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I tought this was a thread about the new soldier weapons?
Not the FAN?

A general rage, wall-a-text post: (Do not read).

I haven’t had a single issue with any of the guns in this game… at all, and i’ve played pretty much all of the classes in competitive TF2 for at least a while. Sandman I decided to side with the masses. Figured sure, I can see why people don’t want it in the game, the arguments are resonably justified. Saying that, I wouldn’t have shed a single tear if the sandman wasn’t banned. I would have just developed strategies to play against it.

There appears to be too many crybabies in this community. As soon as a weapon comes along that can be even remotely useful, especially for a class that isn’t theres, they don’t want it on the battlefield. Sure, medic unlocks only! Guess what, Kritzkrieg doesn’t exactly effect a medic does it, it effects the class he is healing which means it’s effects you (Unless you play medic :P). No one whined about the medic unlocks because all of them effect you. Ubersaw = more chance of ubers, more invunerability time for you. Blutsauger, medic stays alive, more healing for you etc.. They aren’t the only reasons of course, they add skill or whatever, but it’s easy to see why almost no one wanted those unlocks banned.

Have a look at every other unlock that has come out in this game (or at least some).

Pyro unlocks – A class that isn’t really played in competitive. Backburner, mostly useless, with the added air blast to the original, not many players opt to use it. (BB accepted), Flaregun, little damage, in a 6v6 has little to no effect compared to shotgun (Flaregun accepted), Axetinguisher, very situational, requires a pyro to get close to you and get a melee hit… not going to happen much, a minor upgrade to a class that isn’t played (Axe accepted).

Spy unlocks – Ambasader, a community call for a ban (Until it was realised it actually makes very little difference). Allows spies to have an element of deathmatch ability. Requires more skill (community likes needing skill!) to use than the original magnum (slower firing, you need a headshot or you won’t kill). Players realised that ontop of the annoyingness of a spy, they could now get killed or almost killed from the other side of the map. Deadringer – A call for a ban from several members of the community until people realised it’s not actually as amazing as it sounds. Cloak and Dagger, pretty much accepted except for a few randoms.

Sniper Unlocks, Huntsman, no call for ban, considered useless allthough annoying. Jarate, calls for ban. Adds a new element to the sniper class. It means he doesn’t just have to sit at long range picking off targets, he can actually do something in a push. Community seemed to think minicrits are overpowered and a sniper could result in your whole team dieing just by throwing one bottle. Well yes, your team can die, but if you are grouped up and all get hit by a single bottle of jarate, and then still get hit by the following incoming spam, it’s your own fault. Jarate (accepted after people realised that snipers are rarely used and rarely do anything effective with jarate anyway).

Scout unlocks, FaN, accepted at the start, considered useless (Very few scouts ran the weapon), I still remember going into pickups and people telling me to switch to scattergun as the FaN was useless and I wasn’t helping the team. Some FaN scouts became effective, valve also slightly increased the damage (because no scouts were using the FaN and they wanted it to get some play time). More FaN scouts become effective, community calls for a ban stating that the stun is the problem (despite it being there from the start… when it was considered useless). Valve makes tweaks based on community requests, community still calls for a ban despite addressing (at least partially) most of the initial issues. Bonk, no call for ban, considered mostly useless due to a long speed decrease after the effect. Sandman, community calls for ban. A projectile that can be used to stun a player for a brief duration of time in exchange for one of the most valuable scout features, the double jump. Valve add tweaks so that a stunned player takes less damage. Community still doesn’t accept. Valve adds tweaks so that the player using it has 95 base HP making the weapon more of a risk. Community doesn’t accept. Valve adds tweaks making the ball no longer stun (in 90% of circumstances), but send a player into the ‘fleeing’ animation. Community doesn’t accept despite that being one of the requests they initially set out to address.

Heavy unlocks. All considered useless or downgrades from the originals, except for maybe the fists, but as a competitive player, if a heavy gets within melee range of you… you probably deserved to die anyway. Heavy unlocks accepted.

Soldier unlocks. TDH, community calls for a ban. This is a weapon that changes the required skill of a soldier. A non-direct hit rocket does almost no damage, a direct does more damage. It moves faster as the increase in damage doesn’t make up for only being able to realistically damage a single target (instead of the original being able to hit several with the splash). Minicrits in the air screw over anyone who jumps. Scouts are furious that they can die in a single hit (a bit like with the demoman), despite in general being the hardest to hit with the weapon (excluding very close range). Community taking a more cautious view on banning the weapon, but you can bet as soon as anyone plays this weapon to any decent effect, a ban will be called.

