All the cool dudes who were involved in cool dude things at Valve like their writers and artists and level designers and basically everyone else are (really fucking good) programmers and people who know how to make Valve more money and it sucks because we'll probably never see a game with Portal's writing or Half Life's general brilliance because Valve had some secret sauce or something and now the games people rave about are Uncharted and shit and fuck Uncharted its one of the the worst fucking games on the market because you play as a bland white dude and crouch behind chest high walls shoot and dudes with no cool gameplay mechanics like the gravity gun and this makes me super salty.

Like, at a Steam Dev Days conference or whatever the fuck it was Valve said the future of gaming was cosmetic microtransactions like hats and weapon skins and they said they don't see the point in making games that can't have that system and we saw this with Portal 2 and no one bought those hats so Valve said "Oh shit single player games don't work with this lol bye" and only makes multiplayer games. Like everyone thinks L4D3 is kinda an odd choice for a next game but it makes perfect sense because its like the last existing multiplayer IP they have that has a large player base and no cosmetic microtransactions so they're going to make L4D3 and force hats or whatever on it and then just sit bye while they have 4 distinct multiplayer games with microtransactions shoe-horned into them and I don't care because they probably won't add Payday 2 style skills into it because that wouldn't make sense and builds in Payday 2 are fucking dope.

And then they rake in hat money whilst doing fuck all for the community making them rich beyond fucking belief. Like I fucking hate Overwatch but holy shit when Jeff Kaplan makes a 15 minutes fucking video basically wanking the community off and telling them about the changes they're going to make to comp and balance changes and shit its just so fucking nice after the radio silence you get playing a Valve game. Like Blizzard stuck to no hero limit for the longest time but then they swallowed their ego and put 1 hero limit INTO FUCKING MATCHMAKING. Whereas Valve puts all their faith in fucking numbers whilst ignoring the wealth of community input like holy shit it took Valve like a year to figure out how to buff tapping in CS:GO and the solution they ended up using was just a 1.6 style gradient AND THAT'S WHAT FUCKING REDDIT WAS SAYING. If Reddit and the pros are all saying the same thing then chances are you should just do that but they need fucking numbers before they make any changes.

Valve are a shadow of the company they used to be and people need to stop worshipping them because all the artists and level designers that made them legendary have left and they just invent new ways of putting hats into games to make more money.

:(

how 2 games journalism:
Make big boy edgy statements about games to try and act like you actually matter, whilst playing like 1 hour of every new game and then just moving on to the next thing while never mastering the deeper mechanics of any given game and overall having a smaller perspective than any average Joe who plays games for fun, not for their job.

To understand how big a joke games journalism is, just look at gamer gate. A massive shit fight between games journalists who're acting like the industry has this cancer that's going to kill it off, while everyone else just goes about their business because no one else actually gave a shit.

You simply can't treat a game review like a movie or book review. You watch a 2 hour movie and you literally know everything you could possibly need to review it, but for a (multiplayer) game, there's massive sub communities like the jumping/trading/comp/pub communities in TF2 or the speedrunning/challenge running/lore discussing communities of Dark Souls. And games journalists don't know anything about these extra parts of the game or even deep mechanics like all the advanced rocket jumping techniques in TF2 or bhopping in Half Life 1 (people still recommend fucking Black Mesa but you can't bhop in that game but you can in Half Life 1 so its automatically inferior like holy shit why would you opt NOT to be able to bhop). Games journalists probably don't know even know what a bunnyhop is and why it works. But if you ask a veteran sports journalist they'll know every nook and cranny of the game they specialize in because they probably used to play it in a local club or something.

Games journalism is silly holy heck.

"The matchmaking beta is cool and all, but can we disable viewmodels please? They're really distracting"
"OK, we'll now cap the viewmodel FOV to 54"
"What, we wanted to disable them, not make them even worse"
"Oh, sorry about that"
"So can we disable viewmodels now?"
"We'll try to make viewmodels transparent"
"Oh that's neat I guess. But will we be able to disable them outright?"
"OK we couldn't figure out how to make viewmodels transparent even though modders in the community who don't have access to the source code could figure it out so here's min viewmodels"
"What? Those are almost worse than stock because there's still something distracting on the screen, but now it doesn't even point to your crosshair. We just want to have absolutely nothing blocking our screens or moving around when we shoot because it doesn't convey anymore information than what the HUD does. Its unnecessary and distracting"
"OK, we'll fix a few, but not all animations and allow you to use viewmodel_fov 70"
"..."

Valve holy shit stop wasting time on changes that fucking no one cares about. People either don't give a rats arse about viewmodels, or they care a lot and want them off. Fixing animations or adding new positions is a waste of time considering matchmaking STILL puts people in 300 ping servers and doesn't let you pick what map you want to play and there are many blatantly broken unlocks etc etc. Priorities.

Like holy shit TF2 is never going to be a huge esport 9 years after release just let the remaining community enjoy the immense customisation this game used to allow while also enjoying a Smash-like renaissance.

No comp players are going to enjoy playing matchmaking with retard unlocks and restricted configs and forced viewmodels and no class limits and not being able to select a map (like holy shit why the fuck does casual let you select a map and not comp holy shit) when they can just organise a PUG with friends or randoms and play normal comp TF2 in a way that the community found was optimal AFTER NINE FUCKING YEARS OF PLAYTESTING.

pls stop making this game so hard to like I just want that damn major holy shit
/rant

RIP best jerseys. Hope the team can find another sponsor.

Payload would be fine in MM if you could fucking choose what maps you want to play.

