All that being said, I think there is something about all this we need to pay attention to: 6v6 TF2 is really boring - but don't hit that - button just yet.

This is going to seem like a really dumb way to do this and probably not work at all, but try it: take away all of your knowledge about 6v6 TF2, and just leave in the basics; how each class works, the skill it takes to accomplish certain tasks, those are fine, but don't assume things like uber advantage, or choke positioning, or buff control and crit-heals.

Now try to imagine the last game you watched: it was a team of 6 people, half hanging out in one part of the map, and the other half in another. Nothing's happening; a scout is hurting himself with the boston basher, which is making the medic heal him. There are a bunch of stickies on a wall, and nobody has switched to pyro to blow them away. There's a team holding the last point, but they haven't switched to two engineers and a heavy to make sure they can hold them off until time runs out.

What I'm getting at is, this is how the average player would probably see our games. They're not as dynamic or exciting (to them) as a pub player; nobody is trying anything crazy, until a soldier rocket jumps in and kill himself, and they're just sitting on the same 6 classes, waiting until who knows what to actually do something. Then they fight for a few seconds, and then it starts over.

So how do we fix that, how do we engage more people without bending over backwards and erasing years and years of tweaks? I think we've had the answer floating around for a bit, but it's never really been fully realized: king of the hill. This is a game mode that, generally speaking, has the most dynamic play and potential for change. This is where the most regular off-classing happens, and where there's almost always something new popping up every season. Most importantly, this style of play most closely resonates with pub players', because there's less holding chokes and more rallying to push in a group, with random, wild plays here and there.

I'm not proposing we shed all of our 5cp maps and turn TF2 into a KOTH game, but it would be nice to see some growth on this aspect. I think there should be some discussion, mostly from higher level players, about how to create new KOTH maps that aren't just Viaduct-a-likes. I think there can be some interesting features added to KOTH maps that could tweak the way that particular one is played, without completely breaking existing strategies. Different point configurations, built-in ways to off-class, maybe even a dual-point type of thing (please don't bring up standin) - as I've said, there's a lot of room to grow in this regard.

Don't worry sire, I read all of your words and liked them!

I dont think I understand this post. Valve/Robin wants to make the game more fun to watch, and more dynamic and interesting. They want to change the game based off of what makes competitive dota fun to watch, what makes HL interesting and what robin (and honestly, pretty much everyone who doesnt play competitive tf2) sees as his personal reasons for why 6s isnt interesting from a spectators point of view.

Lots of people in the community, even high level 6s players, have expressed a feeling that 6v6 is stale, or could be improved with a large level of variety. Robin seems like he is open to different options, and meeting the community halfway.

So yeah, this post seems a little overdramatic. Valve isnt trying to destroy tf2 for personal gain, its trying to make it better. 6v6 imo HAS been a success simply because it is a fun game-mode to play. But so is HL, and why shouldnt Valve's vision be?

Valve isnt trying to destroy competitive tf2. They are doing what we should already done on our own.

I think we all like a well designed KOTH map, but it's unfortunately really hard to make a balanced and fun map. See ashville and stock viaduct.

I like it how viaduct's biggest problems were literally fixed by opening a hole in it.

That's fucking hilarious.

I don't see any harm what so ever in trying what robin and valve are suggesting.

The fact that they reached out and are attempting to do something for competitive tf2 play whether it's 6v6 or highlander is great, even if it is on their own terms.

Who knows what will turn into, it may turn out to be huge or a big flop, but we will never know until we try and support what this robin guy wants to do.

To go against what valve and robin are trying to do is a HUGE mistake. We don't get many opportunities like this.

