To me the worrying part of this is that at this point in time it seems that the flight was brought down by rebels. All instances of civilian planes being taken down in the past were military acts by national forces. That rebels somehow obtained the means to bring down a plane at cruising altitude is disturbing because this would mean that guarding the airspace directly around an airport is no longer enough to guarantee safe flight corridors.

It's also interesting to point out that when civilian jets have been brought down in the past, it was almost always(or even just always) a mistake as well; two examples:

• An American cruiser took down an Iranian jet in the past because they thought it was a missile coming at them due to its flight pattern on their target radar.
  
• A Russian fighter jet was looking for an American radar plane during the Cold War, but he mistakenly took down a Korean civilian jet(this was at night) which happened to be where they were expecting the scout plane to be. The flight had veered off course due to failing to set the correct heading mode on the auto-pilot.

So as you can see, while it is worrying that rebels have such weapons, military forces are known to make these mistakes as well(especially at times of war).

I prefer watching the EU rule set. I also don't see the problem in playing two different maps in a row if you can play three to five different maps in a row when it comes to grand finals time(not to mention you don't even know what the maps are going to be, though you do have a pool to practice in its entirety). I suppose it might be a bit harder for players at lower levels of competition, as they haven't played the maps as many times as invite/professional/premiership level players, not to mention their team might not have been together as long.

Seems like local STV is recording but remote STV isn't working.

As a spectator and not a player, I have to say that yes, I did want slower game play to some degree. I don't know if this goes for everyone who enjoys watching TF2, but I like it because it combines the elements which make other FPS successful. There's the positioning you get from tactical shooters, mobility you get from arena shooters and still the gun play is solid as well, which makes the DM fights fun to watch.

In my opinion, the way Valve effected the nerf lessened the quality of some of the elements I just mentioned. There seemed to be more of a focus on raw DM fights and less on positioning and carving out space carefully. I also feel that a lot of the transitions and übers were tactically uninteresting to watch and ended up being sloppy quite often. There were a fair amount of Gullywash stalemates yesterday, yes, but I enjoyed the match immensely. On the other hand, I do understand that as a player it can get boring having a stand-off while waiting for a pick. I suppose this is true especially for the roamer, since you're often the one who ends up having to bomb in and die, sometimes several times without getting any return on your efforts.

I think there is room for a nerf which lessens stalemates while still allowing for a nice balance of DM fights and tactical play(on some maps or even some specific points there is maybe too much of a focus on über pushes indeed), but it wasn't the one Valve implemented. Do you feel that if there were a lesser nerf implemented, the game would still open up a bit more to off-über pushing and less Demoman-focused defence during transitional plays, or would it have to be quite a drastic change to allow for that to happen?

I hope it's because someone at Valve reads these forums, because that would mean that they read all the alternatives people have suggested in this thread, not just that people didn't like the nerf... which would also prevent another unbalanced nerf next time they decide to tweak the weapon.

It would help to know what the text on your screen says. If the error on the blue screen says something along the lines of "a processing unit has failed to receive a clock interrupt", you might want to clean your processor and graphics card. Consistent blue screens while gaming that only come on after a while are very often caused by parts of your graphics card or processor overheating(due to dust or something else) and often that specific blue screen will come up.

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.