Actually this is what surprised me, the season immediately after the bitcoin scandal broke (It broke ~May 1st, 2013, Season 14 was May 13th, 2013 - Aug 25th, 2013) was the largest TF2 season ESEA ever had. Also coincided with the largest season UGC NAHL ever had.

Basically, that point of time can be pin pointed as the period where North America's competitive scene in general was at its peak population.

I will do 6s at some point to compare with ESEA (I'm a bit exhausted at this point of numbers), I did HL first to compare with the NAHL scene as I was primarily a Highlander player who played his fair share of 6s (back when eMg was just starting its legacy) and I was mostly interested to see NA<->EU HL difference and the crossover of NA HL<->6s sizes.

That was the ETF2L Highlander Challenge, biggest tournament TF2 ever had. 10,000+ some odd players.

Also every Open season that had multiple conferences has very unbalanced death stats with one conference always having almost all the teams that die that season in it, leading to that conference having a much different skill balance than the other conference which has almost all of its teams live.

Conferences seem like a pretty bad idea with these amount of teams. I don't actually play 6s anymore or keep up with it too terribly much, so maybe that isn't the common belief but just from a statistical point of view I can't remotely see how this plays out very well. I can only imagine that one conference winds up being significantly easier to the other one.

I'm on a break from work and back home and hella bored so I spent a bunch of time making up to date charts for ESEA 6's and UGC NA HL as far as team size goes over the course of each leagues history (I also did ETF2L HL which I'll link at the end). To cut to the chase here you all go:

ESEA Total Teams: http://imgur.com/EP0gYj5

ESEA Alive Teams (teams that played 12 matches or more, aka lasted to at least week 6): http://imgur.com/JGoTAPB

UGC NAHL Total Teams: http://imgur.com/5X1qEpa

UGC NAHL Alive Teams (week 6+): http://imgur.com/9Rrgrxr

ESEA 6s + UGC NAHL Total Team Time Overlap (similar dated seasons): http://imgur.com/17hMH2E

Of note is that both leagues tend to be mostly in sync as far as growing/falling goes, leading credence to the idea that neither league is really cannibalizing one another (alongside the high amount of examples of each league sharing talent with one another).

ETF2L HL Total Teams: http://imgur.com/UkDHHhd

Not sure how many people are curious about this here but I figure it was worth the share.

i agree with literally everything else you suggested (it's far better to identify the problem if you're a community member, not a propose a solution, designers have a ton of people that can shit out solutions and actually test them, it's identifying the problem that is the useful part, it's also half of what makes a good designer: capable of identifying the real problems (and making solutions that benefit the game the best).

but this statement is false. The eventual Blutsauger nerf (one of 4 versions in it), Medic regeneration change, Pistol ROF change, FaN nerf, original Sandman nerf and thrown Sandvich functionality/G.R.U. (irony) were all directly changed/added due to competitive community feedback with the TF2 Competitive Closed Beta back in 2009. They also listened and didn't add the PDQ (reworked it into the Gunslinger), didn't nerf the Ubersaw (they tried two different nerfs), didn't add the Fire Retardant Suit (eventually got reworked into Spy-cicle), and didn't add the Medigun with no overheal decay due to competitive community feedback in that same beta.

The Equalizer solely exists due to community feedback. They directly say this on the update page, they took the weapon idea from community members: http://www.teamfortress.com/soldierupdate/

granted, this was all ages ago (the only recent thing you could count is just features and valve listening to banny on not doing their proposed Reserve Shooter change he said would have been a buff, and listening to not doing something is technically just as important as listening to doing something) and was during a time when the high level 6s community had enough of valve's ear where they had an entire private branch of the game to play on and communicate with valve with, but there is precedence for it all the same.

(again, not that i think this kind of stuff in this thread is a very good way to go about any of it)

there's like a 99% chance it's future barry

(or rather just barry in general)

((seriously if it isn't barry SOMEHOW then the writing this season was just atrocious as anything else would betray the entire theme of this season and be an asspull))

There's a forced on (even in competitive - tf_damage_disablespread only applies to weapons) 20% damage spread on fall damage.

(was kinda surprised none of the people who had Valve's ear ever bothered getting this one fixed)

it takes 5 games to get a character for 24 hours and its quake so 5 games doesn't even take a lot of time

there's no compelling reason to have everyone

in duels character choice wont matter

its not a big deal. i had almost the entire roster every day of it and i didnt even need to have them considering i stuck with like, 2.

e:

yeah it sucks still but

a) its way less grindy than any other char unlock based thing i've played

b) most of us interested in it are gonna buy it and have all the characters anyways

Borderless Window'd on everything past Classic Theme W7 (normal W7, W8, and W10) has forced v-sync on in DWWM, so your mouse will feel like garbage.

did you try vista sp2

they'll give more codes out for future tests, this is just a weekend test atm.

i think the most i can say publicly for the little bit of it i've played is that it's good, it has the obvious potential of being really good and most of the things 'wrong' with it are just things that will obviously be fixed (or added since they're just missing due to the early beta status.)

Also maybe it's just me, but V-sync appears to just be an FPS cap to refresh rate, I can't tell any input lag on the mouse anyways, will help make the game run better until they optimize it.

(also will help your temps, considering without it on you're sitting in a queue at like 500-600+ FPS rofl)

It's a long beta, with this weekend being dedicated to making sure their queue system works fully under bigger loads and works properly at manual expansion (happening tomorrow morning).

People here going "omg I can't play during the first weekend of this beta I get for months", if they don't do this you encounter the issue you're complaining about already where when it launches the entire queue system crumbles under the load. It's better to get it out of the way during a weekend or two of a closed beta than a full wide release launch.

If you signed up shortly after the beta sign ups went live there was a bug where it didn't send confirmation e-mails but you were confirmed in still. If you sign up with the same e-mail address and still don't receive a confirmation e-mail it's because you're already confirmed signed up.