TF2 was my first PC game. Before TF2 I only played console games and one of my friends at school told me about TF2 and it sounded cool so I watched some videos of it and decided to save up for a laptop to play it. I was like 14 at the time. When I played the game I noticed that my game look different because my arms were closer to my screen and my HUD looked different. I Googled why this might be and like 6 months later I had a custom HUD, weapon reskins, class configs with different key bindings for each and I used console commands to make my game look better than what was possible using the video options menu because the game actually ran well then and I didn't care about FPS. Sorry for the retardedly anecdotal evidence but y'know.

My point is, I had no issue figuring out TF2 customisation when it was my first PC game and I did it with console commands. I didn't know what a dev console was before TF2 and I got along fine. Valve should just make it easier by making settings like phong masks be present in the menus instead of have to use the dev console. Considering how much kids use computer these days they should be able to find their way around a file system like holy shit they might be retard memers but I think they can handle their favourite streamer/YouTuber having long arms.

Bringing this post back on topic: Why am I being matched to Tokyo servers with 250 ping when I not even part of a queue. The excuse of "its the first week of the update chill" makes no sense because they beta tested and STRESS TESTED the update for months. How the fuck did zoom sensitivity ratio not get whitelisted? There was so much documentation about what settings should undeniably be whitelisted in the final build (although it sucks, we understand that Valve wants viewmodels on to show off skins etc) so why did it take like 5 days for that to be fixed. Valve say TF2 majors might be a thing if matchmaking is well received and they're making so fucking difficult to receive well. Pretty much every random pubber I've found in matchmaking so far either has no fucking clue what's going on, or is complaining why their weapon models are so close or why they can't turn phong masks off like Star does and all their characters are covered in oil.

If any Valve dev sees this, I know /r/tf2 might convince you otherwise but most kids are pretty smart and can handle autoexecs or graphics customisation. Removing the need for a dev console and putting more cvars into the advanced options menu would be a great step. Also pls no tokyo servers I want to play projectile classes.

Holy fuck your first weekday back from SGDQ and you updated the HUD you're the fucking man.

Blood isn't possible because its a texture and textures can't be removed on sv_pure 1/2 servers as far as anyone knows.
Ragdolls probably wouldn't work because the model they use is the same as the player model I think, so replacing the model with air would mean you wouldn't be able to see players and that's an issue. Gibs should work fine though.

Does this enable all blacklisted cvars like viewmodels or is it just graphics related ones?
E: k I tested it and it disabled phong masks and that was about it. Detail textures like grass were still present. Viewmodels still on with 54 FOV. Ragdolls and gibs on etc. RIP the dream.

This whole casual matchmaking thing is retarded and I don't know how Valve interpreted the general opinion of the wider PC gaming community on server browsers, being "Games that release without server browsers in 2016 are the antichrist and shall be executed as such" (see: Doom 2016 multiplayer, Star Wars Battlefront 2015), as "Retroactively remove server browsers from games with successful server browsers". Like what how did you even think this was a good idea. Also having to queue up to play a pub and having to wait after playing one game is stupid. I'll dearly miss jumping into a vanilla Valve pub on process or something and just DMing for 45 minutes.

Matchmaking is pretty dumb with all the restrictions. They didn't optimize the game enough to play at competitive framerates with all the locked cvars and didn't balance most of the problem weapons (Danger Shield etc). Would've been nice to see the changes of product implemented into regular viaduct because in my experience from the beta, KOTH was pretty fun. But yeah, clamping down on customisation seems pretty dumb considering the average pubber who's been playing for a year probably knows about custom HUDs and even a pony server regular knows about reskins and stuff. Valve don't seem to trust their audience in the slightest but even pubbers seem to understand the basics of mods. Why not just add all the common cvars to the advanced options menu? Pubbers get new commands to optimise performance without configs, comp players get to play the game with max viability and framerate.

TL;DR: Casual matchmaking is counter-intuitive and awful in Oceania where there are like 5 decent community servers and the rest have ads and stupid plugins. Matchmaking has a way to go but with a change of mindset from Valve it could be really cool. They should look at competitive Quake and other arena shooters too see how they should lock the game down, rather than CS:GO.

Honestly pretty salty I can't just hop into my favourite map on a Valve pub and just click on dudes with some music without playing the objective but I seem to be in the minority here. Having to queue up to play fucking casual is the biggest problem with Overwatch and CS:GO and the fact that they downgraded TF2 to do the same is pretty boneheaded. Kinda feels like they axed the style of pubs they had after building it up for 9 years.

@#20 there have been murmurs of them locking viewmodels on to show weapon skins and to not confuse new players/people who haven't played TF2 because they won't understand why popular streamers don't have guns on their screen.

On the subject of no-whitelist, it doesn't really seem like a good idea because even if a weapon isn't overpowered in the slightest, it may make the game less fun to play (see: Booties) and considering the size of comp TF2, fun is all the majority of comp players play for.

Also, I'm not sure if I'm the only one but the idea of us changing our rulesets to suit Valve seems rather insulting considering we've been playing the game competitively for 9 years, begging Valve for comp support for a large portion of that and they've only just started listening. Valve may know how the game works under the hood, and what makes them more money, but we know how the game plays and what is more fun. They should be asking us how rulesets should work (r_drawviewmodel unlocked pls tyty)

You know an update is going to be intense when they have to ship a smaller update before it just to make sure the game can handle it.
Also interesting that according to the HUD files they're going with BO3 for MM. In the beta this felt really short but maybe with ranks actually doing something rounds will have a bit of back and forth. iunno man I'm pretty hyped unless they ruin customisation.

http://www.teamfortress.tv/33566/b4nnys-valve-visit-5-9-16/
Was somewhere in this thread.