Arseny Tarkovsky - Jag is right too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSaKUPtWb_g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9Yn9q25NWAw#t=699 (english subs but also whole movie, many other of Arseny Tarkovsky's poems are featured)

It's from the movie Zerkalo by Andrei Tarkovsky (unfortunately I couldn't find any English subs that weren't the entire movie).

Yeah I'm quite aware of that problem myself scorpio - I did some new map pugs back in the day, and I remember how leery people were about even cp_process when it first hit the scene (given changes were made, but the core of the map was fine).

I was mainly getting at *at least* a tournament, because just pugging on it won't draw the sort of attention - you'd need wide swaths of the community to participate in the thing and encourage them to play on the map multiple times so they could get a real good feel for it so that either A.) meaningful changes could be made (or at least suggested) by a large number of players as opposed to the typical 5-6 or B.) we'd know just to move onto another map or throw it in the rotation. My other insinuation in my previous post was, out of the previous 4 maps we've tried out in past seasons (unless I'm mistaken) have all been made by scorpio. There's nothing wrong with him being a prolific map maker, but the fact that he seems to be the only one still doing meaningful development means something is broken or could be done better.

I think another helpful development would be for people to get together and partially systematize how maps are made. How many entrances into last is too many or too few and so forth so that folks who get that urge to make something decent don't end up accidentally making cp_obscure. How big is too big how small is too small and so on. You see this sort of thing in star craft where *basically* every map resembles each other slightly,but will be somewhat different in a few important ways either due to size, routing, etc.

I think the inherent problem here is that we're looking to ready-made solutions like new items to change our game when we should instead be expending more effort into fostering in new maps and map makers. Just the inclusion of CP_Process changed the way some teams play in regards to pushing off of last, the ramp rollouts, and so on that are nice subtle changes that don't obliterate the entire history of comp tf2, while providing us with something fresh and new.

But that requires actual work on the part of somebody (besides whichever guy made the random items valve releases) so it's not a particularly popular option. Especially given that we don't have any particular system for testing new maps - and our selection of new maps tends to be incredibly biased.

If we really want change that badly (CS has been playing on the same maps with only 3 new weapons for over 10 years, quake gets a new map every now and again) we should look into coming up with a system that will encourage people to become map makers, and to test those maps with like weekend pug tournaments or something. If we were in a place where we had so many good new maps that cp_badlands was the map we were talking about cutting as opposed to relative stinkers like GPIT and/or metalworks we'd be a much healthier scene imo (of course, I doubt we'll ever see the end of badlands but I use it here for effect ;) ).

Bump - now looking more seriously since quickfix has been dealt with and I'm now looking to make or join a team for sursies. Also ty for all the compliments above ;)

I honestly considered making a video, but then I heard through the grape vine what was going to happen so instead I had a coke and watched a mother goose walk her ducklings around and I was pleased.

The crashing this season was relatively mild compared to seasons past really.

At least nothing had to be reformatted and everybody had Tf2 on their PC lol - with TF2 you can't really blame the hardware, this shit just breaks sometimes, unless the PC was blue screening and so on.

Speaking objectively, 5 cp does cause stalemates relative to KOTH or A/D since those are governed by a different mechanic.

TBH I think a little stalemate (30-40 seconds) is actually a healthy thing for the game because it gives the casters time to explain wtf is going on without sounding like somebody calling a horse race. Particularly given how hectic mids/team fights are and how easily you can continue to talk about the play even after the dust settles and somebody goes to camp the wrong spawn door and so on.

I imagine that the vote is fairly amorphous yet because of the invite teams forming and changing so the vote will be delayed I imagine (at least it wouldn't have been today) - so Killing took the initiative to solve the problem now rather than let the issue hang in the air for several more weeks, especially given that many of the current invite captains who will have votes apparently voiced their intention to ban the item to killing.

Not the cleanest possible course, but it'll do for now until something satisfactory is done with the item. It shouldn't have been allowed into s14, but it, like the conch, were relatively useless items prior to the update, so I understand perhaps why it wasn't picked up until it was too late.

I played on the same team as hugh in that particular season - it really wasn't that bad. I never felt like we were just hopelessly crushed - and I know I learned a lot from playing against such teams.

Well OOV I wasn't talking about the DPS of the pyro, I was talking about having him stand inside his own medic's hit boxes and holding down m2. Since QF uber basically has to go on a soldier, his only option is to impotently shotgun the medic, who invariably will be acquiring qf soon. Not to mention if the pyro happens to understand what he's doing and reflects a rocket into somebody and shreds them.

