isnt that just outright worse than the crossbow was before anyone but fragile used it?

i feel like the bow warrants a smaller direct nerf and then a passive downside. anything tied to the weapon itself is going to have to be balanced around being more useful than needles. and even a single bolt comes into play often enough that itd have to be absolute garbage to be on par with a weapon that does nothing to support your team.

i think something like the blutsaugers passive healing penalty or a health debuff would actually be an interesting tradeoff on the xbow since youd be trading your own survivability for your teammates.

its not really the same situation since the xbow is very much overtuned for a class thats already in arguably the most valuable spot on the team. and it also grants capabilities to med that are completely off the table otherwise. the only thing keeping the xbow unbanned is that a lot of players like using it or like its impact on the metagame. but with the scattergun its more fundamental to the class, and all his other unlocks pretty much do the same thing with minor tweaks. stuff like knockback with the FaN or minicrits with the backscatter dont really change what a scouts supposed to do or how you fight him.

tf2 just aint the same without those two goons

war is such a good caster

reminder that the sandman was invented to make scout better on dustbowl so you can blame this guy for inventing whitelists too

Search for "Drafting Chair" if you want a chair with good back support. they tend to be more ergonomic than typical computer chairs.

you want something with a seat short enough that your back will be properly supported, and generally you want the seat to go as high as you can without your legs physically hitting your desk (and keeping your feet on the ground). having adjustable armrests or no armrests can also be good since those often put more stress on elbows/shoulders unless theyre perfectly positioned.

ill personally shill modway since ive had a good experience and theyre not crazy expensive, plus they have literally every dimension marked on the page.

tacking on, profitability is one of the most important things for growth at this point. theres been a ton of super charitable passion projects done for tf2 that all eventually die out due to the time or money not being worth it to them anymore. not to mention the sheer number of orgs that have come and gone throughout its existance.

the best way to keep comp tf2 alive and grow it is to make it worth it financially. faceit (or anyone else) making money off tf2 gives them a vested interest in growing the scene. and while the community has kept tf2 alive longer than most games that lack dev support, its inherantly unsustainable. and honestly its selfish for anyone to expect people to just perpetually burden themselves with keeping the scene alive out of their own pocket rather than take a more pragmatic approach.

its not much but the mm algorithm was pretty routinely giving such small change that it was truncating to 1 or 0 after every game for a lot of people. and when the ranks are heavily dependant on fucking rounding errors it can make the MMR very inaccurate and fuck up team balancing on top of all the other problems it has.

its definitely oversaturated right now since it just went free. no telling how well itll be after a few days. queuing was improved a bit somewhat recently i think. i was getting faster games with around 500ish players than i was when it was higher some months prior. but i could be misremembering.

they did also merge playlists into team/solo, but its hard to say if merging the groups will offset people not wanting to be forced into certain game modes.

access is free to keep on steam this week

https://store.steampowered.com/app/611500/Quake_Champions/

games still pretty crusty in a lot of ways and they still toss in questionable design choices here and there, but the games improved pretty significantly in the past few months imo.

for those trying it out, do the tutorial at the start, you unlock a second character immediately and get 200k favor (250k gets you a permanant class unlock)

new dgd

https://open.spotify.com/album/6rBnEJJUih41OU4AemGs4y

EDIT: full albums only out as the time zones roll around

idk. problem is that when that counts, certain playstyles just become inherantly better for laddering. its a pretty common issue in overwatch honestly.

like take soldier for example. its generally good to have both a pocket and a roamer rather than two of either. but pockets stats are usually much more impressive on paper. and while its not so much a big deal for casual, they use the same thing for comp. and itd suck if youre stuck with teammates that avoid the right play just because they think itll hurt the mmr they would get.

i think one of the biggest issues is that theyre recalculating a rating after every single game. glicko's kinda meant to have like 10-20 games in a period every time a new ranking gets calculated. with how valves currently doing it, the change is very often a small variation that gets rounded to 0 or -1, which really leaves you up to the mercy of the matchmaking system to give you a game where positive rating change is even possible.

id guess that casual is pretty lax on team balance since theres a focus on keeping matches full with generally low pings. the majority of your opponents are most likely average players (starting glicko rating is 1500) so the formulas likely assuming that almost every match you play is in your favor.

like if youre in a spot where the game just assumes that you have like an 80% chance to win all your casual matches, then thats 4 wins per 1 loss, and if youre actually meeting that expectation then your skill rating is probably pretty accurate (and itll reflect that by penalizing your 4x as much for losses or whatever, its more complicated than that but thats the gist of it)

glickos not really meant to be easy to climb. its really good at being an accurate skill rating, but since a players actual skill tends to take weeks to see serious improvement a lot of games try to use flashier MMR systems cuz it feels nicer. but like in this case its a (mostly) hidden value so its not really a big deal.

noone particular but like 80% of ugc teams try to game the ruleset for free wins

literally had a team call an admin to have two of our players removed from our team halfway through the week because they had played a higher div like 3 years prior

showdown is great. current metas pretty matchup based but not like outrageously so. i think its better than last gen at least.

https://i.imgur.com/QucIC1p.gif