Buffbanner, community calls for a ban. One of the initial issues with 6v6 is that the whole game is almost entirely based on the medic staying alive, using ubers and everything else is played according to your medic’s status. We aren’t actually playing a control point game here, we are playing a protection/assassination game, a bit like Hunted in TFC. The buff banner adds a new pushing / defensive manouver that isn’t dependent on your medic’s status. Community seems to prefer the game revolving around a single player. Buff banner calls for ban.

Equaliser, generally accepted except for a few randoms. Soldiers have long been considered ‘weaker than they should be’. The soldiers obviously want this weapon as it is a straight upgraed on their class, with no drawbacks. Other classes are generall fine with this as it will shut the soldiers up about how underpowered their class is. The weapon gives the soldier a nice little escape option, allows some clutch melee kills and allows him to get to middle quicker. Doesn’t sound too bad really does it?

Jumping shoes, accepted, considered useless.

Demoman unlocks, sword and shield thing. The soldier’s unlocks are really stealing the limelight in this update. Most competitive players are considering the unlocks resonably useless and therefore they will be accepted. I think the new sticky launcher will get a call for a ban soon though, after someone (probably Byte if he puts the effort in) masters it. If you want an annoying weapon, how about a demoman that can still spam while making a push, but also has 1, 2 or 3 sticky traps still set up somewhere. I can see the call on the ban coming ;p You heard it here first!

My point is (finally…I know), this community sucks. Any element of change, any sign that their own class can be killed by someone easier in some random situation, and people throw a wobbly. Things like class limits are accepted. Not all classes in the game are equal, and in my opinion, they only really balance out when you are talking 12 vs 12 gameplay, unless it’s a single class in excessive numbers. Class limits infact promote diversity, otherwise nearly every team would be using several medics, demomen and soldiers. We would have found the optimal class lineup (without limits) for every map by now in that scenario. An American team used to run 5 demomen and a medic, which was pretty solid… but not diverse.

Limitting unlocks also promotes diversity. If an unlock is powerful, or even considered more powerful that the original weapon, there’s no reason why it should be banned. There isn’t a single unlock in this game that can consistently decide the outcome of a match. There isn’t one unlock that is essential in this game to victory. A pure scattergun scout team can win against a pure FaN scout team, and vice versa. A Kritzkrieg team can win against an uber team and vice versa. When you also consider that both teams can run the same weapon lineup, in the end it all comes down to the team’s overall skill. Valve aren’t stupid. They aren’t releasing a weapon that is soooo powerful that it HAS to be run or a team can’t win against it unless they run their own.

I simply think that this community is too scared to make any changes to their play style. This community wants to play the same game 24 hour a day, run the same strategies for years and years and know every counter to every possible situation. While that is fine for a significant number of players right now, in the future, people will get bored of doing the same thing over and over, players will leave the game, no new players will start playing the game competitively and the game’s life span will die out a crap load faster. These unlocks, maps, game modes etc… all keep the game fresh. They add a new card to the table, something else to consider new strategies and counters to develop.

Now if you did manage to read up to here, well done, if you’ve just seen this last line, well done. This will probably be my last post on anything related to unlocks, balancing, strategies etc… It’s got to the point where people seem to hate me for my opinions on the issues in this game. For the record, I don’t play this game to be the best, I play it for fun. I enjoy playing with the FaN, and enjoy having the options of using all of the unlocks in this game, as well as being forced to come up with ways to play against them. If the FaN for example, does get banned, I won’t shed a tear, I’ll find something else that is fun to play with, even if it means I suck (it’s just lucky i’m pretty decent with the FaN). If everything I attempt to play or use gets banned, and I get bored of whatever I’m doing, i’ll leave the game (see the play for fun bit). Anyway, it’s been fun arguing / debating with you over these years, I straight up can’t be assed anymore as they are empty words. You may start your cheers ;) My gosh this was a long one!

Arx you should write academic reports for general databases

prolly the longest one since…. EVER.

also Alfa, get a life and stop posting 24/7 on every thread.

Sorry man I got several reason for doing this 24/7 (offtopic inc).My pc is broken,im at my uncle in Vaughn (thats 50 km away from Toronto) and I cant get my PC here atm,this pc I use atm is for work and it cant even run tf2 with numlocks config.

After seeing all the videos on fail blog,playing every mini-game on the internet,checking all Sony Vegas rendering tutorials tell me if I have something better to do than F5ing on ETF2L all the time (I wish I had the power of locking/editing power on this forums lol *insta thread locking!*)

[edit] Took out my attack on arx.. its christmas.

