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Ban snipers, problem solved.

Quoted from AcidReniX

The top level players should be playing the game that the masses want to see, at the highest level they can.

yesyesyesyesyesyyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes etc.

People like random critical in FFA, should we add random critical in 6v6?

Quoted from ouizzeul

People like random critical in FFA, should we add random critical in 6v6?

Actually not sure about that, I think only the very newcomers to tf2 like random crits, to be honest I never played on random crit servers (only 1 or 2 times) and the very first servers I played were no random crits. It’s not that fun for me, of course some times it can have its hilarious moments on pubs, bt overall it’s not worth it for me, and I think most of the pub community prefer non crits as well

Random Crits and CL1 are bad ideas, but unlocks aren’t.

Basically what Arx said is right. If you wanna see the game thrive, you gotta see top players playing the game how the majority wants it, not the other way around.

Quoted from freshmeatt

[…]
I love emphasizing this, so I’m gonna do it again. You cannot force a title to become considered as an esport game – Brink and Shootmania can serve as primary examples (we shall see about the latter, but just for the sake of it, I’m calling it now).
Besides, ‘esport title’ is just a tag given to popular game supporting competitiveness. I really cannot understand why so many people assemble slogans with this term to be put on banners and marched with across the Internet. I can get hyped over TF2 even while knowing, that nobody aside from our communities give a shit. Sure, it means money, which means LANs and prizes, which means popularity, but I can’t help an impression that some don’t even want to play this game without it.

Thing is, the two games you highlighted, also highlight my point, and essentially, you’re saying the same thing as me, but with a different angle.

You can’t force an eSports title. That is correct. Brink and Shootmania are indeed, prime examples. Simply put… they don’t have a public, casual scene, let alone a similar one to the competitive version of the game. Brink was going to be ‘the next big thing’, but only competitive players were interested in it, in the hope it was going to be an eSports title. Simply put, without having a huge community following, usually consisting of public players.. the game will never be an eSports title. Shootmania will be the same. Unless they can get a large number of casual players, playing the game, any instant competitive scene will fall off months later. Even a game like world of warcraft became popular in eSports for a while. That was entirely because of how popular the general game was… nothing more.

Take a look at some of the huge eSports titles past and present.

Quake – Had a huge following. Everyone knew the game, gives people reasons to watch.
Starcraft – An extremely popular, casual title.
Counter-strike – Became popular before it became ‘professional’. The public game is very similar to the competitive game, except for organisation levels.

Find me a game that is a popular eSport, that doesn’t / didn’t have a massive casual gaming scene for it, and isn’t just it’s own… niche genre.

I’ve spoken to a lot of casual TF2 players. The first question they ask when watching a 6v6 game is: ‘Why is nobody using unlocks?’. After explaining it to them (all the positives about vanilla style gameplay), I just get a, “Hmmm well that’s boring”, or just a general state of confusion as to why they aren’t allowed.

I bet if you went on the steam forums, to advertise infused vs epsilon or something, and put in the title, “Professional 6v6 match, blah blah blah, medic unlocks only”, over 50% of the next 50 posts would be asking / questioning / complaining about unlocks. People want to see, how the best players in the game, use the weapons and classes that they enjoy using… and there are very few public gamers who go on a server and only use vanilla weapons.

See this is the thing. Having no unlocks is fine… as long as that is what you want to play. The problem I’m finding, is that very few people actually want to play with this ruleset, except the top level players, and they want the game to grow and become a bigger eSport, which I think is impossible if the public game differs from the competitive one. The game is fine without unlocks, perfectly playable, reasonably balanced, and still fun for a lot of people, but it’s going to start dropping off a lot faster as the public game gets more and more alienated from the competitive one (which is happening because of additional unlocks). How do you think highlander is becoming (has become?) TF2’s most popular competitive mode? It certainly isn’t because of the player limit… it’s harder to get 9 people instead of just 6.

I know it’s not completely related to the topic of this thread, but one point that seems to be overlooked about why highlander has exploded in popularity in the past year or so is because since TF2 became free to play and the subsequent influx of new players, the overall skill level once found on public servers with dedicated players (who may or may not have been interested in competitive) has dropped dramatically.

As a result, many have turned to highlander as they prefer the organisation and the somewhat higher skill level/team coordination that you just won’t get as much as before. Yes, pub servers always have been poor for teamwork etc. but it has gotten worse in the past year. Having new players is of course a good thing – it allows those who have played TF2 for years and yearn to keep playing at a level they enjoy more so than random or community pub servers.

It’s not always about unlock restrictions or class limits. Some people will have interest in 6v6 and some won’t – it’s as simple as that. What classes someone plays also a factor.

I do think however that the elitism and derogatory comments aimed at highlander doesn’t really help, although the same can be said about some ‘top’ or well known highlander players who are far from constructive about their views regarding 6v6. It’s a no-brainer there’s higher skill involved in 6v6, but we should be looking at ways of coordinating the two formats instead of isolating them.

Just want to throw it out there that Mercyless created a SPUF thread about what was preventing people from coming into 6v6.

Unlocks were hardly every mentioned. Classes were a big thing (wtf is with all the people maining pyro) as were: Comp players are all elitest dicks.

The classes thing is not something we can fix (I will kill the first person who suggested CL 1) but I do think we could have a better relationship with both HL and pubs.

Get involved with the communities, maybe make our own. Either way unlocks did not seem to be that big at issue (I know one thread on one site doens’t help, but better than people’s one off’s etc)

Unlocks will not help the scene grow, if you want unlocks, cool, argue for them. But instead of blaming unlocks, fucking help. There are a 100 jobs you could be doing, even small stuff like not being a douche in pubs (I know who you are, as do you).