I can assure you, as a Australian, do not under-estimate the retardness of Australian routing. Sometimes my packets to Melbourne (1 state away) will get routed through to Adelaide (imagine you want to play on a NY server and you're in NJ but your packet does a round trip to Houston first).

International routing is an even bigger joke.

Nothing, just that those classes have lower skill ceilings than comparable 6's classes so forcing a team to always run those classes naturally puts an artificial cap on the possible skill level of a said team.

Many unlocks add nothing to the game and requires more skill to take down than to deploy. That is, they aren't properly skill indexed. Many items simply change the outcome of the fight by merely equipping it and using it (that is, take it out and left click, or simply walking around with the passive buff). If I need to take down a wrangler I need to use teamwork, but the opposing engineer didn't, he just had to equip an item (sacrificing a pistol) and build a sentry he was going to build anyway.

Doesn't less organisation, more spam and more clustered play equal more luck, less skill and less emphasis on individual plays by definition?

More=/=better.

If we're critical of anything is that it requires less skill, like I said, you just said it yourself that it's more spammy and less organised, doesn't that by definition mean it's a less skilled team game?

TF2 at its core is a game about specialists and generalists. That is at its core, the game and the mechanics operates the best when it's played like that. If you go into any high-level pub, with players who know what they're doing (they may not have amazing DM or huge technical skills, but assume they're using they're using their mics and have some semblence of co-ordination) there is a natural class balance that flourishes.

That class balance heavily favours classes like the soldier, scout, demo, heavy and medic, anyone who isn't completely pants-on-head retarded will see these classes are simply better at doing 90% of the things you need accomplish to win the game. Yes, there are a few snipers, engineers, spies but all those classes collectively make up a tiny percentage of the numbers, that's why they're specialists. Forcing a team to have as many specialists in the game as there are generalists will just make the game worse. Both to play and to spectate.

Now Valve has tried to address this issue by putting in unlocks that make it more viable to play full time spy, sniper, engineer but I think we can all agree that these unlocks are not fun to play against, especially when they were first introduced.

A lot of times when people debate weapons it's always the statistical balance that gets argued, but no one tries to argue about the weapon being NOT fun to play against. Why is that? Are we forgetting that this is a game and however balanced an item may be, if it's not fun to play with or against then it should be immediately banned?

We play TF2 for ourselves, we don't have some sort of huge spectator crowd behind us, we don't have huge sponsors behind us, what makes TF2 tick is the players. And if something isn't fun to play against, it should be banned.

Hence why people hate stuff like the mini-sentry, jaratee, wrangler, pre-nerf GRU-sandvich combo, pre-nerf enforcer/spycicle/DR combo, etc, etc. The list goes on. They aren't fun to play against, I think that should be a valid criticism and grounds for a ban.

A lot of these unlocks are also non-skill indexed. What I mean by that is that the skill required to overcome the unlock is not equal to the skill required to deploy it. Case in point, the wrangler, any idiot can equip it and take it out and swap between that and hitting the sentry. You've just gained yourself a 600hp sentry that can heal by hitting it with a wrench (building a sentry can hardly be classed as difficult). Now what do you have to do to kill it? Well firstly you most likely have to build an uber, then you have to co-ordinate with your demo or heavy and both of you need to stay alive for at least 40 seconds. Now those aren't really hard things to do, but they are much harder than what the engy has to do.

I mean all of the not-fun unlocks are like that, it takes more co-ordination to take down than it does to use.

Then there's the fact that Highlander is a defensively orientated game-mode. If you look at a 6's team with default classes, it excels at movement and sustained damage output. A highlander team excels at holding and stagnant play. You're trading having 2 scouts and 2 soldiers for having classes like the pyro, engineer and heavy, all who are excellent at holding points than getting points. And you also gain 2 unreliable pick classes in the sniper and spy.

Unfun unlocks, non-skill indexed items, defensively orientated team makeup, broken class composition.

I honestly feel like Highlander is being propped up by the terrible people who can ONLY play engineer, spy, heavy and pryo. If it weren't for these bads HL would die right off. No one good at the game would actually try to main engineer.

If you're playing this game for money, fame or to appease the small amount of viewers this game gets, you're doing it wrong. And this applies at every level of TF2.

Forcing players to not play with people they get along with is a sure fire way of destroying the competitive community (most successful teams/players move up from the bottom to the top by playing with regulars and building a chemistry).

Good meds in low divisions are rare, probably because if you're a good med (relatively speaking) you will get frustrated playing with people who are bad and are constantly out of position. Nothing worse than dying and knowing there's nothing you could've done and it was a result of someone else's mistake.

The most important thing is play with people that you like and get along with. Sticking together is the best way to improve, team hopping will get you nowhere.

TF2 has built in functionality to output a set amount of frames in a lossless format. Any editor worth their salt would be using that function rather than some screen recording software which is limited to their monitor refresh rate (maximum 144 Hz realistically, unless you somehow got your hands on a 200 Hz CRT), which would also require a ridiculously overpowered PC to record at that rate with a movie config. It also allows you to have a consistent output, even the shittiest computers can render 1000 FPS 1080p lossless frames, it just takes a while.

And all the streamers now use OBS, the feedback is apparently OBS is pretty amazing and it's a free open source software.

I'll be honest, trying to target the gaming demographic is going to be pretty fail straight up with regards to streaming. OBS already exists and is free, even if it has some small technical issues most of these people are tech savvy so they don't mind working through small problems if it's free.

As an editor myself, it's my hobby and I enjoy doing it with some aspirations of going into real video editing, so for me, using AE/3DS Max/Premiere is as much about trying to familiarise myself with the industry as much as them being excellent programs. I would imagine the truly dedicated editors, the really good ones, are similar. So I probably wouldn't use your editor even if it was free.

