Sounds more balanced than pomson-gunslinger-loch-sandman-fortress two.

Ok I have had long talks with people on this, I dont feel like making an essay so just 2 things...

The funny thing is all of that was quite balanced, pyro was a tad useless untill the airblast update but every class had its place on those maps, the maps might be shit but they are really balanced with stock 12v12 tf2 in mind.
And #2 this doesnt really mean shit because weps rain from the sky more or less but I get the feeling that people forget that unlocks are exactly that, UNLOCKS thy dont come witht eh stock game and yeah they are not hard to get but for someone to jump into AR with no help is not possible because of them, atleast 6v6 is playable at a stock level....

you are one delusional motherfucker

Completely agree, considering the feedback you've had from Robin and I can see why you're experimenting.

I just can't see why pushing a completely new format altogether with a limited and somewhat average map pool is the answer. Maybe 6's isn't, maybe HL isn't and maybe 4v4 isn't but each of these gamemodes exists and has some form of following across the globe already. I know valve are reluctant to play with competitive in it's current format, and I welcome a more open whitelist and pick/ban system but not the 5v5 Arena Respawn mode. Try to fit it as best you can to existing formats, I'd say HL and 4's have more potential than 6's to fit with "Valve's" game.

I'd support 5v5 Arena Respawn if Valve did with matchmaking, but from a competitive point of view, we have 3 different and better formats to go for.

I'll bet that you never played tf2 back then, bastid.

not sure if this thread is too far into discussion for me to bring something new up, but has valve even given us an inclination that they would make a matchmaking system if we fulfilled a set of requirements? do you guys feel like valve would even make a competitive matchmaking system if we abandon 6s and play with no bans? and do you think this will help the competitive community as a whole?

personally, i feel like playing legitimate 6s would be more fun, even if it would only last one more season. i would rather completely start over and play cs instead of playing whatever "valve's game" would be.

I find that if you try to promote AR as an alternative to 6s, the success rate will drop immensely for it to become a real league format.

I enjoy both HL and 6s and even threw 4v4 a shot with some buddies, but while AR might not be the answer, it definitely bolds the problem. The competitive scene is divided by HL and 6s to begin with. They are the two most popular formats with people playing either one or the other, and sometimes, both.

Creating a new format might come off as a good idea to bend to unlocks and "Valve's Game" but a lot of what's wrong with that idea has to be how much farther away AR's format is from pub gameplay.

I find HL to be the stepping stone after pub play because of its similarities with a standard 12v12 pub server. After that I can see 6s as another step for a higher skill cap in the eyes of newer competitive player. I don't see AR being the next step after or even the alternative to either of those formats for reasons aforementioned.

5v5 sounded appealing because of major games like CS:GO and Dota2 at first. Everything outside of that though, specifically the rules of AR, pushes the idea away for me.

As much as I would like valve to support comp tf2, they just don't make sens at all :

TF2 : Valve releases a ton of stupid unbalanced crap and tells us they want us to play with it in competitive formats.
DOTA 2 : Whenever there's a big change to the way a hero works, they remove it temporarily from the competitive format to see if it's broken or not first based on feedback and stats and stuff.

Please valve, start making sens, this alone makes you look pathetic to me

Bit late with this, but oh well.

As someone who has played UGC for a few seasons, here's the reasons that I think limit people making the jump to open:

Actual Content:
Lack of solid content about sixes means that anyone in UGC who does go through the effort of a map review pretty much just watches the marxist video and calls it a day. It would be nice if there was a wider variety of content so that UGC teams end up not wasting 2 seasons with the "throw strats at the wall and see what sticks" idea. The few people who actively do demo reviews help a bit, but that is more specialized than needed. For the generic comparison to other esports, think of all the "How to do ___ Smoke/Flash/Whatever" CSGO vids, if some high level TF players would go for making videos like "Gran Yard Push Garage to Left" that were just like 3-5 min videos going over some basic push strats and/or their counters, I feel it would be very effective at making teams feel more confident in their skill and make the jump to open.

