if pyro gets to mid before soldier and people did it constantly, then there would eventually be almost no reason to run roamer to mid on half the maps in the game because they'd completely shut down anything the roamer could do.

we have enough good 24/7 badwater servers already, stop suggesting it

the US really needs a better rotation pub server, and I hope this is it

Speaking of Robin, I wonder what top secret developments he's up to.

the last thing tf2 needs is pyros at mid before soldier

When you take the "let's let people play how they want" attitude and /force/ the game to allow it, that's like letting people make One Kind of unit in Starcraft II and rewarding it. That doesn't develop meta, that doesn't encourage skillplay, that's just bad design rewarding people for being faggots. Here's a better example: Imagine if units in Chess didn't have the same movement restrictions. What if the Knight could move anywhere within their radius, or the King could instantly move to any edge of the board? You're destroying a sacred, stable metagame. What makes you think it hasn't been tried before? It doesn't work well, if you do either of these things the game would be completely broken. Everything changes, and the game doesn't reward the same things.

So, you don't reward the player for doing things they like doing. You reward them for doing things that go with the focus of the game and make it stronger. That's the key word here: F o c u s. I'm gonna say it again, because it's so important. Focus! What's the focus of God of War? Gruesome buttonmashing. Myst? Ambience, exploration, and puzzlesolving.

Let's go further into familiar territory - What's Quake focusing on, as a game? Obviously, it has pickups, and maps, and a heavy "vertical" element. And it has guns. The goal is to kill the other person, more than they kill you. But most importantly, it has zoning. The entire Quake meta revolves around zoning - it's the major player in which player (sorry for the weird pun) has the advantage over their other. The player with better aim doesn't always win - if the other has an absolute advantage, like their health/armor stack or a tactical advantage on the map, they can still win.

Even in high level Quake you see "aim players" and "brain players", and both deathmatching and understanding are very, very important to zoning, engagement, and timing. You need to know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, and you need to be able to pull it off too. You can get lucky - you can divebomb in with nothing against a person who's completely better than you and totally shine in every way. But that's mechanical skillplay, and you getting in over them, somehow, even though they're more skilled than you. In Quake, these kinds of plays are rare, not just in a single match but across them too. In tf2, they happen every 10 minutes.

Even though tf2 seems slow and weak compared to quake, it has something special over it. Its absurdity. In TF2, almost every match that's not a roll you see something great happen - That Awesome Medpick, even though it was worthless, That Huge Airshot, even though you got cleaned up by a scout, That Crazy 1v3, even though you failed the push, and that ABSURD time when you just KNEW what the enemy team was going to do and EXACTLY how to counter it, you DO it right and you win the round off of it too. Clearly I'm making a point in a horrible way here, where I give three horrible situations with a highlight that couldn't save them and then something that just totally wins.

I'm not being vain or weird here, either, this is important - In TF2, the team that overall performs better in the things that make TF2 what it is than their opponent (sorry for the wording) should win. What I gave is a good example of that. In simpler terms, Good Play Over Bad Play. What kind of play is the wrangler? You sit with it and it's a virtually indestructible Mowing Wall until you're dumb or dead. You're basically playing heavy, but stationary and a lot more powerful. And the enemy team has to use an uber on it and do a very good push at that - that is, wasting their main resources and betting on a lot of some kind of luck All On Top Of being "better" than the engie and whatever's protecting them at the moment, where to counter pushing into this sentry, it's not nearly as hard. This is just outright a buff to defense, which very easily allows Bad Play to ruin Good Play. And that's Bad.

ITT: highlander elitism and backwards logic vs real culture.

Every class is useful in 6v6, the only reason 6v6 exists the way it does is because the community wanted a faster paced game, with more coordination, teamwork, and skill, opposed the alternative 8v8s and super early 12v12s that existed. Every weapon ban in ESEA (with a few exceptions due to power) is because of slowing the game down or encouraging "gay play" (where unskilled things totally change the flow of the game; like the wrangler!). Reasons like "You can counter it!" or "It's normal!" are bullshit for justifying gay, slow, and OP things.

