yeah, back your demos and cfg up, but this has happened to me like 8 times, where as soon as you try to reinstall, steam grabs onto your tf2 folder and is just like "my bad"

This is a stupid rule even disregarding accidentally doing it. Valve has killed more than enough hiding spots without anyone else's help.

I'm surprised people are ranking S/M so low. First actually good story in a Pokemon game, and also, snazzy outfits.

I didn’t ask Valve anything, Valve doesn’t give a fuck about the competitive community.

I said it would be nice. And it would be. Pubs don’t reward winning, sure. But nonetheless there are people who play pubs, try their best, and are morons. People who think no team is complete without a Heavy, people who don’t build Teleporters on Stopwatch, people who earnestly think Scout and Sniper are terrible and Pyro wins every 1v1. Anyone who doesn’t care can disregard the classifications as I am sure they already do.

Plus, they are pushing competitive matchmaking that actually functions and isn’t complete garbage. It’d be helpful there.

To prove that statement you have to disprove every other conceivable way the scene could grow. Return of LAN. Matchmaking that is competent and not a 100% joke. Newbie Mixes, putting in work to keep nurturing and easing new blood into the game in NA and expanding to other continents. Reaching out to the community with things like Tip of the Hats and Comms vs Pros 6v9 showmatches. Valve making important matches more prominent on the menu or on their website. Shoutouts from popular sympathetic Youtubers.

This defeatist attitude isn’t just wrong (it is also probably wrong), it’s going against what you want. You want to grow the scene while telling everyone their efforts are pointless, which discourages them.

Please show me where the post you linked says “these classes are shit.”

If every class is a generalist then they can remove the labels. There are labels right now, they are just impressively unhelpful and in egregious cases completely wrong.

Also, changing labels would probably take thirty seconds, while rebalancing specialist classes would be a much longer endeavor.

From what I’ve seen in competitive matchmaking, you’re very generous to budding competitive players.

i honestly don't think there'd be much of an issue reclassifying everything as "standard", "turtle", and "pick", except they'd need to swap medic and pyro's positions and that'd be really weird for a while

the problem is that nobody gives a shit in casual so those terms don't mean anything, really

also it's like a million years too late for anyone to forget the old terms

if there was some incentive akin to OW loot boxes when you level up in casual that scaled based off of the in-game exp, that gave you some hats or some shit, or like a .1% chance of a key/strange/[something else people want], maybe people would care, and doing little stuff like this to tell pubbers how to win would actually be worth pursuing.

also, meet your match update killed community servers so everyone is forced to play with fucking full-time conga sandvich pootis

I didn't watch it, but holding last and waiting for a midfight reset has been a thing as long as we've played 5CP in competitive, especially Badlands, which has the shittiest second retake, and especially if you're running Pyro / Engineer, which are much worse at pushing out of last and take time to swap off of. Vote to get rid of Badlands or figure out how to deincentivize round resets in 5CP, but telling off people for playing to win is ridiculous.

I don't understand why you draw a distinction between "early matches" and "important matches," either. I'd hope that everybody plays to win in matches no matter how many weeks in the season are left.

It’s quieter, easier to jump off left walls, and easier to shoot though cracks.

OMG I love flatline he is chill and my eternal roamer / spy rival

so what kind of furry are you

Nobody scrims Viaduct because learning how to play Viaduct is only relevant one week out of eight. Splitting 5CP and KOTH evenly would be fine to solve this, it doesn’t have to be all KOTH or no KOTH.

Also pretty sure the reason Viaduct isn’t pugged is that it’s the best Scout map so whichever team has shittier Scouts will ban it. Viaduct pugs are fine.

Interesting, I would have thought Badlands to be one of the best maps to run Pyro over a Scout, at least outside of midfights.

It's obviously fantastic pushing last because it's small, you can blow up point traps and walk onto point, or Uber into them top left/right, or walk into Soldier bottom. This is one of the strongest possible things to do with Pyro right now outside of holding last.

Pushing second you just bully away the roamer and jump up dropdown, he can't do fucking shit about it. You can probably just jetpack sac onto the Demo's head too, or just walk through Haunter since it's only a pocket there usually.

Pushing mid is shitty, but being able to blow up traps and keep explosives off your team walking through choke or house seems pretty great. You could also switch to jetpack off of resupply and jump somewhere dumb like your shithouse or their house or their diag, or just walk under / shithouse and flank.

Holding mid and second passive is much stronger for a Pyro since Scorch/Det have no falloff and they'll naturally stack as they walk through the choke.

Holding 2nd Scorch/Det is perfect for holding flank, Pyro is much harder to kill with double Soldier bomb or stickytrapping as well, and is quite decent walking into house and fighting the Soldier or wrapping Haunter. You can also switch secondaries really quickly with the resupply cabinet - if you need to jetpack somewhere. Since both a roamer and a Scout walking through house can't really win a 1v1 vs you sitting on diag you can afford to walk onto diag and poke whoever is sitting on porch. If they shove their whole combo into you, you can probably do like a thousand damage just by walking into them and get a million kills by wrapping your pocket through Haunter.

And Pyro is great holding last top right, or you can just switch since the spawn is right there.

