FACEIT Solo Queue Cup (Weekly Cup #4)
Thursday January 19, 2017
Approximate schedule: 6pm EST - 9pm EST
Check-in begins at 5pm EST
Registration: https://www.faceit.com/en/tf2/tournament/2bc38c57-4fc1-41be-b947-6b0c018dde00

Rules:
6v6 With Standard ESEA Class Limits and Whitelist
16 Teams, Single Elimination, BO1
Chicago Servers
120 Second Map Pick/Ban Voting Period
Map Pool: cp_badlands, cp_sunshine, cp_snakewater_final1, cp_gullywash_final1, cp_metalworks, cp_granary, cp_process_final

Prizes:
FACEIT Points Prize Distribution
1st - 4000 FACEIT Points
2nd - 2000 FACEIT Points
3rd/4th - 1000 FACEIT Points
5th-8th - 500 FACEIT Points

FACEIT Shop: https://www.faceit.com/en/shop
FACEIT Shop TF2 Items: https://www.faceit.com/en/shop/tf-2

Once again, I’m framing this as a “solo queue” tournament where people are encouraged to solo queue into the cup and get paired with other solo queuers. The way it works is that check-in opens at 5pm EST for one hour, and during that time you simply join the tournament "As Solo" and it will pair you with 5 others to round out your team. You will be on the same team for the entire tournament. I, and hopefully all who queue, will be adding up with the intention of just having fun and bringing positive attitudes, so hopefully you all will do the same. If you are looking to try out FACEIT specifically or are just looking for some more competitive TF2 to play, this is definitely the cup for you. People of all regions are more than welcome to participate as well. If circumstances permit (my solo queue team gets eliminated), I will be casting some of the remaining cup matches on my stream. Should be fun!

Like last time, the chaos of scheduling around the LAN has prompted me to avoid a team centric tournament, which is why this one is going to be a little different. Of course, if you do have a team/party that would like to play you are more than welcome to. Keep in mind that only if your team makes the grand finals will you have to stick around the whole time, so for most people the time commitment here will only be about 1 hour or less. As always the goal is to get 16 teams worth of players, and your participation goes a long way towards building a bigger and better relationship between FACEIT and our competitive TF2 scene (we will soon be announcing something cool that's already in the works for any skeptics out there!) If you have any questions feel free to ask here or hit me up on Twitch. I hope to see you there.

Any experience from S14 QuickFix is pretty much invalidated due to the two recent (as in post-s14) nerfs, which are:

• All mediguns now allow medics to move as fast as scouts
  
• The build rate of the charge was reduced from +25% to +10%.

The weapon has been changed so it should be re-evaluated with testing.

There is a lot going for the Quick-Fix, which makes it a complicated weapon to pinpoint what specific changes would balance it, but in my experience, the issue with the Quick-Fix was that you would have perpetual uber advantages (which forced both teams to run it so that they wouldn't get steam rolled at middles). By reducing the build rate, that problem may or may not have been eliminated, but the point is that we can't know unless we actually test it. Most of us know from experience that closing out a 10% advantage is extremely hard to do, so it might be a non-factor like most of the other items unbanned at this point. The main problems were not that you could jump your medic around or that it healed faster, which people seem to be focusing on. My team won the S14 LAN so I promise you I understand how the Quick-Fix works and what the actual problems and overpowered strengths of it were. Don't forget there are plenty of downsides to running the Quick-Fix as well which, of course, have been completely ignored in this thread and people are acting like it's the greatest weapon with nothing but upsides. Let me remind you: your buffs are 50% smaller, leaving everyone unhealthier, especially your flank classes, which can be easily abused. You are not invulnerable while your charge is active, leaving you susceptible to all kinds of burst damage like coordinated spam, sticky traps, heavies, snipers, sentries, etc. Your medic may often get inadvertently blast jumped out of position making it much trickier to heal soldiers and demos who tend to jump around a lot. With the upsides being reduced and those downsides still being as prevalent as ever, people may decide that it's not worth running at all, which I find most likely.

The ideal situation is that the standard decision of running default Medigun would remain just as viable after these changes and you wouldn't be forced to run Quick-Fix because the other team is running it. If that is achieved, the situation where both teams run Quick-Fix becomes an extremely unlikely one, and one that the teams that force that upon themselves should be forced to deal with. Only by playtesting can we determine if that is actually what will happen. It might not. But lets find out. If it's a problem, everyone agreed we can take the same approach as we did with the Atomizer and BASE Jumper and reban them.

