TF2's original design only includes slow HoT's (mediguns, dispensers) that force you to position somewhat close to one another as a downside, with the only exception being health packs which force you to wait for them to recharge and position in very exact spots (which usually favor particular teams or holding particular areas depending on the pack). This was actively chosen because all of the damage classes (except Pyro coz Pyro lul) did extremely high burst damage at their respective ranges, the intention being that stalemates would rarely happen because the damage in the game would generally always outpace the healing to an absurd degree, if you land good damage you could push on good damage.

Burst healing on the level of the crossbow has skewed the game pretty hard, because the game's damage numbers weren't designed around players being able to receive burst heals on a tiny reload timer with an infinite LOS requirement.

Take something like Gully's flank to 2nd, if you ate a good rocket back in the day you were boned, you hopefully had enough health after all the pressure to jump to your Medic otherwise you either walked up slowly (ancient Gully) or equalized up and then you waited for your 24 HP/s while your Scout was alone on flank, making your flank vulnerable and very easy to overrun.

Nowadays if you eat a good rocket you back up a couple steps and get crossbowed and the entire flank momentum basically gets reset. You need to sync damage before the xbow hits to land a kill or else you're not making much headway with the Medic up.

Plus it's basically a Scout buff, Medics are able to heal Scouts so much more often after they buffed the Crossbow's reload time + passive reload attribute because they can crossbow everyone else and spend less time healing everyone else directly and invest that time into Scout. If you tried to heal Scout as much in a no Crossbow world, you'd be forfeiting heals directly on your Soldiers/Demo.

Mind I just think they need to make it work off the crit heals mechanic and dump the passive reload stat, Medic's healing power is basically tied directly into crit heals and the crossbow completely ignores them which is pretty dumb. Players aren't supposed to receive good healing in combat unless they grab a pack, and Crossbow is pretty much ghetto packs in its current state.

If e-sports continue to take off and grow this will become more and more common place.

You can be a relatively small competitive scene'd game like Team Fortress 2 where for the most part the community tries to police itself on how much or how little inclusive it is for better or worse, but it has very little money in it and everything is essentially grass roots and built by the community for the community, main downside being that due to there not being money in general and the dev support likely not being all there this type of experience is essentially guaranteed to wither eventually as players/casters/community builders move on to other games where they are better rewarded for their time/energy even if they don't enjoy those other things as much. As e-sports continue to take off and the years go by these kind of games will become more and more rare. (I think you can easily argue this is already happening, the amount of competitive games with no dev interaction is minimal, and the ones that do exist don't even make it to 25% of TF2's lifetime nowadays.)

Or you can be a very large competitive game, heavily backed by the developers with in-game MTX/advertising support, large sponsor support, and lots of companies all intertwined. Due to the sheer amount of money/marketing/brand imagery, a higher level of professionalism is required and you have to be extremely inclusive (or at least, maintain the image that you are such) to make all of said companies happy/look good. They will steer away from imagery that has any real negative connotation, even if it can mean other things. They will put greater emphasis on punishing what is publicly hurting their brands/image more than what isn't, even if what isn't noticed is worse than what is noticed. This is the kind of game you can genuinely live off of as a real job, but it is a real job and you actually have to treat it like that every waking hour you're making yourself public or else you'll get dumpstered, and since e-sports is on the Internet and kind of super intertwined getting dumpstered in one game is likely to just end your career in any game if it's severe enough. (e.g. the recent DK drama in OW, if that pans out he's basically done in anything e-sports)

There's really not much of an in between here, when money and companies and branding gets involved, so does professionalism and some people need to put on a fake face to make it. Even real life sports have penalized players for homophobic remarks and other such behavior. If people hire you and put you under contracts and sponsorships, you have to do your best to represent them publicly, that's life.

If Valve ever hypothetically actually invested into competitive TF2, it'd go the same way.

e:

Sorry just got off work.

To specify, obviously I did not mean TF2 would be anywhere near as strict as OWL, Valve gets their e-sports money from the community currently so there's no reason it would be as strict as OWL since they aren't as beholden to other companies, but Valve would still heavily punish someone if they dropped the n word or homo/transphobia at an International stream/interview or something on that level, which would be more strict than the current TF2 situation where we've had players scream the n word at ESEA LAN and go completely unpunished, still able to play competitively and all that. Plus players would still be beholden to sponsors at the top end if they wanted to keep them for wages/gaming houses/LAN travel coverage, etc.

