All this being said, it is almost 100% certain that cukei was cheating before that one night of pugs -- maybe for months or years before, cheating over and over and over -- so even if the ban is for the wrong reason, he probably should have been permad anyways.

Loafe didn't think my last thread was serious enough (my bad loafe!), so in this post I'm going to give some suggestions for how we could improve Sniper in 6s.

Before I give my suggestions, it’s worth thinking about what is fun and/or reasonable about sniper:

• Sniper’s skill expression is high in certain respects, in particular difficult headshots, quickscopes, swinging into the open to headshot a medic, and so on. It is not really "unbalanced" to get quickscoped at close range as a Scout, for example; I don't think very many people have a problem with stuff like that.
  
• Sniper helps break stalemates on offense, and helps put the game in motion on defense. Having an alternative to double sacking over and over on offense, and having a defensive tool against dryfights is, at least in some situations, reasonable. You can argue that Sniper is too powerful in these situations, but that doesn't necessarily mean the option should be removed from the game.
  
• Sniper is crucial for the balance around last pushes, forcing the attacking team to pop through a doorway. If Sniper didn’t exist, pushing last would become easier and less skill-expressive. Last pushes are currently in a good spot balance-wise with the attacking team having, in my estimation, a 70/30 advantage against the defending team on most maps. If Sniper didn't exist, this advantage would increase to 80/20 at least, which would make holding last on disad feel really unfair. On maps like Snakewater, I could see the attacking team milking from top-right all the way to truck before popping uber if Sniper didn't exist, which definitely shouldn't be a viable strategy.

What don't people like about Sniper?

• People don't like situations where there’s little to no active counterplay to the opposing team having a Sniper. Players generally prefer "active" counterplay (bombing, spamming, exchanging, etc.) to "passive" counterplay (hiding, etc.)
  
• People don't like situations where the Sniper isn’t punished for making a mistake or successive mistakes. Snipers being able to whiff 5 headshots before hitting the one crucial shot that wins their team the fight is understandably annoying.
  
• People don't like situations where you have to gamble that the Sniper will miss in order to win the fight.

Given these reasons, here are some concrete suggestions for improving Sniper in 6s:

1. Reduce the Sniper Rifle’s ammo from 25 to 10 or 5. This would force Snipers to think consciously about target selection and manage ammo over the course of a fight. It would reward having high accuracy (which takes skill) and punish rattling shots off at long range.
   
2. Make the Sniper Marked-for-Death when the Sniper Rifle is fully charged. This would increase the effectiveness of bombing a Sniper or trying to hit him with a charged sticky. It would also decrease the amount of CS:GO style angle-holding that some Snipers do (e.g. on defense), encouraging them to unscope and scope back in to avoid taking mini-crit damage. You could even make the Mark-for-Death last for 1-2 seconds after the sniper has unscoped (like the Escape Plan) to further discourage fully charging shots.
   
3. Make the Sniper Rifle shoot a permanent visible laser when it’s fully charged. This would allow medics to know exactly when they can and can't die to a bodyshot, and it would also help reveal a Sniper’s position to the opposing team. If Snipers tried to hide the laser by e.g. standing next to a wall, this would decrease the amount of positions they could play in. You could also test making the Sniper Rifle shoot a laser whenever a Sniper scopes in, which shounic tried in casual to relative success.
   
4. Reduce the Sniper Rifle’s bodyshot damage by 25% (38 uncharged to 113 charged) or 50% (25 uncharged to 75 charged). Maybe the most straightforward way to nerf Sniper, decreasing bodyshot damage would increase Sniper's skill ceiling, make bombing Snipers easier, and overall make it easier to play against a Sniper.
   
5. Increase the respawn timer if you die on Sniper (+10s or so compared to dying on another classes) This in effect reduces the round timer but only for Sniper, which avoids some of the downsides of reducing the round timer past 4 minutes. You could reduce the round timer to 3:30 to nerf offensive Sniper, but I think 4:00 is balanced and shouldn't be changed for other reasons.
   
6. Buff substitute strategies for Sniper. Unbanning the Disciplinary Action would allow Soldiers to go for powerful whip-bombs, which might decrease the amount of Sniper played. Making Spy run 10% faster when cloaked would allow attacking teams to run a Spy instead of Sniper a little more, and so on.
   
7. Decrease Sniper's movement speed from 100% (same as Engineer) to 93% (same as Demo) or 80% (same as Soldier). This would increase the amount of investment teams would have to put in to running a Sniper and make it harder to roll out on Sniper to defend against an imminent push.
   
