Funny though, because that's also the same attitude that most casual TF2 players think about competitive TF2. We need those guys on board for growth.

We can't use highlander for LAN's, it's just not possible. If we wish to attend offline events, we will need to have a 6vs6 or even a 5vs5 setup, so even though this whole thread could be biased towards highlander, it's the 6vs6 community that is going to need to jump on the train with this.

If we want Valve to support this 6vs6 setup, we are going to need to make them some money. If we want public players to start playing our competitive setup, we are going to need to get them interested in doing so. Valve sell items, and public players love items. It's a no-brainer that we need to get them into the game somehow. How we do it without destroying the competitive side of TF2? Well this whole picks and bans system means that anything that is literally destructive to the competitive game, we are able to ban out. Consistent bans will give Valve feedback, and Valve have just stated that they are willing to actively work with us on this.

Of course, it's going to mean compromise, it's going to mean changes in strategies, it's going to throw a large portion of the meta game out the window. It's going to be hella frustrating at first.

It means we would need teams to use and abuse every item in the game. I want to see HRG come out with some Quickfix-deadringer strat and destroy their opponents. This would be competitive TF2 on crack and I think we are at the stage where we could handle it, but the lazy people and teams are going to be left behind while their opponents come out with some crazy effective strategies.

Adapting is a skill. You might not know what the enemy team is running when they leave their spawn, but how you react to it will define the very best players from the shitters.

Some elements of skill will be removed from the game by adding unlocks, but other skills would be added. Difference is we get closer to the public game, we promote Valve's F2P business model and spectating TF2 would be insane for quite a long time to come!

Everyone will theory craft the effects of certain unlocks forever and ever, and it's actually a great discussion to have... if they are a part of the game.

If the comp rules ever did change to cater for all unlocks, with some pick ban system, then I could see there being a huge unlock discussion community, with different strategies and ideas being posted all over the Internet (or at least in its own forum).

But it's all theory. The problem that we have had over the years, is we take the easy option and ban something. Almost the only way to actually test to see if something is overpowered, too strong etc... is to impose no restrictions on it and let it be used.

It might be overpowered one game, or even for a month, but then someone comes up with an effective counter, or people get used to playing against it. Take the gunboats in Europe as a prime example. When they were allowed, jumping soldiers immediately gained (brb pulling a random percentage out my ass) a 54% increase in effectiveness. That degraded overtime as people got used to seeing soldiers arrive to mid as fast as a demoman, or double jumping off walls directly onto your medic. Let's say now the increase in effectiveness is maybe, 15%, but you lose 15%'s worth of utility because of the lack of shotgun. It's a trade off that suits a particular play style.

The same will occur with a number of other unlocks. You allow them, you let them get exploited to shit and eventually their true 'power value' will come out. They could be useless or they could be almost essential. It does mean the game becomes weird at first, with everything being 'lame' or slowing the game down, overpowered etc. Players will get shouted at for running something outside the current meta, but just imagine it as a new game, where you do not get the option to ban an unlock. You have to find a way to play with or against it.

Pretty much the only way I could see any sort of transition working (or just being tested), would be to try a league in North America (us Euros are way too close minded for this as has been proven in the past :P). A league that is on the side to the regular ESEA. Get all of the big teams to join up in the interest of TF2. Play games seriously, but simply don't ban unlocks (I mean literally nothing, use and abuse everything you can think of), attempt new stuff. Get it casted and see what happens. I was trying to do this with pugs calling it 'Alternative TF2' but I'm simply too lazy and don't command enough respect for anyone to listen.

If it is really THAT awful, it will become apparent after a season or two and at least we show Valve that we are willing to work with them.

Wait what?

I can't actually reply to this properly right now, because it would be a MASSIVE wall of text beyond anything I've written before. I'm going to try and simplify it, but it will be very easy to poke holes in what I write.

The two main reasons why I think the current competitive TF2 is a bad product:

- We've alienated ourselves from our huge public community (restricting our potential growth from our most potent target audience). They play a COMPLETELY different game and have no interest in watching our version which utilises maybe, 1/12th of the stuff they use in theirs. Without public players turning into competitive players. We can't grow. If we can't grow, we will only shrink and that is the sign of a bad product.