The ESEA players who play UGC:
If you want to motivate people to join Open, convince your peers who play ESEA and UGC to stop acting like they're instantly above all the dirty peasant UGC players. UGC only has 8 matches/season, so playing against a sandbag team who spams binds and insults you for the whole match pretty much torpedoes 1/8th of your season and on top of it you get to waste an hour making attempts at breaking their Heavy/Pyro/Engy 2nd defense. If you're sandbagging, at least put in enough effort to make a good game out of it. My team got knocked out of playoffs by harbleu and m4risa's UGC team, but at least in that game it felt like there were times where if we played better we could have pulled a round or two out. Meanwhile in a game against full time offclassers you just want it to end as soon as possible because it actively sucks the fun out of everything.

Pay to Lose Feeling:
Based off the last point, due to the fact a lot of lower level UGC players only experience with open players is getting rolled by them, it helps contribute to the "don't go to open you're just paying to fail" attitude that #51 brought up.

Basically, the combination of getting rolled/trolled by ESEA players in UGC coupled with the lack of distinct resources for getting better makes a lot of people in UGC just feel that staying put at their current skill level is the best strategy for continuing to have fun with 6s.

Looking at A:R on the eXtv channel, I agree that it looks fun, but won't be suited for competitive play.

I think I also speak for all of us when I give eXtine this request: Get valve support for it. Then you might get a lot of us. You'll get me to join. But until then, I'll keep playing 6's and you keep playing arena respawn.

Lets do it then, maybe we could make a pug group, super expand the whitelist, and if anything we leave in is actually broken/game changing, remove it. See how far we can open up the whitelist?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbO5L-BAV-E

http://whitelist.tf/2607 ???

Pretty sure valve wouldn't care though. When they talked to Sal, they said they wanted a constantly shifting meta, like vhalin realizing the black box was good. Even if you change the whitelist, some options will probably still be better than all the other ones but not overpowered.

That's the plan for all of it. Getting A:R to put in as a matchmaking format is definitely a stretch right now, but I think we all can agree that regular Arena sucks. Having Valve setup some of their pub servers into the Arena:Respawn format doesn't seem like as much of a stretch to me and I'll be trying to pursue that in 2015.

Keep playing players, I really do hope that 6s can continue to grow and get through this difficult period.

5CP: cap points 2 win
payload: push cart 2 win
koth: cap+hold 1 point 2 win

A:R - what the fuck am i doing

I think you'd have to at least accept the Sandvich, Wrangler, Disciplinary Action and Danger Shield at minimum if not also the Mad Milk and Beggar's Bazooka to satisfy them. But, yeah, my point is they still wouldn't care.
[/quote]

Because, like I said, 99.9% sure they wouldn't actually do anything.

A:R is Arena + Koth, from what I've seen. Like anything starting out, the way it works is very confusing and hard to define. A meta will develop for it eventually and people will figure out what works best.

Of course, if no meta develops and it's essentially pubs with less people, then I can agree with your statement.

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?

.

I also wonder why Valve doesn't use the beta quickplay thing to test 6v6/highlander/A:R??? I would make so much sense to do that. There's no reason for them to not do it. You don't have to create a new map, new weapons, new classes, new stuff. Just 9v9 in tournament mode with certain viable maps. I just don't get it.

Also, i've read on this forum, somewhere, the idea of a strange mercenary badge, where it works like a strange weapon and it would upgrade with your accurary, the number of wins, number of kills, points captured and there would be like a menu where you can check your stats and your rank, similar to the duck thing. The peoples with similar ranks would play together, when they use the quickplay feature, and not killing themselves with 6 engies on their team and we would let new players play with new players, enjoying playing and progressing instead of playing with more experienced players and not having fun being raped.

That idea doesn't even have to come with 6v6 or highlander or A:R. I don't care about playing these types of modes in particular. I just want to play anything without ripping my eyes off with 3 engies on last on process. That would benefit everyone, including the pub community. There's litteraly no reason for Valve not adding this feature. They just have to add a new strange undeletable badge that you could equip in your action slot with stats and track them and put peoples with similar stats in the quickplay feature. This blows my mind.

