ravioli high dif

yes

poppin bottles in the ice..

I think people severely underestimate how much it actually costs to travel with 6 people across an ocean for a LAN. Aside from i46 & that insane level of fundraising I would guess every team that's ever gone to a LAN in another region has probably been pretty notably in the red. Most of the people that play this game at a top level are college students or just starting out in their career so the expenses are a pretty big deal. I'm sure every top team would love to just willy-nilly travel to any notable LAN that pops up but the reality of tf2 is that they can't.

honestly personally ok with elo being round based as long as like 80%+ of point distribution is ONLY W/L

there is 100% a skeez log from a g6 invite scrim where he dropped 8 times

also the community just spews slurs

imo

gamemodes are bad, this was a huge issue for diabotical and you could see it in the gamemodes new people played/liked. Most of the positive feedback came from the 1v1/2v2 gamemode and wipeout, or at least that's what you would see when you opened any random players stream. Serious 1v1 gamemodes are not fun in afps, they work in fighting games because you will sometimes be sitting next to your friend playing with them, not true in quake. All of the traditional team games modes require timing, which is not very fun to learn especially 25/35s timers can be a pain, and the 30/30 that exists in qc is often times fairly painful in certain cases because it means you can run the items infinitely without a player ever having to delay an item.

When I started playing qc I was OK at timing items just by vibes from cpma, which is a thing players will learn, but it's not a fun journey to learn, imagine playing 6s but you always have uber disad and you don't know how to stop that from happening. Luckily, timing in sac is largely irrelevant, and the game mode itself is so foreign to the ones commonly played previously tdm/ctf/ca that it was a pretty decent gateway drug. A surprising amount of na players in qc (not that it's a large community) can trace their origin back to sac.

Wipe-out in diabotical was a good experience and I think it hooked a lot of new players for awhile until they realized how much of a mountain there is to climb to even play the game in the other two game modes they had in rotation. There was some other weird stuff going on with menus and matchmaking that diabotical had some issues with too. However, it felt to me diabotical was this game for practicing aim for most people because there just wasn't this long term goal to invest into or this addicting thing to play, for most people simply practicing aim will get boring at some point.

basically what nintails says here, but I would extend the logic to casual players as well

there's also not enough focus on casual experience, for most first time players loading into a server with 8 players or less is going to be a test unless you get lucky and everyone else is new to the game. TF2 solves this issue by having the default pub game mode having 24. Even in ql as it is now, the pubs that are played are a 24 Player FFA server and a 10 v 10 CA server. There are a couple of other thing going on every night but those are usually organized and played by players with a higher ELO (CA on those servers for instance has an ELO gate because having a low level player in them would be awful for everyone). edit: also being defenseless on spawn is one of the dumbest things quake players hold onto for some unknown reason, one of the best things qc ever did was give you the option to spawn with a shotgun or nailgun, and all of the starting weapons are a threat along with your stack.

Sidebar: QC has a terrible ass engine, and playing above 60 ping in QL is awful because the engine is also kinda crap (I don't think it's possible to run the game over 250 fps, and the game starts getting real buggy with physics and sound when you do play it at 250). From what I can tell DBT is fairly dead, despite it having a pretty solid netcode, but it might just be because I haven't interacted with it. The game itself just seemed to being trying to be Q3 but again which I don't really think is as appealing to large player bases as Q3 players think

it's largely just game modes bad, DBT seemed to really treat the design of gamemodes as something disparate from the basic core of gameplay that it needed to nail rock solid and like really fell flat cause of it, and I think DBT had decent momentum at one point to hold a steady player base if it had really been the experience people wanted. QC you can straight up just blame on the engine being awful imo, playing that game a lot of the time feels like you are playing a sim that is playing a game. There hasn't really been anything else that has scratched those two in terms of potential for a player base.

echoing this part a bit, most of the viable pressure comes from one doorway at the moment (the one from alley), the upper entrance into last through lobby is way to risky to pressure through for basically any class except a spamming roamer and probably needs some sort of change to address. also, still think the spawn doors need to be moved further back a little, it's very easy to defend against an uber push because the spawn is so strong still.

if you have spotify open make sure that it's minimized in the background, for whatever reason when it updates what your friends are listening to it causes major stuttering only in tf2 for me

yes please

if we could get a couple new koth maps and maybe badlands2 or some shit (subbase looks cool to me honestly) and then shoot metalworks and snakewater into space that would be neat

i would welcome playing badlands if it got a major overhaul fixing it's glaring issues (last, lobby) otherwise no thanks

give spy noclip

Maybe it's just a 4head take or whatever but just schedule more time for games? Are there really that many games going super late? I haven't gotten to watch yet but the games were really fun to play, and I actually personally despise the 30 minute time limit format.