http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=case_for_grinch

https://youtu.be/vfc42Pb5RA8?si=7LRQSeXtdp32-lwZ

Oopz

Anybody else is into pocketing their cheese? I think cheese sticks taste way better if you let them sit in your pocket for about an hour before consumption. Letting the cheese warm up a bunch really helps bring out the flavor, like how certain beers are better if you let them warm up. Are there any other foods that benefit from being pocketed? I'm sure there are tons of foods that are kept in the fridge but taste better once they've warmed up a little bit.

what i was trying to say was that even if your opponent only has a small soul advantage, it can be really difficult to kill them by out-deathmatching them because items are very strong. I'd like items to be slightly less powerful (not weak) so that the its a bit easier to outplay people with a small soul lead by catching them off guard. Its not that making plays like this is completely impossible right now, I just wish the range of the soul difference where this is possible was larger.

I've put a whopping 25 hours into the game now and have read some reddit threads about the philosophy of moba game design. As expected, CC seems to a huge point of contention between the shooter side of the playerbase and the moba side. I found a thread talking about how in mobas, CC is necessary because its the only way you can reasonably outplay an opponent who is straight up statistically superior to you everyone else on your team. This makes a lot of sense as its not like you can have much room to out aim or maneuver your opponent. Since so much of people's skill expression is based on positioning, you have to punish bad punishing super hard by making them stay in that bad position.

The issue with this in a moba shooter hybrid like deadlock, is that now you have aim and movement as a way for players to outplay each other. If the shooting was less forgiving, then it would be easier to outplay a stronger opponent because you were able to hit your shots and they were not. In the game's current state though, the items you get from earning souls are so powerful that even a small difference in souls gets you to a point where you don't really need to worry about missing your shots. If they made these items less powerful and the shooting less forgiving, then it would be much more feasible to kill a stronger player by flanking them or landing your shots.

I'm sure CC will always be in the game, so I'd like to see them make CC more interesting for both players and for viewers. I'm totally fine with the softer forms of CC like the walls you can put up and the ice dome thing you can trap people in. My issue lies almost entirely around the hard stuns, as they're huge impactful plays, but theyre so boring on every level besides their context. Instead of stuns, I'd like to see stuff like players getting launched up into the air and taking extra damage from your projectile ability depending on how high up they are. This would lead to cool moments where you were only able to kill the obese opponent because you waited until they were as high up as possible before firing your follow up attack.

There are so many times in this game where I don't even bother attacking because I just know that I am statistically incapable of killing my opponent and all I can do is run away. you really never get that feeling you do in tf2 where you get forced into a scout 1v1 at only 34 hp and then you win the fight because you juked their shots while landing 2 meatshots. I honestly think its best that the game isn't as aim dependent as tf2, but I think a nudge towards emphasizing shooter skills would let the devs put much less emphasis on using CC to outplay people.

One thing I really like about this game is the melee system. you can do a quick jab by pressing q or you can charge it to do a heavy melee attack. If you think a player is about to melee you, you can parry them by pressing F. If you're timing was right, you are rewarded by stunning your opponent for a few seconds. The stun is kinda lame, but it does feel really good if you're the one landing the parry. to its credit, it feels more like stunning your opponent in smash or street fighter. What I like about the melee is that its very useful in the game and not just a trolling/desperation tool. You charge ahead during your melee which greatly increases the number of situations where its a relevant part of your toolkit, reload times are pretty lengthy so melee is often your best option, and if you melee a creep you get their souls instantly which means they can't be denied. Melee'ing creeps adds a lot of depth to laning stage as now you have a good reason to position yourself aggressively.

I like 2015 reddit man food (Craft beer, bacon, medium rare steak) and food desert food (hot Cheetos, Takis).

I'm not a league player, but according to my brief research when I was looking into the game, you have more control over your character when the distances you ask them to walk are shorter, which makes sense because of pathfinding and all that, along with it just generally being efficient in terms of how you move your mouse. This seems to mostly be relevant during team fights and when you're trying to juke people. If I am wrong about this about optimal clicking distance in league thats fine. Regardless of distance though, I am certain that you do need to click a lot to be competitive, which I find straining and annoying.

As for the cons/pros of the different camera angles. I think the benefits of top down are way more apparent in an actual RTS, so thats why i have no issue with that angle in that genre.

I get your point about it being harder to have full awareness because of it being 3rd person. If good players have issues with randomly getting flanked all the time, then maybe its an issue that can be dealt with by refining the map, as its pretty complicated and theres a ton of different ways to traverse it. Maybe its like a tf2 map that has too many flank routes to watch.

going to preface this by saying I've only played a little bit, and I have have very little moba experience. To me, deadlock just seems like how someone would have originally designed dota if they werent working within the confines of being a warcraft III mod. I was never a fan of mobas because I found the controls tedious for little benefit over other systems. For example, optimal movement in league requires you to click on the ground right in front of you as fast as you can which is very tedious. I also don't like how in traditional mobas you cant see enemies 100 feet in front of you because of the camera angle. Yes, there's gamesense and strategies you use to get around that limitation but I still don't think anybody would ever go "the issue with this 3rd person camera is that you can see things in the distance, so lets make it top down so you cant see anything".

