Can anyone who has played on the subtick prototype explain how different it feels? Does the game feel snappier or less snappy? Any hitreg issues?

I don't really understand what you guys expect me to do. I evangelize to all of my teammates, answer their questions about my religion, & tell them about how great Christianity is, but I can't force a person to convert, not commit a sin, and so on. If someone is a sinful person, it's ultimately on him not to do bad stuff (because he has free will). I can't force somebody not to Break RGL's Player Code of Conduct.

LOL

lowkey at this point you might want to try reinstalling windows

If the holding team is playing correctly & rotating heals, it feels basically impossible to destroy the gun. The attacking team has to push through a door before being able to spam (lower, dropdown), which makes it too difficult.

To fix this, the map should either (A) have bigger doors so that you can spam the common gun spots without having to walk through a doorway (like spamming from river to shutter on gully) or (B) change where guns can be placed to make them easier to spam. Sentries don't feel nearly as bad on gully or even process because the attacking team has some ability to spam the gun without pushing all the way through a door.

In my experience, snakewater's last pushes with uber ad feel pretty fair from the attacking side; it's mostly on even ubers where the sentry gun becomes near-impossible to destroy. If you do destroy the gun on evens, you've taken so much damage that the engineer has time to build another while you reheal, or you have to sac on half health. Making it easier to kill sentries would make attackers rely less on sniping (which is boring for both teams) and more on creative sacs.

Also we should ban the jag. Engineers should not be able to build another sentry 2 seconds after you spend 500 team health and 45 seconds of planning to kill his level 3.

Can you make all the doors into last bigger & make the grass on last nobuild?

If you mean using this data to train the model, this is easy with a little manual work. Just go to the RGL profiles of e.g. invite players, and then look through their logs for games where they're playing with their teammates (also listed on RGL). You could easily collect 500 invite-level "sample" logs in like a couple hours of doing this. Tedious but not that bad.

I think you could do this by grading players on a curve. Like, in both slow and fast games, someone still does the highest damage in the server. That's really what should count rather than the raw number, that is, a player's performance relative to his role counterpart on the other team. Fitting performance to a curve like this mostly solves the problem of people having worse-looking stats because the game was slow.

There are a lot of interrelated variables when assessing performance. For example:

• Higher DPM is usually better, but the ratio between DPM and DTM also matters. For example, a 300dpm/300dtm damage spread would likely not help your team win as much as a 250dpm/200dtm damage spread.
  
• Different roles have different performance expectations. The best roamers in the world still often go damage negative (while winning) because their role requires taking negative damage trades during sacs.
  
• The pace of the game affects everyone's performance. Doing 300dpm in a 5-4, fast-paced game is arguably less impressive than doing 300dpm in a game with a lot of stalemates (high average time between e.g. capping 2nd and capping last)
  
• The ratio between the "good stats" and heal% also matters. Doing 300dpm while taking 30% heals is less impressive than doing 300dpm while taking 5% heals.
  
• There are many more relationships like these examples.

My suggestion, if you're trying to get a single metric to measure player performance, would be to measure performance against a sample of known top-level games. For instance, you could gather a sample of 500 invite scrims and matches and compare player stats (dpm, k/d, etc.) on the winning team and the losing team, measuring the difference between the winners and losers. The key here is not the actual numbers, but the difference between the winners and the losers, e.g., what % more damage did the winners do compared to the losers? What % difference in ubers dropped? and so on for many different stats.

Then you would compare the difference in non-sample games to the difference in the sample. For example, if winning invite Demo players do 10% more damage on average than their demo counterparts (on the losing team), then a 10% damage diff would be the "average" or "difference-adjusted" score for demo players (so, a 5 on a 1-10 scale). Comparing winners and losers in a sample of games would allow you to find which stats directly correlate with winning and losing, even if you don't know why those statistics correlate that way. Doing this for many statistics and then averaging them out (for dpm diff, k/d diff, heal% diff, etc.) would be imperfect but give a pretty good overall measure of performance.

