clckwrkIt's astonishing watching the frags fluctuate in this thread from negative to positive. I read the initial post in this thread and I was confused as to what the point was. I scrolled down and saw that one guy getting -fragged into oblivion and I just assumed it was due to like a hundred or so b4nny subs. It's nice to finally see some rational arguments. Even following the argument recently I don't really see the point of the valve sympathizing. You are aware it's not good to have literally all of the update information and matchmaking information go through one person, yes? b4nny is not the community hivemind (in this sense, a collection of uniform opinions across all competitive players). And not to insult anyone's intelligence, but assuming he knows more than every other player on every aspect of how to improve TF2 and make everyone happy is ridiculously biased. It seems he's used as a singular point of hype for the update, while also being a constant reminder that he's the only existing bridge between Valve and the community, which achieves nothing but to marginalize the amount of work, effort, and time other competitive players and especially content producers/TFTV production have put into the game.
It's absurd that even the majority of those with knowledge and influence in the community cannot have an engaging back-and-forth with Valve about what's needed, what we should prepare for, even tentatively. We as a community have offered FREE SUGGESTIONS and free labor to keep the competitive community afloat for like literally 7 years. It's very understandable that anyone would be annoyed about the lack of information that's available. Signing NDA's and discussing closely with the company who holds the fate of the competitive game you love in its hands would be more than welcome. A valve tweet or blog post about the future update doesn't have to be a binding, pinky-sworn promise. It has to be a fucking update on the status of the update and potentially a few specifics that they're focusing on. Leaving the entire community sans one person in the dark is really annoying, especially when the only things I'm left with are hype-garnering tweets that could be placed on a motivational poster in a high school.
Nothing screams "let's work with the community to improve our game" more than putting them in the dark and only discussing changes with b4nny.