Yeah that one's on me, I only watch Europe and sometimes NA my bad. I don't know if you're arguing for anything particular, but im in a typing mood again and so I figured I'd use this post to talk a bit about the dreaded "Se7en stalemate".

5CP in TF2 does have this problem : there's just no real incentive for a team in the lead to push since they're already winning. I don't even think that changing the round timer solves that issue seeing how nothing stops a team from letting the clock run all the way down and go stalemate on their second again instead of going to mid apart from the unspoken agreement that people will usually show up to mid. WInlimit 5 also doesn't fix this directly, it simply assumes that a winning team will want to close out the map before the timer runs out.

So, how do we fix this ? From a mid player POV, my answer would be to say : we don't do anything apart from lowering the round timer to like 7:30 (5 is probably fine for most if it, it's about the few edge cases in the original post lik Granary yard and failed push outs) because I think breaking a stalemate is something interesting that can really test your team synergy and mechanics, and because I think it's more of a crutch than a really optimal way to play the game.

But you're here and you're a prem player telling me that people are still having issues breaking them in the top level in current year, so clearly it's not as simple as it seems and the few stalemates I encountered were of a lower quality.

I'm willing to admit that I don't really know then, but I will say that I still think lowering the round timer to anything below 5 is not a good solution for me, as it effectively forces everyone to adopt a fast paced playstyle to solve a problem that (unless Australia is massively different) doesn't exactly pop up every day. There is nothing stopping you from playing fast with the current system, b4nny has been going balls to the walls for as long as I can recall and it worked, but I think forcing everyone to emulate that no matter their div or will is too drastic of a measure.

Small aside but I think banners are a lot more interesting outside of stalemates cause they charge faster and can be used in fights that aren't always big team trades, its more than gunboats are so fucking good outside of stalemates so they only see use there.

About the game being more interesting with round resets and new midfights, I can see where you're coming from but I don't fully agree. First off, delibaretly waiting for a round reset is the most boring kind of stalemate by far imo, sure it'll be shorter overall but I find it more stimulating to have "active" stalemates where a team is trying to do things than seeing people watching paint dry for 4 minutes.

I also think that midfights don't need to have more importance in today's game. I'm about to say some negative stuff about them (and possibly look like a noob in the process), so let me start by saying that I think mids are completely fine right now, they're an iconic part of tf2, trying to outsmart your opponent is really fun and they're a good way to show off cool jumps.

I love TF2 (on top of all the other reasons) because for me it's a game with both complex team fights where teams have to make on the fly decisions and can come down to very fine margins, and more solo plays, almost always still supported by the rest of the team, but where one or two players are the focal point of an action. Midfights are usually more team based than solo based, and that's completely fine, but forgoing opportunities to go behind, sac, offclass or try something wacky in favor of just having more mids until one med survives and not the other (otherwise you'd just stalemate again right) is a bit of a shame, especially as I think that midfights are not even the best type of team fights. I don't think it's very noticeable now because people play like 4-5 midfights a map at most but if you played more of them, some of their inflexibility would become apparent imo : losing your demo to a fast bomb or a scout to spam in the early stages usually means you should bomb your sollies and leave, your scouts will probably ave to stay on the beam for most of it, and on a majority of maps your soldiers will at some point bomb in and die. What I'm trying to say is that repeating midfights over and over doesn't seem like the most fun interaction to me either.

You're right, it is an uncommon occurence, the last time that I could find it happening in Europe was during season 32, so 4 years ago. For me that's not the point though, my point is that I simply don't see garbage time as an issue that needed another fix apart from the concede plugin, so winlimit 5 just to "fix" garbage time seems unecessary.

Simply looking at comebacks that actually happened doesn't paint the whole story either, having a game end at 5-3 with 8 minutes left just felt super lame as a spectator and will probably feel even worse as a player. You could make the point that it'd also feel lame to have a team run the clock down against you but : A. winlimit 5 doesn't do anything to change that and B. as shinso points out, it would also cut down the number of options available to losing teams, seeing as their doom is always around the corner.

Part 2 : Upcoming issues

So yeah, while I think that those changes are pretty low impact (especially timelimit 5), I do think that they bring a bunch of annoying possibilities and that this should make us reconsider their implementation.