People dislike Heavy and Engie already, in 6s, because they slow the game down and give one team an absolute health advantage over the other, Just Because the Thing is There. Pyro is annoying too, because he counters most of the spam in the game, but he's not as much of a threat as a wrangled sentry and you have a choice whether to engage with them - they have less mobility than every other deathmatch class in the game.

This isn't a debate about people doing whatever they want - there are pubs for that - this is about restricting people and changing the game to make it better. Every strictly-PVP competitive game in the world has changed with competition. Quake 3 CPMA, Starcraft II, ARTSs and other strategy games too, they all have different styles and focuses that make them what they are.

TF2 happens to be an ARENA FPS with some STRATEGIC GAMEMODES.

You don't make a good arena FPS by making it slow and deliberate. This has been proven time and time again, it's a lesson well-learned in game design. You need to reward precision, cohesion, timing, positioning, knowledge, and adaptability. "Vanilla" TF2, and especially 6s, do all of this. When you start mandating people run heavy, pyro, engie, and you let them use things like the Fists of Steel and the Wrangler, you bog down the game by rewarding these things less - and it's not like the "other" team has to do any of them to make the negatively affected team suffer.

Okay, the wrangler takes a /little/ positioning and knowledge, and protecting against an invuln push takes its own cohesion, but what do the pushers have to do? They need to spend a lot of time setting down 5+ stickies to kill a single wrangled lv sentry - any less and you're screwed, and that's assuming you don't get airblasted away by a pyro, blocked by a heavy, and your stickies don't get blown away, and you need a lot of hard work on all fronts to get the combo up to the sentry if it's in a good position and a lot of . If the engie has even the littlest understanding of what they're doing, they're going to hide behind their sentry, and a team with half a brain and not even a little bit of focus or training will be able to protect them too.

The worst thing is, with a little more understanding of positioning and teamwork, the engie can make life ten times harder for whoever's pushing into them. It stacks the game in favor of defense in absolutely every way. It's like having a pseudo-uber heavy with absurdly tight spread and no falloff on his minigun, plus rockets, and they can't be airblasted or knocked around. I once saw a strategy where the defense ubers the /engie/ so that the sentry can't possibly die or get forcibly unwrangled. It can be borderline impossible and 100% up to good luck to push into a very high level HL engie/pyro combo when you're of the same level. I know I'm giving far-out example and putting things very roughly, but this is absolutely the case.

(continued)

EDIT: typos

airblasting normal players with the degreaser is only broken because of the flaregun and axtinguisher. it would be nice if they actually got blasted the direction you're aiming, though, because right now they go UP. Even if you're aiming down.

I agree with pyyyour but in a different sense, people need to start looking for their questions already being posted before making a new thread to ask.

please for the love of god don't make it a 24/7 server like someone was suggesting

EDIT: Not relevant anymore ignore this

I like offclassing to pyro during last point pushes

EDIT: in pugs

I got good at medic by being bad as soldier, and waching communities vs pros. True fact.

what about the built-in support for highlander, and arbitrary weapon whitelists and classlimits?

obviously valve supports comp tf2; it's just not in money. most of the comments in the past of them refusing to get into 6s is that they won't want to put money into anything that /they/ aren't running. mostly that was understood as a dismissive thing against leagues and ladders for tf2 in general, but that's not the case.

i can't track scouts, i just have twitchy meatshots once in a while and lucky line-ups

would a 120 hz monitor help me track scouts please respond

I don't have the money for it so I'm mostly curious, and I'm asking here because the answer would probably contribute to OP

gas jockey set is balanced and helps pyro be a viable class while making him less of a nuisance for soldier and scout

EDIT: That said I like the two melee nerfs (wouldn't it be great if an axtinguisher crit did 150 damage instead, too?), everything else is just pants on head retarded and obnoxious though