Not sure if it's been answered but which part controls the skull thing to tell you that you're taking mini-crit damage? I would like it to be much bigger and in the centre due to the escape plan now.

I don't mind editing it myself but I think that you should now change it to be bigger now that it's more important for pockets.

Ctrl+F "stats", should be fairly obvious where it is.

I think you're missing the point. As someone who's a self-taught 3D artist just learning stuff for fun, there are plenty of high school aged kids who are amazing at technical stuff (programming, game assets, sound, etc), Valve could easily get these people in, tell them they need certain things done (see all those props in every map in every game ever? Someone had to make them, they don't come free, and if you're designing a new game in a different "world"/IP you have to recreate every prop. If you wanted to make a new TF2 styled game and all you've made thus far have been Half-Life 2 environments, you can't exactly re-use the props like garbage cans, doors, book shelves, computers, etc, same with sound, music, all the details that makes a game an immersive experience.)

In game development there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done, which requires talent but is tedious (3D unwrapping comes to mind). High school kids would be perfect.

I've read a little about how Valve hires workers and although their strategy (hiring only the best, disregarding how much pay they want, industry veterans) is great for making a great game, it's not exactly economical to get these people make 10 different garbage cans to populate the world, and then making 10 different styles of windows, and then 10 different kinds of footsteps, etc, etc.

Thing is, even after the nerf, just my experiences obviously but I still see a lot of pub sollies use it.

Pub sollies don't like walking around being low on health and slow, so any weapon that allows them to walk faster is still preferable.

And can we just all agree that the stock shovel is just a horrible melee to begin with? Second slowest class in the game and you expect him to try and land point blank shots on faster classes? With the only exception being the heavy but chances are, even a lit heavy has more health than you and heavies are unlikely to be out of ammo.

So the idea of balancing weapons around their stock counterparts is just a terribly dated idea and holds no water when considering other unlocks of other classes (Pyro... I mean, why don't Valve nerf the Axtinguisher if we're using the equip % as a reason?).

I may have bought 5 copies of JC2, purely because the multiplayer mod looks like it's taking off so got a copy for all my friends.

What's the email you guys use to contact Valve?

And please, if you guys do email, please keep it polite, legible (proper English and grammar) and outline in as few words as possible on why you think certain changes are bad/good. Also it's always good to start off any letter with a positive (thanking them for their efforts, that they've taken changed things because of community feedback, etc).

EDIT: You guys just used the email form and not a staff member's email?

That is as much of a product of the maps as it is the class. I mean, what can you do to the demo to nerf him on a map like dustbowl? You can't, it's as if dustbowl was created for a spam class that can lock off a chokepoint.

It slows the run of play only because there is a cap on the speed of the cart and the faster you push the cart the less players are available to fight. If you only had control points and no cart to push and everyone is available to fight then there wouldn't be these limitations.

Can't we just repurpose a Payload map? Remove the cart and replace each stage with a CP.

The reason why we don't have PL in 6s is because if one person is dedicated to cart pushing then it's really a 5v6 most of the time and since most payload maps are pretty defensively orientated (set hold points where you can't push without making a pick) it's a pretty big disadvantage.

Doesn't that satisfy the criteria of it being a "Attack/Defend" map?

It seems to me most PL maps play out like a successive CP layout anyway. Take BW for example, for Blue to advance they first have to "capture" the starting cliff above tunnel, then they capture the roof, then they capture corner. Instead of actual cap points we just have loosely defined strongholds that must be broken.

Taking a popular PL map (looking at you badwater) would also make it more pubbers and spectator friendly. And a lot of the "meta" of these maps would be directly transferable from pub and HL.

Regardless, failed rollout due to push away as you sticky jump has a much bigger impact on the game than the 1 in 1000 games where hiding sniper in heavy is actually useful and does something to change the outcome of the game.

OWL8 Finals, iM vs 1d, second map

http://heavy.ozfortress.com/demos/pub/2ffd51aecde83a8e28156d18a35b95361372e370/20121218/

5-3 iM win. This was the closest game I could find, albeit it's about 1.5 years ago.

Logs:
http://i.imgur.com/3UXlqY3.jpg (logs crashed after the 1st round in the second half)

Link for 1st map down, was a 5-0 anyway.

OWL9 Round 5 iM vs Rewound, 3 months old (Rewound finished 2nd in OWL9)

http://heavy.ozfortress.com/demos/pub/dacfe658839eb1d530f330b5516d0dc2974c0aa8/20130404/

5-0 and 5-1

Get Ruwin to add No Mercy (ozfortress admin) and ask for the grand final demos:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/306154420

People keep saying gravelpit is good for spectators but I very much dispute this.

Firstly, all the teams of equal'ish skill always opt to use the same strategy. And it seems on RED it's devolved into 2 strats, Ironman (which rarely gets used) and the standard B hold with 1 offclass.

If gpit is the real "test" of strategies then watching the same strat being executed time and time again is not really a good way of showcasing that.

Gpit is a test of team chemistry and timing, why teams do well and why teams do badly even though they're running the same strategy is something that comes down to timing and comms. To convey that in a stream is very hard, especially using only 1st person POVs and no mumble comms. In fact, it's also really hard to convey with those tools. As a comp player myself I know when it comes down to troubleshooting why we are doing badly on gpit, a cursory glance at the demos won't reveal it like the other 5cp maps, we have to go deeper, watching the same demo from different POVs, recording comms and listening back and getting opinions from higher div players. It's not something that can be communicated in a stream and I think it actually alienates new to comp players.

Secondly I would argue that gpit is actually horrible to new spectators. There's too much nuanced rules of thumbs that are being employed for new to comp players to know why teams do something. Case in point is the give up A approach RED always takes, it just doesn't make sense to new players and it also doesn't make sense as a map. Why play a make where 1/3 of it is basically never used and is always a formality?

The above is from the perspective of a spectator, specifically leaning towards someone with little to no comp experience. I think it's a very dangerous road to walk down to start playing maps that are not in the official pool as it would just alienate the pub community more. People can wrap their heads around 5cp, KOTH, but if we start introducing maps like Standin as has been suggested then it's going to be very hard to convey that in a stream. Hell, it was hard for me to pickup and play.

If you really want to do something like this I suggest you do it with macros on your keyboard/mouse (all keyboards with macro functions should have some sort of timing command).

Alternatively, you can knock up a quick autohotkey script if you don't have programmable macros.

Lastly, the best way to do it is simply press tab and look at the game time and minus 40 or 30 seconds, and reference that with your own uber percentage. Getting into this habit will, firstly, familiarise yourself with hitting tab (which all new player struggle with) and secondly to make it a reflex so you know the uber percentage all the time in the back of your head.

@atmo, love it, much cleaner.

Had a friend with the same problem, they sent me the demo that supposedly won't save and I managed to smooth it fine. Seems like a client issue. Try reinstalling TF2 as steampipe may have fucked something over.