Fix invisible players.

Fix the occasional problem where players will just stop moving in demo playback. The only way to fix this is restarting the demo and I cannot reliably reproduce the problem but it happens about 25% of the time to me now (and was happening during a team demo review last night)

(I am unsure of this from technological feasibility) Allow server side playback of STV demos. As In, players join a server and watch a broadcast of an STV demo loaded by rcon. This would allow easier review of demo files, allow post-hoc broadcasting of events in a more interesting way etc.

Stop breaking random shit in every update please.

Make a center version of all the other rocket launchers for soldier: Blackbox, Direct Hit etc.

Honestly, this game is pretty amazing for how old it is becoming and how many updates it has gotten.

Careful there mate, soon there will be no crows for all the strawmen you are putting up. Not once did anyone say that we should tell people to not play anything but 6s. I consider myself to be a relatively 6s purist (best time of my life was playing medic in ETF2L when there were NO unlocks) and loathe highlander, a rather extreme end of the spectrum of players. Even still, I would never presume to tell people they can only play their game the way I want them to.

The issue comes when people like eXtine start pouring money, time and effort into these modes. Now, eXtine and other community leaders are free to do as they wish, its their time and (often) their money being put into these projects. But eXtine is a little different from your average alternative mode enthusiast in that he has more power and weight to throw around when it comes to getting events set up and sponsors attracted. His actions inherently have more meaning than, say, yours in this community. As the community he represents abroad, we have the right to say "woah, hold on here, lets talk about this A:R thing before we start spreading its word."

Note how different that is. If you or eXtine or some random community member want to play A:R all night every night, good on ya, have fun and good luck to you. What is being said by myself, Kevin et. all (if I might speak for Kevin) is that as a community we need to keep the formats consistent and discourage active fracturing of the community as much as possible. Staying together and playing together will ultimately be what is best for us as a competitive game. eXtine's work with A:R flies directly in the face of that ideal and is dangerous and irresponsible in the context of him as a community leader.

A fine theory... except that it doesn't hold up to reality. We see this with UGC and crossing to ESEA (it happens, but not as much as we would like) and with highlander and 6s. Though highlander has grown into a format in its own right, it is pretty undeniable that the best players in the game are in 6s. But there is still relatively little crossing from HL to 6s. (the opposite happens though, 6s players playing in HL leagues during off season/on weekends).

A:R is so different from the experience of 6s that we might as well be talking about pubbers. Players that start in A:R are probably not terribly likely to move over to 6s FOR THE SAME EXACT REASONS PUBBERS ARENT. Will there be some move-over? Probably. But that effect is likely to not overcome the issue of players who were interested in competitive seeing A:R being heavily promoted by prominent community members and choosing A:R, then quitting because A:R sucks.

edited some wording.

It will be useful to take this partially out of order.

I did read your post thank you, but I wasn't responding to your personal opinions on A:R, I responding do your defense of the idea of A:R. We could just as easily put in 4v4 or 5v5 fast attack or ultiduo. The reason we are talking about A:R is that A. its the topic of this thread, B. it is the focus of a well meaning but ultimately horrifically misguided attempt at saving a game that isn't dead and C. it is the only gametype that people continue to prattle on about as if it is the only thing that get valve to pay attention to us.

So you might want to consider re-reading the entire post you replied to, because your personal opinion on Arena:Respawn wasn't even addressed in my rebuttal due to its ultimate irrelevance. Instead, as you seem to acknowledge is important, I was addressing eXtine's probable motivations and why they are demonstrably misguided.

That face to face meeting was years ago, during eXtv's big push to bring legitimacy to TF2. This was when we were gearing up to send the first teams to Europe, eXtv was poising itself to be the final word in TF2 shoutcasting and broadcasting, online and offline.

There were actually several meetings if I recall, though most of them phone/skype, with eXtine, Salamancer and perhaps a few other key names in the organization. What was really learned in those meetings was not that 6s is a broken, nonviable competitive format that valve would be insane to support, we kind of proved that was wrong with the next 3 years of absolutely amazing competition culminating in a year that had 5 separate tournaments worth American teams flying out to play in. Instead, as was clear then and as has become painfully more clear now, is that valve is completely and utterly uninterested in competitive tf2 at all. Their objections to our format, how we pick and choose which weapons we allow and how we basically only play 5cp maps is hopelessly backwards. They feel that we just outright reject all these things, when really, there is a community wide effort to assess the viability and how interesting a weapon is to the game. We don't just ban overpowered weapons, we also ban those weapons that actively contribute to a game that is just not fun to play.

I kind of got off on a tangent there, but we have this recurring theme in the story of eXtine and eXtv, and indeed in the competitive community in general, of trying to appease valve and when one approach doesn't work, we just entirely switch gears to another project. But my point remains. Despite what valve has said in those entirely unofficial meetings, there is still absolutely no reason to believe that we even can appease them. Their profit model for TF2 DOES NOT INCLUDE COMPETITIVE and there is no reason for them to change that.

