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Quoted from unu

[…]

Write “I will read the original post and not ask unrelated questions” 100 times on a blackboard.

I’m not going to make a thread just to ask one simple question.

Unlocks haven’t been decided, but at the moment they’ll probably be the same as the HLNC #2. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another weapon balance update before then though, so who knows.

Quoted from Toba

[…]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRZq3J0uz4

shits getting serious, son

No granary, No CTF please

Quoted from SabaSaba

2) The rules should set a deadline for the map picks. We found out our maps for the semi final 45 minutes before the match time because the enemy team wasnt responding to our requests or simply did not want to start picking maps. This is ridiculous and effectively ruined our chance to practice the specific maps. There should be a rule which states when the maps should be picked.

Better team won in the end, I’m not complaining about that, but it still gives a bitter aftertaste.

It seems fair that there is no deadline for deciding maps because both teams are equally affected by doing it or not. It seems that way because any advantages or disadvantages of choosing when to do the map picks are distributed equally to both teams, right?

But there is one advantage to be gained by delaying the map picks:

This advantage becomes possible when you know your own team is not going to practice, for whatever reason, until a certain time. You delay the map picks until that time so that your opponent also cannot practice until that same time. Of course, their team can simply practice all possible maps but that means a large portion of that practice is wasted on maps that won’t be played. The delaying team is able to lessen the disadvantage of not practicing by depriving the opposing team of practice as well.

There’s two reasons why a team will not practice:

1. They would but can’t
2. They could but don’t

In the first situation, it’s possible to view the ability of reducing the opposing team’s effective practice time as a device to even the playing field when your own team is met with unfortunate circumstances. So, one might say that it’s unlucky for a team to play worse because of things they can’t control and because we don’t want competitive tf2 to be centered on which team just happens to be luckier it’s fair that, in this case, the unlucky team is able to give their opponent a similar disadvantage.

The argument against this is that we want better gameplay skills to be the cause of teams winning matches. This method has nothing to with gameplay. In fact, it hinders gameplay. Also, etf2l enforces match deadlines with sanctions on offending teams meaning that meeting unfortunate circumstances doesn’t justify being compensated in the league.

In the second situation it’s clear that something is wrong: a team that just chooses to not practice is able to force their voluntary disadvantage on their opponent. One team makes a choice while the other has no choice but to make do with less practice. It’s unfair for a team to play worse because of things they can’t control but their opponent does control.

I hope that people see that this kind of metagame device shouldn’t be a part of competitive tf2. It’s a loophole in the rules that, in a certain situation, can be abused to sabotage your opponent without harming your own team and you don’t need any skill in tf2 to accomplish this. The level of tf2 played in etf2l is hurt as teams will go into matches less practiced than they’d like to be.

I think everyone wants the league to be as much about tf2 as it’s reasonably possible.

PS. The main reason I’m so mad is because losing isn’t so bad when you feel you just couldn’t have done any better in the limited time you had to improve. Had the practice I scheduled for team Finland been used effectively it’d have been less painful to be beaten by a stronger team. But the way it happened I feel like we were robbed of the chance to show the best we could do and that adds a whole lot more frustration on top of losing. This would be the bitter aftertaste Saba mentions.

Regardless of the situation between Finland and France (yonus is perhaps more cynical than I am, and kustom3 ignored the issue at hand and threw things completely off-topic), I absolutely agree that there is no reason to enable a lazy team leader to limit the practice and planning of their opponents. I think it’s a fairly straight-forward issue in the rules that needs to be resolved, and I think you should ignore yesterday’s match when trying to discuss it.

Also related to the elimination rule: Is it just me, or is there absolutely no advantage to being the team to eliminate first? As it looks now, one team gets all three disadvantages: They have to eliminate maps first, they have to choose their map first, and they do not get to pick the decider map. Have I missed something? Shouldn’t the team that has to eliminate/pick first at least get the advantage of picking the decider map?

I don’t know how the nations cup map picking went, however snsd got called out so I guess I should explain what happened. In the regular season’s playoff we did leave picking the maps until the last minute. Why? Well, it’s fairly simple, and no, it’s not because of laziness.

We’ve won every single game in the regular season which granted us 1st seed in the playoffs so we “controlled” the map picks (essentially picking 2 out of 3) making it so that we could practice the maps beforehand without revealing it to our opponents. Now regardless of how well that worked out or how predictable it was, it’s a completely fair way of taking advantage of your position and that rule is completely fine. It’s a competitive format afterall.