiles/hitscan are easier to land there. Basically, expose the Sniper significantly more so that it's infinitely easier for the other Sniper to contest from multiple points (but still gives the defending Sniper a tiny advantage) and easier for him to get pressured/bombed.

...this is also admittedly likely more work than just removing the fence, but I think it'd be much better for gameplay overall than just removing options entirely. If the fence is empty it can also be pretty nice to escape on with cloak as a Spy since people don't usually expect you to jump on it and expect you to just stay on the ground.

e:

Shrinking the rock also shouldn't majorly affect any sightlines for defending Snipers since you can stand on boxes and see over the enemy's rock regardless.

e2:

Something like this for more visual oriented people: http://i.imgur.com/y4Nm4eI.png

Note: Nowhere near exactly spaced, it'd have to be spaced correctly to prevent crouched Sniper being dumb.

The main purpose would be so that if you're standing you'd have a significantly larger section of your body (and more importantly head) exposed at all angles, if you're in the middle of behind the rock you'd still have almost your entire upper body exposed, while on the sides you'd have part of your side and most of your chest and entire head exposed. If you're crouched you'd still be more exposed than currently at all angles (with the added downside of you're crouched so you can't move around quickly without standing which now exposes yourself).

Ideally if done properly this would still be a solid rotation spot for Snipers still but wouldn't be a consistent spot to just stand at for most of the game on defense anymore, while still having enough height that denying jumpers shouldn't be impacted significantly in 6s.

Hey Fubar, I don't know if you still visit here (and if he doesn't, anyone on his friends list who sees this and wants to let him know this would be appreciated greatly), but I'd like to very politely request a small (but important unless Valve fixes it themselves) change made to Product whenever you can.

Basically, Valve coded how the Pomson & Wrap Assassin projectiles work differently than every other projectile in the game. Other projectiles check collision by checking individual brushes, however these 2 weapons check collision by seeing if they intersect with a bounding box.

The problem here is that the connector on Product uses func_lod in such a way where these 2 weapon's projectiles always intersect the bounding box of the func_lod when you shoot towards the connector. If you try to shoot either weapon into/out of connector (or a small area around the entrances to connector) the projectiles disappear (in the case of the Wrap bauble it explodes).

This isn't a terribly important issue to fix right away (e: altho having an rc9 before product is played in UGC in 2 weeks would be lit), however it limits the viability of these 2 weapons in these specific areas (mainly in Highlander/pubs), and should Valve add more projectiles like this in the future would affect them too.

Thanks.

pomson is really bad now

you have to be near point blank range to drain anything more than 1-2% (and far away shots drain 0%) with average speed projectiles, it does substantially less damage than the shotgun, it doesn't penetrate anymore, it has less ammo than the shotgun.

if your team somehow allows an engineer to get that close to your medic with uber (which would require the engineer to somehow flank all the way to the combo which also requires basically no teamwork or comms or for the engineer to somehow walk through a demo and a heavy and not die) and the projectiles manage to hit your medic and no one else takes the shot for him/the medic doesn't dodge it, honestly you deserve it.

essentially, it requires your team to basically be pants on head idiotic to actually drop an uber due to it

it's allowed in 6s because of this.

#205

If you look at this season's vote results at UGC the Razorback only earned a 35% unban percentage, so almost everyone actively engaged in Highlander wants it to remain banned.

Likewise the Beggars + Loch n Load have received a majority vote to unban in the most recent season. The Pomson didn't get a good vote percentage so if you don't wanna allow it I wouldn't blame you (truth be told it's only hated because it used to be broken good in the past and now it's basically complete garbage and you won't see it this season at all pretty much) tho.

But saying the Razorback wasn't universally well received by all divisions doesn't really correlate with the amount of votes it got to be unbanned at all, and even Silver players want it to be banned going off the S21 poll results where only 35% of Silver players voted for an unban. The only division that had a majority vote to unban it was Iron which is literally a division of people with zero Highlander experience as even Steel that season was split 50-50.

