small thing, but the old up arrow / down arrow were far superior to the new + / -

sheep was too strong, valve had to buff everyone else

I never argued that competitive tf2 needs to be made purer; I argued it is unlikely to benefit from being diluted.

Part 2: Competitive E-Sports are Video Games First, Sports Second

The problem with looking at popular e-sports for advice on the question of "How to make TF2 bigger" is that when we look at CS:GO and LoL, we are not actually looking at the e-sports equivalents of basketball or American Football, we are looking at the e-sports equivalents of the NBA and the NFL. LoL and CS:GO are businesses run by Riot and Valve, which are themselves businesses. They are not e-sports, they are video games. TF2 is the same. They all exist to make money. Basketball does not exist to make money. Soccer does not exist to make money. The NBA and the Premiership do, to an extent, but they also have a distinctly public character or charter which is totally absent from e-sports.

LoL makes money by selling champions. CS:GO makes money by selling skins and weapons, but it is not free-to-play. The competitive versions of those games are designed to reinforce features that make money. They are not necessarily designed to be the best competition possible.

LoL is by far the worst offender. The level of competition is almost criminally sabotaged by LoL's aggressive patching and the ludicrously large champion pool. Valve's monetization of CS:GO is saintly compared to Riot's of LoL, or even compared to Valv'es own structure in TF2. In CS:GO, you are never at any competitive disadvantage by never spending money on weapons. This is because CS:GO is not free-to-play. That's the trade-off, right there.

TF2 is free-to-play. In at least pub servers, Valve highlights all the crazy weapons Valve sells or drops. Random drops give you random weapons, half of which are strictly worse than stock, although new players won't generally be able to discern this. New players don't generally know what pros and cons are significant. They unlikely to know what is actually an upgrade. The Machina looks cool, and it sounds cool, but it takes a day for a new pub player to realize that the laser beam shining from his sniping spot is getting him killed.

If he didn't get the weapon for free, he can trade. Valve prides itself on the secondary economy, and talks about how much value they create for their users. What they never talk about is whether the time that new player spends trying to hand off his $4 sniper rifle in exchange for some alternate scattergun is time not spent actually playing the game(!) Valve's Game is one that has a flourishing virtual economy at the direct expense of actual gameplay. If you count time in TF2 spent buying hats time spent playing TF2, you have a weird definition of playing but probably a very accurate definition of TF2.

If that new player wants to get his better weapons through random drops and without going to the store, then he has to sink a lot of time into the game all the while playing, by that person's own definition, a competitive disadvantage. During those many hours, he is building an awareness of all the other cosmetic shit Valve has thrown into TF2. Valve's support of competitive DoTA or CS:GO comes from the fact that the competitive versions of the game make them money. Competitive TF2 does not. It's that simple.

Others have made this same argument and come to the conclusion that competitive TF2 needs to embrace Valve's game. The problem is that by the argument's admitted logic, you would be making changes to competitive TF2 for reasons other than improving competitive TF2. You are looking to increase the player base. Bigger might sometimes be better, but bigger is definitely never better when enlargening it comes from knowingly making it worse. Worse != Better

It is fundamentally wrong, perhaps even immoral, to make changes to a game or sport with the aim of increasing popularity or profit. The sport exists to be the best version of the sport. That's the fundamental difference between e-sports and real sports, although some real sports are equal violators of this principle. Notably, the NFL changed it's version of football to cater to fantasy football, which has become its most important audience. This has led to rule changes that have inflated offensive statistics and diluted the game.

Yes, of course these changes are value judgments. It's all aesthetics at some level. You can argue that the NFL is better and more entertaining today than it was ten years ago. The NBA has gone the opposite direction, being true to its sport, relaxing defensive restrictions which led to the stale iso-ball of the Jordan era. The league is stronger and better to watch and follow than ever. Franchise prices and TV money has soared accordingly.

So, both approaches can increase popularity. You can increase popularity by improving the game (NBA) or you can increase popularity by making changes that increase popularity (NFL).

The reason competitive TF2 is hugely underplayed relative to its quality as an e-sport is that it exists within one of the most ridiculously bloated, impure free-to-play video games currently existing. Valve's Game is more of virtual shopping mall than an actual game. And then within this virtual shopping mall, there's this relatively minimal, pure FPS game, existing in direct contradiction to everything around it.

Truly, those who advocate moving towards Valve's Game are asking the question, "How can we make competitive TF2 more accessible and attractive to casual TF2 players?" But they fail to take the next step in that line of questioning. Why would someone who wants to play a competitive video game look to TF2 in the first place?

