river and devour are the same dude???

ah to be 12 again

I really don't understand this logic, as if valve is a cool guy that we spurned and is giving us the cold shoulder, rather than a private company whose only purpose is to earn profits for its executives and higher-up employees.

Valve doesn't support competitive tf2 because they don't see it as a feasible opportunity to MAKE MONEY anymore. Nothing more, nothing less. They are allocating their copious resources by supporting DOTA 2 first, and CSGO in a distant second, while tf2 is basically being maintained by like 3 interns.

Valve has a tried-and-true system of game developing. They find people who had the creative spark to make a great mod, buy out their franchise, and then put the other 95% of their employees on maintaining said games while the creative minds behind them in the first place move onto other projects, or set out on their own. The creative team behind tf2 is irrelevant and has been so for many years.

Valve had the opportunity to do many many things for competitive tf2 over the years, from the very big (hosting big money tournaments) to the medium (an in-game 6v6/hl lobby system, advanced spectator tools), to the rather small (not releasing updates 2 hrs before big matches, not breaking demos all the time, a competitive news tab and streams tab in the main window of the game, a nod to competitive players when it comes to weapon balance, posting about tf2 news on the FRONT PAGE of their website, generally acknowledging the comp scene's existence). They have done NONE of these things.

This false hope that big daddy Valve is gonna step in and save our game makes me want to vomit. It's shortsighted and it isn't what the great PC gaming DIY ethos should be about.

http://sizzlingstats.com/stats/233397

b4nny best demo in tf2

rip

The same people who liked the qf (div 4 retards and, for some reason, Classic Mixup) are advocating for this nerf. They were wrong there and they are wrong here.

That's my whole point in (somewhat) supporting a promod, and in at the very least not sucking valve's cock when it comes to game balance. Why should we care what they think or rely on their support when they do so little for us? People say we need the constant stream of pub players, but that stream is totally miniscule compared to the amount we could have if valve gave a shit. Maybe a really well-made promod, with spectator tools, custom huds/cfgs, lobby integration, better weapon balance, custom maps, tabs for competitive news and streams, and built-in access to teamfortress.tv as a community hub would attract pub players too. Maybe, while many fewer pub players would make the switch, a larger percentage of them would actually move onto playing comp.

Maybe extreme measures have to be taken to keep a 7-year old game alive.

It's possible to know enough about this game to effectively theorycraft without weeks, months, years of playtesting.

Valve doesn't know enough about this game to do so. I have confidence that (some) competitive players do.

So many different parts of this post make it very clear that you basically skimmed my post(s) without even trying to comprehend what I was saying.

You're just talking out of your ass at this point.

"Demo is still a massive damage dealer". Have you seen ANY fucking logs??? Demos are bottomdamaging or barely outdamaging 1 or 2 players.

"follow up more efficiently on the lessened damage". What damage? Like I said, a huge amount of a demo's damage (minus everyone's favorite aspect of demo, roller spam) will just be totally worthless, not capable of being followed up on efficiently at all.

"He still locks down chokes." I thought the whole (shortsighted) pro-update argument was that he doesn't lock down chokes anymore.

"He still does huge damage." Again, you're full of shit.

You are right that this update affects every class as well; it makes them all a lot easier from a gamesense point of view. That's what tf2 needed, right? Fewer players with good positioning, comms and teamwork and more MGE allstars?

Your first point in this segment I quoted is totally backwards. A change to one weapon of one class is so huge precisely BECAUSE this game revolves so much about team play; the entire team dynamic changes, and as I've argued already, not in a good way.

Why should people "take it cool" when the idiots at valve do more to ruin a competitive game they clearly don't understand well at all? Certainly they understand it much worse than most actual competitive players do.

I don't know why you're saying Epsilon have an "attitude" problem for running a perma-heavy on viaduct. Maybe permaheavy on viaduct is really good now that demos can't outspam them easily, ever think of that???

The meta shifts before were due to the skill of players. b4nny and others of his ilk (numlocked, kaidus, maybe platinum) were much more skilled than demos before them, proving that playing around the demo and going off uber with raw dmg output was often better than playing the uber game and hoping your pocket soldier got a .5 second advantage to hit 1 extra rocket. We don't need valve to make changes to the game to improve the meta for us, nor have we ever. The amount of legit sidegrades (gunboats, kritzkrieg) that have improved the game is reaaaally small. Forcing meta changes by raping classes is not at all the same thing.

