corsaSnackb4nnyWe know that they have a major competitive update coming, so why are we still acting like they've given up?
How can you still be this blind? I hate having to derail the conversation even further, but we began our wait for "a major competitive update" in 2013. When it finally came out 3 years later it was complete garbage and too little, too late. During the wait to that, we've had some of the notoriously worst updates that have done nothing for neither the casual community, nor the competitive one.
Do you seriously, seriously still believe that your almighty Valve to come and bless us with a game saving update that will land us on the front page of Twitch every hour and give us weekly LANs?
b4nny, it really scares me how you're one of the most popular people in this community, and therefore have a huge effect on your followers, yet you're this backwards minded.
Before you answer this question banny, it should be reworded. Of course you don't think there are going to be just one or two updates that solves these issues. You think it'll take time. I understand that you're fine with it taking a while to ultimately reach a point where we wouldn't have to ban any weapons. What about, however, the weapons in this game that can NOT be balanced and that can not be fun to play against even if changed, unless they were revised to the point where nobody would use them anymore (aka not "balanced")?
Can you explain how to go about some of those weapons? how can something like the beggars bazooka, air strike, or parachute ever be balanced if you were to keep in mind what makes soldier as fun, challenging, unique, and balanced as it is? Do you think people play soldier in competitive to sit in the sky and spam rockets or even to shoot multiple rockets at once, or is it because of the unique element of soldier that only arena shooters (or a mix of arena shooters and other fps's) might offer? I personally enjoy the unique and challenging part of soldier. To reiterate, you can suggest that it takes skill to use the beggars or airstrike, but is it really the same feel that makes tf2 the mix of arena shooter it is?
You can add all these weapons and also balance them, but why? Why would you make an fps game, especially one that already has a diverse selection of classes, more moba-esque in the sense that picking weapons is one of the main strategies? That was never the fun part of tf2, and it never will be. It has nothing to do with being afraid of change; it has to do with change in the wrong direction, the direction that everyone including yourself never enjoyed. You're lying to yourself if you disagree with the last sentence, because you constantly complain about specific weapons used in hl and how they should've never been implimented in the game. That's almost word for word from one of your streams a few months ago, btw.
I think the way you would go about balancing those weapons is by changing there core gameplay style to something more unique and fun, while still being fair. Although that's something that's really difficult.