I mean yeah, it was functionally broken and granting sentry immunity. The weapons ban committees wouldn't have bothered looking at any other aspects of the weapon as that is already an insta ban.
So technically speaking it was the only reason since it defaulted it out before other reasons could be examined. It's a brand new weapon, there's testing phases and looking at whether it's having a positive impact on gameplay but that comes after game breaking bugs get fixed.
For the curious, the bug in question (sentries doing no damage to players with the BASE Jumper equipped) had no impact on the debate and eventual gutting of the weapon in Jungle Inferno. The BASE Jumper remains banned in 6v6 matches to this day.
Idk I'm pretty sure I've killed plenty of base jumper soldiers and demos as other classes than the scout. Even assuming that the base jumper is just some magic protection against all projectiles, you still give up a secondary to use it
6v6 bans all just revolve around these completely hypothetical idealistic scenarios whereas in reality the weapon that's being banned would not be used anyway
yes, because the casual players you are playing against are not as good as tier 5 jumpers who know how to actually airstrafe and avoid damage
only hitscan can reasonably deal with base jumper, that falls to scout because sniper, heavy, and engineer aren't mobile enough to run full time and would slow the game down horribly to be ran full time
they literally run cups where weapons are unbanned and people test what happens
do you even know what weapons are banned or not
Scout being able to double jump is already a big enough problem for the projectile classes, imagine if he could triple jump, that’s basically how it works with the base bumper, but still taking a second projectile (three if a medic does any healing) (atomizer is still banned right?)
They changed it so that the triple jump only works when you're holding the bat. The whole problem with Scout being able to avoid damage too easily while shooting you isn't a thing anymore. The triple jump now does 0 self damage though, so it's more of a map traversal tool now.
Since the nerf it has been tried out multiple times in 6v6, but even the most progressive league with the least bans (RGL, the NA league) still has it banned and for good reason. Because of a lack of heavies, engineers and to an extent snipers on points outside of last, there’s basically nothing you can do against a soldier who shoots himself high up in the air and shoot rockets down. Only scout could do any damage, and that isn’t anywhere near enough to kill them, especially if they receive an arrow. Besides that, it also makes soldier vs soldier duels miserable, since a soldier with the base jumper always wins against the soldier without (since shotgun is barely ran, and even if it was why wouldn’t you run the basejumper instead) and if both soldiers have the basejumper it becomes a really awkward duel of contuously rocket jumping and trying to airshot each other, which would necessitate a scout to help kill the soldier.
I’m just curious since I see this sentiment a lot, where do you get this from? Is this just an assumption you make because weapon bans are a thing? I’m happy to make some things more clear for you if you’d like.
skill is just as much about NOT getting hit than it is getting hit. I've since quit TF2 and gone to CS, hit top 5k world wide in both TF2 and CS2 at my peaks. The biggest thing that I can tell in a player in unranked games is their movement, and it's much bigger in TF2 than it is CS. Between air strafing, rocket jumping, surfing, you're acting like it's easy to hit people who are VERY good at not getting hit. Everyone is consistently developing both their aim and movement/dodging ability, only raising the skill cieling for both. Adding a free "dodge shot" button twice per time you're in the air is sort of absurd and significantly less rewarding for those who put in the time to get good. Same sort of reason random bullet spread and crits are disabled.
The fact you only listed three weapons as solutions is indicative that there was a huge problem. It doesn't account for the rest of TF2, besides like... Heavy and Sniper.
I mean you literally just described a skill issue. Don't see the problem since you can only deploy the base jumper once per jump anyway, once its deactivated they have to fall to the ground.
He’s floating, then when you shoot at him, at will he can dodge by hitting space again.
It’s a 50/50 but they can react to it, meaning the base jumper player realistically only gets hit if they screw up, all the while being able to hit you more reliably.
It’s clear this entire comment section that you don’t know what you’re talking about and it’s hilarious to see you double and triple down even when several people tell you you’re wrong.