But if you really want to do something then talk to the people who worked on the i49 broadcast at VanillaTV. I think that's the demographic that you would most likely have any success in, small production companies trying to cover gaming events. Ask them how they streamed it, what problems they ran into, how much they'd be willing to pay for a piece of software that takes all the hassles away and gives them an ESPN-esque production quality. And realistically, they're the ones that are most likely pay for a licence, I don't think 14 year olds streaming themselves play LoL are going to give you money, even if it's 5 bucks.

I've read that, but obviously there is some structure. Imagine if none of the games get updated because everyone wants to work on HL3. And truthfully, if you were working on Valve would you decide to work on TF2 when there are some amazing projects that are coming up (new Source engine, HL3, Steambox and those are the ones we know about, there could be a lot of amazing new projects and techs we have no idea about)? That's probably even more evidence of the skeleton crew/bare bones approach I think it's happening, and like I said, the higher ups at Valve are probably working on Dota/CS, next-gen consoles, steambox and licencing the new Source engine instead of worrying about trying to promote TF2 which, so far, has only generated 5k viewers peak.

I'll be honest, if I was Valve I wouldn't bother too much with competitive TF2, TF2 is already an amazing money generating machine with a tiny dev-team, the investment to return ratio is out of this world, why pour more resources into something that may not yield anything and ruin the cash cow (by alienating pub players who generate the revenue)?

I may be wrong but I get the feeling that Valve just puts a skeleton crew on the TF2 project, they're just a rag tag bunch of programmers and artists and the only thing they can do is balance the game, add in items and push out updates. When you need someone to change how Valve makes money off of items (the revenue share idea with an official Valve sponsored TF2 tourney) you need someone far higher up and I feel collectively, Valve have decided that putting someone that high up to work on TF2 is pointless.

I think this skeleton crew also has a very warped sense of competitive TF2, the first thing they try to implement is HL and they're whole philosophy is we have to give everyone all the weapons and then try to balance it out with some pick-ban system.

If you want to grow TF2 as an e-sport the first thing you do would be to push 6v6 with a very limited unlock list to make the game as spectator friendly as possible. I feel this mis-representation/ignorance from the skeleton crew has negatively influenced Valve's higher ups when it comes to the potential of TF2 as a serious e-sport.

Also, I feel like we should NOT give in to Robin Walker's and the TF2 team's vision for what competitive TF2 should be (some form of rock-paper-scissors Highlander with pick-ban) because it detracts from the game. When I saw the Mixup vs HRG game where Plat pushed into last with QF and Conch and Shade popped counter QF, there were about 9 different glowing halos on every player and it looked like someone vomited a rainbow on my screen. There is NO WAY any person can reasonably keep track of what's going on, even TF2 players were perplexed as how Mixup won that point as the commentators and the chat was just a mass of confusion. That is not the image we want to project to a person who is interested in competitive gaming and a potential viewer.

In saying all of this if someone were to try to lead a project I would be happy to be a 2D/3D artist and video editor. You don't get shit done with a negative attitude.

I have experience with modelling and exporting items to the game
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=7183&tscn=1379102717

And here's a frag vid I've done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KSsn22GnUE

EDIT: Also I think it's pretty pathetic and reflects rather poorly on Valve when arguably, TwitchJohn has done more for the competitive community than Valve has done.

You still have to fight on the roof to contest the point, it's during the fighting where they're running around the roof that the sniper becomes deadly.

Moving the cap point onto a spire behind the roof allows the area behind the roof to see some action and relevancy as well as cutting down on sight lines.

The sightline from roof to that ramp thingy under the window room is too long. If RED has a decent sniper he can take pot shots all day and make it incredibly difficult to cap. Plus that sniper can't be jumped and has a healthpack right next to him.

There's nothing wrong with moving the cap point behind the roof, a simple spire will do, no need to make it overly complicated.

With regards to spire, whatever art style you go with can you make the walls around the base of spire solid? All those columns and X-bracing looks like it would just eat up rockets if a scout and soldier are duelling around the base.

The Gpit spire is covered in sheet metal.

I think instead of a wooden one you should make one out of shipping containers, that way it fits the story. RED rushes the build process so it would make sense they would fashion something out of whatever is there (containers) and it would fit better with the art style (since the containers wouldn't look as out of place as a Gpit-esque spire.

If the purpose is to try out different casters and give some recognition to the main division then recasts that are uploaded to YouTube would be good, it avoids the pains of scheduling, you can be picky about the games you cast (a boring stalematey game with relatively unknown players aren't fun to watch) and it allows anyone to be the cameraman, as long as they can upload to YouTube (just run OBS to record to disk).

I think it would be a mistake to try and force out content of 1 main cast/week because you will run into scheduling issues between the casters, cameraman and the teams so scrambling backups will only delay the cast/matches and lead to worse quality which gives first time viewers a bad impression. By all means try to hit that goal but I don't think it's imperitive and the YouTube upload option gives everyone more freedom, when things aren't rushed they usually turn out better for everyone involved.

What do you mean by "support"?

Editors share clips, people give feedback, that comment was my 2c.

I've noticed that all these funky vision app clips are all following the same style, even down to several camera moves that are getting over used now (the camera pan behind a static prop such as the mesh fence).

I feel like all you aspiring editors are basically trying to copy-paste someone else's style.

Just an observation.

But a CaC scout chooses when he takes that engagement, the soldier doesn't. That's the difference.

Of course a scout is going to choose a time and place where the penalty or risk of receiving damage is not as great as the ability to deal damage.

Teams don't have warnings and the scout doesn't have to work towards it, he just has it in his back pocket.

Imagine if medics spawned with an ubercharge, it'd be ridiculous.