Can't we just agree that any weapon that gives a player the ability to do extra damage should be something you have to work towards? You shouldn't just be able to spawn and do extra damage from simply having an item.

Live streaming would, IMO, be pointless. Not enough of an audience locally and it's at inconvenient times internationally. The only viable way of casting is just how Sal does it, ie, recording the STV and talking over it and then uploading it to YT.

Seems like a simple way to troubleshoot...

Bind fire to a keyboard button, same issue?

Play a different game using left click, same issue?

How about plugging your mouse into a different computer.

The biggest complaint so far has to be the down-time between matches.

An overlay of the next match being casted with the latest results would be nice. Maybe have a LAN record so far (kind of like a tale of the tape) of the next two teams being casted.

Also, please, please, please join a MGE of the players warming up. I know it's just MGE blah blah blah but honestly, that would be infinitely more enjoyable than seeing 20 empty seats and 3 people talking in the second row. Put a "warm-up" overlay on the stream so first time watchers know it's not a real match.

Meh... What Bloodsire said but also, there's no risk in running sniper full time in HL. Since you're forced to run sniper if you don't do well, well... you don't do well.

In 6s you can run a scout or soldier and even if you're a bad scout/soldier you can still do stuff like bombing, flanking, support/protect better players, spam.

You are sacrificing movement, spam and sustained damage output for that burst damage/pick. If you don't do well as sniper you are asking your team to win 5v6. It's a big risk, especially in a tournament.

Machete clearly OP, please ban vanilla weapons to spice up the meta.

Sheep mains sniper and offclasses to scout on via and process. If Bulk were actually good at rolling out on Process it could be their best map by far.

The rumours are that someone like bones or cube is going to make a i49 frag movie.

I honestly think that might be a better approach than making another doco. As I feel the doco is infinitely harder to pull off and requires insane amounts of effort by people with relatively little experience (extv did their best but if you wanted to show off TF2 to people 95% of regulars will still link them to PREM by Cube).

Alerts need to be used to announce results of uncasted matches, not to just randomly say Hi.

Sal said it was really hot in the halls and Byte said that they should all wear bikinis.

The i46 finals' vods were posted on the multiplay youtube channel. I hope it's not repeated again as I honestly think it hurts the exposure when they're posted on a channel not usually affiliated with TF2.

In Europe you guys played with no unlocks at all.

So with the introduction of 1 unlock it basically made the game even worse than vanilla in terms of stalemating and effectively made all the other unlocks irrelevant. I'm pretty sure this is a better argument for banning the QF.

And a 3-2 score is not that low. The last cap got capped 5 between both teams as compared to only once at this LAN.

Guys...

We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that TF2 plays differently depending on how you choose to play it.

Whether it be pubs, 6v6 or HL, the format you choose and the primary map pool (5cp or PL or A/D) determines what flavour of TF2 you play.

Some criticise TF2 because of this fact, citing that the jump from pub to competitive is too large but it's also the reason why TF2 has such a large player base.

Suppose 6v6 is the ONLY way you're supposed to play the game, all the pub servers have only the ESEA map rotation with maybe an extra 2 or 3 slots per side but same class limits. A lot of the items become unbalanced and unfun to play against.

The thing is, if TF2 only has one way to be played like a MOBA or a Quake style FPS it would have a fraction of the playerbase it has right now. What many considers a hindrance to competitive TF2 is also what makes it a successful game (not e-sport).

How does this relate to the QuickFix?

Well in pubs and HL, the QF is not overpowered at all, it's a perfectly balanced weapon, some might argue a bit too weak in HL.

It's unreasonable to expect Valve to nerf the QF to uselessness in pub just so we can get a working medigun.

The thing is that we should evaluate every weapon based on its merits and then ban/unban them for the format we choose to play.

Can we as a community get away from this notion that EVERY weapon has to be perfectly balanced in EVERY gamemode? Because that's never going to happen, it's always going to be an impossible goal.

At the end of the day this is a FPS. Every FPS comes down to who can aim, move and react better than the other team. Trying to drag TF2 away from its FPS roots into some DOTA-esque dream of constantly evolving meta is ridiculous.

And furthermore, I would like to point out that if DOTA had different maps (1 lane, 5 lanes, big maps, small maps, only 1 tower per lane, 3v3, 4v4, 6v6 etc) then it would run into the exact SAME problems TF2 runs into. Namely, some maps play well in "pub" but awful in "comp", some characters become overpowered and others become niche and/or useless, there would be 1 correct team makeup for each mode and due to some types of heroes being OP for that particular map layout you would have a form of "limits".

If you restricted TF2 to 1 map and 5v5 you could very easily change all the weapon stats to each be an equal'ish side-grade. The thing is you can't. SO STOP CHASING A FANTASY.

TF2 crashes, that's the unfortunate truth, playing on lan doesn't change that. LAN is to get ping out of the equation primarily.

Can anyone imagine the horror of a granary stalemate when QFs collide with 2 equal teams?

I've yet to see how a QF vs QF on a granary mid stalemate might pan out but I'm equal parts horrified and curious.