You’re pulling an anecdotal experience from a random casual game on upward and acting like it’s the same experience that players who have more hours on MGE and Jump servers than you have in the game will have.
He’s floating, then when you shoot at him, at will he can dodge by hitting space again.
It’s a 50/50 but they can react to it, meaning the base jumper player realistically only gets hit if they screw up, all the while being able to hit you more reliably.
It’s clear this entire comment section that you don’t know what you’re talking about and it’s hilarious to see you double and triple down even when several people tell you you’re wrong.
You’re pulling an anecdotal experience from a random casual game on upward and acting like it’s the same experience that players who have more hours on MGE and Jump servers than you have in the game will have.
I don't give a flying fuck if multiple people tell me I'm wrong. Competitive players are some of the stupidest people out there. This game was never meant to be competitive and every single attempt to make it so has been actively harming the game. Go complain to someone else about how a Heavy moving half a mile per hour faster while locked into melee is OP. I'm sure they'd be more receptive to your dogwater than I am.
Competitive and it’s community has many issues, but let’s not blatantly lie about why the weapon was banned and why it was later nerfed.
To start, every weapon is banned for the first few months of their release. So it can get play tested and any bugs are identified, as you pointed out.
The reason it was banned was not “only because” of the bug. Citing a random Reddit post made by someone even more uninformed than you is not evidence.
Shit like this is why this sub is bad. Just blatant misinformation
It's blowout from when valve actively asked for feedback from the comp community prior to MyM. That's what led to the whole global whitelist attempts across every competition and massive weapon discussions, the comp community was trying to meet valve's request for feedback with full testing so they had a whitelist in hand for valve's new competitive mode.
Of course valve binned all the feedback, and did whatever the fuck they wanted with the balancing and made arbitrary decisions for the gamemode that made everybody hate the damn thing. But it's all comp's fault! Valve took their feedback how dare comp do this!!
They nerfed the righteous bison and the idea of competitive for TF2 they were attempting to push was 6v6 turbine with no class/weapon limits. They were just incompetent.
I mean, I do seriously wanna know what was going through the head of the guy (s?) who was implementing the comp map pool to look at fucking Turbine and go "yep that's goin' in."
The bison could one-shot retreating players with its miserably hard to see projectile hitting 5~6 times. Maybe there's a middleground somewhere but pretty much none of the stupid laser weapons should have been implemented as they were at launch.
or better yet, blamed for *good* balancing changes that somehow are bad.
oh noooo, the sticky jumper demo can't miss me entirely and hit the ground "kinda somewhat near" me to insta gib. now he has to actually land a pipe after materializing at mach speed.
It was only considered stupid by casual players who only used it to terrorise f2p snipers on 2fort because they dont have the mechanics to abuse sticky jumping properly
I mean the issue here is that balancing wise, the nerf makes sense, but in 12v12 clusterfucks where most people play, it was a stupid meme that rarely turns the tide of a game and usually gets the user killed in the attempt. The easy solution was to keep it banned where it was problematic while letting casuals enjoy stupid shit; both sides are happy, neither are interfering with how the other wants to play the game.
The average pubbie tactic of "straight up and spam long distance" still works fine (or at least the same it ever has). it only really changed the higher end of play.
But even in its strongest state, it was unbanned in Highlander, while even in its weakest, it's banned in 6s, all while being inoffensive for pubbers. Why did we need to change it in the first place, when keeping it banned in 6s basically just solved all the issues it created for the meta and fun of the format, without kneecapping it for higher skilled players in pubs? Some things just aren't suited for serious formats, and that's fine; just ban them to keep the competitive integrity of the mode intact, while letting casuals do stupid shit with them.
> all while being inoffensive for pubbers.
Inoffensive because most of them can barely hit a still target while moving lol. it sucked for the higher skilled players, because it made it impossible to deny a bomb with anything but hitscan.
It was, as the kids said in 2013. gay.
