matchmaking

Featured The Competitive Corner 

An Opinionated Opinion on Official Matchmaking

Medic 0 Comments , , , ,

I’ve been holding off on writing an actual article on official matchmaking for a while, not sure whether it’s been the right time or not. It turns out there’s never a good time, so here’s a heavily opinionated article on the matter. First off, whether I’d actually play matchmaking or not, I’ve always wanted ranked matchmaking in TF2. It’s that sort of thing that probably wouldn’t have fitted in early on, but as competitive leagues began to get bigger and bigger, Valve should have properly jumped on it and done something with it. All these years later and we’re only… [Continue Reading]

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Community Announcements Featured The Competitive Corner 

Team Fortress 2 Competitive Beta Sign-Up

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Well, who’d have thought it? There’s actually matchmaking things going on for reals! No more will B4nny (bless him) be the only reliable and constant source of information about Team Fortress 2’s official matchmaking. Nope, yesterday, a Valve employee popped by and announced that there is now an official Steam group, as seen here. It’s almost definitely official, since the admins are three Valve employees, and the group also has a selection of Steam Community moderators. The main admin of the group, someone called Jill, has got nearly 4000 hours on Team Fortress 2, which is a sign of, um,… [Continue Reading]

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Featured 

The state of public TF2 isn’t as bad as I thought

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It’s far, far worse. I was messing around with some of the new options Valve has put into the game, and happened upon the option to enable mouse cursor on the scoreboard. I then by chance clicked on a name on the score screen, and realized, as late to the party as I might be, that you can actually see all the statistics of the player you clicked on – kills, deaths, assists, healing, damage, everything. The ability to have access to this information is huge for me, as when the team is doing poorly, I’m in the habit of… [Continue Reading]

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Featured 

Tough Break and its Signs of Things to Come

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The Tough Break update rolled out an extremely healthy list of balance changes to Team Fortress 2. Spanning the entirety of its class roster and with a general trend of making each class’ stock role more defined, it provides some very clear insights regarding the direction Valve is hoping to take TF2 in the coming months. SPUF is ablaze right now with questions attempting to make sense of some of the more extreme alterations, and since I’m stuck on a five-hour plane ride without internet I thought I’d take the time to comment on some things I’ve noticed and make… [Continue Reading]

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Featured 

On Performance Enhancing Stuff

Medic 0 Comments , ,

On December 2nd, there was a patch. In that patch came things to do with forcing people to use DX9 or higher for competitive matchmaking. This made me very angry. I am now going to proceed by complaining about this. DX 8 does lack some of the features that DX 9 has. You don’t get outlines around Payload carts and around whoever’s carrying the intelligence. You miss out on various cosmetic effects. Some things glitch out and have a strange fire texture on them instead of their normal textures, which looks awesome on Pyro cosmetics but shit on other things.… [Continue Reading]

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Featured The Competitive Corner 

Competitive Matchmaking Beta is here! Kinda…

Medic 0 Comments , , , , ,

Well well well well, looks like those Teamfortress.tvers have found something interesting. It’s a small version of the Competitive Matchmaking Beta! It’s actually a real thing! Turns out a small update yesterday added a console command that enables you to open the Competitive matchmaking menu. The command, for whoever wants to try it, is OpenMatchmakingLobby ladder Typing this into console brings up a new page. It looks like this: Interestingly, it had a bunch of scores, and a drop down box. The box has a choice of either 6v6 or 9v9, which is unusual since everyone thought they’d just do… [Continue Reading]

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Stupidly Simple Fixes: League of Legends edition

Medic 0 Comments , , , , ,

Wow, I’ve done a few of these stupidly simple articles, but all of them have been about Team Fortress so far. And most of them were pretty simple ideas, although later on I was kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel. But League of Legends on the other hand is a game completely swamped with problems, many of which aren’t actually really that game-based. It’s the outside bits and pieces that piss people off and make them angry. So I’m going to pass this over to Vel’Koz to explain these thoughts, since Garen’s still busy rocking the high win rate.… [Continue Reading]

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Featured The Competitive Corner 

What the Gun Mettle Contracts Could Mean For Competitive TF2

aabicus 0 Comments , ,

In my recent article about the weapon-dropping mechanic and specifically its affect on Ubercharges, I mentioned that it could be seen as a sign that Valve is attempting to alter the meta of the game, probably for the sake of revitalizing competitive and keeping things fresh. Part of the reason I think this is because a lot of Valve’s recent decisions have been rumored to be competitively-motivated, and ster (also known as Niichts and STAR_) said a lot of interesting things in his July 2nd Twitch broadcast that went on for 8 whole hours. Considering I can’t ask you to go… [Continue Reading]

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Featured The Competitive Corner 

So about that competitive matchmaking stuff…

Medic 0 Comments , , , ,

At the same time all that crap was going on with Skyrim and its workshop, it turns out that B4nny (a.k.a the most popular Demoman ever) and a bunch of buddies went to visit Valve to ask about Team Fortress 2. After a tough journey, much hard work and a vast amount of sweat, blood, tears and over-exaggeration, it turns out that some of the things this crew of popular mercs asked for are actually happening. The biggest part? Talks of competitive TF2 matchmaking. Now, of course, everyone was happy. The TF2 community, the older and wiser part of it,… [Continue Reading]

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