No amount of pipe aim will ever make a demo uber remotely close to as good as a soldier uber with this update, it just won't happen.

The kritz argument you make is so boneheaded and has been shredded by enough people already so I see no reason to respond to it as well.

I'll address these points one by one.

1. More about aim and positioning for whom? If you're implying that neither is required to play demo on a mid fight, then you're a moron. If mid fight demo were so straightforward, then anyone would be able to do it, and people like kaidus and b4nny who are able to, through a combination of super fast rollouts and really strong aim, dominate early mids more than anyone else, wouldn't be nearly as valued. Anyways, even in situations where a demo can feasibly hit every sticky on a mid fight, there's a huge element of aim involved; imagine if you hit 80% of your shots and your opposing demo hits 100%, and that tiny disparity loses your team a mid. I guarantee there are plenty of mids as scout where you've hit 80% of your shots and gotten like a 5k, while an opposing scout hit every shot but died without a single kill. Mids are about teamwork and focus fire most of all, and demoman has always been a big part of that equation.

2. Why is this better? Is it better for soldier to now be the best at what it already did, AND a demo's former strength? How the fuck does that improve anything, unless you're a soldier who doesn't give a shit about balance as long as your class gets buffed?

3. I'd like to amend this and say "more aggression being possible for scouts with mediocre movement". Or perhaps "more aggression being possible for scouts who want to go lone wolf and not play off their team".

4. Again, how is this in any way an improvement? Like I said, hello 60% heal pocket soldiers again.

5. See above.

6. More defensively when alone, but also more defensively in general, as there's no longer much of a point to getting close, as your damage output is basically the same from further away with the rampup.

7. Yes, but sticky traps aren't really what demo should be about.

8. Yes, but pipes are pretty unreliable no matter who you are.

9. So you're dumbing down what is already by far the easiest class in 6s even further?

10. Yes, they'll be TOO strong, as the opposing team's demo can't stuff the kritz with sticky spam, and an enemy soldier will never be able to burst damage a kritz down without getting a perfect bomb on the kritzing medic.

11. Again, dumbing down the easiest class.

12. I'd argue that this is a huge exaggeration as, ever since gunboats and the equalizer/escpae plan/whatever you wanna call it, the advent of fast 300 hp sollies has made the early 3v3 on mid less important overall (something that many people complained about as well, I should add). Even if it's true, however, why take away something that a) demos have always been specialists at, and b) takes quite a bit of skill?

13. I don't think this change will actually happen, but if it did it would be a negative for roamer players as well.

As for your argument on damage and reliance on aim, I think that's total horseshit. It ignores the possibility that demo itself takes aim to do that initial damage, as well as the fact that medic being able to heal off the main damage source of a team easily can make fights last forever and be super derpy, and that focusing meds early on mid fights and playing heals is now much more viable (a bad change as killing meds on mid is super easy and takes a lot less skill and coordination than pushing together as a team and focusing fragging classes).

This is one of the more logical pro-update points in this thread.

However I still have a couple problems with it.

First off, recently scouts and roamers, traditionally the most "disposable" classes, have been throwing their lives away much less often, for two reasons: a) they figured out they could get a lot more done for their team by staying alive in the fight for longer, and b) good teams can push off of a player advantage even with the other team's demo and medic alive, so losing your own life is still risky.

Second, even if a demo can just go for nuts bombs and suicides, I don't see him having the same efficacy in doing so that, say, a roamer might have. He can't do the burst damage with stickies anymore, it's a lot lot lot harder to hit pipes while in midair bombing down onto something than it is with rockets, pipes don't splash, the self damage is much greater than a gunboats solly, and it's a lot harder to bomb around multiple times avoiding damage because you need to wait till a sticky can be det. It might be more fun for some, but wouldn't it be more fun still to just roam, where your bomb is probably twice as effective?

who the fuck are you and why do you think you could ever add anything to a discussion like this

Gladly.