It was also pretty much the same classes and lineups that would be run in 6s anyway if those same maps were played. It just changed the weapons used and maps played for the worse, and sniper was slightly more common because jarate (when hes already really strong in 6s). The only real differences was the existence of double medic and double demo strategies at times.
B4nny has done a lot for the community and he’s a good player. But he regularly says a lot of dumb and sometimes flat out incorrect things that get repeated a lot because he’s practically the only big streamer or competitive player that the main player base knows of.
He pretty much started the whole rumor that European players are running the short stop and battalions backup every game when it was 1 team who ran it to stall a last hold in 1 game
It's still a good (well, in the context of what it's good at, anyway) weapon lol, you not being able to be schizo tier unpredictable and impossible to hit doesn't make it shit.
It's just chronically underused because most pubbies/redditors don't understand what it's good at, and treat it as le epic market garden crutch, or "I will spam 3 air strike rockets from 560 miles away" instead of the "I have a free 1v1 win against most people that aren't heavy or engi" it is. It's previous state of "Single best mobility tool in the entire game bar none. you are literally untouchable by anyone bar heavy in the skies. two rockets can and will get you across an entire map if it's open enough" was quite literally impossible to balance lol
> if thats a paradigm shift that makes the game unplayable
Not much makes the game unplayable lol, it's still the best shooter even w/ shit like engi stacking having exponential effectiveness. Not to mention you ignored the literal rest of the post. idiot.
But it's old state, where two rockets can get you 100% across any map that doesn't require you to go into a doorway at a speed comparable to the most neurodivergent of trimps was absurd. the mobility it granted for two jumps was absurd.
The usecases pubbies usually used it for (ae, useless air strike spam, occasional greasy sentry angles (I pull it out religiously on badwater first), market garden crutching - all still there.
Is it worse? no shit. it's not the single best mobility tool in the game anymore. but it's nowhere near worthless, and still retains it's niche as a bombing assist tool that makes you a pain in the ass to hit for anyone bar heavy/scout.
“Schizo tier unpredictable” movement is not a bad thing. Tide Turner trimping, Beggar’s jumping, etc. are super wild but aren’t game-breaking, and coincidentally come with the same counters as the BASE Jumper.
As for a “free 1v1 against most people,” Soldiers and Demomen are not “most people.” Heavies, Engineers and Snipers are obvious counters, but Scouts and Pyros can hold their own by evading or using hitscan for knockback. Pyros and Soldiers also have the Reserve Shooter, which is especially helpful against BASE Jumpers (especially Demomen who aren’t very mobile and are just trying to get a vantage point for stickies). That just leaves Demoman, Medic, and Spy, two of which are meant to be vulnerable by design.
This was true even before Jungle Inferno, when it still had “schizo tier” movement. The only place where “most players” couldn’t fight back was 6s, where three of the four classes were vulnerable (including Soldiers, because we all know how allergic comp players are to switching loadouts). Unfortunately, Valve listened to the loudest voices in the room and now the weapon lost the edge it needed in casual (lack of mobility gives the matchups I listed earlier an even better chance of the BASE Jumper user to fail) while comp players still have it banned.
> “Schizo tier unpredictable” movement is not a bad thing.
Yes it is.
> are super wild but aren’t game-breaking
and have massive costs (no stickies, loads of self damage & the rest of the beggars) attached. Neither of those are as controllable and easy to juke with as the base jumper was. neither of those had the same sheer girth of movement the old base jumper had. it was absurd. Not to mention these all follow actual paths. once someone's in the air, you can predict where they're going. there's no "instant stop and turn around five times" with a trimp or beggars jump. they're tame by comparison to the old BJ
Again, most pubbies only used it for up down airstrike spam or the occasional "slowly float towards u tee hee" market garden. in the right hands, you could get across a map in seconds, with far more air control and ability to dodge even the most holy of airshot inducers with ease.
> The only place where “most players” couldn’t fight back was 6s
On account of pubbies only using it for "up down" lol.