Most of the people who are likely to play in this if it happens are going to be very experienced Highlander players looking for the $ who are generally whom you should be catering to anyways since they use the weapons to their full potential and you are running a serious tournament with a prizepool. (and the Razorback has been a near universal ban request with those people for quite some time, almost a couple years if memory serves me correctly. It just took UGC forever to budge on it.)

Personally I'm of the mind that you should run UGC NAHL's whitelist basically straight up because it's the best out of all the Highlander whitelists right now and we don't need yet another tournament splitting whitelists as it does not help the format what-so-ever and has been a grievance of mine for the past 6 years I've been playing the format.

That said if you absolutely refuse to run it for whatever reason, if you did have to ban anything I'd say to ban Spy-cicle (and Razorback obviously). For the same reason as the Razorback: hard countering one of your more potent counter classes super easily is just dumb and lets you get away with VERY dumb positioning mistakes just like the Razorback. This will encourage more Big Earner usage which is fine since that is a knife that actually gets you punished harder if you make mistakes in general.

Even then, I would still encourage you to mirror the whitelist instead to not divide the format further.

Cool to see the prizepools.

Why did you opt for a different HL whitelist tho, Razorback has been banned in UGC for awhile now and was a ban that was pretty much universally requested by Platinum teams for ages?

e:

oh I see what might have happened, the whitelist on the UGC HL Quick Info page is currently fucked and is the one from Season 18 aka last year, not the actual current whitelist. So if you judged it based on that (which you seemed to have other than the Short Circuit which is banned correctly), then yeah?

The relevant changes since then I believe are:

* Razorback banned.
* Pomson allowed.
* Beggar's Bazooka allowed.
* Loch n Load allowed.

#291

I agree for the most part, I've tried to get some people to understand this in the past, but some people don't get that 6s doesn't grab a lot of Highlander players literally just due to the classes. This is evident in the fact that UGC 6s is free + has medals and it's still smaller than Highlander. By a lot.

The easiest way to explain it is the common 6s argument is "but you TOTALLY CAN PLAY [insert your utility class of choice here] 24/7", and sure, you technically can do that. However:

* you're not going to find a solid team.

* even if you do people won't want to scrim your team (I saw this first hand with Hooey on Runaway Five back in the day, there was people that would literally leave mid scrim over him going ham on Pyro and that was just partial offclassing)

* you're not going to climb ranks as 24/7ing that class because the cookie cutter setup is the best setup generally for a reason (weapon ban choice + class limits basically, no one would run 2 scout/2 soldier/1 demo/1 medic if everything was free game)

The reality though is this: there's a huge section of people in Team Fortress 2 who genuinely want to get better and improve - as one class. Maybe two. But generally one. They want to climb ranks, they want to improve at that class. 6s doesn't let them do that for most classes, and that's generally (the medals back in the day helped grab people's attention) why Highlander has always been bigger since the ETF2L Highlander Challenge happened and helped UGC take off.

To put it another way, imagine if hypothetically the way 6s was setup and the way Natascha was stayed the way it was the season every single team ran 2 Natascha Heavies for every single goddamn match of the season. There was no room for Scout....it would literally be impossible to ever climb ranks or improve in 6s as a Scout main for the foreseeable future. Would some Scout mains swap to Nat Heavy like they did for that one season? Sure. Would they keep doing it...unable to play the class they genuinely love, and keep playing 6s for multiple seasons? Almost all of them would quit, I 100% guarantee it.

Thing is though, this isn't really the 6s community's fault and this is generally where I disagree with the lower level Highlander players who hate 6s (most high level HL players play 6s or have played it) and pubbers who hate 6s. Team Fortress 2 just wasn't balanced around 6v6 and when you halve the player count a lot of things get more oppressive and the power level of everything shifts. Sure the ban list + class limits have created the current class selection, but if neither existed the actual resulting meta would be mostly stacking 2-3 classes with less offclassing and would actually reduce variety significantly. You still wouldn't be able to play most of the classes 24/7 and climb ranks on them. Even if you class limit 1 everything you still wouldn't be able to play all the classes 24/7 and climb ranks on them because you're not gonna be full time spying your way to Invite. Going back to the Natascha example, it was so oppressive that season with 4 Natascha Heavies in every single game that it wound up removing Scout, Pyro, Engineer, Sniper, and Spy from play essentially by being allowed. (yes it's not anywhere near as OP now, I'm just using this as an example of how something being allowed doesn't mean variety is created)

The only real solution to this problem (since you really do need a smaller player count to have a viable e-sport with often LANs etc in the first place, which is why combined with infeasibility for matchmaking Highlander was never going to be the main competitive mode) is for Valve to rework the game towards it and improve the overall class balance of the game. That way flexible people can be flexible and be successful, but people who want to dedicate to 1-2 classes that aren't just the core generalists can also be successful.