Before playing, I found the idea of shooting at creeps unfun. However, I found it surprisingly engaging. I actually like last hitting more in this context over regular mobas because if it wasn't for that, then laning would basically be a kovaaks scenario. However, I do like that it does ask you to make quick shots here and there to deny and optimize your soul farming.

I have not experienced enough of the game to comment on the abilities and my takes on this matter are nothing new. Stuns are annoying and lame, like yohnny.

What is really holding me back from really liking the game is the movement system. I like that there are dashes, slides, wall jumps, double jumps, etc, but its all done in a very 1 dimensional, pass/fail sort of way. Dash jumping would be so much more interesting if it didnt require you to to time your inputs specifically, and instead the distance you gain from jumping is determined by at what point of the dash you decided to jump. The movement needs to be more analog and less binary. I'm not expecting there to be tf2 level rocket jumping or anything, but i do want it to feel more source-like. Its just so lame that if you mistime a dash jump, the game goes "error: incorrect timing!" instead of just having you do a gimped dash jump.

Yeah 1 game wouldn't help him see the light, but I do think it would serve well as a means of starting things off in a less confrontational matter and raise interest in newbie mixes which is the best noob onboarding process our community has. Just zesty saying a few nice things about his experience would be pretty big and help give the impression that the comp community isn't completely toxic and that there are helpful, community minded people involved. It could also lead to some good jumping off points for discussions about why x is like y in a natural, friendly way. Pubbers have a hard time even imagining what it is actually like to be in voice comms with your whole team and what that actually entails, so having zesty bring up how the coach suggested rotating around process mid would help the casual audience see that even if there is less class diversity than casual, there are other appealing aspects of competitive play that they will never get out of pubs. I don't think we will ever convince a large chunk of casuals that 6v6 is "real TF2", but we can try to convince them that it's fun in its own right.

I feel the same way. Framing it as a debate is also going to immediately put zesty on the defensive. What would be better would be to invite zesty to a newbie mix or something and have him talk about his experience.

I love reading r/tf2 threads about competitive play and one of the big topics is weapon bans. From what i've seen, once there's been a back and forth on the matter, most pubbers don't have much of an issue with weapon bans themselves, but using them to enforce the cookie cutter class line up. Their vision for competitive tf2 is a game where people constantly switch classes and weapons to counterpick each other for 30 minutes, which is the last thing the current community wants. To some extent, this is just a difference in taste, but I also think that the way you see "what tf2 is about" changes as you get better at it. casuals tend to view tf2 as a big game of RPS, whereas at high skill levels those class/counter class relationships usually seem much softer, and that how your team plays is often more important than what your team consists of. in competitive play, the best way to deal with a heavy is focus fire, but in pubs you switch to spy or sniper.

I'm not sure of how to solve this aspect of the divide, but I think having more high quality class tutorials aimed at pubbers would help raise the overall skill level of those who are at least somewhat interested in playing the game to get better at it. There are tons of bad scout guides out there in particular that say double jumping vs soldiers is bad and that if you aren't at point blank you should use the pistol.

It says a lot about the strength of your character that you are able to look at the situation with Lain and this community from such a rational perspective despite what you are going through now. I was never close with Lain, but we've known each other for a long time as long term members of the community, so the news of their passing made me feel sad, nostalgic, and reflective. I have a childhood friend who was diagnosed with schizophrenia a few years ago who recently went through an extremely traumatic event just as they seemed to be getting their life back under control again, so Lain's passing has me thinking about what I can do to support them. I wish the best to you and your family.

My issue with playing against the loch is that it adds so much to your mental stack when demo is already a class you need to dedicate a lot of your attention to. Demo does a lot to control the flow of the game by denying space and shitting out damage so you really need to keep an eye on what theyre doing at all times. Increasing his effective range now means that you have to actively pay attention to the demo even more actively than before. Situations where previously the worst he could reasonably do is hit you with a 35dmg air det sticky, you now have to worry about eating 100dmg. This is very frustrating on medic where you'll be looking up to keep track of a bombing soldier but then you get hit with a pipe from the opposite end of the point. The only way to reasonably deal with this is to position yourself so that the demo doesn't have any line of sight on you. This leads to much more passive and boring medic play where you're relying on walls as your main form of defense instead of your movement skills. It also leads to more "pussy popping" because if you're below 100hp and the demo has line of sight on you, you pretty much need to pop.

I'm also not really a fan of it it being meta for flavor purposes. The other grenade launchers with their arc and rollers add a lot to demo's class identity and to the game mechanically. The loch takes those interesting properties away replaces them with a flat speed increase which is anything but exciting or deep.

I really like the combination of airstrafing and single shot weapons. Airstrafing to the left to dodge a rocket and then snapping your crosshair back to the right to shoot the soldier is really satisfying. In other games the only thing you need to do with your crosshair is keep it glued on your enemy for the duration of your clip, so aiming in tf2 feels way more expressive to me in comparison scout would be so much less fun to play if he had an SMG because your air movement would get nerfed because you can't really airstafe and track at the same time.