Your eloquence and wit in writing makes me cry tears of joy, James.

As for the cup, it was awesome. Everything from the organisation to the casting was near-perfect. Thanks to all the people involved behind the scenes, and ZOWIE sponsoring this tournament. I hope we can see this cup, or similar cups, returning periodically, because if anything can push the game, it's a consistent recurring event organised and presented beautifully like this one.

yo yo yo smofoooooo

that was not the point, but now you mention it, you lost the very best map in TF2

Anyway we will play with me + sickless + killari + (probably) salmon + delzic + sheepy. gf18 will hopefully hop in for a few maps to make it a more actual lineup. If people'd rather see the russians play, we'd have no problem stepping aside for this one (but they already lack forsaken though). I think this event should be the best event possible for the spectators.

Oh no, not this passive shit again, just because you couldn't bomb me on badlands mid Ipz :P

Just look at the prem playoffs (including the AYO game where we constantly tried to push out against odds/numbers) and our constant pushes, ok thanks.

Currently trying to actually field some form of roster for the cup... I'm afraid it will be more of a mix...

Bare with me cause I am going out on a limb and making this up as I go:

Since Quake was mentioned I tried to compare these kind of scenarios to Quake dueling as it simplifies the matter by having only 2 players. Why does Quake not have complete stalemates, or why does Quake have semi-stalematey situations that still remain interesting for both the players and the spectators?

In TF2, having CP3 can be compared to being in control. Having more round wins than the opposing team in TF2 is the same as having more frags than the other player in Quake.

On most maps in Quake it is not uncommon, and possibly even expected, to see a player out of the lead and out of control make a comeback, regain control, and make frags. Why does this happen? Because being in control in Quake is an active process and requires the player in control to give up positional advantage to maintain said control (circling the items means you will be traversing positionally disadvantageous areas). Also, as the player in control, staying completely passive and defensive between the major items allows the player out of control to gradually even the odds (stacks) by circling the minor items. Whichever the case, there is almost always some kind of possibility for the player out of the lead and out of control to make a comeback (up to certain limits of course). To retain game dominance, the player with the upper hand is forced to take certain risks constantly.

Now compare this to TF2. Being "in control" (having CP3 or CP4) is a passive state. Staying in control does not require the players to sacrifice superior positioning; in fact, the opposite is true: Keeping superior positioning is what maintains the control! Positioning in TF2 is a goal in itself (getting the position on CP5 means you win a round point) and not a means to an end, like in Quake. The means to an end in TF2 are the frags, as opposed to Quake.

With the nature of comp TF2 being about scoring through position and frags only being a means to an end, how can we ever fix this problem? Stalemates are indeed a natural state of the game; they are a result of the scoring meta.

Without changing entirely how comp TF2 works, I think the only solution can be found in changing map architecture. Why, when we talk about stalemates in TF2, the maps we see recurring are snakewater, gullywash and granary? All these maps have no open chokes between CP2 and CP3, and CP3 often offers a huge positional advantage (mostly height advantage) towards CP2.

Especially on snake, if the team in control (has CP3) has good spam on the chokes, its impossible for a roamer from the CP2 team to try and make a force play. Its near impossible for the demo from the CP2 team to do good spam (standing at the bottom medpack near green its hard to get a good spamming position without receiving more spam damage than you deal, and standing in saw room you will already get spammed before you even get close enough to the doorway to get a peek onto CP3. Compare this to badlands choke where the team that has CP2 can lob pipes/stickies through choke with enough room to dodge the counter-spam, and can launch bombers to make a play relatively freely.

So obviously badlands does a better job than other maps (of course, it's the best fucking map), but I propose we should experiment with new maps (or modified maps) that enable teams out of control to make plays more easily. This means that transitioning from CP2 -> CP3 should actually provide a positional advantage instead of disadvantage. The team that has CP3 already has logistical advantage (spawns) and another advantage for simply having a buffer before they can lose a point (if you lose CP3 you still have CP1 and CP2 before you actually are put back score-wise).

This means that we could experiment with maps being designed with an overall valley/dip style layout, where CP3 is the lowest point on the map, and where CP2 is elevated over CP3, so the team out of control can push with positional advantage. It should also be relatively easier to spam from CP2 to CP3 than the other way around. With this layout in mind, there is incentive for both teams to push. The CP3 team will have a worse position and will draw the shorter straw spam-wise if they keep that position, and will therefore eventually risk losing control of CP3, so it's in their best interest to push towards CP2/4, also just for the sake of eventually getting close to CP5 and actually scoring a point. The CP2 team will be incentivised to push for the sake of already having positional advantage and wanting to get out of their out-of-control (cp-wise) situation.

