Activity is definitely the deciding factor. There is always a snowball effect going on where prem players increase the amount of other prem players (who want to play high level pugs) and "normal" players (who want to play against the prem players). When the regulars who usually get the pugs going stop playing it will lead to the discord/site slowly fading into obscurity. We just don't have enough players at the top to have them going 24/7

this looks like ass

https://media1.tenor.com/m/tZQcTtRjafgAAAAd/goat-washed-my-goat.gif

I think I've been playing the wrong granary or something

https://clips.twitch.tv/BetterSpookyMomDoritosChip-zGem_zNLuZ3zH_D_

Reminder this is exactly what happened with bagel at prem level - the majority were not happy with the addition of the map and quickly dismissed the idea of playing it. Fast forward to today and plays differently to product in a positive way plus it fills the long due 2nd koth map slot. I think it's safe to say most don't mind playing it at the very least.

https://i.imgur.com/P5ZSJl2.jpg

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1032048248237600902/1128796153144672336/fridgeonmid.gif

The decision-making when it comes to balancing is always so odd in ETF2L. Banning the LnL with the biggest factor being "it does more building damage" is so out of touch with the meta of the game, its apparent that whoever made this decision has never played against a team that is really good at the turtle sunshine last hold (or any turtle hold for that matter)
The weapon excels at hitting easier pipes in chokepoints and long range, if theres a problem with it its definitely not the building damage. On top of that another factor that lead to the ban is

If this was true, we would see more demomen running the stock launcher. The truth is, that even if it is not the old mega OP version, the iron bomber is still an upgrade to the stock launcher mostly because of the rollers. Of course nobody goes out of their way to use rollers as their main way to damage someone, but it's still nicer to have the rollers in the vicinity of your enemy if you miss. The iron bomber does everything the stock launcher does, but better. You get upgraded rollers for like -10% splash radius, it's a straight up better version. So why is the weapon that works completely different and can offer a different playstyle banned instead of the actual upgrade?

More importantly, why is stuff like this not fixed with a plugin or whatever? ETF2L already dipped their toes into a pro mode lite by buffing gunboats with a plugin, so how come we just dont fix unlocks that offer different mechanics the same way? For example, make LnL pipes do 90 damage instead or something.

Wrong, he lost the 2nd one and I have the medal to prove it

Nas stay losing

It's in a weird spot for me, because one of the main reasons for this plugin to exist was so that enemies (especially scouts) couldn't just hug you to either easily kill you or atleast trade with you. It was a valid complaint to be fair, but ironically, the roles are reversed now and good soldiers just kamikaze into you at the right times. This attempt at trying to fix soldiers killing themselves in close quarters shifted so much power into that class that I believe as a result the pace of EU teams came to a grinding halt which is what we have seen at i69 and RCADIA. It's just too risky to walk through small doors and chokes when a single soldier can ruin an entire push by landing on someones head with the right timing. Before the plugin soldier was already very influential despite getting abused by scouts but the plugin made it the best class in the game by a large margin. Demoman is mostly responsible for damage, Scouts are mostly responsible for clean up: with the plugin, soldiers can potentially do all of that and more.

I think there is no real answer to whether it's good or bad, it just turned out to be a massive meta shake-up.

I paid around 1k for the venue "bar"(table) to not have enough alcohol stocked and sell me sewage water as beer for cutthroat prices

https://media.tenor.com/images/c3bd704d98881857570bce00e53ede5b/tenor.gif

https://i.imgur.com/aVNFZ5a.png

comms
https://streamable.com/9bv1cr

I really appreciated how this was a tf2 only event and how they set up everything for us before we even got there. Crazy convenience for us players.

That being said, can we just ditch iseries for this? Just so much more value