I don't understand how Valve can blame the player base for not innovating enough in competitive. When Valve only creates weapons with low skill curves (ex: tide turner, gunslinger, loch and load, sorry if you disagree) it's very difficult to innovate. It's as if an art teacher only gives his student blue paint and gets angry when there isn't anything interesting being created.

On the other hand, it is disheartening that almost every new weapon is banned from 6v6 if it is in any way close to even/superior to the meta-weapons, or would significantly alter the meta itself. By doing this, competitive 6s is essentially becoming its own separate game within tf2 that cannot grow or evolve with its base. Honestly I think this is the problem the devs are talking about when they say 6s is too stagnant to consider developing for.

It sucks that Valve would rather develop for the f2p base (no offense f2ps) when they aren't the people dropping $600 into the market on hats and returning day after day for 7000 hours. Of course, I guess the f2ps are the ones with access to their mom's credit card and the naivety to sink money into mann co store cosmetics. This is a weird game.

Kritzkrieg, Escape Plan (RIP equalizer), and Boston Basher all significantly altered the meta and are not banned. Weapons not on the whitelist are either incredibly gimmicky or are not fun to play against, i.e. they don't change the meta in a positive fashion.

Matisse dude

Do valve not see that if they invested some time into an inbuilt matchmaking system like that of cs that the majority of their player population would become competitive?

Compare tf2 players to csgo players.

I've seen people with thousands of hours on tf2 that have very little skill if any at all at the game but have spent those hours trading or fucking around on dumb game modes (which i have no problem with) because they simply havent been introduced to the competitive scene.

on the other hand nearly everyone with over 50 hours on csgo have played in comp lobbies and people with hundreds to thousands of hours on the game are almost always of a very high skill level.

This is the main reason why people laugh at you when you say you play team fortress two competitively because the people that have tried the game out see it as a shit-fest full of little kids who want hats and nothing else.

If valve took this simple initiative and made an inbuilt competitive lobby system properly there would be more and more players actually giving the game a go.

What makes you think that Valve wants competitive players, more than they want people buying keys 100 items at a time? Do you think that playing 6s is going to inspire people to buy items from the mann co store?

Mann Co Unusual Trade server is worth 10x more to Valve than any single UGC or ESEA season.

Competitive Counter Strike existed long before Valve even considered competitive match making lobbies.

why is this thread still being bumped just lock it jesus christ

IT'S NOT HAPPENING. GET OVER IT.

If you want competitive tf2 to grow, make it grow. Invite your casual tf2-playing friends to play in a lobby. Coach newbie mixes. If you're pubbing with a fun/ good player, add them and talk about/ recommend competitive; they'll be flattered. Defend competitive from the mouth breathers that make up a large amount of r/tf2. Keep playing the game. Support high level steamers. Donate to lan drives if you have a few bucks. Answer questions on r/truetf2.

Quit saying this thread is depressing. It's not. It's a reminder that our game is OUR GAME. If valve implemented an in game lobby system tomorrow, I would be ecstatic. The fact of the matter is, they won't until it's profitable for them. If we as a community can show them how good this format is, they might consider it in the future. But discussing what weapons to ban on this alternate-universe in-game-lobby 600 posts deep in a hopeless thread isn't getting the game anywhere.

It's happening!

KevinIsntPwn

I LIED HYPEE

lol

how could you betray us like this Kevin

*wipes single tear*

I posted that obviously still hoping for match making, but I was sick of this thread getting bumped and making me sad. I posted it when I had really started coaching/admining newbie mixes and I was very tired of people pointlessly theorycrafting ways tf2 COULD succeed rather than putting that time into something that will actually help the game.

"If valve implemented an in game lobby system tomorrow I would be ecstatic."

I am excited for this new course valve might be going in.
It will obviously destroy everything my fellow TF2Center members and I have spent years on, but in the end it's their game.

There are a lot of unknown factors I'd like to shine a bit of light on.
6v6 is not the vastly more popular game mode

If bringing up the stats for 6s and HL for EU and NA (TF2Center's biggest locations), we see HL is doubling the 6s numbers. Although I've been digging deeper, removing edge cases, and only grabbing the "clean" lobbies (no subs nor unpure closereason), it shows it's really close:

EU6S -(28.85%)
NA6S -(25.02%)
EUHL -(24.00%)
NAHL -(22.11%)

http://i.imgur.com/t7LFCLq.png

Like Enigma said in #144, HL requires 18 players.
Even with 1.5 times the amount of players it shows highlander kept up with 6v6.
Especially with competitive games it's really difficult to optimise this process and make sure everyone that started this will be able to finish it and give it their best.

