Valve didn't throw us a massive fucking bone, they took a massive fucking dump on the competitive community by releasing their abomination of a gamemode, which is flawed on every single fucking level. There definitely isn't a lack of feedback, Valve just aren't updating matchmaking to fix these flaws. I am legitimately concerned that matchmaking turns people AWAY from playing competitive, based on the low number of people who actually play MM.

Valve are deluded if they think they can balance the game around ridiculous class compositions when they can't even balance individual unlocks properly. There is a massive amount of gimmicky unlocks that add no value like Neon Annihilator or Sun-on-a-stick. The only time they work is when you actively try to NOT win the game. There's also some unlocks that are overpowered and haven't been adressed in a million years, like the GRU or the wrangler. It's not lack of information because everyone uses these unlocks, it's just sheer stupidity and stubbornness. I mean even Blizzard realised that their game's competitive integrity was at stake so they had to do away with no hero limit, Valve are just stubbornly insisting that their broken balance works.

If Valve wants us to switch to their system, they got to prove that it works first. So far matchmaking has been a complete disaster. This is not our fault, it's Valve's fault because they managed to botch matchmaking on every single level. We can't risk to split the community even further based on the off-chance that Valve will actually help us out, especially since the benefit of doing is so is to attract a very small number of the people who actually play matchmaking. 6v6 without classlimits or a whitelist is not interesting or fun in any way, both for spectators and players. Most likely, Valve are playing the number game anyway, so if we switch, we will probably just die out.

Yeah flights are crazy cheap. €250 return direct flight from Stockholm right now if any Swedes are planning to go.

Hopefully I will attend, cu@

poll.ru > strawpoll

I mean, playing pugs is better than not playing at all, but pugs also tend to teach you bad habits as medic. In pugs you can get away with having really bad positioning because you're playing against a badly coordinated team, where people are more likely to make nonsensical plays rather than coordinate something that will actually force you or kill you. If you are playing against real teams you get punished for mistakes which normally won't punish you in pugs. The other way around applies to, you play properly in pugs but your team doesn't so you get punished for it. This just makes pugs bad practice, especially for medics. Play pugs to have fun and don't play more pugs than scrims.

Try to main call. main calling is most easily done by medic because you are supposed to the player that's most aware of the current situation (health, position). Work with your team to get information on the enemy's sitation. you will get so much better at the game by directing the flow of it. Even if you tend to make bad calls all the time, it will improve so don't be insecure about making bad calls, not being able to focus on healing (lol), or having an ugly voice or whatever ridiculous excuses medics have for not main calling. I'm not saying that medics should main call in every team, I'm saying that medics should be able to main call, even if they don't do it for the team they are playing in.

The hardest part of playing medic is gamesense, or more specifically, deduction. This is something that you can't get from watching other medics play the game or something that you can learn from playing pugs all day. Learning how to read the game is the most valuable skill you will have as a medic or a main caller. There will be things that are relevant for how you approach a sitation at the time and irrelevant at other times. For example, you are pushing last and the demo just spawned. You don't have to pop through because the threat of dropping your players to a sticky trap is non-existant. You can milk the uber and pop it when you are far inside the last push, and then you had successfully used deduction to understand that there can't be a sticky trap around the corner, which enabled you to get position inside the last point before you popped the uber and consequently won you the round. This is a simple example of deduction, and I can give you many more examples, but at the end of the day it's something you have to learn yourself from getting experience playing the game.

stutter stepping in tf2 is mostly useless but the null cancelling movement script doesn't prevent you from doing that

Which is a good thing imo, you can place a sentry outside the standard spot if you have time. It's pretty dull that the sentry will be on the same 3 spots every single time.

You won't risk dying while repairing with the wrench if you aren't a complete fucking moron. The risk of dying as engineer while repairing the sentry with the wrench as opposed to the rescue ranger is so low that it is negligible.

The tanking ability with the rescue ranger is pretty poor compared to the wrench. Definitely won't tank very much before the engineer is forced to pick it up, at which point you might as well switch to another class if they are pushing because you are useless as an engineer if you don't have your sentry up, especially if you don't have the shotgun. It does provide more options but it's not really that OP.

I would play with the solemn vow, simply because it's not actually possible a lot of the times to know if the enemy has built poorly. A lot of the times you are with the mindset that you have equal ubers, but you might actually have a big uber advantage, or maybe you have a disadvantage because they have been arrow building. You don't get ubersaws that often so it's not worth running it if the solemn vow is allowed.

6v6 is the superior gamemode, but nations cup is not really a serious competition, so lets have 9v9 as well.

don't ever start playing medic

hafficool left

Compromising on the ruleset is such a stupid idea and is completely the wrong way to approach the situation. I'm not even saying that one region should adapt to another region's ruleset. It's much better to have a ruleset that most of the community can agree on than a compromise that makes nobody happy.

The rational way to approach the problem is to:

1. Make a list of many possible rulesets
2. Set up a list of priorities (e.g. works in online matches as well as cups, doesn't require plug-ins, etc.)
3. Choose the best ruleset based on how well they satisfy the priorities

This is a time consuming solution, but it's so much better than tunnel visioning on either the ETF2L or the ESEA ruleset, because there are so many more unexplored options out there. It's time for the leagues to take initiative and make this happen, in a transparent manner so that everyone in the community can be a part of the decision. In the end, a unified ruleset would benefit all of the leagues, so it's a common interest for all of the community.

Halftime is good for teams but it sucks for spectators. You take away from gametime and in 90% of the cases it won't actually change the outcome of the game. In CSGO you need to have halftime and it doesn't actually cut short of any action so it makes perfect sense to have it there, but in TF2 you stop the game for no real reason except to give the underdogs a chance to make a plan, which can be achieved with a tactical pause anyway. 40 minutes per map + a pause inbetween is also impractical schedule wise, especially at LAN.