sorry, everyone on that roster aliases a lot and i have no idea who your 6th is

is it bark on scout? because i think he hasn't gone positive as scout in any of his reasonably-close matches last season, which is probably not going to be an issue this season for proto or bunny

Pretty sure Bunnymonster and Speedy are enough to win Open without scrimming and make their team better than the bottom third of IM, even if they don't cut anyone.

The other possible contender to win Open that I see is tatuwah's team - carcin seems to be putting up good numbers on Scout, tatuwah, bleh, and Cats4Lyfe are good, and I think indecency is good?

Crab_F's team and candlestick's team also have / had good DM but they don't seem to be scrimming.

Good tips!

This is true, but remember that you run slower if you're only holding S. Alternate spamming a and d with a null movement script alongside holding s to keep your speed, or hold either a or d alongside s and walk diagonally.

Also Scattergun does 104 max.

Also it's a good idea to not go near walls in general when a Soldier is shooting you.

@ Finnegan This mentality can be helpful, but it can also be dangerous. Dropping an Uber and popping uselessly are essentially the same thing. You'll be flamed much harder for dropping, but you need to try and use your Ubers well.

This is why, when pushing, you almost always want your heal target to tell you to pop. Since they can see everything, and you can't, they're a much better judge of if it's a good time to use Uber. If your players don't remember to do this, remind them. You can use Uber if you see something that your heal target doesn't see, but otherwise, trust your teammates. If you drop there, it's totally not your fault, it's your pocket's fault. If you pop through every scary-looking choke you'll waste a ton of Ubers.

When you're defending and people are trying to force you, try not to pop against a single suiciding player if you have your combo (Soldier, Scout, +1) around you, unless you know 100% that you will die to the next shot. Your team should be able to kill the guy before you die, and if they can't, it's their fault. If they sac multiple people, it's fine to use Uber since you can get two kills off of that Uber, which is great.

What you're trying to do with an Uber depends on the situation. Generally, you want to Uber people so they don't take huge amounts of damage, because you generally want them to be good health in the post-fight.

If you have even Ubers and are exchanging with your pocket, it's okay to hold for a bit since you're tanking him for the entire Uber, so there's enough time for him to get fully-healed again. Your teammates shouldn't derp in and risk taking a bunch of damage and need flashes to not die, but if they do, you should still flash them, even though it'll make your Uber last shorter.

If you have advantage, then you don't need to worry about milking, since you don't have to worry about your Uber ending before theirs. Flash liberally to get people through the choke, catch out kills, and have good position and health for the post-Uber fight. Think about whether or not you can win the push without using Uber at all - if you can comfortably win a fight without popping, try and save it. If not, don't dilly-dally until their Medic manages to build his own Uber up.

If you're down a bunch of people then you either want to leave without popping and get a force off with your team, or trade Ubers and run away without anyone dying. If you're looking to trade, again, your pocket is largely in charge of deciding when to pop. Since you're numbers down, it's highly likely you're pushing into multiple people who can quickly do 200 damage to your Soldier, so be wary.

Kritz is good because it charges faster than Uber, but the actual charge is much worse than Uber. You want to use Kritz so you can Kritz on them before they get Uber, so the best time is when you'll be even Ubers with regular Medigun and have a small ad if you have Kritz. You need to be using pretty much as soon as you get it so you can take the fight before they get Uber.

It's also weak against Sentries and Pyros, which negate it, and Snipers, who just snipe you. It's also important that you don't telegraph by showing them your Medigun / heal beam, or have your Demo suspiciously peek chokes around the time you should have Kritz. If they know you're on Kritz, they can neuter it just by playing extremely aggressively while their Medic plays very safe. Since it's reliant on surprise, it's countered by a Spy disguise-checking your medigun, which makes it less likely to be surprising when pushing last, or if they have someone respawning who can quickly check that. You also don't want to do it too much or they'll suspect you're doing it.

lf carpool around illinois/indiana!

EDIT: also if anyone is carpooling from florida, go bother split, he's too stubborn to post >:[

i had no idea who this guy was and picked him randomly and he actually obliterated on scout and sniper

do not sleep on this fucker

I don't think this is true. Long ranged splash from things like Soldier, Demo, and Jarate are much stronger with higher player count. Larger player count lends itself to larger maps, which affect balance (Sniper becomes stronger, for instance, Teleporters are stronger while slow classes are relatively more disadvantaged compared to standard classes, Wrangled Sentries become weaker since they can be spammed from multiple angles). And player count influences spawn times, which greatly affects how conservative a team has to be when considering if they should push or not.

Multiple classes also are a huge issue. Stacking sticky traps makes walking through chokes a nightmare and Medics being able to overheal each other makes creating advantages extremely difficult. Being able to temporarily switch to like 3 Engineers to build a [Wrangled] level 3 super fast is also a factor exclusive to 12v12.

If you walk around a corner into a phlog Pyro after he spent ten years farming 221 damage with Detonator, that's not the Pyro getting lucky, that's you making a huge mistake despite very ample warning. There was no luck involved. You just fucked up.

Building Phlog with Detonator is not free, it takes a very long time and you're stuck on a shitty loadout on a shitty class until you get Phlog. There's no way for you to contest Soldiers or Demos who can juggle you into infinity, and there's no way to kill anything that has a working S key. In addition it gets hard countered by Heavy, especially Natascha, as well as Engineer and even Manmelter Pyro.

