The most logical reason they're forcing everyone to have them on is so that people who watch streams don't get confused about what's going on, because little to no other competitive games let you play without viewmodels entirely.

There are better ways to go about this though.

for the record blizzard attempted to do the same thing with overwatch but sucked at it. it's supposed to match identical size parties - so, for instance, a party of 2, 3, and 1 will go up against another party of 2, 3, and 1. it doesn't work in practice though because blizzard set wait times where the matchmaker would just pair you up with odd teams if you waited too long. valve doesn't have such a timer... hence the even longer wait times for larger groups, on top of the already absurdly long wait times that Jill called a bug.

not anymore :^)

Do all of the custom images actually work okay with sv_pure? If so how did you do them?

currently on an island off the coast of maine called Vinalhaven. favorite place, come here almost every year

I honestly have never touched the HUD crosshair stuff so that's probably all left over from yahud (even before takyahud). I can probably take a look at it and maybe I can fix it, but no promises.

As it is right now I'm already cleaning up a lot of shit left over from the other HUD lifespans that I no longer support. I'm still happy to help people with customizations, but maintaining huge numbers of slightly different files for every version is tough.

As an aside I'm aware of all of the misalignment issues in matchmaking and will be looking into them in the future.

you can't change r_drawviewmodel, viewmodel_fov, etc while in comp mode.

all of those cvars are still unlocked in regular play though. no amount of scripting is going to get around a cvar lock.

random question, does anyone actually use any of the backgrounds from the Alternative Main Menu Backgrounds folder? those being the gray gradient, normandy, and trees. they're left over from takyahud and while i always want to encourage customization (and will be working on more themes) i think they're just dumb to include in the first place.

oh, well i think that's mainly because i selectively chose what to include and what not to include. for example i didn't update my main menu because i decided to not implement the dropdown.

paging enigma

it's in the status indicators for each of those spots but I forgot what each one is called, sorry (not at comp atm)

lol this explains way more than it should

that invisible FC tho

The most complicated, modern, competitive game stats-wise that I can think of is Starcraft II. TF2 is almost laughably basic in comparison. For instance, here's just the *movement* stats of one of the most basic units in the game, the Marine.

http://i.imgur.com/HqSou52.png

This doesn't account for art data, stats such as life, energy, or shields, weapon stats or even what weapons it has, or anything like that. Purely movement data.

Using the above example, what's actually displayed ingame?

http://i.imgur.com/uTLKPk3.jpg

Blizzard is the king of hidden stats, not Valve. Not many weapons in TF2 even have hidden stats anymore, unless they're completely different weapons like the Huntsman.

it kind of makes sense for the dead ringer though, because it's a totally different playstyle that did need some small tweaks, and now the DR is a lot more balanced for it.

i think this trend started with the loose cannon and really took off with the air strike.