Grape can relate how effective this particular tactic is in more extensive detail. It's not as obvious as running a heavy, but it's basically the the same out come. Although granted at least you have a hope of killing the pyro (a completely inconsequential frag).

The main stalemate factor in the QF comes from the fact that you basically always have it and any decent projectile class can make it impossible to bomb your medic (jump to the sky box anybody?) on any non-interior point. Thus the aggressor is always at a disadvantage because you're always pushing into another qf and it's impossible to qf more than 1 person at a time in general because the qf doesn't flash particularly well, so you're always qfing into a 1v2 or more who also generally have qf. Nor can you just push to their flank because they can instantly jump in front of you and force you into another 1v2+. Not to mention that it's incredibly easy to get your medic out of a bad situation - which is why even on other-than-gullywash maps we saw teams not sustaining 2 point losses for bad fights (generally if you all but wipe you're going to lose the point you're on + have to contest the point behind it, generally losing).

The other big problem with QF is it builds so fast you really cant suicide to get it out, because even if you do, by the time your suicider comes back up they're going to be pretty close to qf again *unless the med drops completely*. Because even if you have good spawn times (6-8 seconds generally) it's going to be 6-8 seconds plus 5+ additional seconds for that player to catch up to the rest of his/her team, and thus the other team is *at least* 50% qf before you even get ready to push with your advantage. Which is why, even when we saw the ol' roamer bomb resulting in a force, we didn't see the defending team give up the point because they just had to kite for a bit and counter qf. That's why in the HRG vs Mix^ finals we actually saw roamers bombing demos because at least if he killed the demo you could use your qf to push into a choke and hope to pull off something with a marginally higher chance of success.

I get to break out my HDMI cable two weekends in a row for TF2.

GL and safe travels to everybody heading out. While I'm a bit sad Mix^ can't go too it's still going to be a great show.

Bumps.

I should point out that people have been switching spy to check medigun for a VERY long time - much longer than HL has been kicking around. Mackey did it *all* the time on GPIT back when you saw GPIT more often.

Zigster those two "good" rockets will have to do over 185 hp assuming the med is at full health and will have to hit him within the space of the same second - so unless you're syncing rockets he's effectively invincible to any single player in most situations (UNLESS he has been damaged prior to his popping and you get lucky and he hasn't yet regenerated to over 100 when the next rocket hits him directly).

Frankly I think a few people need to realize a few things.

A. Valve's support for our community is minimal at best. Occasional blog posts, occasional conversations with the single individual who maintains this game, and medals for UGC. This will not change no matter what we do, so it is pointless to attempt to appease Valve, because frankly, it's praying to a God that doesn't exist.

Therefore we need to do what's best for the format irrespective of what we may believe Valve wants, because Valve doesn't really care if we live or die.

B. There is no magic bullet that will turn Tf2 into Dota 2, LoL, or Sc2. Doing things to help are never bad, but it's fairly obvious that the display today was sub-par. The viewer numbers are fairly straight forward, traditionally we're over 3k from the very beginning. Not so for this LAN where we often struggled to stay over 2k. "Trying to speed up the game" so as to make it more popular isn't the magic bullet, i46, i49, fundraisers, documentaries, they aren't the magic bullet. They're nice things that most of us enjoy, but they aren't magic bullets and aren't intended to be, and I think a lot of people are clinging to the idea of the quick fix in the hope that it will be that magic thing. It's not - this can be empirically proven by anybody who looks at view counts over the past several LANs.

C. The only factor that changed from the last 5 LANs, for the most part (besides the EQ nerf, the over dose, conch, warmfront/metalworks) is the inclusion of the quick fix.

D. Banning an item that ruins the flow of the game has been used NUMEROUS times in TF2's history to preserve the format and improve playability. Random crits, Bonk, Crit-a-cola, minisentries, wrangler, frontier justice, widowmaker, natascha, GRU, limitations on demoman, heavy, engineer; just to name a few. While some of those items have a more radical impact on game play than even the quickfix, they were all removed for the same reasons that you would remove quickfix now: they pigeon-hole teams into turtling or relying on luck/RNG.

E. A "stale" meta-game isn't necessarily a bad thing - the rules of baseball, and the ways it's played, are basically the same as they've been since the 60's, and as far as I know the sport is still kicking along just fine. It also helps viewers understand the game because things aren't completely wacky for no particular reason.