Rofl

always had a lot of fun in this game, i recommend checking it out

Partners are okay to have. Good for warm ups, but try to frequent public MGE servers with good players. Duel them, take away some knowledge about their style and yours and you've won even if you got knocked out 20-5. Sparring one person isn't largely beneficial as you just learn their style that works against you.

It's okay, it's a good thing. It's just the only two things I know about Mr. Thrasher.

likes dflame and was in a really early top plays of the week

Was laughing at OP until I realized I made this thread.

Not too late to help sponsor i52. Huh? HUH???

Just make sure your bed is of equal quality for the pussy you need to handle when you get that Porsche. That's all that matters yo.

For the time being. It's what I personally would like to focus on, I'm not really fond of Highlander myself. Though if people want to use the resource of players to test out some new Highlander rules or something, I'm not going to get in the way or anything.

I'm going to let the group stay public for the next few days until, idk say Sunday or a little later if this discussion keeps going. Then I'm going to switch the group to private and begin bleeding out the less-serious members and pick out some other leaders and supporters who are willing to let us use a server and mumble for organizing the pugs down the road. By the way, I'm not sure if people have read on the Steam group, I'm not going to start becoming active with this group until around the weekend of July 5th.

I mostly agree with the things I've excluded form this post, but I want to extrapolate on the general idea of the pick/ban system and it's design.

I think playing around the with the class limits inside the pick/ban system would be interesting. In different contexts of gamemodes, manipulating the other team's lineup will incite a whole new spectrum of new anticipated possibilities that make the game worth watching. These things happen inside of our 6v6 gamemode, but it's almost always predictable and unexciting because. To me at least. Not to say watching clockwork is boring though.

In the pick ban system, I imagine two core things to select from to ban. Classes and Weapons. There's some strategy involved trying to inherently throw the other team off by cutting off one of their dependent classes for the map and gamemode.

This is what I imagine going through the heads of a competent captain in the pick/ban system.
"Restrict us to 1 engineer on ctf_turbine? Ok, you guys don't get homewrecker and we use two of our class bans to completely remove spy from the game. Don't have to worry about backstabs or sappers, but we left our door open for demo ubers. But with our lineup, there's room for pyro and I think that will neutralize it."
That's just a taste, I'm getting more and more interested in it, so I think I'm going to try and attempt to design something this weekend.

Do I think the world should change because I have a different opinion? No, but I think we have the capacity to try and not make all of what we've created pointless because we run out of players who get tingly clicking on things in the same, mostly predictable manner. It'll happen, it always does. TF2 Imo is a big uncracked shell of new amazing things to happen and is the only FPS that fundamentally gets away from it because we have so many classes and so many options to play against each other; it's dumb we limit ourselves in such a way.

I've been dissecting the principles of what we know works in the gamemode of capture point and to be honest, I don't see why it can't work. Lack of resources in the giving-a-shit department is a huge factor, so half-assing it is why we didn't see any empirical information after trying it. Designing the pick/ban system would definitely be hard and would need code to prevent violations. But I can already see how I would design it myself to implement the features. Just the parameters of what to allow, who gets to choose, what's off the table and what isn't will be the most difficult part.

Let's scrape the top of the idea. Some things we know to be true like height advantage triumphs all in most situations, among other things that escape me. So we use classes that can capture such advantages. Soldier, demo, scout; all capable of reaching higher elevations fast. We need heals to live, since living is the primary objective besides capturing points, so we must keep at least 1 medic. You need to be alive to attack and defend. You can't kill yourself in the process. That leads to what we know as a reset/wipe, an the game typically doesn't go anywhere.

Deathmatching has always been an important factor, again because we need to kill things quickly and efficiently to capture points as quickly as possible. The idea is to capture a point before the enemy team spawns, so you've got 20 seconds of time to fight, and about 14 seconds of time to do whatever the fuck it is you guys planned to do before the enemy team can recuperate. But is it this we need to change? No, it could be that we just need to educate because if we changed that then we might as well play a different gamemode.
Then again, we go to the unreasonable issue of restricting weapons and such to keep the game pure and free from gimmicks. But Valve has done their fair share of updating to make sure it's less gimmicky and more useful for players to go ahead and play with new things without fear of being a scrublord. When people encounter it in different forms such as playstyles and off-classes, it's hard to accept that to sway from their norm. We've seen some very interesting things from the really creative minds in top-level play using utility classes, so the potential to use them is there. These plays have taught us that adjusting tempo in a playstyle can make an advantage. See, overbuffed heavy turtling last, sentry gun, switching off soldier/scout. All of these essentially gimps your overall speed as a team (taking a risk by not playing with all optimal speed/damage classes) but if done right can serve as an advantage or a big disadvantage.