EVL
Jasmine Tea
Se7en
Meat Market
20b

I don't feel like torturing myself to go back and read/quote all of your posts on TFTV, reddit and on your Youtube channel but literally every time I see you speak about TF2 in general or competitive TF2 lately, you just echo the same entitled mentality and even take it to further extremes. While I don't disagree that TF2 is a great game and its competitive scene has huge potential that I hope becomes realized, I'm trying to be more realistic about taking provably more effective baby steps towards that instead of making these absurd unrealistic demands that accomplish nothing. Hopefully it eases your concerns a little to at least know that I'm rooting for you over Muselk for the esteemed position of poster boy of the TF2 YouTuber complainer movement.

And because of that testing we have helped narrow the banlist to only ~20 banned weapons. Lets keep going ^_^

I have never said anything about being entitled to being paid to play TF2. In fact that's what everyone else is seemingly demanding. I'd have as much to gain if not more than everyone else if I quit for OW too. For entitled please read below:

I don't think anyone is opposed to a higher minimum hour limit. A 300-500 hour limit would probably remove most of those instances of getting brand new players causing team imbalance. Consider that the higher the minimum hour limit the better the games will probably be for better players, but there has to be a point where a certain level of amateurism is accepted. You have 4600 hours. It's perfectly possibly that if I played with you you could be "ruining" my games as a 15000 hour player. Would it be fair for me to advocate for banning you and implementing a 14000 hour minimum? No, it wouldn't. The tricky part is finding that spot where every player has at least a solid understanding of TF2 in general plus a basic understanding of competitive TF2. Because there is no guarantee that even someone who has 10000 hours in the game has any competence in competitive TF2 is why I tend to advocate that people play FACEIT only if they have that basic competitive familiarity, a positive attitude/willingness to learn, and the ability to communicate. You can usually still have a good game if people meet those criteria regardless of their actual skill.

Most people posting here are missing the entire point. Allowing the Crit-a-Cola or Gloves of Running Urgently in their current states could definitely forfeit your fun. Allowing a few innocuous non game changing unlocks doesn't forfeit your fun. The global whitelist project was always moving towards doing only more of the latter. No one except maybe Slin (who doesn't actually care what happens, only that people agree) is willing to completely remove whitelists at this time.

Getting rid of the toxic people who impede progress and replacing them with people who genuinely care and still have a passion for the game would absolutely kickstart progressing competitive TF2.

I've already outlined how these changes do not reduce the fun of the game but instead they can expand it, and I've explicitly described the goal plus provided precedence/evidence that its an attainable one. From the years of playing with you, you've never had a very constructive or progressive mindset; your solution to most things has always been "remove this from the game" even years before anyone expected Valve to be listening. If others have a similarly toxic mentality and are solely motivated by money they should probably just follow your lead and quit now tbh.

Literally every mechanic about those 3 items listed has an even more extreme parallel in OW lol. At least we know the true solution: if we pay everyone to live in the shadow of a big streamer they'll be willing to forfeit their fun! :o

You're being dramatic as always. Are items like the Rescue Ranger, Jarate or Cow Mangler really "forfeiting your fun?" They've hardly changed the overall flow of the game and only expanded the viability of different playstyles. Increasing your tolerance to change slightly is not remotely the same as martyrdom.

And because of feedback from the competitive scene they didn't. Now people are arguing for circumstances where changes like that could more easily happen.

This conversation is about weapon balance, not matchmaking or tournaments. It's fair for now to be under the assumption that we will continue to play on 3rd party platforms. But even then it's still a worthwhile pursuit because it introduces more freedom for play style variations, which I find valuable. The next major competitive update will certainly have weapon rebalances, just as the last one did. I'm saying we should be as involved in that process as we can be by generating valuable experience-based feedback from use in a serious competitive setting. The results of that process have already been seen in the last update through changes to the Quick-Fix, Cozy Camper, Wee Booties, Iron Bomber, etc, all of which were changed to more happily sit within our 6v6 meta. Absolutely none of those could have been properly changed unless those items were thoroughly tested (they were all legal in seasons of ESEA). By forfeiting your participation in the process you should also forfeit your complaints, because you're engineering a system that leaves Valve to solely gather feedback from casual players and reddit tantrums. I'm not okay with that.

Perhaps its a philosophy difference. I find the game more interesting with options that create alternative playstyles or expand the utility of classes to a degree where they offer some strategic variability. There are many items that should certainly remain banned, but there are also many items that can do such a thing without ruining the overall flow of the game. From the current whitelist there are probably only about 6 items that could still be unbanned without ruining the overall flow of the game, and that's all I would advocate for. We aren't ready for a clean slate just yet.

What you say about TF2 now mostly being populated by people that have an undying passion for the game is true, but some, including me, also can't ignore the huge potential for our competitive scene to make progress towards a better one. The fact that alongside all of this Valve have been slowly balancing weapons to fall more in line with competitive principles makes it seem like a fruitful endeavor. We know that they have a major competitive update coming, so why are we still acting like they've given up? If they haven't then I won't either.

You're among them.