8. Punish snipers for missing. On miss, you could make Sniper slower to scope in, or make the Sniper Rifle’s charge slower for every consecutive miss, e.g. base speed for 0 misses, 10% slower after 1 miss, 20% slower after 2 misses, and so on, like a reverse Bazaar Bargain. You could also simply increase the amount of time between scopes for the Sniper Rifle; the current attack interval is 1.5s, and you could increase this to 2s or 2.5s to allow players to move freely after hearing the Sniper shoot. A meta where attentive Medics could briefly advance to the next piece of cover after hearing a Sniper shoot seems reasonable.

Obviously I don't think every single one of these should be implemented; the best is probably one big nerf like decreasing the amount of ammo in the Sniper Rifle to 5, or a combination of medium-sized nerfs. I'm also not sure if all of these suggestions would be possible to code into 6s, but some of them seem like they wouldn't be too hard (e.g. making the Rifle shoot a laser, decreasing bodyshot damage, decreasing movement speed).

https://tiermaker.com/create/sixes-gamestate-tier-list-18025782

https://imgur.com/a/TMshneM

I gave equal weight to fun and skill when I ranked them

I've used AI for scanning an essay's grammar and spelling, and it seems useful enough for that. I've also heard (but not tested) that some AIs are way better at translating texts than Google Translate, which seems cool too. Translation is normally expensive and time-consuming, especially for dead languages or highly technical writing, so AI might have a big impact on that field. It seems like it can also decipher cursive/old handwriting.

Nonetheless, it's interesting that despite huge increases in computing power, AI has failed to make a single major discovery. If you imagine a smart human being who had read every medical article and book in existence, you'd assume he would be thinking of new cures, antivenoms, and so on. To my knowledge, AI hasn't done anything even close to this in any field, which shows that it lacks something uniquely human -- maybe creativity or the ability to truly develop new information. It's best to understand generative AI, I think, as "image splicers" or "text splicers." These algorithms don't actually "draw" or "write," they just splice images or words together based on patterns, so it makes sense that it wouldn't make discoveries any more than a really powerful calculator could make discoveries. To quote Edward Feser, "a simulation of X is not the same as X, and. . . we should be especially aware of this when we are ourselves the makers of the simulation."

Would be fun to see a map that uses dynamic props in a way that affects gameplay, e.g doors opening or cover changing places depending on which team owns a point. Like pathways that are made specifically for pushing out of last or the attacking team on koth getting a little extra high ground or something, or even the point moving closer to the attacking team on koth. Would solve some of the difficulty with balancing that comes from having to make maps perfectly symmetrical.

Yeah this basically convinces me that he's cheating. The way he's aiming makes no sense at all: he's hard-tracking in teamfights and against counterstrafing players with little to no click-timing or flicking.

I can't think of a single player who aims like that. If you play scout and you've ever tried tracking and holding down mouse1 with the scattergun, you know how bad it is. It is literally not humanly possible to do what he's doing in most of these clips, and that's why no scout aims like that. This guy is 100% cheating and I would bet money on it.

Making pyro, spy, and sniper more generalist means that they wouldn't be pyro, spy and sniper anymore.

Making the weak classes significantly more viable than they are for 6s would require fundamentally reworking how they're designed: you'd either have to (A) make them bad imitations of the fragging classes in order to retain their specialist niche, or (B) weaken their specialist side in order to strengthen their generalist side, which is the same as removing them from the game. You can't keep what's good about a specialist while making it on par with the generalists at the same time; that's like having a scout that can airblast. At the same time, if you try to "balance" this by reducing a specialist's advantage, the class literally no longer exists. It's like saying, "Americans can become more successful by acting more like South Koreans." Well, we wouldn't really be Americans if we acted like South Koreans, would we?

The reason the generalists are good is because they are effective at both offense and defense, and at both long and close range (or midrange). Soldier's ability to bomb and scout's speed make them stronger at long range than they first seem. A class is a generalist if it's good at these four things, and a class is a specialist if it's relatively bad at one or more of these, but particularly good at one or more of them. Heavy, for example, is weak on offense, strong on defense, weak at long range, and strong at close range. Now, imagine what you'd have to do to make heavy a generalist: you'd either have to make him better at offense (faster, more mobile, harder to hit) or better at long range (increase damage significantly at range, faster). If you did this, it would look like you're playing heavy, but you'd actually be playing scout. You'd have to make heavy light, which violates his design.