Personally, I dont have much of a problem with TDH except for the mini crits even occuring on slopes… Got 1 shot minicrit on the CP1 pipe on gran.. that was fun. Minicrits also shouldnt occur when people jump etc … but thats been covered.

I will probably be completely against the soldier banner but i havent played vs it yet.
On paper it seems farily retarded and overpowered

The pickaxe seems like a nice idea. The only issue i have with it is i dont agree that it should give soldiers an alternative to escape at much higher speed than rocketjumps for none of the cost. Maybe make it an item that has an increasing speed the longer u have it out or something and drains health down to 1 hp slowly. People will probably hate this idea but whatever…

Now the demo weapons, I dont have a problem with the new sticky launcher.. its a side grade.. takes away from offensive abilities and increases defensive ones. Sounds reasonable. I dont really see it ruining last point pushes as it will just make demoman an even bigger priority target. Shouldnt be able to det from inside resup though :p

The sword and shield are _acceptable_? alternatives i suppose… i just hate the way they are implemented.. If i wanted to play a game with swords and shields i’d play WoW. They need to think up something else for this as it makes the game look fairly fucking stupid

I havent really played tf2 much since update so some of my opinions may change

Put simply, all the unlocks nobody cares about, are ones that EVERYONE uses, NOBODY uses, or are on classes that never get played.

Because of this, the actual unlocks which are sidegrades, you have a bunch of people using one weapon and a bunch using the other.

As the new weapon has to be so different to be a true sidegrade, people rage when they get killed by it, because it’s different, so they call OP rather than accepting “Oh I got killed I suck” – man up and grow a penis, change happens.

I simply think that this community is too scared to make any changes to their play style. This community wants to play the same game 24 hour a day, run the same strategies for years and years and know every counter to every possible situation. While that is fine for a significant number of players right now, in the future, people will get bored of doing the same thing over and over, players will leave the game, no new players will start playing the game competitively and the game’s life span will die out a crap load faster. These unlocks, maps, game modes etc… all keep the game fresh. They add a new card to the table, something else to consider new strategies and counters to develop.

I can see your personal opinion on this, but don’t assume everyone thinks like you do. To some people, fun means control of the game, mastering a game instead of learning new stuff all the time. A game doesn’t need to change all the time to be worth playing.

The most popular games change the least. This applies to board games, traditional sports and even e-sports (StarCraft, CS1.6, Quake).

Other promods like the one for CoD4 and CPMA cannot be compared to a game like tf2 for obvious reasons.

Such as?

It limits the game to about 3 weapons and grenades.

This, and not to mention removes any chance of class diversity (this is pretty much perk variation in cod). So we would have every class the same speed, same health and all using
sniper rifle :D

Is it me or does this not make any sense at all? Why would it limit the classes available or make them run at the same speed? All we would be doing is changing damage values of weapons, just how tftrue removed crits.

because of magic

Anyway long post Acid but some relevant points. However I am against the fan purely as I feel it should not have the ‘stun’ effect. Knockback sure… but make it knockback not up.
As I am also against the TDH. purely due to the mini-crits. Seeing my medic die from one hit across the length of granary last purely for jumping away, on full hp is a load of crap. etc
The buff banner has already recieved its nerfs and will rarely if ever be used in comp play. The amount to charge is far too high to justify a lack of shotty on defending soldier, and offensive soldier wont get far on 4 rockets alone.
The pickaxe is an upgrade, as stated before. Valve confirmed it was and will make relevant changes in the future (stated in an email to creator of said item) get over it already. Though its damage should probably be standardised, the buff to speed is good enough imo.

Other promods like the one for CoD4 and CPMA cannot be compared to a game like tf2 for obvious reasons.

Have you played CPMA? I don’t remember it limiting the weapons, I remember it altering the physics, removing cooldown switch timing on weapons, and changing the damage output of some weapons, oh and also using a custom map pack.

I don’t remember it limiting the game at all, if anything CPMA is a prime example of how a promod should be done.

Q3 was already a level playing field. Everybody has access to the same weapons, same movement, same health etcetera. Tf2 involves 9 classes. It simply ain’t that easy. A buff to the soldier to make him better in situation X affects the entire flow of the game.But anyways, the game is balanced except for the fan and the new soldier weapons (which prob will be patched by valve in some form sooner or later). Why bother with a pro-mod if the game is 100% fine without the unlocks. Valve made a game pretty much balanced without unlocks. The balancing issues from new weapons just shows that’s incredibly hard to introduce balanced weapons to a pool of already balanced weapons.