-the round timer does not necessarily represent if a game is slow or not. There can be a lot of action without a point changing hands, like Team A failing their last push, followed by team B aborting their push out as it took too long, and now team A has to push with 2:30 on the clock, which effectively nerfs stuff like Spy or Banners

-A shorter roundtimer will fuck up Granary’s unique yard gameplay a little bit. I know some (most ?) people dislike the map but I personally enjoy it so it gets on there.

-Short roundtimer could also ultimately slow the game down by having teams play for the clock more now that the round reset is more reachable, something that already happened in the cup. This creates the most boring type of stalemate, as a team trying this will have no interest in any risky plays like sacs or maybe even sniper. We might even see the opposing team opting not to all in before the clock ends as they might fancy their chance at another mid compared to the enemy pushing into Mid with ad should they not manage to get on their med, so we could see two teams not doing anything.

-Winlimit 5 removes garbage time sure, but it also makes close games end earlier. During Rewind 2 Grand Finals, the second map ended 5-3 with 7.30 on the clock. Ascent had already clawed back 3 rounds in 5 minutes, they could have done it again, but no the game just ends. I don’t know about you but I’d rather have garbage time and close games last the whole 30 than the opposite.

-It doesn’t look like continuous overtime will be here to stay, but if it were I’d argue the concept ends up helping out good teams more and would limit upset potential : If I’m playing a team that I know we should beat easily, but we’ve had difficulties getting into the game and it’s now 2-3 with a few minutes left, I know we don’t have to take more risks than needed because the timer is infinite. There’s still a risk on midfights and such of course, but compare and contrast with today’s system where the team losing has to take more risks as the time goes on and I think that this is more fair to a “worse” team who managed to held a narrow lead.

I’d like to conclude by saying that I didn’t write this post to shit on the people proposing new things, as botmode said a few months ago, we’ve been playing this game for so long that there are a lot of things we just accept without thinking about and its always nice to see people try out new things. I just thought there was a lot left to improve on the format and didn’t really see anyone else mention the things I was talking about. I am curious to hear other opinions on the topic, especially since im just a Mid player and lack a perspective on what its like to play the game at a high level.

Oh god its 730 am

Part 1 : The supposed fixes

From what I’ve been hearing, the “Unity Ruleset” is supposed to fix three issues (maybe its supposed to do more but I haven’t really found like a design doc so) : bring a unified ruleset to bridge gaps before intercontinental LANs, get rid of garbage time and remove or at least reduce stalemates.

The unity thing is admittedly a little funny as an idea originally from NA considering RGL still plays (afaik), 1 map a game with freaking half-time when every other league in the world plays windiff 5 and timelimit 30 and didn’t really pressure for unity. But im just being a salty euro, I can’t deny that a unified ruleset would be a good thing for any intercontinental event.
The only issue I have with it is simply that continuous overtime (the part that makes all games golden caps, not the one that makes golden caps start without a new midfight) is simply something I see impossible to use at LAN without putting a hard timelimit, which kinda defeats the point imo. People have flights to catch, go eat and forget the time, have issues with getting the config to work on their rentals, adding unlimited overtime on top of it sounds unnecessary. One LAN finals being cut short was enough for me.

About garbage time, I can’t deny that its effectively gone, ya got me there. What I will deny is the importance of it. I think garbage time is mainly a spectator issue, and more of an annoyance than a problem. I consider garbage time to be >8 minutes at most (= a team down 4 rounds can’t come back assuming 2 minutes per round, not always true but works often enough) and to be usually close to more or less 5 minutes. If you don’t want to watch it cause you find it boring, sure but I don’t think that should be factored in balancing decisions. As for playing through it, odds are you’ll want to close out strong, to prepare for the next map (or if you’re a big nerd, to get a better tiebreaker score). And if you get annoyed of garbage time when you’re losing we had the !concede plugin for those situations, not sure why it got removed, should be brought back imo.