It's a dangerous loop of finding the most optimal scenario that lets us take in more ideas to use different weapons Valve has given us, bullshit or not because a lot of people don't want to try it.

Knowledge is power in the game, and can be just as good as an uber charge if you play your cards right. I think the pick/ban system was actually pretty relevant, because you can pick and choose what your team has to work with and what they can't work with. Knowledge extends outside of the game by nature, because you can instinctively predict what a player is likely to do in a certain scenario. A prime example, I remember Mangachu alone being a huge pain in my side when I scouted in IM because he always found the time to hide and surprise us, and my team failed to compensate for that. If you can manipulate the opposing team's strategy by restricting the potential game changing weapons from play, you can favor yourself a better chance against a better team. With the pick/ban system, it forces each player to know something different besides "go here shoot that." several times per game. Imo, thus raising the skill ceiling across the board. With that in place, you effectively create a whole division of players. It adds to the repertoire each player should be capable of demonstrating and utilizing each round. Overall, making the game more cerebral and competent with different weapon mechanics.

In the end, is it important that we try to use different lineups at will, or bend our own rules with a pick/ban system? Hopefully this group helps figure it out, because by golly we're getting stale doing what we're doing.

argument pls

Greetings. I’m Dennis The Menace, and I’ve been contemplating a lot recently about the status and evolution of our competitive configuration. I, along with others who frequent the private servers of this game want to see this game succeed. There wouldn't be a gracious community full of volunteers and donators I see today if this were untrue. I don’t ask today, nor tomorrow for money, but rather your cooperation and support to help take what we have today, and grow.

In the foreseeable future, I won’t have time to compete in any division. But this doesn’t stop me from thinking about the game when I have the time to distract myself. I have thought deeply about the various topics that govern our game rules for quite some time now, and wish to ask the community to undergo a cooperative mission. It honestly fascinates me to no end how much we’ve accidentally stumbled upon something really cool every season. And to think, there’s still room for discovering new ways to outsmart each other in the context of what we’ve spent our time training for in our community made setups. I think collectively we can figure out a better standard for TF2. Why do I think this needs to happen? Because frankly, our game isn’t going anywhere, and it’s got everything to lose if the interest of our oldest players and newer players sour. Fresh blood flowing through the future seasons of ESEA and CEVO are paramount to let us keep doing what we do, and I’m not convinced going against the grain (Valve’s interest) because this is and will always be an uphill struggle. I wholeheartedly agree with Lange that the biggest issue we’ve had is getting Valve to play ball with us. Mark my words, it’ll be the death of us if we don’t try new things and please Valve. Just look at all the attention CS:GO has received for playing within their rules.

What I propose is simple, an experimental PUG group. Each weekend, I’d like to get together with a group of people of varying skill level to participate in theorycrafted configurations from post-game discussions with the more serious members of the group. I don’t expect to change the game doing this, I have no idea what will come of it. We could even find out that we’ve had the holy grail of competitive settings for our game all along. I just think that our game needs a better standard than something “we’ve just kinda ran with.” Don’t get me wrong, I love 6v6 as it is, and if I could I would play it. But I think we do have a fantastic game to build on, and more than one person and definitely more than one iteration will need to happen before we see things get uber competitive and uber fun.

I’ve created a (temporary) public Steam group in preparation of gathering potential participants and interested individuals. This was attempted many moons ago by another group of people, but I don’t think it ever took off and we didn’t even have our own b4nny back then I don’t think. So what was the point if you couldn’t exemplify the best from the rest?

The group can be found by clicking here. I'd say if the group doesn't reach past 24 interested individuals, I will consider killing the idea.
Feedback, comments, insults, etc appreciated.

Tique Erotique still not sending me nudes is the real tragedy

People need to start using TF2 Beta for that to actually work.

The games we've seen in open to invite since the update have proven(to me at least) that demo isn't as gimped as we thought it was. I think boulder put it nicely, it's the same kind of spamming, just requires one more sticky to get the around the same output as normal.