I hope that some of this makes sense and maybe some smart mapper will take the effort to experiment with these unorthodox map layout ideas.

note: I don't play Quake, I only watch a lot of streams and vods, so I might make some noobish or short sighted observations about its meta.

I guess the confusion is caused by what OP meant with "music producer". Usually when someone says that and then promotes their own songs (instead of a band recording, or a singer for which they made the backing track, etc), they mean something synonymous to "electronic music artist". I assume MasterFloofy is first and foremost trying to achieve that, so his focus should be on songwriting.

If you'd make an actual valid comparison out of yours: it's like somebody just bought a guitar, asks this forum how to make songs with it, and you proceed to tell him he needs to learn how to use a compressor and equalizer. Unless you're making dub reggae, the instruments should be the main priority of music making. The mixing board and effects come second.

To make the point once again, if you take one of Floofy's songs like "Badlands", and put the best mixing engineer in the world to work on making the song sound as good as possible, it will still not be enjoyable for 99.99% of all people because of the musical "errors" in it. However, if you take the same instruments and don't touch the mixing board, and let some composer make a song with the exact same synths, samples and mixdown, it can turn into a amazingly enjoyable song. I don't even know why I have to explain this, it seems like an obvious point.

There's no absolute rules in music, obviously. I mean, even going out of key can be a legitimate creative choice. If somebody creates the weirdest shit and no other person on earth can enjoy it except for the creator himself, and he's fine with that, then who's to say he can't? The point is though that most music artists on some level care what others think of their music, and hope that others enjoy their creations. Especially people who post their creations on a forum asking what others think.

A beat can be repetitive if it fits the song or the intent of what the song is supposed to convey, which is in my opinion a more legitimate reason than "the genre's rules, that I'm trying to adhere to, say that I should have repetitive beats" because a genre should be of a descriptive nature rather than prescriptive (categorize music for convenience instead of dictate how music should sound).

This is the worst piece of advice... Apart from what Casual said about compression not being the holy grail to a great sounding song, technicalities should come last. A great song should sound good, agreed, but if the composition, melodies and arrangement are great then the song will still be massively enjoyable even though it might not sound well produced. It doesn't work the other way around though, you can have a terrible song sonically polished to perfection, and it will still be boring.

I think what Casual said about the songs being off-key should be your main improvement point right now. Try to make simpler songs. Don't start off with an arpeggiated synth preset. Start off with a simple bassline, maybe 2 notes per measure. Then try to play a melody of a few notes on top of that, or an extra voice (pad, high lead synth, something like that). If you're not sure about the melodies being in key, play them in a higher octave, maybe you'll hear better if it sounds right or not. You could try to improve your understanding (but more importantly, "feel") of musicality by learning "dry" musical theory, but maybe it's better to buy a keyboard or something and just learn playing, and build your musical knowledge and feeling by that.

Oh and try to avoid FL Studio stock drumkits ;)

Isn't the original purpose of the Short Circuit to give the engineer a new way to defend his structures? Yes?

Then:

- Short circuited projectiles only do damage against players but not buildings

If that makes engies cry, then make short circuited projectiles do only half damage to players and 0 damage to buildings.

That Short Circuit buff... What were they thinking...

Read the esr thread (ctrl+f for "newborn" to read the head designer's comments) ... They're not aimlessly making a CPMA clone with some gimmicks added without really thinking things through (cough, warsow, cough). Noobs are taken into account and will be guided into the game, but skillbased movement will still be the whole point of the game. Seriously though, generally newborn makes a lot of sense in his posts, so I think this project is promising.

Remember that CPMA is an obscure mod to a game of which most people play an incompatible verison nowadays (QL). The type of game never got the audience it deserved. Same for QL basically.

There's no objection to multiple people having their go at this. There seems to be a general desire in the gaming community to return to the oldschool arena shooters. Shootmania came too early and also didn't have a clue. Even CliffyB recently made some comments on trying to do a "real" PC fps again as his next project.

why are gifs so magical

will definitely back the kickstarter once it gets up (i assume early 2014, from what newborn says in the esr thread)

what?

maybe ur on about the aspect ratio? thats the res i play in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwRdE42qqkA&hd=1