Extine is allowed to be disappointed in his lack of real income from TF2. He has put a TON of hours into this game. But this isn't the game that is going to have an International or be on the main stage at IEM Katowice. And extine is allowed to waste his time on this project, far from me or anyone else to stop him. But as a community we have to be vigilant against things that might spell doom for this, still very small and frail, scene. A:R has that potential.

Your comment about changing the mind of the old guard seemed a dig on those who have been here for a while, have played this game and love this game for what it is. Even if it weren't meant that way, we are coming to my Really Big issue with A:R. Another format for a new player to get trapped in that is unlikely to hold their interest for long and has serious, endemic problems with its implementation, execution and core idea, may dissuade that new player from moving on to 6s. The 6s community in North America relies upon new teams and new players trickling their way up into ESEA. We already have a trap for 6s players in UGC (it can be very challenging to convince players to move from UGC to ESEA). If a new player sees this A:R thing, gets excited about it, plays for a while, but ultimately drops the format because it won't have widespread acceptance or a large playerbase is a potential 6s player completely lost to us. We need those 6s newbies.

The very fundamental problem with that argument is that there is absolutely 0 reason to think that valve is even opened to being swayed by A:R and that, even if they were to say "Yeah, that new gamemode is pretty sick" that they would balance around it, support the competitive environment cultivated by it or do literally anything other than make hats and break shit on updates.

This whole A:R thing, extine's appeals to the community and these fundamental ideas are borne out of some sort of jealousy and denial romanticism where we see Valve giving loving to their other major IPs and we feel entitled to some of that pie too. But it isn't going to happen.

The "old guard is holding us back" argument is also just old and tired. It is an easy cop out: "you don't like A:R or you don't want new gametypes because you have always played 6s."

If the population does turn over to A:R by a sizeable percentage, that probably won't be good for Competitive TF2, at least in North America. We already scrounged to get enough teams to have the only serious organization who actually does give us money and attention keep us around. If we start fracturing this community even more, it WILL kill TF2.

I will just reiterate what I have said in the last couple dozen threads about this shit. Valve isn't going to support TF2. So we have to support it ourselves. We will do that best by not fracturing the community, not endorsing gametypes that are nearly universally considered to not be competitively viable, and by continuing outreach to new players to show them what we already know: that 6s TF2 is fun, interesting and worth the slight learning curve to get into.

Because only you came to us via afterbirth.

At a certain point in time, its called a lack of imagination.

Fixed, thank you

People get called what they are on ESEA because I CBA to keep track of everyone's stupid ass aliasing.

I did ask you, twice. Besides, 9 months and a season and a half later and you still haven't figured out I don't listen to you anyway :P

You are a beautiful, beautiful man.

I totally agree, and I didn't mean for it to seem like my observation of stats is what is driving my predictions, at least not at this point. They are essentially meaningless and have little predictive value (as I mentioned in my post). My intent on pointing out the large number of frags is that tatertots is converting those frags and would be an asset to his team on viaduct in that regard. I will try to remember to use a stat that is correlated with time played in the future.

Part of what I am trying to do however, is develop some sort of framework for analyzing matchups statistically and letting that help predict outcomes. It is something I will be working on for the duration of the season in the hopes that come post-season, the teams will have played against enough of each other that at least the playoff teams will have some meaningful and interesting statistical data to look at that might shine some insight into what sort of plays we might see and how well team A is likely to do against team B.

I know he was joking, but plenty of people legitimately aren't when they think that. Plus he gets shit on a lot, including sometimes by me, and I know it's gotta be affecting his self esteem :(

<3 u uni.

Benroads is legitimately upset that his absolute shit-canning of split didn't get into a frag video.

Why?

With an IM roster, sure I probably could have attracted the attention of a bombshell 10/10 mature pocket who would show me a world of a good time. But I think what most people overlook is how far Uni has come in terms of skill and teamwork over the last season and a half. His DM has gotten better for sure, but his reaction time to calls and our chemistry has gotten loads better, especially starting with playoffs last season.

I haven't cut uni yet because I don't need to cut uni. My team is doing just fine with him and in part because of him. Over the past few weeks, I think he has proven himself able to hang at the lower end of IM, which if we are going to be fair, is where the rest of our team is right now. Plus, he listens to my calls and tolerates me dropping him every other push, which is hard to find in a pocket.

I've really come to trust in the curry monster that we call Uni, and he is a consistently cheerful and positive presence in our mumble. One day we will stop playing together, either because we go our separate ways or because one of us quits TF2, and on that day I will be at least a little bit sad.

Rosters should be back next week, I was having a great deal of difficulty getting them properly aligned and just decided to scrap them. Sorry!

Wrong thread tery, we are in a completely new set of threads and in week 2 buddy :)

I actually meant 5-2 but I accidentally hit the 4 key and didnt catch it

nah man, they are just playing around and friendly ribbing :)

Thanks for the thanks though!