Competitive TF2 is not drawing from other TF2 players. It is drawing from other potential competitive FPS players. These people have a range of choices. Someone who wants to play a competitive FPS wants to play a pure form of FPS. How many people would look at TF2 to provide that? Basic design aesthetics make CS:GO look like the serious, pure game, and TF2 the diverting, casual frolic. And for 99% of TF2 and CS:GO, this holds true. For competitive 6s, however, TF2 is actually purer than CS:GO. It's just that relatively few people looking for something serious wade through the thousand hours of non-competitive TF2 to get there. The problem for competitive TF2 isn't casual player's lack of interest or pub server's, it's other competitive FPS games. If competitive TF2 did the things Valve would need it to do to get Valve's support, you'd lose that competition anyway. People who play competitive CS:GO don't want to play Valve's Game. So, you really can't win. We need to accept that and accept that making competitive 6s as good as possible is way more important than chasing popularity.

At the end of the day, there is no "solution" to make competitive TF2 big. It's very existence as a very pure game within the realm of TF2 is almost a paradox. To dilute the quality of the game to chase popularity is ethically wrong and a disservice to the competitive players who are already playing the game.

Anyway, Thanks a lot for reading, those who did.

The weapons whitelist has been a source of considerable discussion in recent months. Arguments have been made for both sides, Valve's Game has been played and casted and streamed. This is my longish addition to the heap. I come at this topic from a mostly abstract perspective, and have a few points to add. Overall, the current way whitelists and weapons are handled in competitive TF2 is strongly positive, and should not be changed.

Of course, you can tl;dr this wall of text all you want, but I won't be compromising my argument for brevity, I'm afraid. So, anyway, here is a frightfully, perhaps unforgivably long defense of the status quo.

Word count: 2437, Reading time: 12 minutes

Part 1: What we talk about when we talk about purity

Calling a game pure is a compliment usually reserved from real-life sports such as football (soccer), tennis, boxing, or whatever you happen to prefer. What we mean by purity is simply the direct competition between individuals. The more directly two people or two teams are competing against each other, the purer the game or sport.

Purity usually comes hand in hand with minimalism. Soccer is much purer than if every player had to wear various handicaps or was given various advantages. Imagine if some players had to carry ankleweights, some had to wear horse blinders, some were given hockey sticks they could hit the ball with, and some were given clown shoes. The object of the sport, to score goals, would remain the same, but it would be complicated by the intricacies of a rich meta of which players carried what weapons or handicaps and how would the manager counter that. If that sounds ridiculous, then consider how ridiculous people sound when they talk about e-sports.

We see this exact sort of approach in the popular MOBAs. League of Legends has more than a hundred champions, each with different abilities, strengths and weaknesses. There are reasons for the existence of all these champions, which I will address in Part 2, but those reasons are not to benefit competitive gameplay. Just as in the absurd soccer hypothetical, direct competition between human beings is reduced by all this other stuff, by these impurities.

CS:GO is impure in a different way. CS:GO has a variety of weapons and grenades, but FPS's probably need a variety. Rather, CS is impure because of its economy. The economy reduces direct competition between players because in a majority of rounds teams do not have equal or equivalent equipment. This means not only are the players competing against each other, the guns and grenades are competing against each other. Just like the champions, or the random crap in the soccer hypothetical, the presence of additional factors is cluttering and crowding out direct competition. This is what we walk about when we talk about impurities.

TF2, however, with its whitelist, has neither a wide range of weapons or champions (classes), nor an economy. The existence of classes should not be confused for an impurity. First of all, teams run identical class structures the vast majority of the time. Secondly, classes should be thought of as simply packaging the various differences a CS player would get from his armor, his weapon, and his weapon's effect on his mobility. TF2 is an arena game, so these differences are more extreme in an absolute sense than in CS:GO, but relative to the way the TF2 universe works, the difference between the Soldier and the Scout is comparable to the difference between having armor and not, or running around with an AWP or a pistol.

The vital difference is that in TF2, you don't buy Soldiers and Scouts, or Medics and Demomen, and you can't have three scouts or two medics because you have more money. Clockwork and b4nny never have to run out to mid with pistols against their opponent's scatterguns because their team is eco-ing a round. They are always competing directly against their opponents. That is the purity of competitive TF2. Everything is always the same. That allows the actual players to create all of the differences.

Most rounds of CS:GO feature one team having superior equipment than their opponent and some aspect of worrying about preserving equipment. TF2 players never have to back away from a fight to save a sticky launcher. If you don't understand this argument about purity and directness, consider that most CS:GO matches feature multiple rounds where a player chooses not to fight his opponent in order to save his own gun. In these common situations, the game encourages non-competitiveness. Even the best player in the world would be sometimes recommended not to try his hardest to win the round, because of the way the economy works in the game.

LoL is truly ridiculous with the limits it pushes impurities. At least in CS:GO, teams switch sides at the half. In LoL, whatever champion differences exist last through the entire match. Analysts frequently say a given match was won in the pick/ban phase. Consider how ridiculous that is! LoL is a game where it's valid to argue the match was decided before it was played. That's the complete opposite of direct competition. The competition between players was literally prevented by the advantage one team had from their champion selections.

