I'm glad to see that the Grand Finals are being covered, it seemed that the rest of the tournament was overshadowed a bit by the Twitch Invitational(not that I'm complaining :-D).

I think the sticky nerf might actually work better with a root function ramp up than with a linear ramp up. This means that at the start of the two-second period the damage would increase quickly, but at the end of the period it would take much longer to ramp up the damage. This would mean that by the time the sticky is primed, it will do ~50 damage instead of 19 damage, but after that you'll actually have to wait a significant time(allowing the other player to move) to get a nice big hit off on your target.

They could also have raised the base damage(which seems to be 19) to something around the 50 damage mark, which would solve the problem of crit stickies not being able to drop a medic(3 x 50 = 150). Note that a root ramp up would also do this, because by the time the sticky is primed, it would be at 50 damage.

There are many options, but I think the base damage of stickies is just a little bit too low now. If instead of the two-second ramp up, they just slightly reduce the maximum(to around 100-110 damage which I think is currently 138 on a centered direct hit and 120 on a far-end-of-the-model direct hit) and ever so slightly reduce the maximum fall-off damage(to 40-50 instead of I think 60 on player damage now), I think it would be much better. It definitely needs some tweaking, but the concept of slightly nerfing stickies isn't a bad thing, in my opinion. It's just how they did it.

"Osiris suicided. (crit)"

I was rocket jumping with Gunboats equipped, shot a random crit and took crit self-damage. ~80 hp > 0 hp. Is this a bug or is crit self-damage a thing now?

Exactly, but that is why action-thrillers don't have a gripping story: because that's not what you expect or want from them. It's about the action and the thrills, not about the story. The story is just a medium for the action, which is exactly what Valve does with the comics and short videos. I just don't understand why people expect a narrative in a TF2 short, it's like expecting a Jean-Claude van Damme film to win an Academy Award for best writing. You end up with a Call of Duty single player campaign disaster when you ask for that; I'd much rather have something which is just entertaining and knows what it is than some pretentious and uncharacteristic grand work.

I don't understand why you would want a plot from the short. What's funny about TF2's "story" is that Valve made the game and the story was a complete afterthought, so they decided to just make it as stupid and incoherent as they possibly could while still offering an explanation for what appears in-game. If you really expect a heart-wrenching drama from a group consisting of an overconfident Boston boy, redneck army man, mentally-ill pyromaniac, perpetually drunk Scottish demolition man, gun loving Russian brute, Texan oil drill engineer, insane German "doctor", creepily prideful Australian mercenary and sneaky French assassin/charmer, you really need to rethink if you're directing your expectations at the correct thing here.

tl;dr Go watch a film instead of playing a cartoonesque FPS for your narrative needs.

I seem to remember someone predicting a space update for TF2 though, but you're right; it has nothing to do with End of the Line.

Wasn't the End of the Line supposed to be a space thing? A countdown would make sense for a rocket launch.

Contact Steelseries and they'll give you an RMA. I've always had good experiences with their products and customer service. Asking people on an internet forum for help with broken hardware is usually a bad idea if you've not contacted the manufacturer first. You will mostly just get biased "information" without finding out what's caused the defect or what your options are in the way of a refund or replacement.

I thought Escher(after this drawing by M.C. Escher

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Escher's_Relativity.jpg

was a much better name for "tetris". :L I think that was used when a match on the map was cast as well.

I played from early May of 2001 until just before EoC came out and probably should have quit July 2007, because that's when I found out about what they were going to do with the trading system. When Constant Tedder quit and the Gowers stopped being around as much, it really went to shit. Whenever there was a problem with the game, it would be "solved" at the cost of gameplay and enjoyment, then when Gerhard became the CEO their ego got so large that even when 80%+ of players all said they didn't want something, Jagex would go ahead anyway, reverting their non-sense months or even years later when it started to cut into their bank account because everyone was leaving the game. I was also one of those players who hated that they made everything so easy. It took me years and lots of timed clicks to max out all the skills and then suddenly people did it in a quarter of the time while afking. In my opinion, all that's left now are a few good artistic people(sound, story, concept graphics, etcetera) and a bunch of greedy managers who will milk the game until people stop playing. I enjoyed my teen years with the game, but I don't think the top level of that company deserves anyone's money nowadays. If they released a new MMO and it would become popular, I wouldn't even give it a try because I know what would happen to it in the long run. Valve definitely hasn't done badly with the monetisation and balancing in TF2, in comparison, even though half of the weapons make us facepalm a bit in a competitive setting.

Fun game, especially the way viaduct started swinging back and forth as it has a tendency to do in grand finals.

I really like seeing this sort of thing, it's always fun to see how the scenes in different continents hold up against one another.

I cannot stress that enough. I don't know how it is in America, but here the examiner will just fail you if he "feels you aren't paying attention to the right things at the right time"(it's probably their way of getting your to pay for another exam). I personally find that the looking around in the dumbest places imaginable "for good form and safety" actually detracts from looking out for the true danger, but whatever; you just have to think about meeting their requirements and then you can learn to drive safely and properly after you get your licence. You'll learn a lot more after you get your licence than you do before your exam. Good luck.

If you've had them for three months, contact SteelSeries RMA. I had an old IceMat Siberia V1 of which a plastic part cracked a month after the guarantee ran out and I couldn't even find my receipt for it. They had me send it to them and a week later I got a brand new headset in the mail. This was many many years ago, though, just after they changed names to SteelSeries; I don't know if they're still that good about their RMA. You should first try rolling the volume controller back and forth quickly a few times, as the wheel sometimes gets stuck internally and stereo headphones often have this weird thing where one of the earcups doesn't work unless you put the wheel in just the right position.

Good luck, hopefully their customer service will live up to its former glory.

It is capable of refreshing the image displayed on your monitor 144 times per second(or as many times as your graphics card/chip is capable of sending a new picture to your monitor), instead of a standard monitor which is capable of doing so 60 times per second. As you can imagine, this gives you a much smoother view and it therefore makes aiming more precise. Most people won't notice this smoothness when watching a film or something like that, but virtually all people will notice a very clear difference when playing FPS.

Most of these modern 120/144 Hertz monitors also have a feature called "strobing", which displays a new image sent by your graphics card at a higher luminosity(hence the word "strobe", from a strobe light as you get them in a club for example). This is to reduce what is called "motion blur", which is a problem of LCD monitors which CRT monitors never had. If the monitor doesn't get a new image by the time it is supposed to refresh the image, it will display the old image again, but at a lower luminosity. This basically makes the new image, when it comes, stand out more to your brain and therefore you will be able to react quicker to what is happening in games. The technologies for this differ from company to company and they all have their own brand names for their respective strobing technologies.

There is a lot of technical difference between these monitors, so it's good to read up on how they work before spending 300+ dollars on any of them. Some have better colours, some have better refresh rates, some have better anti-motion blur technology, etcetera.