Maybe you should have a private chat instead of passive-aggressively uttering frustrated psychological projection and blame shifting on a public forum in regards to someone you've probably never actually spoken to. You might find that you're trying to reach exactly the same goal, but from a slightly different perspective. Otherwise, in future you are just going to have less enthusiasm to make maps for competitive and people like Ben are going to have less enthusiasm to provide the feedback needed to make them. Everyone loses, nothing is won. I think we all understand where this frustration has come from, because there is a lot of rude and unhelpful feedback mappers have to sift through and learn to ignore, but you might not want to be projecting this onto someone who is genuinely trying to help you(and by extension all of us) .

Why not give every class three interesting and simple unlocks in every weapon slot and keep it that way until all of them are balanced? I mean, would a medigun with "+50% charge duration, cannot switch heal target during über" not be more interesting and easier to balance and understand for new players than the vaccinator and quick-fix? For pyro not even that would be enough, because it's so buggy and conceptually flawed within a game with strong arena shooter elements. It's not even difficult to make it work, but they just don't seem to understand what the engine and classes have done over the years to shape the playstyle of this game.

All that shows you is if you want to win you use the best weapons. That doesn't tell you if the person/their opponent/the spectator enjoyed being part of the experience, no matter how balanced it will be when Valve get their precious data. If you put two turds of equal mass on a set of scales, they will be in perfect balance, but it doesn't make your house smell less like poo than when one turd was bigger than the other.

What TF2 needs in order to be a competitive game(not a successful one, just a competitive one to begin with) is direction, not balancing or expansion. There is nothing to balance right now because in Valve's mind, competitive TF2 has no clearcut identity for people to be captivated by and which the balancing would work towards achieving. Quake has fast-paced DM and internalised timings, Overwatch has class-centric teamplay, CS has slower moving heavily aim-based tactics. According to this community(TFtv), TF2 should be about über-centric and movement based three-dimensional DM supplemented by utility class and unlock switching, but if you just take an honest look at some of the classes and most of the unlocks that are in the game right now, Valve has no such precise vision for the game, or at least this update did not show what that vision is.

I'm happy matchmaking is now part of the game and I'm sure this will not be the last competitively significant update, but my gut still tells me that something is missing in Valve's mindset. To me it still feels like they don't know what they want competitive TF2 to be. Without whitelists and class limits(which the competitive community had to invent over the years), there just doesn't seem to be a framework for a competitive game.

Pick a map type, decide the feel of the game and how each class can use a few skills(some more potent than others) within that environment. If the player plays the class skillfully and intelligently, they should be able to either use skills normally belonging to other classes at a weaker level, or be able to circumvent the skills of other classes. Then, and only then, you can start making interesting unlocks which make the game interesting instead of breaking either the feel(and therefore player/spectator enjoyment) or fairness of the competitive game. Unlocks which trade all or part of one of those class skills and reinforce another skill to compensate for it are the ones which make the game dynamic but not broken, and allow for actual decision-making and risk-taking instead of roulette.

You must first decide to use nails or screws before opting for the hammer or the screwdriver. This update was Valve deciding that fixing the boards together was worthwhile in the first place, which is a welcome start. I remain hopeful the rest will follow.

With your name, is that supposed to be a good or a bad thing?

Thank you to Matcherino.

In America things aren't consumable unless they have sugar added.

I like this recent trend of cooperative jumps with two or more people doing a jump at the same time and assisting each other. The music during the TAS run was pretty funny as well, because it looked so casual since it just kept going on and on, seemingly leisurely flying around even though it was extremely complicated. Good job everyone.

Why not just make the round time 2 or 3 minutes instead of 10 minutes during a golden cap? If you don't push after winning the mid fight, the other team gets an equal chance to wipe you on mid after 3 minutes. This would force a decision, which should be the objective of a tiebreaker, right? This could happen a few times, but at some point a team will wipe or one medic will survive and the other won't, unless a point changes hands.

What have we done to you to deserve this?

I linked a post of a Valve employee saying P-REC causes crashes unless it is updated. When matchmaking was made available, TFTV was full of people posting that they were crashing unless they removed P-REC from their custom folder.

Can you not read?

P-REC hasn't been updated for all of the new things that came with matchmaking. If I remember correctly from another thread, the creator, Orange, doesn't intend to update it. There is nothing anyone can do because P-REC is a signed plugin and Orange either has to update it himself or hand it off for someone else to maintain and get it signed by Valve whenever a new version is made.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tfcompetitive/discussions/0/405693392927698879/

I'm just going to assume it will be bad until they release an expansion, just like every other fairly recent Civ game. They usually run like a bucking horse as well, so if you needed a reason not to pre-order video games, there are two big ones for this game.

http://puu.sh/oNmaR.png

Just an idea I had. This would cover choke sightline from flowers if tetris were put in the exact right spot and would offer a wall to surprise jump over top of and allow people to sneak some cap time onto the point without having to eat so many spammed projectiles and stickies.

Thank you for the years of top notch entertainment and hopefully you can soon find a place for TF2 without having to sacrifice other things.