Someone remind me why there isn't an ESEA-free division again? I'm not talking about freemium, I mean a division lower than open to invigorate the league with players who are not yet ready to pay to lose. Those are the players in UGC right? Give them the client, maybe they'll even use it to look for scrims and guadge their skill relative to the rest of the league. Would it not make sense from a business standpoint to have a free division without a prize, just to refresh the total player participation in the league? Then when they are already signed up, already familiar with the client, they can decide if they want to pay fees to compete in a more competitive division. Why is this not a thing?

I responded to your full post on reddit with a video because I'm busy with IRL stuff and tournament stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HrEz6WB228

This would probably hurt ESEA's profits especially in TF2, at least in the short term. Plenty of people will drop out of the paid division to play in the free division.

I would love them to make a free division but they won't. Especially for TF2.

What does "not competitive" even mean to you guys? I'm seeing it used to describe any mode that doesn't happen to be your favorite.

It means that the format doesn't have the same skill ceiling as sixes. When discussing TF2 unlocks in particular, this is because tf2 unlocks become a game of weighted rock paper scissors with a million different combinations that turns the game into a complete guessing game.

Most players here would rather reward strong dm, good teamwork, and correct positioning than happening to guess the correct unlock to deal with your opponents'. The sixes gamemode and whitelist is the one that is most effective at doing this.

In many cases it isn't even rock paper scissors. It is fighting fire with fire. The quickfix for example was countered just as well by the quickfix, and not just the kritz. It's just like running sniper or heavy. You can get a class to pick those classes in particular, but it is much easier and generally just as effecive to just do the same thing as your opponent.

Valve told us before that they are not interested in comp TF2, I don't know what made people think that Valve would be interested in competitive AR or any other format that isn't 6s/hl.

Matchmaking could be implemented, but what many people don't seem to understand is that it would simply result in ranked pub games, with the higher rank games in matchmaking being doublemixes with strong DM players. The game mode that would be played in matchmaking is almost 100% guaranteed to not be a huge thing. It will not result in Valve sponsoring LANs and it will not create a huge inlfux of players in ETF2L/ESEA/UGC e.t.c

The other thing is that Valve aren't financially supporting the comp community, if they did then it would actually save the game, since the players who quit TF2 would return, just for the cash, but everyone realized already that it will not happen.

The decreasing amount of players in leagues is the primary concern, right? Advertising comp to pubbers will not save the game either, even if Valve do a popup in the TF2 client with a message that comp exists and with tips on how to join. Most of them are too bad to compete, are not interested in playing comp at all, or will lose the interest in it really soon. Remember HL Open? It had 256 teams, right? How many HLO teams decided to play in the next ETF2L HL season? 5? 7?? It's a perfect example.

We can't stop the slow death of TF2, there's simply nothing you can do when people simply lose the interest in the game. But TF2 is still alive, right? You can still play in those leagues like you always did, and there are no signs of those leagues dying soon, ETF2L has a long way till it becomes what Wireplay is today, and ESEA has a long way till CEVO (correct me on the last part though, I could be terribly wrong).

I'll end this by saying that people that want TF2 to be something more... are just egoists, want free cash or just aren't realistic with their dreams, like I said, you can still play your 6v6 and HL, but there's little help from shitposting on the forums and begging valve to support competitive which would simply be wasted money for them.

That's basically what has been said over and over in this thread except for some reason you think it's a good thing. If the only way to counter a weapon is for the other team to use that weapon then the meta shrinks. So despite having a broader whitelist, the meta is shrunk. This happens with a lot of the weapons that are in the game, they just aren't designed for competitive.

People bring up the randomness of the unlock system a lot, and its a very fair criticism.

However like you guys said, people just end up using the best thing, like they always have. Whether that is quick fix or medigun.

Having a player switch from load out to load out just to get the jump on their opponent, is probably enough to make many of you quit tf2. But its very unlikely to happen, at least with any sort of regularity.

I'm not sure where you got that I think it is a good thing. I am in complete agreeance with you. I believe most unlocks make the game less interesting because they slow the game down and force other people to run certain strategies that are usually less fun to watch and to play.

I feel like 6s is more akin to traditional sports in how strategies develop. The rules stay relatively constant and no new mechanics are introduced and yet you still see evolution in the game. I don't really understand why everything nowadays has to follow the "include a million items and characters" when it comes to esports just because that's what works in Dota/LoL.