Adjusting for roles would also be necessary since expectations vary widely between them. Comparing med to med or demo to demo would be easy, but you could use heal% to determine which players are on combo/flank scout and pocket/roamer. The scout with the higher heal% will almost always be the pocket scout, and same with the pocket soldier. Using a sample of high-level games to train the model would also allow you to handpick who's playing what role, so there wouldn't be mistakes in the data.

Sorry if this isn't exactly what you asked for. I've thought a lot about how to measure performance in sixes and it's honestly pretty difficult. Keep this thread updated with your progress; I'm very interested!

Is there a way to increase the game's tickrate? The 200 tick mge server feels really smooth and cool, but I was wondering if there was a way to do that at the engine level

I think we should consider unbanning bonk. It's not that good outside of tanking a sentry, which would help with attacking last. The original reason it got banned was because people thought it would be too easy to go behind, but I'm pretty sure that's just wrong and it doesn't make going behind way easier.

I agree that we should try this, especially on sultry's left-side door into last from the attacking POV. Someone needs to take over sultry and update it since I'm pretty sure the creator quit

On sultry last there should also be a permanent ledge in the sky on the left side (from the attacking POV), like where soldiers are currently jumping up to spam the gun. If there were a ledge there, it would eliminate the most broken sentry spots without creating a new sniper sightline. I think there should also be something like this for snakewater, but I don't know how you would implement it.

+1 then, hope the benefits of releasing outweigh the costs...

That is crazy, how long has that been around?

If this was already spreading around in cheating circles then it probably makes sense to release, but if not then I agree that releasing it publicly doesn't make a lot of sense.

The Artisan mousepad sponsorship is cool -- how did that happen?

So, after sleeping on it and reading the other posts in this thread, I wanted to ask a few more questions.

1. I don't know how other people feel, but I would rather have 3-4 giant international LANs every year than an entirely new league. If it's truly a part of your mission not to be a direct competitor to RGL, then it makes more sense to do something different. I'm imagining a LAN circuit with weeks-long online qualifiers, etc.; something like this wouldn't interfere with what RGL is doing. Why not do this?
   
   That being said, I don't actually mind if your goal is to overlap/replace RGL, but I'm wondering about this since you keep saying you don't want this new league to be a direct competitor. Given this project's history of going bust, it seems like it would be a lot easier to "test the waters" running a few standalone tournaments, maybe a LAN, before deciding to go all-in on an entire league system. Setting up a league is ambitious -- and in RGL's case requires consistent unpaid work -- so why not host a few tournaments first to build trust in the community, prove that the money exists & that this is real before trying to create an entirely new league system. Hosting a tournament is hard, but creating a new league is, like, at least ten times as hard. Why not do the easy stuff first?
   
   
2. Another question I had, really a request, is whether it's possible for you to be completely transparent on how far along the project is. I don't want to just trust that it will be shipped this year; I think it would really help with people's skepticism if you gave people open access to seeing how much work has actually been done. I want to be able to look at screenshots, videos, or log in to a beta version to see that work is actually being done. I don't want to get in a situation a la Kickstarter where communication goes dark for weeks.
   
   
3. The #1 question I have is about the money. If you had said "I'm wealthy and love TF2 so I'm going to fund it basically out of charity," that would make sense, but this stuff about a business funding everything is confusing. I want to hear directly from the people with the money (you?) the reason why they are throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars away on TF2. And why $40k per season? We'd be grateful with much less, especially if it reduces the chance of the project burning out.

I also wanted to mention that if this ends up working out, I will be a huge supporter, everyone will be grateful and buzzing, and it'll be the best thing to happen to TF2 since I started playing 6 years ago. I'm super excited that this even has a chance to happen. My suggestion right now would be to build trust with the community given your track record of shelved projects.