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the time has come for a custom pro-mod

Advantages to a Pro Mod:

– Gives the competitive community a game they can control
– Gives the community what they believe to be fair damage handouts per weapon

Disadvantages to a Pro Mod:

– Someone/people have to spend time working on this for no money (unless they get paid, from where?)
– If the creators stop doing it, unless they pass it on, the Mod is stuck in a particular stage
– Loads of players would not want to have to miss out on free Valve updates (even if they do mess things up, they can introduce new things to the game which can be fun)

I personally don’t want a pro mod. I like TF2 the way it is, it just needs Valve to recognise the competitive community exists and put in some cvars that enable competitive settings – ie no damage variables.

There are a lot more advantages and disadvantages

A promod allows things that have been forgotten to be relooked at. Valve wont be spending large amounts of time rebalancing the new heavy weapons, but the players could, because as we all know, the new weapons suck in 6v6 (and so no1 uses them). We could go over them and change them, allowing for heavies to be more useful in 6v6, and making the game more varied (something it lacks atm, considering it is class based).

Yet who decides what is right? Top players? Vote? Only those that work on the mod, and their friends? Arguements would break at, like should div5 and div1 players get equal say, should div5 players get any say at all, should their be an elected group of experienced players?
Another negative is that it hinders new player input. Having to change from one game to the next depending on public/ private would become annoying, and players with no experience of the new game would become frustrated in pickups trying to relearn the game.

I like the idea of a pro-mod… A server-side one. Kinda like TF2Turbo – you can join a TF2Turbo server in TF2 without having to install anything. I think it’s very naive to think that Valve suddenly will begin to do more for the competitive community – especially a year after the game’s release.

Christ all Valve really need to do is fix the recent damage values then give us a variable (like the nocrits var) which allow random damage to be turned off

It really isn’t that easy. If it should not be random damage it should be static damage… So answer the following questions:
– Should a grenade do 124 (or less) damage or 125 (or more) damage?
– Should the “distance” of the grenade affect the damage? How much?
– How much damage should one sticky do if you stand on top of it?
– What should the damage range be for the scattergun?
– What about rockets?

It really isn’t as simple as just making a cvar to disable random damage. There are a lot of decisions that needs to be taken, and whatever is decided there will always be a lot of people that won’t be happy about it.

Actually, there is already a CVar to remove random damage. But it is hidden, so you need a plugin to unlock it or it’ll say “Unknown Command”.

The problem is then with how VALVe made the random damage. They did something like this:
-Set the base weapon damage
-Random damage code is enabled, it higher the base weapon damage + make it random (with a range).

So, that means that when you disable the random damage with this CVar, some weapons make less damage.

Example:

Shotgun makes usually 80-90 damage in 1 shot at point blank range, and the REAL shotgun damage value is 60. It is the random damage making it 80-90. So if you disable random damage with the existing CVar, it’ll set the damage to 60.

Same for some of the other weapons.

Static damage value for grenade launcher : 112
Static damage value for stickies : 120

EDIT : The BASE damage value for the grenade launcher and stickies didn’t change after the update, I’ve checked.

Thing is. We played this for a day and have seen these issues already. They make a small update and don’t even manage to notice it in testing. If they can’t notice this in testing, how can you expect them to fix the other issues and balance it better?

Priority will always be what people on publics think, and there is no real issue about random damage on publics. Emphasis will be on making new class weapons and features for 24 player servers.

id prefer a balanced game to a tournament mode tho

lol i’m with dunc on this one :x

Sure the damage is ott , as for a MASS RIOT PROTEST OMG PRO MOD REQUIRED etc…just wait and see if they do a update. It happened to the demoman before when they upped the sticky damage IMMENSELY and then changed it back…

I’m sure some player out there will post a message to one of the valve moderators on the forums and then someone will consider etc blah blah…

Cheers

Byte