There is a large opportunity cost to playing Pyro instead of Scout or Soldier. There is a large opportunity cost to playing Phlog Pyro to crack a stalemate instead of Battalion's Backup Soldier, or Engineer, or Heavy, or Sniper. There is a large opportunity cost to playing Phlog Pyro instead of regular Pyro. If that Phlog Pyro correctly analyzed that your team would most likely not be able to counter a joke weapon on a joke class without the element of surprise, and has the balls to actually try it, that is skill.

Would you feel better if you were killed by the far superior stock Flamethrower?

If a team is so much better than you that they can kill you with joke weapons and not be punished, then they could kill you just as hard running stuff that is unbannable, like permaHeavy/Sniper/Pyro, or Shotgun-only Soldier, or Crossbow-only Medic, or Pistol-only Scout, or anything. What's ultimately annoying is that you're losing and being disrespected, but banning underpowered weapons won't change the fact that there are teams out there who are better than you and want to BM. You'll still be just as upset.

Imagine trying to Uber into Badlands last through top left and being bodyblocked in the choke by an invincible Scout for 8 seconds. Or pushing Process IT into mid.

Not to mention you can literally run away from any overextension as long as you can duck around a corner for a second.

It's actually so blatantly broken, please don't force us to play with it.

To clarify, it is really annoying and should be banned, but nobody will use it because there is no reason to sac a parachute Soldier when you can jump back to spawn and switch to Battalion's Backup, which is a second Uber, is impossible to punish reliably, and doesn't put you down a fragging class.

The Huntsman is significantly better at this because it kills stuff. The Wrap Assassin is significantly better at every other situation because it does damage and doesn't make you 1shot by rockets. This thing is actually completely useless.

From what I remember, I think it’s actually called Theseus’ paradox?

holy fuck this guy is insane

Improved her positioning a ton and has always had great arrows and dodging. Try her out.

You're right that the graph is fucked. My bad. I found the UGC 6s data and we'll see how it matches.

EDIT:

https://i.imgur.com/gggOvIN.jpg

This graph is players, not teams.

Keep in mind, this doesn't factor out ESEA + UGC duplicates, so the playercount for 6s should be slightly lower than it is.

There are. (EDIT: BAD GRAPH, LOOK BELOW FOR BETTER GRAPH)

https://cdn-enterprise.discourse.org/waypoint/uploads/default/original/2X/5/5b0bb2ef30904410c2d1a928182e46ef5c27a191.png

This is team count, not player count, so make the Highlander graph 50% higher.

Highlander isn't a terrible gamemode just because it allows every class. It's a terrible gamemode because it forces you to play your class even when your class is fucking shit (Spy, Pyro, Heavy, Engineer), too many players means that most classes cannot create advantages large enough to push on (which makes the game slow as fuck), the Wrangler (which is utter bullshit) is unbanned because 1/9 of the playerbase would be completely useless without it (which makes the game slower), and full-time Sniper discourages pushing because it fucking kills everything at every range, especially because a Highlander team comp is better at protecting a Sniper than pressuring one. Also, Jarate and Mad Milk are unbanned for some reason I cannot fathom, they are easy to use, you get them for free, and they can completely stuff pushes by themselves while disproportionately punishing the aggressive team (since you have to cluster to walk through the choke).

Also, pushing the cart is boring as fuck.

Allowing class switching, bringing the player count from 18 to 12, not playing Payload, and banning fucking Milk and Jarate because they're blatantly overpowered fixes all of these issues.

Doesn't work.

If you look at the pick/ban system in Sigafoo cup, they don't touch any broken shit for the core classes, they only ban unlocks based on who has a better Pyro / Engineer. This isn't DOTA where every team is playing a different comp - everyone is running Scout, Soldier, Demo, Medic, and Sniper, and Stock Heavy / Spy are pretty much top tier loadouts so banning is pointless - the only bans that matter are Short Circuit, Wrangler, Gunslinger, Powerjack, Degreaser, Dragon's Fury because they actually cripple the effectiveness of those classes. Pick / ban will not solve the fact that there is no incentive to ban broken shit on core classes because it won't give you an advantage over the other team since it gimps both teams.

[/quote]

This is a good point. I think that a big reason that 5CP is so offputting to casual players is that it discourages running non-standard classes due to how fast it is.

Dragon's Fury is strong enough that it'd give Pyros full-time viability, at least at lower levels, without being actually bullshit strong like other unlocks that give a enough of a boost in viability to justify running them (Sydney Sleeper, Jarate, Short Circuit). I know dozens of Pyros who never got into 6s because Pyro was too weak for 6s, Highlander is a terrible, boring gamemode, and Highlander Pyro is the most terrible, boring class in that gamemode. If you assume that every class has a roughly equal number of players, and change the amount of viable full-time classes from four to five, that's a 25% increase in players. That's a sizable difference.

As for the other unlocks, I don't think it's that cut and dry. I think a lenient whitelist makes competitive TF2 less of a leap from pubs. We shouldn't bother with obviously-bullshit stuff like Bonk, but I think that it'd be dangerous to return to a strict medlocks + Gunboats whitelist because it'd make competitive seem intimidating.

I agree with this, but I'd like to make a note that competitive players instinctively dislike all change. Look at how long ETF2L players refused to unban Gunboats, for instance, or how even to this day nobody equips Battalion's Backup even though it's blatantly overpowered. We need to make sure that we're banning things because they're actually overpowered, and actively try to fight that bias against new things so we can make sure that the metagame we have is as good as possible.