hi lft. i'm pretty solid on everything but demo but i'd play him too tbh

Hopefully these wind up being being pretty entertaining as well as informative. I feel like one of the major issues with comp right now is that there's no obvious way to get in that doesn't involve several hours of reading/watching a bunch of boring ass guides or just getting in game to be endlessly flamed. Honestly I find it confusing that it's taken as long as it has for anything like this to come out, considering that the game has played pretty consistently for years now. I mean shit, I made my own attempt at a video when I had less than a year of TF2 experience and absolutely zero editing experience, and while it didn't actually turn out to be useful for getting better I thought it really seemed to resonate with newbies. b4nny and Shounic sounds like a dream team for making something people will legitimately want to watch. Good luck!

i miss watching brad pitt farm on star and satan

also might be worth just putting bind 2 slot2 in the scout config

holy shit

rockmonkey cuz u can call him cockmonkey and pretend u did a sikk diss

faceit lives but its cups do not

every cup should be a soloq cup! i spent the whole hour in the queue for a cup today and was the only one every time i checked :(

na fam, analysis is fun

Yeah no that's fair, I haven't spent much time playing any moba. I've only really spent time watching them be played and listening to my friends talk about them. Tried to play Dota but immediately decided I didn't want to spend the time reading what all the heroes do. Also not a fan of the WoW combat system, or MMO system, or whatever it's called. I tried to appeal more to OW since I've actually put time into that one.

Still though, I'm not sure that irl sports is totally incompatible the type of choice I'm talking about. That clothing analogy was heat of the moment, but I think I can come up with some better ones. Like what if basketball teams, rather than choosing to make a 2 pointer or go for 3 on the spot, were forced to choose whether they'd only be allowed to make 3's or regular goals before each possession? Or if football teams had to choose whether they'd only make field goals or touchdowns at the start of each quarter?

I guess those are still kinda shitty, but I think they get the point across. Having a system where the items picked and heroes played cancel out the choices of the other team distorts whether the skill of the teams really determines the outcome.

The bit I bolded is blatantly untrue. Where do you think we got the original whitelists from? Or the match timer, or the class limits? To be fair, I've been been playing for only just over a year, but very little progress has been made during that year. We unbanned a few weapons that were thought to be less broken, and even rebanned your beloved rescue ranger. Saying that these weapons have been allowed to "shine" is ridiculous. All the cow mangler does is dumb down the game by removing the need for ammo management, and the rescue ranger was rebanned because being able to repair your sentry from spawn and then instantly switch classes when it finally dies is insane.

I also seriously doubt you were able to do your "engi coast to coast" solely through the merits of the rescue ranger. If you took your sentry into their last, it's due to some combination of your team hard carrying you and the other team being hopelessly incompetent. The only example I know of the rescue ranger being able to do anything like what you described in an invite game was Ronin vs Bird Noises, setting a sentry up on mid, and that was just to lock in a stalemate to the end of the game. I can hardly even believe you're using a Faceit match as the basis to argue about the ultimate meta of the game.

"Out-dated meta." Outdated by what? I'll assume you're referring to what people love to refer to as the stale meta. As for why we "cling" to it, that's because it's good. It can't be argued that TF2's weapon meta has definitely stopped changing, but I think calling it stale implies there's something majorly wrong with it; instead, the term "stale" is just a holdover from every other esport. I think it'd be more appropriate to call it a stable meta; one where coordination and skill take precedence over experimenting with new weapon/class combos. I'm not really sure you watched the same Rewind I did--I don't recall a single 10 minute stalemate outside of Se7en games, and stalemates that long were rare even there. The meta is certainly not perfect, and there should be an effort to reduce those stalemates, but arbitrarily unbanning weapons that have spent years being banned for good reasons is a silly way to do it. I also think it's important to consider the idea that completely eliminating stalemates should not be the goal. Occasional short stalemates are important for casting analysis, for teams to consider short term tactics, and for viewers to understand what they've just seen; especially new ones. The fights that happen, the occasional offclasses to deal with specific situations in the game (as opposed to dealing with whatever shit the enemy has on their lineup), are all entertaining. They're good.

I also don't think you understand why solly and scout are run so pervasively. Other classes have options in a totally unrestricted meta. Were the gloves unbanned, heavy is completely viable outside of last, and even on mid. The issue is that fighting a heavy anywhere outside of last is boring and annoying, and if you think the current meta is slow, a meta where heavy is frequently run would totally stun you. Scout and solly are the fastest, most mobile classes in the game; putting rules in place that ensure they are run frequently helps minimize stalemates. Were other classes made to be as fun to fight against as scout, solly, and demo are, I think people would be a lot more open to seeing them run more often. Please, Valve, fix pyro.

That specific shift you referred to, I'm totally fine with. My issue is that in esports those types of shifts--where a weapon previously discarded as useless is experimented with and "discovered" as having a good purpose without being patched--are exceedingly rare. Most of the time, the game is patched, the weapons themselves change, thereby changing the rules of the game, and meta shifts develop from there. That kind of change is what I'm referring to as superficial. I'm arguing that TF2 is in a unique (are there any semi-popular exceptions besides Melee?), desirable position where the weapons meta has stabilized, and winners are determined by whoever plays the game with the most skill, as opposed to who abuses the current meta the best until the next patch comes out.

Totally unrelated, there are a couple of russians who have been queuing on NA servers the last few days: dis guy and dis one

They play on a consistent 120 ping, are completely unable to speak or understand English, and have no idea how the game works. From what I was able to gather from google translate (difficult to use in its own right since for some reason copying text from TF2 chat is nigh impossible) they're only here because "NA players are better." I mean, I'm fine with newbies on Faceit, but they do things like running heavy to mid and can't communicate, so I don't see how they're going to improve on NA servers. Is there anything to be done besides reporting them over and over?

Yeah, my bad, I was trying to think of a sports metaphor, but I guess there isn't one because something as stupid as a counter system doesn't exist in real life sports. You either play better or you lose. Sure, games like Dota require a kind of skill, but it's not exactly an interesting one to watch in action. "Oh, they picked the right heroes to directly counter our team? Welp, guess we're fucked!" Watching Overwatch matches and knowing how the next two minutes are going to play out because one side went for a dive comp while the other went with quad tank is boring as shit. And then the rules constantly change and the meta shifts; things that once worked no longer do, watching old games starts feeling like a waste of time, and mechanical skill and teamplay get less relevant. It's about who spends more time in scrims doing what would have once been stupid shit to see if it works now.

Again, I don't understand why this system is so prevalent in esports. Honestly, I feel like it just makes bad players think they can beat good ones if they just read the meta thoroughly enough, letting them direct their salt at other people even when they play like shit. Or maybe people really do just like not knowing what the fuck is going on since the rules are different today than they were yesterday.

That's a 20 page thread that I'm not reading, but man, Robin's comments make things so much more clear as to why things are the way they are.

They literally want(ed?) competitive to be the exact opposite of what I think everyone is here for. They want wins to have more to do with the weapons picked than the skill of each player and team. Un fucking real. What is with this mindset!?!? If any real sport started being more about what clothes and shoes the players are wearing as opposed to how well they play the fucking game, they'd be stupid as shit and lose their audience. Why do people want esports to operate on such a superficial level?

Make sure you've got clutter like Discord and Steam closed. Discord in particular makes me lose frames. I'd suggest trying to play the game at a lower resolution, though idk what to say to shoras. Other than that I mean yea just keep trying things. Unplug your second monitor, double check your task manager, click on that porn site ad for a 25% speed boost.