i knew democrat voter turnout would be down when I looked at tftv

I know this is a bad idea, but can you explain how it is possibly a good idea to provide the combination therapy of "making you feel like shit + provide advice" vs. just "provide advice" within the context of a short ass pug made up of (who i assume are) 9-5ers.

Also ignoring the fact that you know, maybe the 1 player who makes a living off of competitive should try to make it appealing to new players (crazy i know)

b4nny argued with charis for over an hour when charis tried to tell him the extremely radical idea of "constantly berating people in pugs doesn't make them play better, actually"

playing demoman just brings out something in him

Holy shit am I finally able to yap about cryptography on tftv.

Japanese naval codes (i.e. JN-25) were not readable prior to the attack. They were "solved" in the sense that the structure of the code was known, requiring two codebooks that perform grouping and additive operations (will ignore details for now, you can look at this if interested). But without these codebooks it was not functionally readable.

Diplomatic codes were cracked by this time (PURPLE). So the White House certainly knew an attack was coming (it has been a while but I believe primary suspicion was against Macarthur who was not in Hawaii) but there was no clear indication in decoded PURPLE messages that the target was Pearl Harbor*. The infamous 14 part declaration delivered immediately prior to the attack was also not decoded, written down, and delivered in its entirety until about an hour after the attack (and if you read it doesn't really declare an attack officially in Western fashion, just cuts off negotiations. Maybe people who were more used to Japanese sensibilities would know that is equivalent to launching an attack, but still there is no mention of Pearl Harbor. You can read it here.)

Also from a conspiracy theory perspective the motivation to let the attack occur is unclear; wanting to escalate a war with Japan by giving up a critical military keypiece is certainly...a strategy. American neutrality was already a farce by this point in the war with Roosevelt's order to basically shoot to kill German U-Boats so on that front it's not like they need any excuse as well.

*There was correspondence between a spy at Pearl Harbor who reported to the consulate, who would then report to Tokyo. If you know anything about Hawaii there is a large Japanese population there, so his presence is not unusual by any means. One important message that was missed was a request about the location and # of warships at Pearl Harbor. Given the volume of messages being decoded and the people who were actually able to see such messages (notably not the military commander of Pearl Harbor iirc) along with other fuckery that was going on in the cryptography branch it's likely that this was just bad oversight.

It is really funny to me that the one season that ppl didn't threaten a boycott, which again started because people didn't want playoffs to be messed up cause of a cheater,...had playoffs being messed up because of a cheater. Can't make this shit up lmao (sucks for everybody involved though)

Weren't esea open threads like this, if anything it's a sign that Nature is Healing

exhibiting real eater behavior during your first time is a good sign, i am impressed

where's the slaw (or did you sub it out)

Agree on the engineer part and on the points made saying that it can be pretty consequential to not be able to offclass. Engineer is definitely the biggest offender and honestly just making it so you can't be restricted off engie/spy probably solves most issues.

Possible I'm misunderstanding your point here, but I agree with this sentiment if people were trying to play "optimal 6's" in which case yeah putting an invite pyro main to airblast on gully last barely matters. But if you are already resigned to playing perma heavy/pyro and understand that a lot of the time they are objectively the wrong choice surely having an invite hl main on those classes is better than random combat player from x div if the div is low.

Regardless, I agree with your point that no matter what banning offclasses does make it more difficult to learn the format for the HL players in this instance. On the other hand though playing against the pyro/heavy team is surely not conducive to other teams in the div learning the format as well.

That one RGL admin who was like an IM 6's player made amateur playoffs on engineer (i don't even think they were a scout player, they were banned off soldier) and that class blows, I feel like a top heavy player could place in IM or something that class is not even that bad.

IIRC the reason is so players in lower 6s divs actually have the opportunity to learn how the format is supposed to be played as opposed to just playing against perma offclass teams, which at least to me makes sense. Perma spy seems super dogshit though tbh but perma heavy/pyro probably requires specific counterplay.

The side effect of course is that it kills offclassing on last which is not optimal (and also hurts the ability of the HL players to learn the format) which in theory could be rectified via some complex "no offclassing except on last" ban but that seems kinda nightmarish administratively.

Any invite hl player gets restricted off their class in IM or below (minus med), but it is funny lmao. Also a good idea tbh.

These mf's got the most detailed ban reason ever meanwhile Diddle Dee and Diddle Dum just get "Breaking RGL's player code of conduct" like what

Ngl the idea that some casual ppl went on this website for this thread and may have seen "pedophile nazi brony" on the sidebar is really funny to me.

Zesty Jesus has played HL before (actually with some players I know wtf small world), but tbh I don't really see the point of this. Him not liking comp is perfectly fine, nothing inherently wrong with that. He's much more of a video essay/theory youtuber (idk what the proper term is here). More focused on design/philosophy of the game rather than individual experiences I feel like, and the points he makes are not really things that are addressed/resolved from playing a single 6s game.

One example is insinuating that comp players ban things because they are "bad" or afraid of "meta shifting" (when mostly it's just cause u can't fucking push last lol). Not ideal obviously for PR purposes, but idk I feel like this opinion will always exist no matter what happens as long as a ban list exists. I've seen you in the trenches of /r/tf2 so I'm sure you agree with me on this, people will just post shit to post shit (they do get dunked on in the comments though which is nice to see). This sentiment has basically always existed even pre meet your match, and it if it still exists I highly doubt just playing a game resolves this. Shit even if Zesty Jesus were to take a complete 180 on this take I'm sure a lot of people would still have it.

TBH I think the best thing would be to just discuss things and clear up misnomers, like the quickplay stuff people mentioned earlier. I think it's also valuable to make known that comp (like casual) is not a monolith and if anything I think most people, especially in the past, disagreed with b4nny (who I imagine is the one and only face of competitive tf2 for somebody like Zesty Jesus who doesn't really play) regarding things like unlocks. It's unfair to characterize an entire community as "forcing Valve to cater to them" when most ppl (especially back then) were more or less happy to just fuck off and play the game with their whitelists. Although it is also unfair to just put the target on b4nny and those with similar ideas given that Valve just kinda botched everything, it would be like if people thought you were at fault for asking for an accessible entrance when you have a physical disability and the building owners respond by building u a shitty dirt ramp and then blowing up the main staircase.