I don't think full-time Pyro is ever a good idea, but Pyro is disgustingly strong pushing and holding Badlands last, and getting stuck on Pyro isn't that bad on any particular point, I think, as long as your team reacts accordingly to the swap - you need to play slower because Pyro is bad at killing stuff at mid+ range, but a good portion of the map is cramped and you can afford to play slow on wider sections because Pyro can deny spam, can blow up traps, has great long-ranged damage over time, and has the option on your second to quickswap to jetpack if you need to roll them.

Bonk lets you bodyblock Ubers. It lets you overextend and get out for free. It negates Sentry guns. It lets you bodyblock explosive classes while your team shoots them. It allows you to walk through chokes and get behind, which can only be stopped by wasting disproportionately large amounts of time and ammo to juggle them, or blowing up a stickytrap, which either launches them way behind, in which case, they get what they want, or launches them backward, in which case, they lose nothing, and you are now down a stickytrap for free. You can time it so you lose invincibility as you land on a Medic or Demo's face and 2shot him. And you get it for free when you spawn for some fucking reason.

Base Jumper allows you to sit in the air forever and puke out damage from ranges where Scouts do 3, while forcing Soldiers to direct you. It forces someone to be almost useless to keep an eye on you, because if nobody is looking, you can just fall on them and sync rockets. Or they run Sniper / Pyro full time, and nobody wants that.

I doubt anyone actually tested Gas Passer since it forces you to play Pyro without a secondary for a very long time, which is miserable. It was probably banned because it goes through walls, but even then, it's 100% outclassed by Soldier banners, since the effects are a thousand times stronger, don't need to be aimed, are not countered by resupply / health kits / Pyros, and funnily enough, also go through walls.

https://youtu.be/UOP5wRiyIp4?t=5

(0:05)

See Smitty's post. This is not true.

Nope.

I wasn't asked jack fucking shit about whitelists, nor was anyone else on my team. From what Knuckles and Nursey said, they weren't asked either.

Weeks later, we were asked to test and provide feedback on five weapons. The Base Jumper, Machina, and Bonk, which are obviously broken and need no testing, and the Gas Passer and Sandman, which are obviously worthless (apart from Gas Passer going through walls) and need no testing.

None of these are controversial at all. There were actually controversial things we could have tested or been consulted on- for instance, Cow Mangler, Natascha, Dragon's Fury, Atomizer, Buffalo Steak Sandvich, Vita-Saw, Loch-n-Load, Vaccinator, Quickiebomb, Battalion's Backup, Rainblower - but they only asked us to give feedback on things that were blatantly obvious, while making all of the difficult decisions for us long ago. This pathetic attempt at reaching out NA players honestly might be more insulting than if they ignored us completely.

Maybe this problem wasn't caused by the arrogance of ETF2L's admins, maybe tri dropped the ball, I don't really know. Regardless of who is at fault, the fact remains that European players were absolutely given preferential treatment and this is fucking unacceptable.

Is Pyro more viable? Yes, in certain situations and on certain parts of certain maps.

Is full-time Pyro viable at the highest level? Probably not. Pyro is still slow with short range, meaning there's nothing you can do against kiting, especially since you only have eight to ten airblasts. For that reason, It's also just worse at keeping up with the flow of 6v6 - chasing down targets, rolling forward off of momentum, things like that.

Even though Detonator can put out a lot of damage over time, it does so slowly and doesn't stack well compared to regular spam, since you can't set someone on fire twice, only refresh the cooldown. This shitty spam means that Pyro can't deny chokes like Soldier, and makes pressuring the flank much more difficult to deal with.

Pyro also has to choose between ranged killing power with the Shotgun or spam + out of combat mobility with Detonator / Scorch or Soldier-tier mobility with Jetpack. If it had any two of them it would be full-time viable.

There's also certain points where you're completely useless - long lasts like Granary and Snakewater where nobody is holding close, you don't have the speed to get in, and you can't do anything against Heavies, Sentries, or Manmelter Pyros.

Also a big reason to run Pyro was that he could easily get rid of stickytraps, but since Quickiebomb Demo exists and it's much worse to be stuck on Pyro than to be stuck on QB, that niche is gone.

I also tested Backburner + Jetpack bombing and melting people with glitchy crits, but that's gone now.

It also might be viable if the enemy Soldiers are constantly feeding you rockets to reflect rocket jump off of, but that's unreliable, and I think eventually they will just figure out how to play against Pyro and not let you do that.

I think it's theoretically possible to substitute a Shotgun Pyro for a Scout and do okay, but Scout is just better at doing a Scout's job than a Shotgun Pyro is, and the things airblast and flames bring to the table almost always don't make up for the loss in speed and double jumping.

Also I can't fucking believe this bullshit. North American players were graciously allowed to provide feedback on five weapons out of over a hundred? Why is nothing being done when that this "global whitelist" treats everyone outside of Europe as nothing more than an afterthought, and only begrudgingly, at that?

The ball does literally nothing and you get 1shot by rockets. It's 100% outclassed by Wrap Assassin, and if you're throwing balls from spawn and resupplying to refresh it, Huntsman, Flare Gun, Detonator, and Scorch Shot.