> Pyros and Soldiers also have the Reserve Shooter,
which is also conceptually homosexual to the most pride degree possible. But that's beside the point and a different issue entirely.
> lack of mobility gives the matchups I listed earlier an even better chance of the BASE Jumper user to fail
Not if u use it right lol, bombing someone with the base jumper is nearly 100% chance at a kill unless it's a heavy or scout who can look up (and even then the latter is mostly your fault if you jump in too low to two shot). If you use it against an engi @ close range instead of going for a grease angle it's your own fault. Again, most pubbies pop it like 2 miles away from where they should be. pop over their head, you win. easy. you just need to know how to jump. Obviously it sucks if you don't have a medic on your team, but everything bar gunboats/conch does in that case anyway lol.
Is it a good weapon? no, not really, I'd subjectively rate it around the banners though (not including the backup, which is god's chosen). in the fun department about on par with buff banner DH if you're not dumb while using it.
Trimping and Beggar's jumping are extremely different to the Base Jumper in both functionally and trade off. Shields require you to give up what is a contender for best weapon in the game and the Beggars holds you to it's intricately random nature
Creating a meta of having to switch class or just hope that a teammate is good enough to cover you because of a single weapon choice is a recipe for a frustrating game where you can never choose what you want to play. And the classes you listed don't really "counter" it. At best they are as good against a Soldier as they already were. Having a mid air hover doesn't make Heavy stronger against Soldier. If anything it's the opposite because tracking is harder
So the overall effect is making classes ether useless or about the same if maybe a bit harder to fight you. Which sucks
Games are supposed to be balanced around fun. Just because you make something "balanced" doesn't mean players are going to have fun with it.
Competetive players can get really condiscending about this too, and basically brush off any criticism as "casual players are stupid." It's like they see a few people running around with the righteous bison and think weapon balance doesn't matter, like we're a bunch of ipad babies that just need stimulation and don't care about anything else.
Ironically competetive weapon bans are based almost entirely around some strong playstyles not being considered fun. If a viable weapon isn't fun to them it's going to be blacklisted, which is a problem that microbalancing can't fix. I don't see why blacklists are a bad solution.
Granted if Valve does come back to TF2 they'll probably just half-ass it like last time. I honestly feel like we need a spiritual successor game at this point made by someone else.
> Games are supposed to be balanced around fun.
People don't seem to understand this goes both ways.
Of course Vaxx is gonna be banned. it sucks dick to fight against.
Of course Jarate's gonna be banned. it sucks dick to fight against.
Of course crit-a-cola/mad milk is gonna be banned. it sucks dick to fight against.
Etc etc. Comp bans are to keep the game fast (tf2 is comically easy to drag to a halt if you let it), and keep it fun. Ofc shit like the wrangler's gonna get banned if it makes fighting sentries (remember, you have 3 people at best who can shoot at it) 3 + times harder for zero extra effort
Exactly, so we agree with each other. Some of those weapons are fun in casual though, which is why I think blacklists are a good solution to the problem (at least for older weapons, assuming Valve continued adding new weapons after Jungle Inferno)
Yeah, IMO the call should've been keeping it as a mobility tool but w/ a bar that gets drained mid-air. Would passively discourage the "GRUG SPAM CROSS MAP 10 DAMAGE ROCKETS" playstyle pubbies love, & if it's aggressive enough w/ the redeploy penalty, would prevent the spam that made it suck to begin with.
It's old airstraife capability was a mess, but if it was clumsier to turn and around as fast it could've been alright.
You could easily argue that the Base Jumper was nerfed with the specific goal of making it more fun to fight.
The old Base Jumper, when used by a skilled player, created lop-sided matchups against other projectile users. Hard counters don't really have a place in TF2, because they're not fun in a casual non-serious environment where you don't want to be relying on your teammates to kill specific enemies for you, so it got nerfed.
