yeah I don't get the comparison. the huntsman is specifically a weapon where it's total garbage but sometimes the game gives you a free headshot for no good reason, any argument you'd make for LnL is doubly so for any other grenade launcher. if anything, the LnL is the most consistent because of how easy it is to get a hit when you use it

my wish is for valve to actually read any one of these threads instead of doing things all on their own with little communication

as a more specific want: please use your beta mode to test mechanics. stop suddenly giving huge changes to take into account with zero warning (and at many points, literally right before major matches), that is active hostility for a competitive scene

some general replies:

1) if people think pacing issues in 5CP maps are bad enough, imagine how people will react to the same stalemates, but with a slow difficult-to-kill class replacing one of the more mobile classes

2) there is absolutely no way to allow every single weapon and have people handle it, because fully comprehending what it'll all do to the metagame takes a long time. ETF2L had the right idea when they opted to instead slowly bring in new weapons season-by-season

3) even assuming both those things, it's ridiculous to assume TF2 players should compromise what makes their competitive format good enough to please valve. it's valve's job to appeal, it should be the community's job to simply make sure this format is the best it can be for wide-scale popularity. I assume that there's going to be no bans one day, but that's only under the assumption that valve changes the problem weapons, which they seem to be absolutely garbage at doing

my one hope is that the universal whitelist is a direct way to show valve "these are all the most busted weapons, for the love of god fix them already", but given that the valve-discussions from the past year include b4nny having to stop them from buffing those weapons even more, I'm a tad skeptical

but then, it would generate more viewers and pubbers would care more if valve supported competitive tf2. catch 22

lord knows I've been a critic before, but to say it can affect TF2 on a large end scale when just about every popular e-sport game is an infested hellhole, with communities that have ramifications a hell of a lot bigger than "your format is shit"? that's just straight-up delusion

TF2 isn't the cleanest of the pile, but given the games around it you could certainly do with far worse

at the end of the day, even under the assumption that highlander was flawless and filled with only the skilled of players top-to-bottom, it isn't caster-friendly, and that's always going to be the death knell. you can't have a successful competitive game if there's no feasible way of it getting stream traction--6s already has that issue in some ways, HL has it multiplied by a thousand

I thought it was to cover issues like cp_granary, because the default map had one side with slightly better spawning positions?

voted for something else in the hope of spiting you

yeah, it's not as if koth_product is exactly a haven for soldiers, and it's near-impossible to easily stall out a KOTH map like you can 5CP (unless you somehow end up in a scenario where neither team can cap the point to begin with, I guess?)

but then, I'm also thinking about granary defense with infinite ammo, and boy howdy does that sound like the least exciting match of all time

even then, couldn't you just push with the other soldier/demo?

it had a good enough flaw in the reload speed being longer, but then they made it 1:1 with the default so it seems like it'd be a pretty easy choice on any map where you don't have to care about engi defense. I've never seen a match that uses it though so this could all mean nothing, I'd rather wait and see how people effectively use it

ppl forgetting that one of the best TF2 teams of all time quit specifically because NA stopped having consistent LANs to go to

invite-level LANs create big money for winning players, big money for winning players mean more dedicated players who aren't afraid to go all-in practicing and playing with the intent of getting paid, which means better competition and better casts

oh, I'm not against coaching on its own, that's going to be a thing in just about any and all forms of popular competition. the thing is, this isn't just coaching, this is trying as hard as humanly possible to have a seventh team member without having a seventh team member, because maincalling is a core player skill in TF2, crowns offloaded that skill to someone else

coaching is 100% okay before a game starts, and during an ESEA halftime, but nowhere else. I'm not particularly salty in any way, but it doesn't change that people doubt their victory because of this legitimate issue, and regardless of whether or not crowns deserved it, that's not something you want out of a big event

I'm incredibly confused at how this level of coaching was even allowed. isn't one of the core parts of 6s that one or two players in the team call for plays with only their viewpoint and what teammates tell them as their information?

having live coaching, while being able to see every single player POV seems to just skip that entirely, it's an objective upgrade

as if two heavies sitting on last forever because they just stack health+damage and stalemate the match forever is a complex strategy with depth

this is a huge flaw a lot of team-based games have tbh. being able to just stack the same min-max bullshit multiple times doesn't add depth, that just means you're going to want to run two of that at minimum whenever you need the max stats. that's a devolving metagame, that's making it more shallow

preachin' to the choir, but: HL looks like it's a more balanced format. it isn't, because classes like sniper mean a million times more than any other slot (and as a result, HL play can easily devolve into which sniper gets the right picks first), but because every class has to be accounted for (no matter how useless they are for many points in the match) a casual player sees the list of players and assumes there's more variety

and let's be real, valve for the longest time was balancing classes with the idea that they were all treated equally, and casual players know that. it's going to take a while to break habit

nvidia users even get free money now? smh

(if it's a 970 and you bought it before this, it's eligible; the lawsuit came from the fact that the "4GB" of vram was basically 3.5GB in practice since the last .5GB was complete garbage) (also afaik it's american-only, as almost all class action settlements end up being)