Are you trying to say that harbleu isn't a good player? I haven't watched many of the matches, but mix^ seems to be doing pretty well, it seems to me like he's doing just fine.

The bottom line is this: you can't do damage if you don't hit your shots. I never said having low DPM explicitly makes you bad, just that having high DPM tends to mean you're doing well. It's the only statistic, in my opinion, that can stand on its own and still hold value, but it certainly isn't the only thing you should look at to determine skill.

"Mostly" is a gross overstatement.

As I mentioned, TF2 has very few player resources: the two most prominent ones are Health and Ammo, the latter of which is a great deal easier to manage; players can replenish their loaded clip by themselves using their reserve, and can gather up ammo from fallen enemies or easy-to-reach ammo packs.

Health, on the other hand, is much harder to come by; players have to either seek out a healthpack, which are typically in dangerous areas, or find their medic, which soaks up valuable heals and buffs their teammates could be receiving.

When you deal damage to a player, you weaken the enemy team as a whole. Even someone who spends the entire game sitting back and spamming to reach 300DPM is doing a lot of work: they're applying pressure to the enemy team, they're creating room for their teammates to be more aggressive, and they're forcing the enemy medic to focus on healing damaged players instead of buffing healthy ones.

As I said above, there are certain scenarios where solely looking at DPM falls apart, and that's going to be the case for any one statistic you look at. However, every combat class is capable of putting out damage. If a player has low DPM, they're not putting as many shots into the enemy team, which makes them objectively less effective when it comes to the enemy team dying.

Of course, there are ways they can compensate for this: players who only put in damage when it matters most will be slightly penalized in terms of constant DPM, but their KDA should look better to make up for it. Likewise, a roaming soldier who spends 90% of his time alive bombing in and trading for the medic or demo will show a higher number of med/demo picks.

The above scenarios are definitely the exceptions, and are not necessarily the marks of great players either; a roamer who is constantly dying to trade for the medic quickly becomes predictable and, more importantly, counterable, and if they can't adapt to shift their playstyle then they probably weren't going to look very good to begin with.

I'd love to see an example of this; you'd be really hard pressed to find one. Even if this mystery player somehow did manage to bait every single player on their team, got the finishing damage on every kill, and got away with a sliver of health to boost their KD, they'd still have to hit an incredible number of shots to deal that much damage.

Either the team they were playing against was really bad, which will break down any system that only looks at one game at a time, or the player is, surprise, actually good.

Is it possible to inflate your stats with spam and baiting? Absolutely. That being said, to inflate it to a point where you severely skew the data is really hard to do without possessing some amount of skill.

The only real possibility in your scenario is if only half of the situation is true: someone who goes 30:10 but did 100 DPM and lost clearly did so by dashing in, finishing up a kill by baiting their teammate, then running away to heal up again. The reverse is also true: if you deal 400 DPM but die three times more than anyone on your team, you're probably just holding W and spamming the enemy team before dying and leaving your team down a player.

I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think there's one stat that is completely objective and doesn't need context to show someone is a good player (medic excluded): damage per minute. Health is the primary resource in TF2, and every time you take health away from someone you're reducing their effectiveness and gaining an advantage for your team.

Having low deaths is also a plus; this should be valued as a percentage of your team's deaths, probably?

Other things would be bursts of damage, as DPM is largely affected by spam. One way to help evaluate that is measure the number of direct hits (meatshots included), but the better option is if you can somehow determine if someone did a lot of damage with one shot (ie. soldier shoots a rocket, deals 80 damage to 3 different people grouped up).

Damage-to-heals ratio is an okay stat, but shouldn't be so much a punishment (pockets would suffer no matter what) as a plus; at the same time, if you could see whether people got buffs or not (don't think this is possible?) that would also help. Good players are constantly overhealed.

Off-classing could be somewhat measurable; if someone goes sniper and gets a headshot in a small amount of time, that's a pretty effective sniper. Likewise, if they string 3 picks together quickly, and then the team caps the next point, that was a really clutch sniper player. However, if they switch to sniper and don't get any kills before switching back/losing, they didn't make anything happen (not to say they're awful, but in this instance, they weren't effective on sniper). Obviously there's also the idea of using a sniper to stall the game and prevent the other team from pushing before they have uber or something, but that's much harder to measure.

There are a handful of other things I could probably think of, but they start to get more complicated because they need context of the situation (one thing that comes to mind is if your medic switched to kritz at a good time; you can sometimes determine this straight from numbers, ie. if they were going to have a decent kritz advantage, if they haven't used it before which makes it more surprising, etc.).

Anyway, those are just some ideas to consider, I totally don't expect them all to seem valuable to everyone or even easily doable.

Wow, I didn't even see this thread until just now. My account was also disabled out of the blue, and I don't even post anything.

I talked to a friend at Google who said he'd look into it, with this many people affected I can only assume it's a mistake.

Edit: I didn't even try because I got no email, but my account is back as well, totally intact; I hope nobody lost any videos!

Knowing about this more than 2 days in advance probably would have helped, but this seems like an awesome opportunity and I really hope some of the guys out west will be able to make it.

I could probably show up.

Keep in mind that ESEA and CEVO only support Windows for their clients, so if you want to play in a league you'll have to keep a Windows machine/partition.

Borderless windowed mode takes way more resources than vanilla full screen.

It's like someone saw Gangnam Style, thought "man that was really popular we should copy it" and then copied it.

0/10

Unless something changed since last season, the client won't open if you already have TF2 running.

This looks awesome. I don't know if anyone else would be interested, or if it's an easy thing to do, but I think it would be a neat feature if you had a team-wide healthbar for each side next to each other, so we can see the overall health of each team during fights. Not incredibly useful, but might still be a bit insightful.

Also please open source it, I've been slowly trying to pick up on C++ and Source stuff and it would be cool to see how you did this (plus then I could look into making the change myself :V).

Not to be too much of a downer, and I know I'm not even playing in ESEA this season, but this thread seems really odd to me. I think it's cool ESEA was able to make it another season, but so far this hasn't been a very good feedback thread in my opinion.

For starters, Killing made a thread just like this before the season started, and it was pretty much a repeat of what people have said in the past. This thread has seen the exact same suggestions as that one, but the responses have all seem to be "Sorry, we can't do that" or "We'll look into it"; these are the same answers we had back in January, so what's the point of this thread if nothing has changed?

Don't get me wrong; it's great that ESEA's staff are being more engaged with the TF2 community, but it seems to me like nothing's changed.

It's okay, I got the joke :>

Lookin' good; adding an Event type of category would be cool too, ie. ETF2L Premier Finals, CEVO-Main Finals, Zowie Invitational, etc.