Raphiam's been a friend and a backup of mine for a while and without him being available and eager to play my team(s) would have been in mucho trouble and so I'm very grateful to him. Raph's strength is in his dm which is overall quite reliable and when he gets in the zone he's ferocious at fragging things as scout or soldier or sniper or anything really. He also has an overall very positive attitude. He's always eager to talk about the game or review demos or receive feedback and he's always hungry to play.

His overall relatively small amount of experience leaves his gamesense a bit underdeveloped and he often doesn't seem to have an idea of the big picture that's happening all around, or at least he doesn't do the appropriate actions for the circumstance. At any given time he's likely to be imagining how a fight will play out and is working to make sure that fight happens to his advantage (and he often gets the frags) but many times just getting a kill or two is not enough and fighting isn't what the situation calls for.

Also Raph can be a bit cocky and hardheaded. This isn't the awful douchebag-asshole arrogant cockiness that so many people seem to develop but more of a playful and confident sort of cockiness. Confidence is a good thing but you have to be careful to not overdo it. If during a demo review a bunch of experienced players are pointing out how things should have been done differently but you just endlessly try to justify that what you did was right "and here's why" eventually it's going to rub people the wrong way and shows that the tunnel vision seems to extend beyond just that one moment in that game.

Overall Raph has tons of potential and mostly needs actual full seasons to get his head on straight with regard to gamesense and that just comes with time and experience.

We didn't part ways with Cyntro on any bad terms. Actually aZn might just reclaim his role as medic (despite being a force on pocket). The amount that Cyntro improved over the last season is very notable considering how little previous experience he has. It honestly exceeded my expectations. I don't know about IM level due to what is still little experience, though there's no harm in trying, but high open easily. Anything less (and he deservers more) and he'd be whipping you into shape and leading the team upwards. Personally he is no slouch. His mechanics are quite strong. He was hands down the best rocket jumper on the team. His calls and gamesense are ever improving and are good for his level of time played. He can be a bit annoying and trolly sometimes but in reality he's a really nice and kind person who's always down to work hard to improve, always has a positive attitude and won't let your team down.

Try him right meow before we change our minds and take him back in.

p.s. Beware, when we picked him up he developed a terrible, debilitating cough and while it's mostly gone now he still has it many months later so his days may be numbered. He could go tits up at literally any moment.

Just did some testing and it seems like rockets and stickies have the exact same radius so it's back to post-nerf normal mode.

Remember, anything bad that happens, ever, is my fault for I am tf2-satan. That one guy sold his soul so you will never see him again, sorry. ‡

✮ אם אתה מאמין שזה אתה יכול להיות אידיוט ✮

Nice guy and good scout. Deserves a good team.

Yeah basically that. I get home Wednesday night to find our match got overturned. I didn't get anyone banned from esea and now I've finally had the chance to talk to all my teammates (we're not all here Wednesdays) and nobody did anything. I don't give a shit about the win, they beat us well in the match, fair and square. In fact if I could transfer the win back to them I would. I feel bad for the team because they're good and seem like decent people. I didn't know sam played until after the match was done. This kid and his personal squad of cronies here are right cunts though so I can't feel sorry for him at all. I'm a really convenient scapegoat to dump everything on after you did a bunch of dumb shit for yourself.

I should really monetize my youtube because the amount of channel hits lately has increased like crazy. Hope you all enjoy my home movies and stuff and everyone finds some entertainment and/or educational value.

Lux asked me to scrim at 9 on Tuesday, then they can't get 6 for 18+ minutes after the agreed upon time because Hivemind is playing lobbies or something... wasted our time. Pity, it would have a good scrim.

9:18 PM - Jaguar | PlayComp.tf: talk all the shit you want, that's a waste of my time
9:18 PM - luxor: ur just mad we crushed u pregame
9:18 PM - Jaguar | PlayComp.tf: u know it dood
9:21 PM - luxor: we are taking ur server
9:21 PM - luxor: sry
9:21 PM - Jaguar | PlayComp.tf: k
9:26 PM - luxor is now playing Team Fortress 2. Click here to join.
9:28 PM - luxor has changed their name to MiniMoe.

2015 and still not having 6 ready when getting scrims smh (20 minutes after 9 when you asked for that time)

I don't know him too well personally but from what little time I've spent with him in mumble he seems like a real nice guy. I can confirm though that he's a strong soldier.

