http://puu.sh/qsr7W.png

That's nice to see.

That was great!

AGAIN WTF

That was an insane end to the first map.

Mouse>monitor>keyboard. Mechanical keyboards are disproportionately expensive for the amount of improvement you get in gaming. A 60Hz monitor is like driving with a dirty windshield, whereas a bad mouse is like having a steering wheel made of pudding, not to mention a "cheap" good monitor is at least ~3x as expensive as an expensive good mouse.

Yeah, kind of a shame Cypher isn't in attendance. It's just not the same without him at least in the mix.

1st $12,000
2nd $7,000
3rd $3,000
4th $1,000
5th-8th $500

I know this sounds counterintuitive, but you need to make sure you have a fast CPU rather than a fast GPU to get more frames per second in TF2. High clock speed on mainly the first two physical cores.

I did not appreciate getting a million page legal document shoved in my face after already having wasted 10 minutes answering personal questions about things like my annual income and being asked for my Twitch account name so it can be linked to my person or at least my e-mail address. For all I know, it says somewhere in the middle of the document that they are free to sell any of the information I provide in the survey, but I don't have the time or desire to read for two hours just so Twitch can have my free feedback. Sod off. Either put it at the start of the survey so I can decide not to waste my time or gosh, maybe anonimise the data you gather so your users who are willing to help you improve your product for free don't have to read binding legal documents.

Good job on putting the video together the way you did. I had no idea this was a bug(at least I hope it is a bug) and not something to do with lag.

Flamethrower becomes an LG with rapid damage ticks and limited range and properly functioning hit boxes. Say 2 damage per tick(if we assume 66 ticks per second) and you need to obviously track their hit box every tick since it's a LG. That would be 144 dps including two afterburn ticks.

Airblast doesn't stunlock you and reflects aren't minicrits. It knocks the pyro back in the opposite direction the same amount as it would an enemy player. Handy for disengaging or making small jumps. Airblast should probably have a longer attack interval to make this extra mobility more committal.

Secondary weapon is a LG with unlimited range which has 3 damage ticks per second which do equivalent to pistol damage. If you hit 5(or some other number) consecutive damage ticks on the same target, target catches fire. Damage amounts and fall-off per damage tick would be exactly equal to hitting a bullet with a stock pistol. I think this would make pyro interesting to use when the other team plays a slow mid fight with maybe a sniper because you could deny heals and make the sniper flinch if no one targets you.

Afterburn slows down healing to the same rate as when you have the escape plan out and packs give no health when used to extinguish oneself. Afterburn ticks go 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 before extinguishing, 6 dmg/s for 10s is too much in my opinion.

Maybe you should have a private chat instead of passive-aggressively uttering frustrated psychological projection and blame shifting on a public forum in regards to someone you've probably never actually spoken to. You might find that you're trying to reach exactly the same goal, but from a slightly different perspective. Otherwise, in future you are just going to have less enthusiasm to make maps for competitive and people like Ben are going to have less enthusiasm to provide the feedback needed to make them. Everyone loses, nothing is won. I think we all understand where this frustration has come from, because there is a lot of rude and unhelpful feedback mappers have to sift through and learn to ignore, but you might not want to be projecting this onto someone who is genuinely trying to help you(and by extension all of us) .

Why not give every class three interesting and simple unlocks in every weapon slot and keep it that way until all of them are balanced? I mean, would a medigun with "+50% charge duration, cannot switch heal target during über" not be more interesting and easier to balance and understand for new players than the vaccinator and quick-fix? For pyro not even that would be enough, because it's so buggy and conceptually flawed within a game with strong arena shooter elements. It's not even difficult to make it work, but they just don't seem to understand what the engine and classes have done over the years to shape the playstyle of this game.

All that shows you is if you want to win you use the best weapons. That doesn't tell you if the person/their opponent/the spectator enjoyed being part of the experience, no matter how balanced it will be when Valve get their precious data. If you put two turds of equal mass on a set of scales, they will be in perfect balance, but it doesn't make your house smell less like poo than when one turd was bigger than the other.

What TF2 needs in order to be a competitive game(not a successful one, just a competitive one to begin with) is direction, not balancing or expansion. There is nothing to balance right now because in Valve's mind, competitive TF2 has no clearcut identity for people to be captivated by and which the balancing would work towards achieving. Quake has fast-paced DM and internalised timings, Overwatch has class-centric teamplay, CS has slower moving heavily aim-based tactics. According to this community(TFtv), TF2 should be about über-centric and movement based three-dimensional DM supplemented by utility class and unlock switching, but if you just take an honest look at some of the classes and most of the unlocks that are in the game right now, Valve has no such precise vision for the game, or at least this update did not show what that vision is.

I'm happy matchmaking is now part of the game and I'm sure this will not be the last competitively significant update, but my gut still tells me that something is missing in Valve's mindset. To me it still feels like they don't know what they want competitive TF2 to be. Without whitelists and class limits(which the competitive community had to invent over the years), there just doesn't seem to be a framework for a competitive game.

Pick a map type, decide the feel of the game and how each class can use a few skills(some more potent than others) within that environment. If the player plays the class skillfully and intelligently, they should be able to either use skills normally belonging to other classes at a weaker level, or be able to circumvent the skills of other classes. Then, and only then, you can start making interesting unlocks which make the game interesting instead of breaking either the feel(and therefore player/spectator enjoyment) or fairness of the competitive game. Unlocks which trade all or part of one of those class skills and reinforce another skill to compensate for it are the ones which make the game dynamic but not broken, and allow for actual decision-making and risk-taking instead of roulette.

You must first decide to use nails or screws before opting for the hammer or the screwdriver. This update was Valve deciding that fixing the boards together was worthwhile in the first place, which is a welcome start. I remain hopeful the rest will follow.