And to say regular 6v6 play will die is just pure paranoia, regular 6v6 play is going no where, whether valve does something with comp or not.

it's not really possible to make competitive tf2 more interesting by using other classes, because heavy and engineer and pyro are literally monkey retard classes that are cheap and unrewarding both to play and to play against and should be removed from the game, and spy is only fun to watch when the other team has a collective IQ of 80 because it's an underpowered class designed around a game mode where no one ever communicates anything or pays attention. as for unlocks, most of them are just +stat -stat versions of either stock weapons or other unlocks. sometimes something genuinely different is introduced—the pyro gets a flare gun, the soldier gets shoes and banners, the scout gets an energy drink and a cleaver, the sniper gets a jar of piss and a shield, etc—but even then a lot of the concepts are kind of ridiculous. "throw this jar in the vague direction of enemy forces to get extra damage for no reason!" again, if a monkey could use the unlock, it's probably bad.

if valve wanted to make the competitive game more fun to watch and less stale here are some suggestions

remove the stupid classes. there should not be things in a game where you can do nothing but stand next to a payload cart and hold M1 and still win. that's like playing baseball with an aimbot and the rocket jumper.
remove the insta-kills. no spy, no sniper, no random crits, no loch 'n' load type weapons.
add some classes that have interesting skill-indexed abilities. like, what if there was a class with the ability to fly around the map in, like, a hang glider or some shit. that would be pretty interesting. add more projectile weapons with different abilities, since projectiles require more prediction than hitscan.
make it viable to not have a medic. make uber less important. (with engineer removed from the game uber doesn't need to be a hard counter to anything.)
make some competitive maps in other game modes. like reinvent CTF with a neutral flag both teams have to try to capture, or reinvent payload with a cart that automatically goes forward when the attacking team has a numerical advantage. TDM insta-respawn should totally be an official mode btw.
make some unlocks that actually change the way a primary weapon is used. a scout primary that's not a scattergun (maybe the nail gun from the concept?), a soldier primary that's not a rocket launcher.

(this is the considered opinion of someone who only ever played tf2 in pubs and was spectacularly bad at it)

equalizer

@#91, why not make a 5cp map that plays each point like a KOTH map? That is, the respawns, the holds, the way each point is structured would be like KOTH, and the respawn times balanced accordingly.

This isn't something unique to tf2. Competitive CS is the most boring thing in the world if you don't understand the game well but it still had very high viewership when it was popular. Half the time spent in mobas is farming creeps and jockeying for positional/vision advantage yet people still watch those.

if valve cared just a bit about the comp scene, they would atleast add that "clan tag" feature that they have on csgo, i know it's something dumb but it means something.
we just cant kill our comp scene by building a comp scene that valve wants, not that we prefer

It does come across as something more akin to changing the rules to "spice up the show", when there's structurally nothing wrong with the current format. Most of the "change" people want is currently right now the minute gains, the stuff you work on to make your pushes that much more efficient.

Sixes as it stands is the most refined and effective format in Competitive FPS today, it is the Formula One of Shooters. Please oh please don't put a smaller engine in the game we love for the sake of those not watching...

We really dont need valves support. So what if our 6v6 format is a little hard for pubbers to "get". We ALL started out as pubbers at some point, then we found the competitive scene somehow, and here we are. We dont need to change the way we do things to get support from valve to make our scene grow at thrive, because we already are growing and thriving.

If we could just get valve to put links to some of our popular streamers on the official team fortress site, and promote things like fully charged on the site as well we could help a lot of new pub players find their way to the competitive scene.

Also, have we thought of starting a petition to get a 6s lobby system made with OUR ruleset?

unbelievable

excuse me for asking a question enigma

It's already been said Valve won't do this because they can't guarantee the quality of the streams or what the streams will do, it would make Valve look bad if they said "hey check out this stream" and then for some reason the streamer one day decides to just say nigger 500 times in a row, etc etc.

They don't even do this for dota 2, so there's no chance in hell they'd do it for tf2.

very good points, i didnt think of that

while removing key class limits would certainly kill the game i dont see a reason not to allow all the unlocks in the ingame 6v6 lobby system, and honestly moving people from the ingame lobbies to the competitive leagues with weapon bans isnt all that off putting once they realize that our ban list isnt all that extensive anyways. and honestly it wouldnt be the end of the world if all weapons were unbanned either.

just play the game and enjoy it as it is.
6v6 is fun, i don't see a reason for changes.
having support from valve or more viewers won't change anything.

