I think one thing that hasn't necessarily been talked about enough in these discussions is that people don’t just play competitive TF2 because they’re trying to min-max progression through divisions. A huge part of why people stay in the game is because they want to keep playing with specific groups of people, which was absolutely true for me when I first started playing.

A lot of the players I used to queue and team with are now either much higher div than I am or have moved on from the game entirely, while I also stepped away from playing at a serious competitive level for a long time. The result is that under stricter restriction systems, it becomes realistically impossible to ever form some of those rosters again even though we already played together in the past and weren’t some untouchable superteam, even when it was more competitive. I would absolutely shoot stickies into DoomIcorn again.

I see a lot of people echoing the same sentiment of “I would come back if I could play with my friends again,” and I think that resonates because the current system tends to treat players as permanent snapshots of their peak placements instead of where they actually are now or what kind of team they’re trying to build. And realistically, with the size of the current playerbase and the amount of volunteer admin work already required, it’s impossible to perfectly evaluate every returning player’s current level through demos, logs, sparse recent matches, scrims, etc.

There’s always going to be tension between “maximally competitive league” and “league people can actually come back to and participate in without dedicating all of their free time to grinding.” Those are fundamentally different goals. Obviously there still needs to be protection against blatant stacking/ringing/sandbagging, but I think the league has drifted too far toward preventing hypothetical imbalance at the expense of roster expression and player retention. At the current size of the game, I think that’s more damaging than just letting the teams (and just jazz) play.

done

Both changes made

Added to sidebar + name changed

Absolutely insane. This is going to set a new standard for editors going forward (and finally also solve the amount of fragmented videos of partial knowledge around youtube hopefully)
If you’ve had interest in editing until this point, this is your sign to jump in

what do you think youll get from santa mr rents

i agree! but I also know for a fact if I shoot a rocket in the game, and then alt tab into next to ANY video in the style of marmaloo the difference is noticeable

This really lets me nerd about on the thing that I honestly love the most about TF, thank you
There's an artistry through novelty that I think really makes a selling point for a frag movie. The moves I watched in weeb_whacker's example really helped exemplify that, and other examples like pky II and pretty much anything Kaidus put out during his peak that aren't necessarily edit heavy, but I still go back and watch years after I initially discovered them (which was years after they were posted) because they're just so heavy in gameplay quality that the editing didn't need to carry that much.
I think the novelty aspect carries a lot, especially when the game itself doesn't change at all in balance, look or feel. I can't imagine the levels of consistent insane output required for kaptain to post LAN frag videos at full length, or the amount of time it takes to learn to edit like nick and cyanic, or making shadowplay clips interesting through team personality, they're all different strengths and intricacies that make them uniquely interesting

I wish though when I was making my own that I had known at the time that it's essentially required to speed up your clips by 5-10%, otherwise they feel slow in comparison to everybody else's. I get why that started, just something I don't see anybody else really talk about

Really loving to see the amount of work being put into this- how possible is it to try and host pugscrims in TC2 for 6s? That seems like a good way to do some limit testing

when I was a team captain in open I would schedule late because I had to go to class and when I couldn't find people I would give other team leads a key to bait their scrims and scrim me instead

https://i.imgur.com/qgV9E04.png

he definitely needs time away from the scene, at the least.

most of his posts here have been relatively incoherent for a while now, and I wish there were other people who knew him more personally that would do more wellness checks because while I don't know his situation on a personal level, this on top of things he's said in the past need to be addressed by people with degrees

In 6s, this is a nonissue. In HL, isn't separating your pyro from your combo generally also really putting your team at a disadvantage against soldier bombs and spy plays?

I get as well that clearly you used an example from a most extreme case scenario, and taking it as your sole argument is obnoxious. But in the really few instances where this could ever come into play, it's generally always a better solution to just shoot rather than some inane spy-adjacent play without an invis kit to be able to position yourself with. I get where you're coming from, but I'd rather start banning these cosmetics on just being horrifically ugly than pretending it has an actual negative outcome on the game state.

Valve released the TF2 SDK in February, and immediately we all jumped in on a conversation about our own version of the game, but with blackjack and hookers improving the game on all fronts to better suit our needs, whatever those needs were. This conversation wasn’t even new, competitive-focused mods have been talked about for almost 12 years now, at least from what I can find in TFTV discussions.

More recently than the release of the SDK comes a wallhack exploit that was publicized, with steps on how to achieve it, to perfectly bypass sv_pure limitations. Unfortunately, we now know that Valve in their latest large patch since then has not addressed it, just like they did not address the spy decloak bug that also had a step-by-step guide written for it (6 years ago!). While I think it was the right decision to publicize this exploit, it makes plain the continued pattern of Valve not caring about game-breaking exploits, which is clear to anybody who frequents this forum.

That should have been some sort of rallying point. Instead, people got caught up in discussing the philosophies of exposing exploits to the public, rather than what we should have been focusing on: legitimate fixes from and for our community in the form of our own promod that actually addresses our very real problems.

The downsides of forum discussion become very clear, very quickly when you try to read through everybody’s opinions and ideas. We get stuck in endless “what ifs” that lack any real scope (and sometimes, merit) and spend our time debating the boogeyman of the week instead of narrowing down our ideas to qualitative goals. Questions that need answers get buried by rebalancing offclasses, adding tutorials, remaking matchmaking or hosting pugs some nebulous new service, giving pyro a lightning gun, whatever. Meanwhile, we’re still stuck with an inconsistent experience that we actually have the power to fix.

This, just like the time before and the time before that, can be a wakeup call to focus on something that really matters, which is a fork of TF2 that is consistent, fixes what Valve clearly won’t, and gives the people who push the game forward the tools they need without reinventing from the ground up. Mastercomms just did this with TC2’s summer patch, and it looks amazing. Is that a jumping off point, or even a blueprint?

I’m not saying I have answers for who codes, funds, or maintains the crazy amount of work that a project like this would entail. I just wish we wouldn’t spin our wheels for a decade arguing over making a third global whitelist or anything that isn’t making our experience realistically any better. We’re playing the game now, why don’t we want to make the one we have stable instead of daydreaming about a totally different one?

respawn binding and spamming as soon as you're any level of caught has been such a game changer since it became a mainstream feature of 6s, but it's so shitty to push against, esp on process and sunshine, which are also the two most popular maps in the pool (at least for pugging)
shifting the goalposts for how easy it is to take advantage of the ridiculous sightlines on those maps with zero consequence makes it hard for me to say that it's healthy for the game, even if it's been around for so long that it's become central to a lot of holding strategies on those maps and is considered QOL by most