I'm looking for high level 6s video content to help out players interested in competitive, this content will be used in a directory on the TrueTF2 subreddit where players interested in competitive can access it in 2 clicks making it readily available in a contained place. This directory is part of a larger guide to competitive TF2, that includes everything from explaining why competitive has restrictions, to setting proper competitive options, explaining standard competitive terms, setting up Mumble/Discord, how to communicate well, how to join Newbie Mixes, advertising PUG groups for appropriate skill levels, and much more.

These class pages include class specific guides (which I already have from prior made content by other people), descriptions of how the class is utilized/played, and the weapons/unlocks that are currently largely meta.

Currently, Highlander has the most amount of content here and that's largely because I do not actively follow/have contacts with modern 6s players, so I'd like your help in getting 6s to either have as much or (ideally) more content representation than Highlander. If you know of content that meets the criteria or are a top player interested in even contributing just one video for your class, it'd help immensely and add up.

Feel free to post it here or PM me with the content.

Here's the things I'm looking for and the requirements:

(Note: Content should be at least post Jungle Inferno, so that it is more relevant to the current game state.)

POV Videos

* Commentary optional, although it would be appreciated (either live team comms or you playing the POV demo back and commentating on your gameplay)

* Scrims and matches only.

* Highest division in your region's primary league (ESEA/ETF2L/etc) or from the top of the division before it.

* On YouTube (if you streamed on Twitch, you can easily link Twitch to your YouTube and move the VODs over).

* Avoid music or any other content that can get your video region locked.

Demo Review Videos

* Scrims and matches only.

* The Demo Reviewer should play in the highest division in your region's primary league (or from the top of the division before it.), but the Reviewee can be from any division.

* On YouTube (if you streamed on Twitch, you can easily link Twitch to your YouTube and move the VODs over).

* Avoid music or any other content that can get your video region locked.

Utility Clips (fully expecting these to be rare)

* Scrims and matches only.

* Highest division in your region's preferred league or from the top of the division before it.

* Video clip should involve a utility class being used well/being a deciding factor in the game.

* Clip can be a part of a larger video, just give me a time stamp.

* On YouTube (if you streamed on Twitch, you can easily link Twitch to your YouTube and move the VODs over).

* Avoid music or any other content that can get your video region locked.

---

Just in case if someone asks why not demos:

Getting players to read only their config.cfg in order to watch a demo and not have their config potentially replaced if something goes wrong and having to deal with the technical issues some demos have been having with crashing even across small patches, and then having to explain how to tick skip (and deal with those crashing) over-complicates the process too much. This is all about having the ultimate newbie friendly experience - you hover over 6v6 Resources, click the class you want to learn about, and have information at your finger tips.

e: If you have experience playing close to the highest division (high IM etc) I'd accept too at this point.

RE: Natascha

Before this update Slows in TF2 were applied but did not temporarily lower your class's base max movespeed. This is important because:

a) Hastes (Conch, Whip, etc) temporarily adjust your base max movespeed so mechanically this is doable.

but more importantly:

b) It meant if you held W + any strafe key (or alternated them really fast ideally) it would reduce the slow significantly, if you tapped fast enough you could bypass slows pretty much entirely.

Post update, Slows in TF2 now temporarily low your class's base max movespeed, so moving forward + strafing no longer reduces slows.

This means:

a) The Bonk slow downside actually matters now and can't be exploited out like the OG Bonk could.

b) Sandman slow is potent as fuck now.

c) Natascha is finally slowing people for the proper amount for the first time ever.

I'm sure they will probably have to re-evaluate the Nat slow because the reality is if you held W+any strafe key (likely) you were never getting slowed for the proper amount and the weapon was likely balanced around that originally.

IMO this is resolvable with the following changes:

* Punish people for demo review offenses right away.

* Change it so week punishments only go down from actual seasonal weeks, so if someone gets a demo review punish at the end of the season it will remain and then bleed over into the next season. This puts more pressure on taking demos during playoffs seriously which is good because those matches are even more important.

* Mention it in the next ban post regardless just to provide clarity.

Mechanical gameplay I guess? Which I mean sure but mechanical gameplay isn't the sole thing that makes a game exciting to play, and what we've already seen shows solid complexity on the macro side of gameplay.

You have to manage 3 different mana resources, pick your heroes based on synergies, have good hero placement both to win your lane & be able to utilize your color cards properly, try to earn gold and decide how to spend your gold economy to win the game on your heroes, manage/watch 3 lanes at the same time and pay attention to cross-lane effects, coordinate combos to push in tower damage, know when to forfeit some tower health to gain an advantage on your next round, pay attention to initiative between rounds, etc.