This is something we're are trying to tackle in the matchmaking system TF2Center is developing, but it has a lot of constraints on who can actually play and punishments for players that are leaving.
It's most likely a 6v6 system is far easier to develop and implement, but the lot of the staff have an highlander-oriented mindset and would like to include all formats instead of trying to scale systems up to try to cater it.

So yea, don't pick either. Do both HL and 6s, and maybe look into ultiduo and bball.

After running the lobby system for a while, it is really tough to set up match making if you want to include all players that want to try to experience competitive TF2. you need a distinction between players. Even if it's just for the sake of quality during startup. It is really hard to mix casual competitive players with tryhard winning-mentality (team) players. And the upper part of comp TF2 has a lot of the latter.
The base of these plans was set after talking to players at i52. Seagull, Harbleu, Enigma, Lange and WARHURYEAH (we tried to talk to Hildreth but he kept introducing me as the worst heavy in prem to everyone that would walk by,) gave a pretty good view for us what would be required and needed attention.

Needless to say we worked way too slow to satisfy the comp TF2 community and our chance could be over if Valve is really serious about adding this (if not adding in mann power 2fort matches).

But the focus of Valve needs to be broader. Match making is one thing, but one thing I as an ETF2L admin have seen is the blatant lack of support. There will be a few news posts about a signup opening or finals coming up, but as everyone might know the entire competitive scene is held up by a few people doing everything. From medals, maps to configs this step could change it.

I think it's a horrible idea to set up a pick-ban system. A few years after the red-letter where we got the message that they would rather see a dota-esque system for TF2 we (EU HL) players started doing these matches with the help from whitelist.tf (create and upload your whitelist on the fly).
It just turned out no matter what you do, the OG sixes classes don't really get hurt like the support classes. A demo targe banned doesn't have quite the same impact as banning the wrangler, sandvich or dead ringer.

Either work to abolishing whitelists and making all weapons more balanced, or enforce the league whitelists. On TF2Center we've chosen for the second for obvious reasons, but Valve has the power to do the first.

TF2Center is always open to share what we've learnt with Valve if it helps the competitive scene. Just have to let us know.

Sorry for jumping from one thing to another, I'm just typing where my thoughts lead me to. I'm really passionate about this so I'm trying to cram the most important things in whilst I'm still kind of sober.

I think something important to note is that the higher leveled 6s players are almost never on TF2C. ESEA pugs, pug.me, private pugs, are usually where they play non scrim/match related games. HL, on the other hand, has very few of these pug groups, so you'll see a lot more high div HL players than you do 6s players. Might that tip the scales in 6s' favor? Maybe, but I doubt it would be a large shift, and the information you've posted is interesting nonetheless.

There have been 1200 PugMe's in the last month. Not sure how that would factor in.

And a tonne of tf2pickup dot nets as well over in eu, along with doublemixes every night. The same kinda thing just doesn't happen for highlander - and a highlander LAN is even more difficult.

Cherrypicking at its finest

when the thread is about lobbies and he looks at all lobbies played it's hardly flawed imo

There is always the possibility to have "6s" but not in its current format maybe in the future they'll be class bans or class limits. Say player A limits to 1 Solly then play B limits to 1 demo etc then you ban 2 classes or something along those lines then pick so you have 6 classes. The only problem with that though people might ban medic etc then it'd just turn into a dm server.... If you think about it that way they'll be a 6v6 but not in its current form.

There were over 5 times more 6s games played than HL on TF2Pickup.net in the previous month
http://tf2pickup.net/stats

... which is irrelevant because HL players tend to favour TF2Center! 8)

Yeah it's not really cherrypicking, because tf2center is the place which is most similar to in-game MM - big player base, mostly newer players etc. Just mentioning that it's not quite the full picture.

I really don't think TF2C is destroyed when matchmaking becomes a thing, though, because MM won't be pure 6s or HL. There will still be demand for 6s and HL, and TF2C (and the other pug groups, etc) will be the only place to get both formats.

Argue to me that the current implementation of lobbies is significantly more like matchmaking than public pickup systems are and I'll get back to you.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. CSGO's in-game MM hasn't destroyed things like ESEA pugs, if anything it's increased their subscriber count as players decide they want to move up to the next level.

Im hopeful that because of MM, TF2C will become a higher skill level and better lobbies happening with people wanting to improve and tired of pubbies.

glad this is fixed

it hurts