- Our game developers make money from a system we do not promote. They have no financial interest in 'sponsoring' our competitive community when we stick our middle finger up to their money making system by banning unlocks (what they make money from since F2P). Valve are a business. If we can make them money, they might invest in us. They do it for competitive Dota (who make them money). If we can show them a system that makes Valve money, investing in us might be a good idea for them (meaning we get tournaments). How can we make them money? We need to promote what they sell... which is unlocks hats keys etc. Without supporting our developer's income, we will get no future development. A game with no future development, cannot grow. See above. We are lucky the public community do make money which keeps the developers working on TF2, but they certainly aren't focusing their development efforts on the competitive community.

Correct. I don't mean we have a bad game to play. Obviously we like it enough to stick around for a number of years. If that is the only thing that is important to us, then by all means, change nothing and we can continue as we are!

What I'm getting at, is we have a bad product if we want to have larger tournaments, more players, largest prizes, more frequent events, more viewers, more discussions, communities, fan art, global recognition, and even.... future versions of the game!

If we want all of that, the product needs changing pronto. If we just want to enjoy ourselves playing the game as it is for the last few years of it's life, we can do that too! I like the game, but I'd personally want to see how big we could get it to become. I'd love to see how intense a TF2 tournament with a $100,000 prize fund would be. Imagine the nerves in the final! I'd shit the bed even watching that game, let alone being one of the 12 players actually competing in it. If that's what you want, we need to change.

So yeah... you're correct. The game isn't bad and it isn't failing as such, if this is where we want to keep it.

Honestly, it would be MAD at first (probably in a bad way), but after a while, a new, diverse meta game would start to appear, but there would still be room for some crazy strategies and set plays that could keep the game fresh.

Yeah it was just, something thrown together in a minute. I'm sure someone would come up with something a billion times better. It's more the concept that I was suggesting, as in, only allowing a few unlocks but rotating some of the lesser used ones? Could that be a 'meet in the middle' compromise to the whole unlock situation or does it make things too inconsistent?

I was simply thinking that it would be similar to the league of legends free champion rotation. Players might see new unlocks in the rotated item list that they don't own, read the description, and then want to buy it. At the end of the day, we need to make Valve money if we want their support for tournaments and stuff.

Different unlocks will change the different roles of classes. If the gunboats gets banned, it will reduce his effectiveness at that particular role (diving getting picks) but he will have to play a different role, or accept that his ability is going to play that style will be reduced. That is called adapting and that is a skill.

It promotes a diverse way of playing the game, and in terms of competitive highlander, it could even be a strategic choice. Maybe you've researched your opponents and found out that their soldier is picking off medics frequently so you want to reduce his effectiveness. It is then up to the opponents to adapt. Maybe they will want to utilize their demoman as a more aggressive pick class and keep their soldier closer to home for medic protection. This game shouldn't be so one dimensional when we have so much variety available to us.

And on a side note. In terms of a pick ban system, here's what I wrote on another thread in regards to an 'in game lobby' system that uses picks / bans on unlocks:

Here's a quick idea of mine.
http://arxandbeta.com/images/idea.jpg

So you would have those weapon boxes for each of the classes. There would be 9 weapons that would feature permanently for each class, and then a selection of 6 weapons (could be 9, or any other number) that change each week. Obviously this isn't ideal for competitive play as it adds a random element, but it might not be the end of the world.

There would be a set number of bans in total. Maybe have a max limit on bans per class, so say, all of the medic unlocks can't be banned leaving everything else open. Team captain would be decided on the player with the most experience (played the most hours or played the most lobbies etc...). That player would be in charge of the weapon bans.

There would be a 'buy unlock now' button for unlocks that are not owned (gives valve some incentive and potential income).

Anyway, just an idea.

You're right. Those sports have been played the same way for ages but they didn't always have a static rule set. In soccer the offside rule was added at a later date to prevent people from sitting around the opponent's goal waiting for a long ball to put in the back of the net. That was an adaptation on what was still a successful sport, simply to make the game better. It does happen.

While you're focusing on the successful sports, what about all the ones that haven't made it to the mainstream? There are a tonne of 'sports' where the actual product is simply bad. It might not be enjoyable to watch for most, it might not be enjoyable to play for most, it might be too hard for new people to get into. As unpopular as this comment will be, competitive TF2 is one of those failing products. The public game is a million times more popular than the competitive game. By all means, if we want to be one of those little tight communities, that plays their own game, just like several weird sports communities do, then awesome, we can do that... but then at that stage we have no right to complain about how TF2 is not a popular eSport.