Onto stalemates, the focus point of this ruleset based on how many people talked to me about it. There are a few layers to this one. First off, old Se7en style stalemates, where a team is winning and just doesn’t push are just not something ive seen in the last 2 years. Like, at all, and I watch Prem pretty religiously. I think generally teams are better at pushing off small picks and making plays because I’d say (numbers pulled out my ass) that the time between two caps was already below 3 minutes 90% of the time and below 5 minutes for like 98% of the time. You could tell because when watching the LAN or the cup, most of the footage didn’t really feel different, like I didn’t feel anything changed until people started feeding in or the round suddenly reset sometimes.

There are still stalemates of course, although I’d say most of them consist of a little bit more than trading single soldiers and don’t last a lot more than 5 minutes. Those stalemates usually happen on lasts, and for me are more about maps than time. A team can be holed up on Gully or Process last with a full setup, but the attacking team still has many options due to the amount of doors available on both maps and unique map traits like water on Gully or the need for the defenders to fight for lobby control on Process. Those options vanish on other maps, and when you add in fast respawn timers for the attackers and a second point complex to push into (Sunshine is for me the worst offender on both those aspects, but Snake and Metalworks aren’t ideal either), you end up with almost an involuntary stalemate, where both teams are encouraged to play slow by the map design. Tweaking those maps or simply playing new ones is what we should be focusing on instead to solve the stalemate issue.

To conclude part 1, I’d say that while its impossible to deny that the ruleset had an impact, I think it impacts parts of the game that didn’t really need to be impacted. And by it’s creation, the ruleset might also creates problems that we did not have before.

In the wake of the announcement that ETF2L Season 42’s PreSeason Cup and potentially the season after will be played with parts of the Unity ruleset, I thought I’d type a classic nerd essay at 4 am about how I feel so here it is.

Before I start ranting about why I think everyone is wrong except me, I’ll quickly preface it by saying the actual stuff that I hope I can actually change : I wish there was more transparency behind the changes, I’m not even talking about involving “the average player” in the decision-making process, just saying why some changes are being tried and what are they expected to affect. Right now we’re just put in front of the fait accompli, with no explanation about the logic behind it and I really think that this approach can only drive a wedge between the admin team and the playerbase.

Ah my apologies then. There was also a spot by 5 on the lobby side where you could stand on some computer console thing to get the drop on someone that's been removed but i understand that one a lot more since it wasnt visible in any way.

Ya don't get me wrong thanks for all the work you're doing i just feel like some of the spots that are being removed like the computer panels by 1 and 5 are being removed while others like the medic spot on the spire of 2 get updated visually. It just feels a little arbitrary to me, both of them were situationally useful but a bit gimmicky imo and I'd like to understand what thought process goes behind such a decision. (I'm also unhealthily obessesed with hiding spots so im curious to see if other people agree)

Whenever I play against good scouts I like to enter a parasocial relationship with them in order to get better reads

I'd be interested in adding damage drop off to bodyshots

https://i.imgur.com/touyXj3.jpg

I enjoy having something to do everyday and TF2's gameplay is hard to imitate

We really really need new producers in Europe, if you fit the requirements and are free on some days I'd really appreciate it if you considered it, without producers there's no coverage

You're doing Gods work Arie

• Good music is always a plus but since that is pretty subjective I'd say "music you like and that isn't just there for a meme" is good enough, sometimes you can tell that music is an afterthought cause they put some fuckin meme songs just to have something in the background and its not great.
  
• Overall quality of clips should be the same, too many great fragvids have been kinda ruined because the creator decided to add a 3k demo clip from a 2AM dmix, just make a leftover fragvid for those. I'd also even say that if you have frags from a very serious environement (offis and high level scrims), putting any clip from like PUGs with them isn't gonna work out unless the clip is really nuts.
  
• Kind of a minor point but I'm not a fan of using the song name as the fragvid's name, it doesn't tell me anything new and its kind of overdone imo
  
• I really enjoy when people put clips that aren't usually considered fragclip material (a single kill, a quick 1v2, a daring escape, a nice bomb), I think it adds character to it and if you're proud of it I think you should add it. Of course my standard for those is also highly dependent on the level at which the clips are filmed.
  
• Small thing once again but if you have to fast forward for more than 3 seconds, just do a cut instead
  
• If you can add voices of casters/your teammates screaming at a cool play you did, that's an instant +10 for me
  
• Lastly I will say that editing isn't like ultimately important, I think an underedited fragclip will always be better than an overedited one in my opinion