The problem with removing the TF2 whitelist, as some have argued doing, is that it reduces the purity of the game. Weapons differences might add strategy, but in doing so they reduce the direct competition between players. In soccer, the "meta" consists of using 3 center backs or 4, or how you arrange your midfield or strikers, where you play your players. It is not about whether your winger is wearing the clown shoes or the ankleweights. TF2 exists in a similar strategic space. The strategy is where you set up on the map, how you push, where in the team your personnel plays. It's not about having the best weapon.

A version of competitive TF2 where strategy is about gaining advantage with your weapons is a version of competitive TF2 where teams are actively seeking to minimize direct competition between players. In some respect, that's all that strategy is: gaining advantages beyond of skill level. That means the more strategy in a sport, the less direct competition that sport has. In a way, strategy is an impurity. It's all about efficiently and elegantly creating strategic options without adding bullshit like a hundred champions or a hundred weapons.

Compare Tennis and American Football. Tennis of course still has a great deal of strategy, and any fan can recall the way Nadal deliberately attacks Federer's backhand. Boxing is similar. Boxing and Tennis have a ton of strategy. But the NFL, by comparison, has a ton of tons. 90% of the NFL's millions of spectators can understand no more than 10% of the strategic levels the game is operating on, all the myriad the schemes and playcalls. LoL is similar.

Of course, the NFL and LoL are wildly popular. But so are the World Cup and Wimbledon. It is safe to say that competitive TF2 is not wildly popular. That doesn't mean it needs to be changed.

part 2 below

agreed. During Dreamhack, SirScoots was saying this about CS:GO competitive scene trying to get the CZ nerfed. Valve was like, "well, prove it."

re: arx's argument

the problem is that many of the features that are banned out in competitive TF2 or those allowed in those bigger games have nothing to do with the games as e-sports and everything to do with the games as Free-To-Play money making machines. The actual competitions in CS:GO, DoTA and LoL would all benefit from simplified and pared down game, similar to how competitive TF2 handles things. The popularity of those games has nothing to do with the actual quality of the e-sport.

Competitive TF2 benefits tremendously as a product in its relative simplicity compared to even CS:GO, and certainly LoL and DoTA. The reason competitive TF2 isn't larger has more to do with the lack of people playing TF2 with an eye towards e-sports than with the failure of competitive scene to embrace the casual style rules of the game. If Valve promoted competitive TF2 the way it promoted DoTA and CS:GO, you'd have all the size and prestige you want.

The added rules in 6s are among the greatest strengths of this comp scene, and looking at CS:GO, with its anti-competitive economy, or any of the MOBAs, with their vast complexity, as a model, simply because they are bigger, is misguided.

tl;dr bigger ain't better, popularity != quality

Clockwork seemed to get used to sitting right by the door today. There was a clip of him playing while people were filing in and out. Can't be ideal.

I think ultimately iM didn't lose because of any lack of ability, but rather because they didn't have enough experience winning in high-pressure situations. The core of mixup (and epsi and 4g) have played lots of high-stakes games. Harbleu's decision not to pop and his double-kill had little to do with his absolute skill level and everything to do with his ability to perform under pressure. In comparison, Sheep and Yuki had the first two deaths in that Golden Cap mid-fight. It's not that iM choked (see Granary, iM vs. TCM @ i49), it's just that clutching in a situation like that is easier when you've done it before (see Golden Cap on Badlands, mix^ vs iT @ ESEA lan).

The irony, of course, is that the one experience iM does have in a situation similar to this had an identical result; last year, TCM won a golden cap to drop iM into fourth place at i49.

It's not iM's fault, though. It's perhaps their fatal handicap that Australia can't support at least one other team of similar quality. In some sense, iM's absurd skill level means that while they are right there with the top teams, it's impossible for them to be psychologically prepared for an event like this. Traveling around the world and spending so much time bootcamping, renting a house- these only added to the pressure iM felt to perform. There's no way to simulate these sort of situations. By comparison, even Mixup's least experienced player, Squid, has been to three ESEA lans and played in two LAN grand finals. Snowblind and Termo have zero comparable experience. The rest of iM have just i49.

At this level, everyone is skilled. Mixup won the match in the closest fashion possible, but it's possible the factors that led to that victory were beyond either team's direct control.

"race relations"

smh

read this: http://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE

velocity is not x + y + z, where x,y,z are speeds in each dimension.

it's a vector, which means it has a magnitude and a direction.

it sounds like you want the magnitude of velocity, which would be (x^2 + y^2 + z^2)^0.5

if you just want horizontal component, then (x^2 + y^2)^0.5