Not exactly. They had issue with the coaches basically being a 6th player calling all pushes, tracking the economy, always being able to comm. It created a scene where established teams with coaches had a big advantage that was hard to compete with, especially with how a lot of the major teams started to get the Coach to maincall. Valve made a rule for all future Valve tournaments to restrict communication between coaches and the players to timeouts and between maps. This way the players still need to keep track of the economy and decide pushes for themselves outside of the tactical timeouts.

Honestly I think this would be a good compromise to TF2 as well provided people don't pause all the time, and people actually enforce the pause limits that are set in the ruleset of each league.

Tldr; I don't think having a coach is an issue, it's that he's allowed to always stay in mumble/TS and communicate with the players during gameplay.

Completely agree. His plugin was great and I haven't seen something equivalent to that since. I remember when the game had an exploit that his plugin used where you could screenshot players screen, but only in-game. Some people of course was concerned that this was too intrusive but especially for ESP it was a foolproof way of catching people if you trusted the source.

The same azn who got a vac in the LMAObox wave after the esp ban? And then used a friends account in an official?
Such corruption.

Is there a possibility solid's access was used by someone else? I can't ask him because he's off right now but this doesn't really sound like something he would do. What are we talking here, innocent shenanigans or actually disrupting a match?
Suppose abuse is abuse anyways.

Can you assign multiple accounts to the same phone number? I thought most people used Winauth and a burner number for mm/trade alts.

Just to clear some stuff up.

VAC does remove most of your tf2 inventory, but legally they can't touch items you've bought in the store or otherwise purchased. I've also seen it take several days to happen so it's not instantaneous. Non-tradeables stay in the inventory though. (and sometimes crates etc for some reason).

What mustardoverlord says is also accurate. Everyone who used LMAOBOX donator was not caught in this. Most likely Valve included it's signature and waited a fixed time period to flag accounts who used it.

Didn't they months ago introduce a patch to make it harder for wallhackers by making all models invisible when they are completely behind an obstruction/wall? A lot of people had issues with it especially when people would peek corners the models would pop into view magically. They have optimised it since then but I imagine if you have a connection with chokes and drops you'd get the worst of it.

Thx rays <3

Well they also won i49.

Wait? So playing vs NA players with high pings and have to play the official at 3pm is unfair? ^^
We all know it's unfair it's just le europe vs na memes.

http://i.imgur.com/7Zqnf32.jpg Kappa

Personally wouldn't call a direct upgrade at all. It's just really specific situations like bombs where it's retarded. Or for example holding a corridor on cp_steel and spamming down it all day it takes no skill or effort. The first rocket reload is also retardedly fast, but that might just my own personal pet peeve.

A medic force or drop is supposed to be a big play, not an unavoidable expectation.

It's not that lock and load is much better. It's that it's too easy. You and blub have played demo for a long long time and the regular pipe launcher is great if you're good enough with it as it has a very high skill ceiling. Especially on maps like viaduct or badwater where rollers make a significant difference. Lock and load anyone can pick up and hit 60% of pipes within a week. When the pipes are that fast you eliminate the margin of prediction and it get's closer to how you would use a hitscan weapon.

I think it's really rare to have a weapon even the Americans have banned now unlocked for Europe. Typically we've been the most stingy and we've had extended testing of most weapons, usually checking it's performance and issues in NA UGC or experimental cups. The December buff to lock and load is just ridiculous, and I can't help but think that Valve actually considered it a nerf, but decided to "throw in" an extra grenade per clip to compensate for the (very) small damage decrease, and they even added a 25% self damage decrease. I feel sorry for heavies who needs to play against this and personally would want it banned. A toddler wouldn't miss those pipes, and the regular pipe launcher is a beautiful weapon with a very high skill ceiling. Lock and load are none of these things. Whenever you see a weapon that forces everyone to switch to it, (which is what I did with crit-a-cola in season 6) it's generally bad for the scene.

