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*has fun reading JDX comments* a 12vs12 no restrictions league.. Im sitting with a huge smile here ;)

I’d be actually fine allowing the Saharan Spy. It is far from an upgrade and voice communication ruins the idea of a silent backstab.

I’m not demanding it, but would be interesting too see would anybody use the set. I would not.

Quoted from Jazz

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Screws up spies. When you get stab instantly you know where the spy is. Bit of a disadvantage to the spy. Also FPS lags i think?

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First off, people on this forum will listen you just have to be responsible and listen back. Admins listen to people and are responding to what the etf2l community wants. After all its in their best interest to keep as many of us as they can. Without us a league wont exist.

You say the spy is a weak class overall, is it weaker than a scout? Or weaker than a medic? How is it weak?

Second, yes for every weapon they ban they might lose a person from the community to come play competitively but equally they may gain X amount because people dislike this weapon and want to play game where people aren’t playing with it. Also when tf2 went F2P there was like a 50k increase in players in tf2 but i really don’t think the competitive seen has seen even a 10% of those players in their communities. So the impact of banning 1 weapon on the community isnt that huge as you think.

Thirdly, They haven’t castrated the spy game play. If you were gonna do that you would ban DR. Spy is more than viable and if you look in Vanilla Tf2 then you’ll see that spy is viable with only vanilla weapons.

Now back on to the topic.

The spycicle is NOWHERE NEAR the same as the normal knife. take a look at the stats from below taken from the tf2wiki.

Spy cicle special abilities

Silent Killer: No attack noise from backstabs.
On Hit by Fire: Become fireproof for 2 seconds.
Backstab turns victim to ice.
Melts in fire, regenerates after 15 seconds.

Knife
None

Not gonna lie but how are they the same? Or am i missing something?

1) spy is weak charcter because the more spys precentage you got on a team, the less likely your team to win. lets take 6 demomans team vs 6 spys team. who will win ?
like in economics- the “marginal product” that spy can give your team is rapidly declining, compared to most other classes.

2) for the second point you mentioned , people opinions are important , and I am pretty sure most gamers will prefer to see pro gaming scene thats is similar to those they play at the servers, and not the structured 6v6 9v9 that exist today.

3) spy cicle gameplay is more or less same as normal knife. for someone who knows how to play with normal knife and deadringer, it would be 5 min to learn spycicle.
it wouldn’t be like that if you take normal knife player and tell him to learn your eternal reward gameplay.

Quoted from JDx

[…]
1) spy is weak charcter because the more spys precentage you got on a team, the less likely your team to win. lets take 6 demomans team vs 6 spys team. who will win ?
like in economics- the “marginal product” that spy can give your team is rapidly declining, compared to most other classes.

2) for the second point you mentioned , people opinions are important , and I am pretty sure most gamers will prefer to see pro gaming scene thats is similar to those they play at the servers, and not the structured 6v6 9v9 that exist today.

3) spy cicle gameplay is more or less same as normal knife. for someone who knows how to play with normal knife and deadringer, it would be 5 min to learn spycicle.
it wouldn’t be like that if you take normal knife player and tell him to learn your eternal reward gameplay.

1) But that’s if he is a team of the same class. Versus maybe the most powerful class in the game. If you put 6 heavies v 6 snipers which is more likely to win? I would go for snipers so does that mean that heavy are a weak class?

In a 9v9 situation the spy isnt that weak. A good spy on certain maps can easily top frag and outscore a medic if not be up there.

2) Yes im sure people wanna see shit for all. If there was such a demand for 12v12 comp play then please link me to that league.

9v9 is the closest that you’ll get to pub and whenever they do celebrity match or pros vs pubbers they do 9v9 and i rarely see complaints and they attract a huge size of the community to them. So i think your demand for big shit for alls are limited.

3) Yes maybe the fact it can insta back stab and all that jazz it is the same as the knife but the thing is the spycicle takes out the pyros job. The spycicle can remove the fire that is suppose to help identify the spy? I don’t see that as balanced and equal to knife that can’t do that?

Quoted from Jazz

[…]

1) But that’s if he is a team of the same class. Versus maybe the most powerful class in the game. If you put 6 heavies v 6 snipers which is more likely to win? I would go for snipers so does that mean that heavy are a weak class?

In a 9v9 situation the spy isnt that weak. A good spy on certain maps can easily top frag and outscore a medic if not be up there.

2) Yes im sure people wanna see shit for all. If there was such a demand for 12v12 comp play then please link me to that league.

9v9 is the closest that you’ll get to pub and whenever they do celebrity match or pros vs pubbers they do 9v9 and i rarely see complaints and they attract a huge size of the community to them. So i think your demand for big shit for alls are limited.

3) Yes maybe the fact it can insta back stab and all that jazz it is the same as the knife but the thing is the spycicle takes out the pyros job. The spycicle can remove the fire that is suppose to help identify the spy? I don’t see that as balanced and equal to knife that can’t do that?

1) as I wrote, the marginal benfit spy can give a team is declaining rapidly compared to other classes. In fact 6 spys will probably loose. vs 6 every other class there is.

2) u mad bro?

3) spy cicle do high noise when it burns, its really easy to notice it as a pyro and then you just continue chase the spy

Reason Enforcer was banned has been explained clearly, we don’t intend to re-introduce the weapon unless Valve change it to balance it a little better.

JDx we appreciate your feedback, my colleagues from the admin team have already answered your questions more or less but let me just state that as a league we will probably ban about 6 or 7 weapons this season. I don’t think we will ban anymore than 10 weapons in future seasons ever unless Valve decide to release several items we deem bannable. We really want to play with as little weapon bans as possible but we’ve learned from experience you need to say ‘no’ and ban particular items for the sake of enjoyable games. Nearly everyone wants to see the Enforcer banned, we did a season with it and saw it was used by the majority of spies and its only negative quality isn’t particularly big, a tiny amount less of cloak time makes close to 0 difference, especially with the Dead Ringer.

We will update the whitelist so your players need not accidentally equip the weapons for Season 2 and the small amount of items banned makes very little difference. Highlander will be as close to your expectations of it as possible, you will have a variety of weapon choices to experiment with just like in a public TF2 server…only a few items have been banned.

With this said lets try and move away from discussing The Enforcer – we have made our position clear on it and we would rather discuss the newer weapons.

Quoted from JDx

[…]
1) spy is weak charcter because the more spys precentage you got on a team, the less likely your team to win. lets take 6 demomans team vs 6 spys team. who will win ?
like in economics- the “marginal product” that spy can give your team is rapidly declining, compared to most other classes.

Which is of course 100%, completely, totally irrelevant. We’re discussing unlocks for highlander in this thread, which means that there will only ever be one spy per team. I’ve been playing highlander since before the original ETF2L highlander cup, so take my word on this: the spy is not a weak class in highlander, not by a long shot. You don’t know what you’re talking about, so please just give it a rest.