it makes perfect sense that this wasn't a huge update, honestly. you have to realize that most of these devs are likely not the original ones, and they're almost definitely trying to work against really bad code from other people

if you know anything abt programming, you know that it sucks really hard to try and even read old, badly-commented code you made from years ago, much less old code from others. imagine that, but with 10 years' worth of other people constantly adding code without ever improving it. imagine being the person who chose, willingly, in this dumb-ass video game company where nobody takes responsibility for their own bugs, to try and fix it. the fact that the few people involved managed to actually fix a few really important things at all is a fuckin miracle

the fact that it was every format under the sun except for 6v6 just proves what i was actually trying to say, but ok

looking up old TFC info is a super huge pain, i always saw a lot of different formats and never really knew if one was more or less popular. double-checking though, you're definitely right on that and i made the mistake of thinking a weird UGC format was the standard, my bad

there's no standard lol, TFC was 7v7 when people played that, and 6v6 just happened to be what people liked in TF2 after experimenting with it. the only reason it could seem like there's a pattern is mostly just because overwatch lifted a lot of surface concepts straight from TF2

6 is a good number of teammates for this game, though. mixed in with the class limits 6s has, it fills all the cool roles nicely without getting into a situation where one of those roles means significantly more than the others

unless banana is somehow the most busted shit on the planet and/or pyro can somehow tank everything by accident with one of their changes, this isn't as big of a potential problem as you'd assume. the reason QF fucked up was because a pocketed heavy could tank anything bar a 100% charged sniper headshot, the worst i can see here is the gasoline one screwing up some chokepoint-heavy maps

point being, though, if people test it before whitelisting, they should be intentionally trying to use it in the most obnoxiously toxic ways possible like that QF heavy situation, and if it's still fine after a lot of testing, it should be allowed at least before playoffs. if anything, i'm more worried about the rest of pyro's changelist tomorrow since they only mentioned fixes and stock flamethrower buffs

the only reason i'm holding out any hope is because fixing pyro is a dangerous game that, if done wrong, can and will piss off every single person playing the game for different reasons, so even the people who thought that the reserve shooter could use a buff are going to understand that they need to do a lot more than surface-level changes. it's probably why this took so long to update tbh, pyro is the end result of programmers dicking around without being willing to fix stuff for a full decade

it's reasonable to be cautious, though, valve hasn't exactly earned much trust from comp play from the years of goofy shit they've said and done

valve gets basically nothing for unlocks since nobody buys them so it's not a bad idea, but in practice there's so many unlocks, and a sweeping majority of them are worse than the stock loadout, so they might choose an awful loadout right off the bat, instead of being forced to work with the fundamentally sound basic ones

just make them all universally unlockable through achievements, or some freebie contract equivalent solely for noobs or something

it's really weird that they didn't show any examples of the war paint. like that's the thing that's going to make you a lot of money, at least show it doing something to a weapon instead of giving us a square to shove the patterns onto

it's likely just valve making sure to show people at least one new pyro thing per day, so reddit won't get mad

they've actually been pretty intentional about wanting to support 6s as the main format, similar to CSGO's setup, and they've said that multiple times to people when they've visited valve HQ. the actual problem is that it's valve, and valve usually just lifts stuff from the casual tf2 community like pub maps + taunts for 90% of all updates post-2011, so that intent just so happens to translate to fuck-all

assuming valve would want the dr. grordbort weapons to be actually good design and not the objective worst, wouldn't the phlog be able to function as a lightning gun equivalent? like you just narrow the cone of the weird flame visual it has, make the hitboxes actually represent that visual and there you go

whether or not the jetpack is good is dependent on what else they changed/fixed about the pyro. if it's a means of evening out shit like airblast nerfs by giving them a better mobility tool then it's good

alternatively, it's the only change given to pyro, they spent ten thousand years just to do that and tf2 is dead forever. either/or

isn't the intent of this config to have all of them in one place in case you want to change it? it should be commented out since it's useless here, but getting mad at it for existing at all is silly

if this is a pro wrestling metaphor, then this was a RAW match with 50/50 booking to waste TV time and ascent's going to get their win back soon

it sounds like a meme, but the only reason pyro is a joke right now is for horrible technical issues. like, if pyro's airblast range was anything smaller than three cubic miles, how bad the netcode actually handles those airblasts would be far more obvious to players, so it's massive to compensate. fuck, the netcode can't even handle anything involving the flamethrower, since the max range of the flames is 100% dependent on ping

pyro's been balanced all this time under the assumption that they have to cover up the glaring, systematic problems that they couldn't fix in the late aughts. the second those are fixed, making pyro into something that works well wouldn't actually be too hard

also, this is the joke answer you give to a wishlist thread and you are taking it so deadly seriously that i don't know if you understand how balancing is supposed to work

some of valve's proposed balance changes to items seem built to try and stop stalemates. like you see an item like this

and there is no way that wasn't 100% designed for quick suicide bombs onto medics