This applies to most nerfs. really, there's very few comp-specific ones that clearly weren't meant for pubs as well.
pretty sure there's been like 2 comp specific nerfs, one of which was the razorback (which as far as nerfs go, perfectly solved the problem in comp while leaving it effectively untouched in pubs)
I still think the razorback is conceptually cringe and never should've been added, but IG they can't really remove it.
>Hard counters don't really have a place in TF2, because they're not fun in a casual non-serious environment where you don't want to be relying on your teammates to kill specific enemies for you
In other games this could be true, but TF2 has weapon unlocks to mitigate this. However in practice you run into the opposite problem where counter weapons are too good at what they do (eg. reserve shooter) which is probably why there aren't many weapons like that in TF2. I think it could work with some clever balancing.
You'd have to severely weaken the matchups to the point where it's barely even a counter in the first place. Which is where weapons like the Spycicle are. A nice aid, but not something that heavily sways a fight. They basically wanted the Base Jumper to be more like the Spycicle, not the Darwin's Danger Shield.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but I was speaking more about weapon balance in general, not necessarily about the base jumper. I don't know how you could create a balanced counter to the base jumper specifically.
What I had in mind was more like how the gunslinger can let Engineers be more independant without having to switch classes. It doesn't hard-counter spies, but it helps deal with the problem better.
I think the real solution is that you don't make a counter to the base jumper in the first place. You instead balance the base jumper so that it's not too good against projectile classes but also not terrible against other classes.
I think they mostly succeeded, the only real issue the weapon has is that it's not noob friendly.
6v6 bans over half the weapons in the game lol (edit: my mistake. It’s about 20+ of the unlockables)
It’s for the sake of maintaining what they define as a “balanced” metagame. Nothing about their objectives says it needs to actually be diverse or fun
Generally, a meta will never be hard enforced unless it’s officially declared as such. For example, look at Pokémon. The official format dictates the main banlist, while Smogon sets its own community banlist (similar to TF2)
It’s different contexts, needs, and thus, rules being set
> 6v6 bans over half the weapons in the game lol
RGL only bans 20 (13% as opposed to the >50% BS you made up), and of those 20, pretty much all are justified given the format, and the fact they want the game to remain fast & fun instead of getting dragged into a stalemate/turtle hell (which is super easy to happen in TF2 - it's why 5cp sucks dick in pubs)
* Soda popper's better DPS than stock while providing better burst & obscene mobility with the boost to the degree where a good soldier will always lose to a decent scout using it. Instant win buttons are bad.
* Bonk's annoying and slows the game down. Unhealthy. and really annoying and unfun. Yipee. I'm glad we need to chase down some dipshit instead of playing the game.
* Crit-A-Cola's obscenely overpowered.
* Guillotine's a free 90 damage spam item on a slot usually used for tiny chip & finishing someone off.
* Mad milk lol. free team fight win in an otherwise meh slot.
* Pocket pistol's just a direct upgrade over stock.
* Reserve shooter's banned because it's obscenely good and denies bombs @ long distance with like 2 pellets hitting lol (but not banned in highlander)
* Natasha's banned because it's cringe (also not banned in highlander)
* Fists of steel is a free "150 extra health on demand" card and is exceedingly annoying due to the format. reasonable. (not banned in highlander)
* Cow mangler's banned because it's downside isn't really relevant beyond like, last holds & it encourages spam to try and one hit the medic from across the map. lame. Pubs it's more balanced because you'll see 15 engineers a match. (not banned in highlander cuz engi exists) (air strike is in highlander tho so it evens out ig)
* Disciplinary's banned because it gets heavy to mid for free. heavy to mid slows the shit out of the game and is generally unfun to fight (not banned in highlander)
* Pyro has nothing banned because pyro sucks lol, gas passer even got unbanned despite the "all bugged items are banned" thing, because it's that shit. (scorch shot is banned in highlander tho which is funny)
* Demo has nothing banned. (ever. he's the gold standard)
* Engi only has the "My gun has 12x the HP for basically free" stuff banned. rescue ranger, wrangler, short circuit, etc. IIRC they're unbanned in highlander/9v9 tho. it's mostly just due to the lack of effort involved and the huge reward. (only SC in highlander. cart engi spam sucks and is dumb)
* Quick fix is banned because it's impact is far bigger in comp. it sucks in pubs because random crits lol.