I wouldn't exactly say the 6s ban list isn't extensive, almost half the weapons in the game are banned.

There are 50 weapon bans, and (ignoring reskins which don't do anything but including the Pyroland reskins) 123 unlocks.

So 40% of the game's items are banned.

e:

And some of the bans are for items that I think most people would admit are really bad items that wouldn't affect much except allow a niche strategy if they were allowed and at least give the "illusion of choice" at worst for a new player.

More in Europe I'm sure :P

Even as a comp. player, watching a 5-10 minute stalemate for no reason is incredibly boring. "Let's wait until someone makes a mistake." I'm getting really tired of hearing this.

let me quote the first thing said in this thread

Then let me quote something said shortly later

To be sure of the validity of my implied statement which shows the redundancy of yours,

And then the last paragraph.

I'm sorry, but that was just way too redundant for me to take.

ETF2L allows 9 weapons, so 88% of the game's weapons are banned there, yeah.

YOu do realise that is down to
a) defender's advantage
b) wanting to win

Unless you can get teams to not want to win and somehow destroy the defender's advantage (by fundamentally changing how a FPS is played), you will NEVER get rid of that. It's an inherent part of competition, just look at any sport, game or competitive ANYTHING.

You know what will happen if you make pyro/spy/sniper even more viable? Teams run them and create stalemate situations out of nothing. Soon you'll see teams that lose the midfight resort of M2 pyro at chokes if he becomes more viable and powerful. I mean, that's how it is in HL with 24/7 pyro. At every point, at every point, the defending pyro is just spamming down M2 trying desperately to reduce the uber so it becomes another stalemate. Or a game of leap frog.

I'm unfairly picking on the pyro, but the same can be said of the spy (teams will just turtle up and let their spy get a pick), sniper (same deal), engy (same deal, defending team will plonk down a sentry and bait the attacking team into a sentry). And because the attacking team now doesn't know what kind of gay strat the other team is running they'll just deploy the heavy and be all like, yea, if you wanna push into mid, you'll have to jump against a 450HP heavy.

If you make any of the other classes more viable it'll degenerate into a turtle-fest or a rock-paper-scissors match, neither of which is fun to watch or to play.

I think Arx's idea/screenshot is definitely on the right path. Along with a 9v9 highlander and 6v6 traditional, you could add a 6v6 comp as well - rule sets could be added etc. I mean there's numerous ways Valve can go about this, but ultimately they are going to go with what caters to the masses (don't be suprised if it looks exactly like the MvM system). The issue being for Tf2 is the mass has always been the casual pub player. They honestly don't need to draw people to the game at this point with comp, simply because the steam store and the chance of getting unusual hats has really carved it's own stamp. TF2 is really just a money dump for valve now...i would love to see how much (total) the steam store generates on a monthly basis.

TF2's biggest success is that it's a relatively easy game to just pick up and have a good time with. You don't need to be at even a high open level to just go into a pub and do well...people like that, and it makes for a fun time as a casual gamer. All you need to do is look at steam stats...TF2 is consistently in the top 3 played games ranging from 30k-70k gamers daily.

Now unfortunately, an incredibly small percentage (probably around 5%) of that is comp players. I don't want to come straight out and say Valve doesn't care at all about comp tf2...but they certainly have never done enough to promote it. I can count the number of times on one hand 6v6 has been mentioned on teamfortress.com. I'm still at a loss after all these years as to why they never even tried...with such a big audience to advertise to, they could have turned a lot of people onto the game and made an entirely new niche for themselves. The problem is they've had their chances, but as in the past, they tend to cling to one game and really promote the hell out of it (see Dota 2 - 1 million dollar challenge, and now upcoming 2 million dollar challenge). Hell if they even had a TF2 10k challenge, just think of the amount of people that would bring in.

Four times wasnt enough.