Yeah seems like some of the stuff this guy has done is pretty petty but u have to admit he knows his audience.

Yeah in addition to random spin, pipes also have a random velocity added (including left/right and up/down velocity), I think it's this that causes the spread right?

He is preparing for the ritual

With the ability for one team to be able to get out really quickly, small advantages apply more pressure but only for a small time because of a teams ability to melt away and blob. I think this generally leads to less time spent actually fighting, longer stalemates and more time spent on last which imo are the least interesting parts of the game. The aggression that you gain from the medic being able to move faster with his team I don't think enables you to do more with aggression unless you have significant player or uber ad most of the time. In an even fight I think the faster the combo moves it's going to make the aggressors lose more of the time unless the player they're aggressing on has made a big mistake with their positioning.

Oh absolutely this is not the optimal way to play but it's heavily incentivized because it's at least safe. This is true of a lot of things that have made the game significantly worse, they allow people to play in a non optimal way which is safe enough that they probably aren't going to lose immediately but also leads to them playing on their last for most of the game (see, vaccinator, overcommitting to last holds with multiple offclasses etc, maybe ESEA S14 quickfix too).

I don't think either of these things will be the case if you do revert the speed change and if it really does change the meta so that this is always the case then I really think it shouldn't be implemented.

I think your argument centering around medic attach speed making the game more aggressive doesn't quite take into account a few things. The way attach speed currently works incentivizes something I call "half committing" where meds and scouts tend to play a lot safer in fights than they would pre attach speed which often ends up hurting coordinated aggression (this is particularly noticable on mids like process). This is because they know that with this positioning they have a guarantee of getting out and preserving uber if the fight goes poorly. I think this is more what fucks soldier in the current meta than "medics heal scouts more", it's just that it provides more of an incentive for their team to bait them and changes their class role to be more throwaway.

If you watch older TF2, you'll notice meds will bail on mid far earlier than they would now if they smell things going badly. You need to do this to have a guarantee of getting out when you don't have attach speed. You might think that this would make the game far more passive, but the thing is that having to bail this early means that you're almost certainly baiting your team for a loss, so it has much larger consequences. Also, you'd see meds and scouts commit a lot more in fights because there's no guarantee they're getting out otherwise, so it's optimal to get your team as healthy as possible. Basically, if you can't guarantee your medic living it's less optimal to play around doing so.

I'd also just like to point out that I've not been happy playing the meta for almost exactly 5 years and that the 2015 meta was probably when TF2 felt the most fun both to watch and play. It's not just playing soldier either, I think scout and medic became far less fun after the change compared to soldier which only became moderately less fun. I will say that we're definitely in a better place than we were a couple of years after the change, but I still think what we're playing currently needs shaking up badly.

I really like the idea of using a season as a testing ground of some of these things. It would be good to be able to test some of these in isolation though as I think it might be hard to separate the effects of each change. Don't just judge this on whether all of these plugins together make the game better or worse.

Sorry to hear about your uncles UGC steel team bro, that shit sucks.

He gets six

So ur an unlocks fascist, noted.

Agree mostly with your category list and which categories should/shouldn't be banned here but I think the reason being cited for the ban here is that the Iron Bomber is a straight upgrade because of a bug which I think you could argue is a more legitimate reason for banning it.

I'm still not sure it should be banned because imo even though it's a bug, I'm not sure banning the Iron Bomber would improve the game in any significant way, but I wouldn't care hugely if it was.

I don't know if I completely agree with this. Obviously banners work best if you play around a stalemate but they don't make creating the stalemate any easier which I think is the main problem with other unlocks that deserve a ban. They also provide a resolution to their own stalemates and some of the best counterplay to them is to not let the game get slow enough that they can build it (by doing stuff like aggressing the flank with ur combo, sending players behind etc). In that way they feel more equivalent to stuff like offclassing to sniper and spy where you're going to do it when there's already a stalemate rather than planning for one with it. It does take longer to build than a pick class does to get a pick so there's something in that though.

I'm not sure that enabling cheese plays (where you're saccing for the point or deleting stickies to get through a choke) is inherently bad, it's just different. I do think that deleting stickies as they're coming out of a demo's gun so you can do damage to him and deny him from doing any is a pretty stupid mechanic though.

I think my general point is I kind of worry that we have a very fixed idea of exactly what the game should be. At this point everyone has figured out how that version of tf2 should be played and it's purely about execution which imo makes the game far less interesting than it has been in the past (along with certain balance changes that threw off the initial flow the game was designed around in the first place). It really hits home watching the streams of the old ESEA finals where they're still working out how to do all this stuff. I don't think unlocks in general really affect much at all, but I do think that wanting to ban stuff when you won't see it used in 95% of games and it's effect on gameplay is minimal or for one specific play is very much a symptom of that.

Also, I realize most people disagree with me on this, but I don't really understand why you need to ban the 80% of weapons that nobody ever runs because they're terrible. I feel like tf2 is the only game where people want to ban things for being too underpowered. Beyond that, I think there's a few weapons that actually have good use cases that most people don't include on their lists (soldier backpacks, and either quickies or scottish resistance for getting stickies off a point).

As for things that should be banned are some weapons that are arguable because they throw off class balance a bit like the winger and then the real problem weapons are things like the vaccinator, quick fix, wrangler, rescue ranger, natascha which all have the common problem that they make stalemates and holding last really easy, or things that just insta win fights for no cost like mad milk.

If "straight upgrade to stock" is at all a valid reason to ban a weapon then we shouldn't allow gunboats, escape plan or crossbow. "Does it change class balance in a way that makes the game significantly worse" is probably a better motive to go with.

Watch out ETF2L, if u keep banning sniper mains u might inadvertently create the perfect league.

I used to get this crash on my old laptop years ago in really bizarre circumstances which was when players in the server had certain hats equipped, and the error message indicates it's probably an issue with a dodgy model trying to be rendered. If it's every time a demo is loaded it might be some model that always gets loaded every time a demo starts, but not when you're in game? Maybe something that's blocked by sv_pure? I'd try launching with no custom folder and validating game files. Otherwise someone might know what model is causing it from context?