One thing that TF2 gets (almost) perfect is how attacking and pushing is generally stronger than defending and holding. Many other games get this wrong, and the best games (e.g. basketball) get this right. The new config for 5cp was an additional improvement in this area. If defending (or not attacking) is stronger than attacking, the game grinds to a halt and becomes boring to play and watch. In addition, attacking (in any game) is generally regarded as being more complex and having a higher skill-ceiling compared to defending. This is why "camping" has a bad reputation in some games; it's why the best Counter-Strike IGLs set themselves apart with their T-side calling rather than their CT-side calling (e.g., Karrigan on T-side Mirage); it's why the phrase "the best defense is good offense" exists in military strategy and basketball; and it's why the famous military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said,

"What is the object of defence? To preserve. To preserve is easier than to acquire; from which follows at once that the means on both sides being supposed equal, the defensive is easier than the offensive... as the defensive has a negative object, that of preserving, and the offensive a positive object, that of conquering, and as the latter increases our own means of carrying on war, but the preserving does not, therefore in order to express ourselves distinctly, we must say, that the defensive form of war is in itself stronger than the offensive."

The reason most of the specialists (Heavy, Pyro, Engineer) have to be worse than the generalists, in terms of good game design, is because defending is in and of itself stronger than attacking. Defenders get to sit back and let the enemies walk into their crosshairs, they get to hide in safe places, they get to focus fire a single chokepoint, and so on. In order to balance this natural advantage that defense has, and because defending is more boring and less skill-oriented than attacking, you make the defending classes worse than the attacking classes. Counter-Strike does this by giving Ts the AK-47, and TF2 does this, in part, by making the defending classes worse than the attacking classes in various ways. It's just good game design.

My wishlist:

• Be able to strafe after being airblasted obviously
  
• More in-game crosshair options, including glowing crosshairs. Crosshairs in tf2 can be hard to "see" while playing because of a lack of crosshair depth, opacity options, and so on. clockwork mentioned something like this once.
  
• You should also be able to see what crosshairs and viewmodel settings other people are using when you're spectating them, that would be cool.
  
• Players should be able to ping locations on the map like in modern FPS games (CS, etc.). If that seems too chaotic, make only medic and spy able to do it and add a delay between pings.
  
• I think a minimap that only shows your teammates is worth testing. It would probably take some work to implement and might not fit for 6s, but not having to call exactly where you are every 2 seconds if you're behind the enemy team would be nice.
  
• You should be able to see your med's uber % whether or not you're being healed. There's already a way to do this but it's banned.
  
• A way to automatically record POV demos for league matches (or on specific servers) so that no one is able to forget to record would be nice.

Common-sense weapon and class changes I'd also like to see:

• Reduce the sniper rifle's ammo from 25 to 10 or 15 (small change but worth it IMO, 25 is way too much)
  
• The whip as a weapon would have a lot of positive implications for 6s (e.g., whip bombs through doorways) but it's currently broken because it allows you to get a heavy to mid with little downside. Just add a delay of 10s to the whip on player spawn like the gas passer and it would instantly become balanced enough for 6s.
  
• You could also balance the guillotine for 6s really easily by just increasing the delay or adding a charge meter (e.g., 150 damage)
  
• Spy should get a speed buff of 5% while cloaked to make it easier to roll out. You should also be able to fake reloading while disguised (e.g., by pressing the reload button while disguised). I think this is already possible but it requires turning off autoreload so nobody does it.

ha ha ha

Setting aside the fact that you draw furry porn, "if it's legal, it shouldn't be bannable" is a pretty strange argument. Cheating is legal and should be bannable because it hurts the competitive integrity of the league; being a pedophile or "zoophile" is also legal, but it should also be bannable because it hurts the social integrity of the league.

The question is not only whether a literal child has been harmed, but whether the integrity of the league is maintained, or whether the community is made better or worse by allowing this kind of behavior. Since bestiality and pedophilia are definitely wrong, and since they definitely make the league worse, they shouldn't be allowed. It's really that simple.

Scout: b4nny, cap, botmode
Soldier: kobe, soapy, laz
Demo: logan, habib, artist
Medic: lolguy, howard, dank

For the record, the dollar is "strong" compared to the yen right now. If anyone reading this has been considering taking a trip to Japan, now is a pretty good time to do it -- your money will stretch around 30% further than if you had visited in 2019. One of my professors was talking about this last semester.

When I saw the wall of text I thought it was going to be a nothingburger, but from what I understand it looks like there are actually some nurbanians down in AM. Who could have thought.

(18-20 July 2024)

Elo should be win/loss only and you should never lose elo for winning a pug.

Also, when you sort by elo on the add-up screen, it doesn't sort players by highest to lowest elo. Sorting by div also doesn't work.