There is another thread vaguely discussing balance issues in pubs currently and I want to propose a very rough-draft idea for a pub class balance system. 99% of this was worked up by my teammate Slider. This doesn't address rebalancing teams by individual player skill but rather by the mix of classes on the field. Unlike something like a weapon balance discussion where you must assume that a highly skilled player is trying to get 100% effectiveness out of the item this instead assumes everyone in the pub is of the same, average pubber skill. Also the standard format assumed is a 12v12 though the system should work for any amount of players (but would be totally disabled when there's less than 6). All of the individual values and numbers can be tweaked and are subject to deliberation.

Everyone knows the scenario... You have 3 spies and 3 snipers on your team while the other team has a couple of soldiers, a couple of demos, a heavy a pyro and a med as well as some supports/specialists and the game is generally all but decided. Your team has no pushing power, no ability to maintain a front line and it's generally a one sided affair.

The basic idea is that every class has a point value assigned to it, either positive or negative. The classes in the table below are arranged by HP, but also you could say there's a pattern of generalists being at the top vs specialists at the bottom, or maybe even lower skill floor at the top (kind of, a bit). The sum of all of the values of the classes on team has to be at or above zero, and the game would not allow you to choose classes that would drive the value below zero at any point. Basically the team needs to invest into strong all-arounder fighting classes to get points with which to afford specialist classes. The system roughly enforces classes which are "good for the team" and helps maintain a certain balance and pace to the game.

http://i.imgur.com/p2mKGIF.jpg

The fighting classes maintain the same positive values regardless of their quantity but the support-ier classes have an increased negative cost with each aditional one. Not only does this system encourage a certain ratio between the "diferent types" of classes but also it discourages stacking too hard into one specialist class. A sniper and a spy is a better deal than 2 spies. 3 spies is terrible as they bump into people more, make the enemy team more paranoid (to their detriment), target the same players and generally step on each other's toes, not to mention the lack of contribution to the fighting at the front. Engineers are also kind of special because they are very important, so their initial penalty is small, but each next engie raises it by a higher amount. Too many engies on offense hurts in an obvious way but for defense it's often very good for your team-- too good if we're actually playing the objective and the game. It kind of makes the game crappy for everyone in the server.

So purely as example, if you have 10 soldiers and 2 spies on your team the total sum is 11 (good). 9 soldiers and 3 spies comes to 0 (still good). You cannot, however, have 8 soldiers and 4 spies (nor 3 spies, as 8 soldiers does not afford 3 spies).

Obviously this system isn't perfect. You can still argue that Valve wants zero restrictions or that it's too draconian and there are still ways to "game" the system and end up with some weird or less than ideal team setups (but some flexibility is a good thing). That's all reasonable but it still seems like a pretty decent system, or at least a place to start from. Once more all credit goes to Slider.

Thoughts?

I want to share some weird happenings that went down in my team's last viaduct match and find out if anyone's had these issues or perhaps how to prevent them.

Firstly when the game went live my pocket was assigned to the enemy team making it a 5v7 and it would not let him switch. After pausing and having him rejoin we were able to make things normal. I vaguely recall something like this happening to me before long ago but don't remember how it was handled. Probably the same way. This is an issue with the ESEA client, I take it?

Even more maddening though is that in the 2nd round, after gaining a considerable lead on the clock, the point refused to go into overtime, instead just hanging at 0:00 and decaying cap time at the normal rate as opposed to the overtime rate. Eventually the endless hordes of frantic opponents overran us and took back the point. Then we got flustered and threw the rest of the round by playing like crap. So yeah, not making excuses- they played well and we decided to forego teamwork for some reason (the whole game) but still this shit is sad and irritating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqvKBsEiapk

Haha yeah you got me dude! Burn! Actually I still had the tab open when people were saying the page was gone so I just pasted it over. I do believe I've been mentioned in these things many times before.

http://pastebin.com/z22gxvAN

Text is there

Right, so that sounds like a similar sort of condition or event which happens where the client sort of chokes for a small amount of time and when you come back things are messed up.

A question was asked during the show: How to reproduce the bug with invisible players? I'm sure there's multiple ways to get it (though it doesn't seem to be as prevalent now as it did at one point in time) but I know this occurs from time to time on your client when you lag out a bit then come back. That's not much to go on but I'm sure other people can confirm that as one way to end up with invisible players.

Nice guy, good gamer, fast learner.