So what exactly does 45 minutes per round mean? If a game starts with only 20 minutes before the next round, is it just a 20 minute game?

also according to the june monthly thread this month is gonna feature a new, good tournament platform and shorter waits between matches

holy heck this looks nice, psyched for this month. how many teams can we be on, and can we start more than one team?

Lmao unbelievable. The response to "oh this elder scrolls franchise is really popular and is doing well" is "better not develop any more games and milk this one as long as possible!" Im not saying it doesnt make sense business wise, but as a fan its fun to know that giving them money actually gets punished

On the other hand, doesn't it kind of encourage teams to scrim all maps except the ones they ban, encouraging greater map diversity? I don't know about everyone else, but with the old system, by the end of the week I was absolutely sick of whichever map we had to play. The new system means teams should just try to get good in general, and gives teams a day to work out their kinks if they still happen to get a map they're not good with after 3 bans.

Not really. In EU the map was swapped out with literally no warning. No one knew that it was important to the season to test shit and offer feedback until it was too late. In NA we were told weeks ago to vote for our favorite new map, but no one bothered to do any testing anyway because of this ban system. Somehow people are now bitching anyway when they forget to ban the map. Personally, I'm looking forward to my team's Cardinal match this week, but I'm disappointed that we're basically gonna have to go in blind.

The way everyone immediately shits on new maps is straight up some autism shit: aversion to any and all change. For real, anything that deviates from the process "3 chokes, open spaces" is immediately dismissed without any testing. Even with Product, people just refuse to play it because its not the same as every other fucking map. "I don't know how to play it, therefore it's a bad map." For example, everyone gets mad that Product has strong sniper sightlines, but there are ways to deal with sniper on Product. There are places you can hold your team to spam the point without dying, there are jumps your soldier can use to get onto the sniper from all sorts of places, and you can use ubers to get deep without dying. The only excuse you have for losing just because of a sniper is that you didn't know how to play the map. Are you allowed to have an opinion about the map? Sure, of course. It's perfectly reasonable to be miffed that sniper has strength on Product, because he does. But he's not even close to invincible, and you shouldn't confuse personal opinion with how you like to play with legitimate criticism of the map. Product isn't bad because you don't know how to play against the sniper, it just means you don't like Product. There's a huge difference there.

Contrast this against criticism of Granary. You could talk about how the crates on mid block all the sightlines, so that only the soldiers on either team have any idea what's going on. You could talk about the struggle between yard and 2nd, the so-called extra capture point, and how it contributes to stalemates. You could talk about how hard it is to sac players into literally any point, and how ultimately the optimal strategy is to just stalemate and hope boredom takes the other team first. That's where criticism stops being personal and starts being useful: talking about optimal strategy. When you can say the best way to play the map is boring, dumb, or impossible to counter, that's when things really get interesting.

No one has an optimal strategy for Cardinal. No one's played it enough to develop one, let alone to try to counter one. People have just noticed it doesn't play perfectly to the rules of 5cp that have been developed for the maps we already have, and have dismissed it right away on that. If you don't want to have to learn how to play new maps, then fine. Go ahead and say that. But don't call Cardinal shitty just because you don't know how to play it yet.

it really does suck tho, fuck esea

my first team from all the way back in ugc iron. only one of them hasnt quit tf2 yet (Big Ups To Invite Shylo), and theres another i still play games with, but the other 3 quit gaming in general and i miss them a ton.

also failwizard and friends :)

never got my rewind pin either :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQRW0RM4V0k

rocket league babyyyyy

lol. from the outside the cup just looked like a fun little thing that beater and etf2l had put together. literally no reason to believe the cup was immediately relevant outside of providing map feedback, which is only fun for a select group of people. ive got nothing against the people who did play it, but there's also no reason to hold a grudge against the people who didn't.

POG

but yeah sandblast + laz + slem = im???

for one thing, asshole, i absolutely provide feedback when its asked of me, i just didnt want to play a euro cup. i actively participated in na new map pugs back when they happened and made plenty of posts on map threads about what i thought worked and what didnt. you havent even played competitive since fucking 2016.

its not fair to begrudge people for preferring to spend their time playing maps they know are gonna be in next season instead of spending time on a cup playing maps they have no reason to believe they will ever play in any official capacity.

edit, what im trying to say is that if etf2l had indicated at all that they were considering trying out these new maps, people would have cared a lot more