There might be a way that we can make small(ish) changes to the game, and make it a LOT more appealing to people outside of our competitive community. If that means having a few extra unlocks, or changing a few rules / formats here and there, and results in us having more frequent, high stakes tournaments with more viewers and global recognition... then that's something I'd be willing to sacrifice; and who knows... maybe they game might end up better anyway!

The game is fine how it is (to play) but if we want it to grow, simply put... changes NEED to be made whether you like it or not. Going from 3000 viewers for a league final to 4000 viewers for a league final in the space of 2 years is not the kind of growth that large sponsors care about. We need to change our product, or be content with that we have now (as it's only going to get slightly bigger over a long period of time). Either way works with me.

I haven't really read any of this thread yet, but I thought I'd post what is going through my head. There are so many unlocks at the moment, I think the pick/ban system would be a mess without refining them down a bit.

Here's a quick idea of mine.
http://arxandbeta.com/images/idea.jpg

So you would have those weapon boxes for each of the classes. There would be 9 weapons that would feature permanently for each class, and then a selection of 6 weapons (could be 9, or any other number) that change each week. Obviously this isn't ideal for competitive play as it adds a random element, but it might not be the end of the world.

There would be a set number of bans in total. Maybe have a max limit on bans per class, so say, all of the medic unlocks can't be banned leaving everything else open. Team captain would be decided on the player with the most experience (played the most hours or played the most lobbies etc...). That player would be in charge of the weapon bans.

There would be a 'buy unlock now' button for unlocks that are not owned (gives valve some incentive and potential income).

Anyway, just an idea.

I'm excited about this. Robin is completely right about the current state of competitive TF2. It is the same stuff over and over again. Only the existing competitive players really enjoy consistently watching 6vs6 matches because we notice the tiny little differences in play and we appreciate those things.

People are assuming full unlocks would be bad for competitive TF2, but team's who want to put the effort in can come up with a vast range of effective strategies that currently aren't possible. The problem that most people have, is they can't be bothered to learn anything new, or more importantly, can't be bothered to learn how to play against anything new. Sure, things _would_ be shit at first, but after a few months when the new strategies start to become common and refined, you will probably find a couple of unlocks getting banned that you wouldn't even think are that powerful at the moment.

People might not enjoy playing it as much at first, but I can tell you that spectating will become 100x better from day 1. Us commentators will have so much more to talk about and we get to see a tonne of new stuff. Valve get promotion on items that players can buy (they make money) and we get a larger viewing crowd as the game becomes less alienated from the public community (they might be remotely interested in watching, while currently they are not). Competitive TF2 becomes fresh, exciting, and more popular.

It's literally win-win apart from a handful of 'pro' players who would outright refuse to learn and would quit the game. With the recent high levels of production from all of the casting organisations, a game (product) change like this could be the boost we need to bring this game into the spotlight if people actually took the time to think about the bigger picture and are willing to adapt (which is a skill btw...).

The TF2 community seriously needs to get on board with this as there is a clear cut direction the game needs to take and with the developers already on board, it's either TF2 sinks, or TF2 gets a motherfucking speedboat.

Best game ever!

filco majestouch with brown switches is the best keyboard I've ever used. The keyboard weighs like 1.5 KG, it's a solid build and extremely easy to type on. If it wasn't for the high cost I'd buy one to take to work as well as use at home.

See, sadly I don't think this is the case. I honestly think if you went into a number of public servers, asked the server a very simple set of questions:

1) Have you ever watched a competitive TF2 match?
2) Did you enjoy it? If not, why not?
3) What changes would you make to the game to make you want to watch it more?

I think you would get quite a few people saying they have never watched a competitive TF2 game, but I think you will find that there are more people who have watched one, but simply didn't enjoy watching it or have no interest in watching someone play a computer game, when they can play it themselves.

If asking what changes they would made, I think the most common response will be related to maps, classes and unlocks. Of course, this is just my predictions. I'd love someone to actually take the time and go and get the public's opinions (from directly on the servers). If someone takes the time to do that, then they could point people towards TF.TV / ETF2L etc, if they haven't heard of it, so it wouldn't be a complete waste of time.