If I'm honest, and Gabe said something along these lines too, it's probably going to turn some players off like DotA does because it's the antithesis of simple Hearthstone-esque gameplay.

IDK if people saw, but it was confirmed that Richard Garfield started working on the concept several years ago (before Hearthstone existed) and pitched it to Valve 4 years ago when he realized it could be skinned with an ARTS shell who hired him to then work on it.

For those who don't play card games or are oblivious to them or whatever, Richard Garfield is basically the Icefrog or John Romero analog to card games. He's the guy who put the genre on the map essentially, has very good design sense, and just overall is a great designer.

More than anything this is what has me hyped, a passion project from Garfield - someone who has long wanted to fix the problems Magic has and fully take advantage of the digital space for card games - is exciting as hell and probably is to anyone who has actively played Magic hardcore in the past.

I honestly don't know why Valve didn't lead in with this on their original announcement since there's a ton of people who will see the name Richard Garfield and instantly be on board, but Valve does seem to have a history of underwhelming opening announcements then casually dropping big news out of the blue, they did that with Half-Life 2 even, showed off a physics tech demo then later basically went "by the way that's actually a real big part of the game".

Final Fantasy 8 is a top 5 Final Fantasy and the people who say the orphanage stuff makes no sense didn't even pay attention to the story in the first place.

It spends what little time it does have talking about the game itself explaining 6v6 and the core classes and sidesteps all the other games & communities and events that led to 6v6 being the popular e-sports mode, again including the 6v6 specific ones. Heck they don't even touch on the 5 other classes or KOTH to just keep the gameplay explanation timely and simple.

If the documentary didn't even spend time on the 6v6 specific events that helped 6s grow, it sure as hell isn't going to throw ultiduo/bball/mge/Highlander/anything else not 6s TF2 into the mix and dilute the focus.

It would also take more than a minute or two to do those things real justice which is also extra time you have to find a way to fit into the documentary's pacing, and if there was any kind of optimal time limit as consideration for the Grand Finals then you have to work around that.

This wasn't really a "History of Competitive TF2" documentary, where stuff like the ETF2L Highlander Challenge (and 6v9 events and MGE etc) would basically be necessary to bring up if you were doing it competently. It doesn't really touch on much of the actual history of 6s at all outside of the modern LANs fundraising really.

There's no reason to mention those, how or where people got into 6s wasn't even mentioned in the documentary (including even the 6s related events!) because it wasn't really the point of it and it would have easily bogged it down & over-complicated the docu to non-TF2 players.

The way it balanced rehabilitation & punitive justice is one of the things I think got skewed by me not answering the questions correctly or something, because I'd say I'm way more rehab (like reasonably in the 90-99% area) but I felt like the test didn't handle this part of it very well or maybe I just misunderstood parts of it.

i agree with mustard too, some questions im pretty confident i answered wrong because they were worded really poorly and there was even 1-2 that were legit missing words.

several questions about repeated topics that i personally felt weren't the biggest deals politically (or could at least have been summed up with 1-2 questions rather than the like 5-8 some of these were given) while completely ignoring other political topics almost entirely.

https://imgur.com/a/4eoZO

This really isn't difficult and I dunno why people over-complicate it:

Does adding the spoilers to the title actually add anything to the overall piece that couldn't be replicated by making it the first sentence of the piece?

If the answer is no (spoilers: it is) then why do it when it clearly only subtracts by annoying people who don't want to be spoiled?

UGC gets this right...like c'mon.

I dunno how much you care about graphics or needing to read, but Planescape Torment: Enhanced Edition is 10$ during this sale and it is the best story I've played in a game yet. It's superbly well written, has a very unique setting with a very unique set of rules it abides by, and the main hook of the game (the most I can say without spoilers is you are an immortal with amnesia from dying too many times) is actually played extremely well and used in actual game mechanics.

It's also very replayable, I played it 10 times through to see everything, because your decisions & alignment matter quite a lot and there's so many layers on the main characters you can peel away depending on what kinda character you play. Also has the best Evil playthrough out of all the games I've played.

The negatives are that the combat isn't amazing, and if you aren't into Dungeons & Dragons type combat (Baldur's Gate) you might hate it, but it's one of those games where if you go heavy into Intelligence/Wisdom/Charisma (which you should) you can avoid 99.9% of the combat if it's not your thing.