We've all been waiting for Valve to work on the game like that for a long time now.

#263 ^-highlander player

highlander wasn't added to the game because it's impractical. uncompetitive and not fun are subjective, but it objectively wouldn't work unless

a) tf2 became bigger than league of legends (not gonna happen)

b) they didn't bother matchmaking based on skill/region (defeats the entire point of, well, competitive matchmaking)

LoL's the biggest MP game on the planet and if you're a top level player you can look at some super obnoxious queue times (i've watched some dudes at slightly off peak times get up to 1.5-2+ hours) and that's only 5v5 with 5 roles each. Highlander is nearly double that. And TF2 has - and this is a massive understatement - a significantly smaller player base. you would need to disregard all matchmaking parameters aside from role and form unbalanced games just to even make it work.

#264

i didn't say they wouldn't play competitive, generally i'd wager almost the entire playerbase in CSGO that actually plays the game and can play competitive matchmaking does. the problem is since casual is super different (you can't say that is bullshit, it's objectively different in numerous ways beyond just player count which is already a major difference) it makes the transition from casual -> competitive matchmaking much harder than it needs to be for newer players. i've seen players in the time I played the game during my placements that didn't buy defuse kits because they didn't know you actually had to buy defuse kits since casual gives everyone on CT for free. ditto for kevlar/helmet. ditto for the grenade limit difference. all of the changes in casual also warp the entire concept of a pistol round and the pistol rounds dont remotely play the same nor do the follow up rounds due to the economy changes.

casual should always be a relaxed way to learn "the real game", and casual CSGO is entirely unrepresentative of what the "real game" is.

the solution to that is not to make csgo's comp more like casual. just like the solution to tf2's problem isn't to make comp more like casual.

likewise to both though the fix to both requires valve's help (in tf2's case to make each of the classes more equally useful) and therein lies the problem.

no one plays csgo casual seriously and a large portion of the csgo community has been pushing valve to make csgo casual exactly like comp except with no rank to help ease players into the competitive gameplay easier

(also casual in no way plays similar to competitive in csgo at all, positioning, player count, bomb timer, and the money system are substantially different)

#238 i'm mostly a highlander player and if you think 6s has "always had a stale meta" then you either

a) pay attention to 6s even less than me which is a feat and a half

b) don't actually know what meta means (hint: it's more than just class selection, but even class selection has changed over the ages)

or c) are blind

i've been paying attention to the 6s meta since 2009 and the amount of meta changes over the years has been plentiful. in no particular order (and not nearly exhaustive): when everyone rolled out on badlands through house, people played normal viaduct because viaduct pro didn't exist quite yet (which was a different meta compared to pro because no connector etc), the Battalions Backup-Sydney Sleeper meta on normal Viaduct, watched engineer-heavy-pyro cycle between which class was a more common last defense class, the shotgun-gunboats emergence and switches between pocket-roamer, the rise of scout dominance (can you believe that back in the day people used to think scout wasn't the carry class?), demo pocket, heavy pocket, the season where everyone ran 2 natascha heavies because it was broken and allowed, x6's blob strat, everyone emulating that, people stopping the blob strat because it got countered, the season where people ran double gunslinger on gravel pit, the roamer role and how it is played has changed drastically since 2009, crossbow and every meta shift it caused by existing, etc.

sure for the most part 2 scout, 2 soldier, 1 demo, 1 medic with offclassing has mostly been the same (aside from some really terrible seasons, seriously 4 natascha heavies in every match was boring af) but if you count that as only the meta then you don't get the word. the actual offclassing itself (both in amount and what classes and where), the weapons people use (and how those affect how the game/maps are played, e.g. the rise of boston basher scouts to build medics instead of pockets), and what maps are played and how maps are played are just as important if not more so than what the cookie cutter setup is to the meta of 6s.

e:

also if anyone thinks the meta is stale in 6s due to class selection then the easiest counter argument is logically that means the meta in highlander has never changed since the class selection has been the same for its entire life. that also isn't true (the meta not changing), but it forces them to either change their viewpoint or take on a hypocritical belief.

