In terms of the stats listed they do but those are just a cosmetic bonus because I collect them. You shouldn't draw any conclusions about the ranks from what you see (or don't see) there. If there's no damage in a log damage isn't part of a ranking.

Sorry for the lack of TFTV thread earlier, I'll be posting updates and stuff in this one.

Off the back of my lobby balancing researches I’ve made this website tracking player rankings in TF2Pickup and TF2Center.

http://beta.tf2playerrankings.com/

It’s currently in beta but should be functional. Please check the FAQ first for questions, but I’ll make some quick notes here. Join the steam group for announcements! Although I’ll probably post updates here too.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/tf2playerrankings

The research basis is given a very basic outline here:
Zen and the Art of Balancing a Lobby

-You get a different rank on each class and for each site.
-You need to play about 10 games on that class and site to get a rank.
-The ranking mechanism is a trade secret.
-There is an inactivity penalty that will degrade your ranking over time if you don’t play, although this has only started working in the last couple of weeks so there’s still a lot of old ranks in there.
-If a good player trolls or plays recklessly they don’t get a good rating.
-The first 3 ranks always have a set number of players in them; 20, 30 and 50. After that rank population sizes are a proportion of the total population.
-Heals per minute tends to be messed up for medics, it’s down to missing data from logs.
-Names may be a bit messed up, I’ll be putting something in place to request name changes but I won’t be doing it manually now. You can search on your community id instead, the big long number with nothing else in it.
-You should be able to copy and paste urls for player detail pages so you can share them directly

Why does this exist? It started as a project to provide the basis for automated lobby & pickup balancing, and to improve lobby balancing a database like this has to exist. As far as I could tell no one else was in a position to do it. There doesn't seem to be any reason not to make it public and exploit it for entertainment purposes as well. Bug reports are welcome. If you're planning or run a lobby system there is a balancer API that does the heavy lifting for you, if you want to use it let me know.

I wanted to be sure the server was happy with the load from etf2l before I posted a thread here as well. I'll do something "official" a bit later.

You'd be better off citing specific arguments by individuals and addressing them than saying things like "Others" and "those that" because you're misrepresenting complex and nuanced arguments simply to suit your own.

From the Dick Van Dyke school of English accents, Mary Poppins

It's not all ban, you can ban enough to remove the totally horrific unlocks, then limit picks to enforce a stable in-game meta which deals with the other problem of the open whitelist, which is having no idea what your opponents will run producing chaos because there's no ability to plan.

So you're right, 6s remains essentially unchanged while a much more officially acceptable version of the format comes into being.

Edit: There has to be an understanding here that the end game with regards to any of these new formats is supposed to be official recognition. My starting point is that current 6s is the best format we've got, and there is no chance of official recognition while blocking a lot of what makes Valve money which is weapons. Nothing better than pick/ban crafted to maintain the existing meta reasonably closely occurs to me.

So ban them during the ban phase.

I've seen this mentioned a few times before so it must have something to it. Within a pick/ban scenario (not AR) I think this is essentially setting a parameter for how it should work - that players should only be able to pick a couple of weapons after a ban phase to maintain a consistent in-game meta (but with the potential for variations between games), so it's a matter of making the pick/ban phases effective enough to limit the number of weapons in actual play.

So my guess would be some kind of ban phase to kick out the most broken stuff, and then a pick phase to set the meta for the game from the remainders. I'm not sure exactly how you'd work it, a balanced system to reduce trolling but also give the potential for proper strategy would be the goal. Maybe even allow the teams to select different weapons from each other?

Nice to see one of the participants really giving their experience some thought, thanks Herr_P

There's a perception that adding unlocks will suddenly make recruitment easier (it probably won't, HL doesn't have this enormous player base and they allow almost everything). There is also the chance Valve is going to bring in match making which would bring in a huge number of players to the format, but Valve won't be banning anything even if it's bugged, and getting Valve support for any small team format will hinge on that. It seems this second point is genuinely possible, particularly with Overwatch apparently supporting a competitive game mode from the start.

It's very interesting that after playing open unlock games you come to a similar conclusion to the TF2 team's suggestion and not just for "ban this broken unlock" reasons, but for improved strategic gameplay reasons. What do you think of the idea of a pick/ban mod where players ban unlocks before the match starts? In the matchmaking code that's been uncovered so far I think (from memory) there is a designated section called "strategy time" but no one knows what it does.

I blame Pinion

We won't really know the full impact until some teams are playing just to win and aren't spamming unlocks for the novelty value. Although the theory crafting is fun it's how they're actually used that counts. We need to see situations that will arise in genuine competitive games, like Wrangled level 3's on Gully last.

I considered doing this but it didn't feel quite right applying an MvM scale to the competitive game, then I thought nothing I can come up with will please everybody so it would be better to let people have their say up front.

It's for a standalone website that will track and display the ranks. Any pickup/balancing service of any kind should be able to make use of them if they wish.

I don't see the point of worrying about it to be honest, UGC isn't going anywhere and neither is ESEA as long as they get signups. Get exposure of the format to new players and the scene will thrive, the leagues will continue to take care of themselves. Someone saying you have to kill all leagues other than ESEA on a forum will have zero impact on that.

The efforts players are making with the playcomp.tf thing are really the things that will make a difference. It's the one place Valve can't shut us out from and probably doesn't want to - the actual game itself.

I think the similarities between pubs and HL goes some way to disprove this, although of course if the base game was Highlander it would make leagues more accessible.

The differences between TF2 and Dota and CS that drive large scale participation are exposure (it's in the game client with competitive news), ease of use (it's almost one click to start a competitive game, really easy to play with your friends too), and official recognition.

The only 'official' competitive game format from Valve is 9v9, but despite this there is no way to join a 9v9 game from the client home screen and they don't include any news about the competitive scene in general in the game client either, and anything we ask for is marginalised in the blog news tab.

The only way to get that stuff into the game client is via a custom hud (this is possible right?). How you motivate thousands of pubbers to use your hud is open to question, it would have to have some compelling features.