As for the beggars bazooka, I commend Hartz to perhaps for the first time embracing it and show what it's capable of in competent hands. It's beautiful to see him jump around and get work done, but he showed a fundamental problem with it that you wouldn't understand if you haven't experienced it. There really is no counter to the medic bombs with it. We've had pyro ready, level 3 sentry in position, the medic rotating around, the bomb getting called well in advance and every factor you can think of but still the fact remains that that force WILL happen. The medic can't surf it. The sentry can't lock on fast enough. The pyro can't reflect more than 1 realistically even if he's lucky to get even that. You can't hide or rotate your medic since the speed of the bomb is twice as fast as stock rl so the solly can readjust his jump very easily, even if his teammates don't call out the medic position.

Think about it. All the solly has to do is jump around a corner and release mouse1. That's it. He can do that from across the map. I don't find the weapon overpowered whatsoever, in fact i'd rate stock or blackbox higher overall for most maps and setups but to have something like this weapon in competitive and adding to that a randomized luck-based spread of rockets is sort of an insult to competitive in itself, where you want the players skill to be the factor.

There's a lot of misconceptions every time I see these threads. No-life wall of text incoming.

#1 Releasing evidence
No reputable league or game company would ever release evidence on a players ban. It just isn't done. Ever. Is the average player competent or unbiased enough to be able to review such evidence accurately? The material is always extremely technical, we're not talking Youtube videos with bad editing and effects here, or ignorant comments like "that shot was bs". More importantly, cheats and anti-cheats is a constant cat and mouse game. Cheats improve, AC adapts. If cheaters are aware of the methods used for catching them, they will adapt. I've always referred to this as a double edged sword, because a player has no way whatsoever to defend himself after a ban. Nonetheless this is entirely necessary for the overall good of the league. The majority of people asking to see evidence do so to satisfy their curiosity, which is not the best of reasons.

#2 "But he's bad" "but he was on lan"
Some people assume cheaters are bad at the game, which can be incorrect. When common players think of cheaters they might imagine a very young person that do it blatantly in pubs with ragehacks, not developing their game sense and positioning/aim because of the extra help they get, but could you imagine a competent competitive player with just a simple % increase in his accuracy? Players skill is entirely irrelevant for an AC admin because it's actual technical evidence that is used. It can be done on any class (medic with esp for example) and it shouldn't matter if the player is high profile or, excuse the term, a nobody. Public backlash should never be a factor, and every case should be treated equally. A cheater doesn't necessarily cheat 24/7. It can be utilized on a random pub or on a crucial moment in an official where you need a medic pick, just to give an example. A person can go 0-20 while cheating and stats and logs are entirely irrelevant.

#3 "but he/she isn't Vacced?"
briefly looking at most of the the cheat forums in my bookmarks while writing this, i'm seeing 20+ public cheats that remain undetected, one famously being undetected and used since 2011. Keep in mind that these are public forum (ie script kiddie sites), and this doesn't account for private ones. Valve is really pushing AC into cs:go due to the dev support and how prevalent it is in destroying players experience in matchmaking. Only relying on VAC for a game like tf2 is just not realistic for a competitive league. Heck, even the donator version of LMAOBOX (biggest commercial cheat in tf2) remained undetected for a long long time through regular patches, although the creator now forces you to utilize a burner steam account to avoid his customers complaining about getting a VAC ban.

#4 "Vac is game specific"
Yes. Sort of. Doesn't hurt anyone if I talk about this because a banned cheater can do nothing to prevent it. A ban in cs:source for example carries into tf2 because of utilizing the same game engine and some cheats are usable for both games, so Valve simply included most Source games together, exception being cs:go and Goldsrc games. You can't directly tell on a users profile what game a VAC applies to, but every items that's not bought in the store is queued to be removed from their inventory, usually within 24 hours. Sidenote: I really think Valve should consider showing what game a VAC applies to, because players suffer from a lot of scrutiny and currently you can even get a VAC ban for joining a custom achievement server in CoD:mw2. 300 games currently have VAC implemented and it's unfair to a player that gets one ban to be possibly scrutinized from the players of all these games.

tl;dr it's saturday night and I bothered to write all this. AMA.

Chessclub looking good. Exciting to see what you guys can achieve for this next season.

Now only if we can get sheep or/and Yuki to post it'll be perfect.