#49 I feel ya, I was sort of similar really. Back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and b4nny didn't exist yet as a competitive player I was a pubber who played Arena (2k of my 8k hours are Arena lmao) and a bunch of competitive players came in one day and were just massive cunts to everyone and kept bragging about playing ESEA etc. I pretty much became one of those bots that said "tf2 wasnt intended to be competitive, etc etc".

Then I got accepted into the 2nd GameFAQ's 6v9 hosted by Cerious as the pubstar Spy. It was fun and I did try a bunch of TF2Lobbies because of it (although I almost quit because literally my 3rd lobby some of vhalins friends were on our team and swapped to his team and made it a 3v9...AND it was yukon so it was already miserable), but I wasn't totally convinced. (although reading gotfrag was fun as a lurker)

The game changer for me was that I was considered the best pubstar Spy out of all the 6v9s so I was asked to come back as the Allstar Pub Spy for an Allstar game, which was against Blaze, Yz50, Move, SolidSnake, Radio Raheem, and TLR.

While everyone on that team was cool, the game changer for me was Blaze. I wish I could get the archive of the GotFrag thread for that 6v9 but Blaze was the best. His personality and attitude towards me is basically the sole reason I even bothered really playing 6s and is the sole reason I played Highlander and have kept up with this scene since 2009 after getting over my comp hate spree from 2008.

I usually have somewhat thin skin myself, but the niceness Blaze displayed after that event was a glimmer of hope in what was to me (and tbh, still is) a sea of toxicity. It's all I needed to try because if I could find a team filled with people like that I could be content.

In the 8 years + some odd months I've been playing I only ever found those dream teams twice.

I mostly stayed for the people I do like, but my people have basically all quit at this point (the Runaway Five folks and what not).

If you're too thin skinned to play, I don't blame you at all, but I hope you're doing these things because you actually enjoy doing them and not because you want to contribute to the invisible "community" as the only thing you'll ever really get out of this is personal fulfillment and maybe the occasional feel good moment by people that will just go be dumb like 2 seconds later.

Things on this front won't get any better, I've experienced it personally get worse as the nice players I buddied up with quit the game - in part (often a significant part) due to the community's overall personality and attitude. The blatant hypocrisy of wanting the game to be big and then acting abhorrent within the community is also pretty annoying. People usually pull the "but people are awful in other (bigger) games too so its ok" card but its like, yeah, but those games competitive scenes aren't actually dying, need tons more players and sponsor support and don't mostly hinge on community support to survive. I mean, ESEA last season dropped to the same amount of teams it had back in Season 7 which was the season when it fully destroyed CEVO and became the main 6s site - so large that they finally introduced Intermediate for the first time. That was in August 23rd, 2010. TF2 can't really afford that level of behavior, it isn't fuck huge like those other games are. Those games being fuck huge is what allows that level of behavior to not impact them severely.

#24 I suppose compared to LoL/DotA yeah, but in the grand scheme of things Heroes of the Storm itself is very successful for them from a business perspective and from a competitive side of things it is nowhere near a niche competitive game like TF2 is.

As far as the topic on hand, it sucks (for the esports orgs) but this is where esports are heading. It's pretty much this or they don't go anywhere, there's really no other way around it.

you just hold left click and then double tap right click when your crosshair is on the guy, it fires instantly, then you unscope immediately.

even highlander is smart enough to ban machina

like come on

Source * .2

Some of the number differences in this for HL are because on the team page it listed several teams across the seasons as 0-0 but weren't greyed out, so I considered them as dead and not a participant but this seems to consider them a participant I think.

I wasn't sure if it was just missing stats and those teams actually participated or naw.