I'd like to start narrow, by talking about demoman itself, before I move onto overall balance. I would've thought that, whether we were outraged by this decision or thought it was worth it for the greater good of competitive, that people would at least admit how shitty this made demoman. However, it appears some people are in denial about this fact. When b4nny, the best demoman to ever touch this game, starts literally bottomdamaging for his team, you know something is wrong. The best that even top demos seem to be able to do is match the damage of their scouts and roamer, and go a fair bit under their pocket's damage. However, people saying "so the demo is less OP and is just the same as any other class" are deluding themselves. Demo is by far the class that pads damage stats the most and pumps out the most useless damage; damage that no one can reasonably follow up on, that gets healed off, and that briefly holds someone up from coming through a choke but doesn't take off a significant margin of their health. In almost every log of a top-tier team from before the update, demos regularly topdamaged (as did pockets depending on the map and heal spread), but other classes almost always outkilled the demo. This was sensible; demo did by far the most dps, but had less finishing power and was worse at making its damage count than scouts or even sollies. Now a demo has similar damage output to other classes, but its killing power has dropped even more, being far below scout or soldier. That useless stat padding damage I mentioned before? That's still present, largely unchanged from before. The only difference is, a demo basically needs to go pipes only or bait everyone else on his team to get kills now. In addition, demo is far less fun to play than before, as the only viable way to play it is to hide waaaaay behind your team and chip damage from afar. So essentially, AT THE VERY LEAST the update has alienated 25% of the 6s community. Also, please don't spout that bullshit about "NOW U ACTUALLY HAVE TO AIM". First of all, aiming well doesn't help a ton when a scout is bulldozing into you like a retard and you're forced to quick det. Second, that kind of "heh just deal with it" logic could be used for literally any nerf for any class, no matter how bullshit. Imagine if valve listened to people complaining about soldiers just shooting their feet mindlessly, and made the rocket launcher have the spread of the direct hit, while keeping firing speed and damage the same. People would be outraged, and no amount of "wow now you actually have to aim rockets" would fix it.

Maybe, MAYBE this change would be worth it if it were beneficial to overall class balance and gameplay, but I STRONGLY disagree that it would be. First off, let's talk about the behavior of the three major fragging classes in 6v6. What makes tf2 interesting is that there's kind of a triangle of counters here, but it's traditionally been EXTREMELY soft. Scout counters demo, demo counters soldier, and soldier counters scout. However, any of these relationships can easily be reversed in tons of situations if a player has lots of skill, positions themselves well, gets heals at the right time and works with their team. Now, however, demo no longer has any upper hand on soldier, as the slow moving nature of sollies is a lot harder to punish with the meager damage stickies do now, especially with the high health of soldiers in general and overhealed pockets in particular. Scout v demo, meanwhile, is simply a complete joke. No matter what people say about demos needing to learn pipe aim nowadays, it's pretty ridiculous to argue that a really good scout is beatable with pipes when, 90% of the time, said scout will win that fight. Pipes are too much of a random element, and it's not like they've been buffed to compensate, with more in a clip or higher reload speed or anything of that nature. In short, the class balance triangle has been basically ruined. In terms of the speed of the game, I suppose it's possible that the game will be faster-paced, with running through chokes being easier. However, I don't think this was a good way at all to increase the tempo of the game, as it was done at the cost of tons of strategy. Now a team can just walk right in through a choke, with no sexy roamer distraction, no amazing shots, and no offensive demo spam of their own. Plus, you lose out on offensive demo spam to make room for a team to push, which always had a great element of aggressive focus fire to it. Just give the pocket 300 and he walks right in. That point brings me to what I probably want to emphasize the most. Some people thought demo was too much of a priority class, and that nothing but med should be elevated to that level of importance (why people believe medic deserves that level of esteem but draw the line at demo, I do not know). However, I believe that this update will make pocket soldier ridiculously OP, simply replacing the demo's former role. A pocket can basically go wherever he wants at any time, as long as his medic follows him, with very little risk. Where before we saw pockets with like 35-40% heals, and demos at 25-30%, I believe now pockets will be pushing like 60%, just like at the heart of the quick fix fiasco. Most good pockets will start to play the way Tiger did back in open, just running around with constant 300 doing whatever they want. Scouts will have a much harder time countering this strat, as without as much focus dmg sent the pocket's way it will be much harder to do enough burst dmg to defeat the overheal. Scouts might not complain, as demos will be shitty enough to feed them kills and dmg to make up for this change, but I see it hurting the game overall. In recent years, especially after gunboats became the vogue worldwide, we were nearing a point where every class had something to offer, and the super balanced frag, heal and damage distribution of top teams was very clear. Now, the balance is out of whack. To use a hyberbolic allegory: imagine if, tired of their pesky ways, we killed all the ants in the world, only to find the food chain collapse, and life on Earth end.

I hope I made my point.

I guess going into hl at this point would just be beating a dead horse; suffice it to say it will suffer even more from this change than 6s.

P.S. I refuse to even go into a discussion about "valve's original intent for the class", as that's such a fucking asinine argument for a variety of reasons