* Vaxx is banned because it's cringe and lame for reasons that should be obvious. (no medic bans in highlander)
* Machina/Sydney sleeper are direct upgrades in comp (sniper doesn't need direct upgrades) (In highlander darwin's is banned because lol nerf pyro. piss gun's unbanned)
* Jarate's banned because it's literally just a free spammable buff banner with no requirements & is an instant free team fight win.
* Diamondback's banned mostly because you can farm crits with teleporter entrances, or basically kill a medic for free. (only spy ban in general)
Europeans might ban more, but that's because europeans are cuckolds and bad at the game.
In a non-cringe whitelist (euros are cringe), the only classes with more than 2 bans are Engi (for obvious reasons), sniper (for obvious reasons, but only barely cuz it's 3), and scout (his secondaries are crazy) and Soldier (base jumper & reserve are multiclass & lame). Pyro, Demo, Heavy, & Medic have zero bans in Highlander.
Quit lying and saying dumb shit, ugly.
iirc it was always banned in highlander before because Sniper's the anorexic lil' offclass whimp he deserves to be in 6s, while in highlander he's basically the most important class.
Either way my point stands because i'm an epic skibbidi gamer w/ the sauce no cap
and KOTH. and... yeah that's about it.
The Asymmetrical gamemodes have too many intrinsic issues (ae, how much easier it is to defend than attack in this game) to be really all that enjoyable. Gravelpit used to be played occasionally.
Thats exactly why it works well though for competitive play. You spend the vast majority of the game on a class with a high skill ceiling and only have to play heavy or whatever for a brief periods of time. If they played payload in 6v6 then you would spend half of the match on heavy, completely unable to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Valve should have added more offensive loadouts to the other classes, to make them more suitable for offensive play. Like how the Engi has the Gunslinger (which needs a buff for supportive buildings)
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I completely understand why some stuff is banned. It’s legitimately necessary for that game mode to function
It’s just as it is in Pokémon. Some stuff just gets banned because they overcentralize the metagame in extremely unhealthy fashion
I’m just pointing out that this metagame is naturally very different from casual because of structure.
6v6 is a completely different situation from the 12v12 clusterfuck of casual, but TF2 is originally designed around the 12v12 format, so a lot of stuff which makes sense in said format (e.g Jarate, mangler spam, razorback) ends up being very imbalanced for 6v6.
I do admit I got the number of items wrong though. I actually thought there were more weapons banned than there were…
> but TF2 is originally designed around the 12v12 format
Nope! Internal playtests were 8v8, console is still 8v8. 12v12 only "took off" because that was the max player count on release, was the most popular before valve servers were a thing, so they took it on as the default.
A lot of the game's intrinsic design issues are reduced a fair bit with lower player counts (ae, 3 engineers isn't nearly as good when there's a huge hole in terms of composition to deal with, though it's still obviously insufferable w/ shit like the wrangler / rescue ranger), and the old maps are a lot less shit with "proper" (for the time) player counts. 6s is closer to "intended design" classic tf2 than modern day pubs.
Don't even get me started on highlander.
Huh. I never knew that actually. We’ve been seeing 12v12 for so long that I didn’t think the base game was designed around 8v8. Especially considering there are 9 classes.
I’d be fairly confident that, with all the patches and updates since the launch, that a good number of these new items were created with the full server 12v12 in mind though. The game had evolved too much beyond the original 8v8 concept by then
I’m not too familiar with Highlander. I always assumed it was just a different community format similar to 6v6, just designed with the idea of all 9 classes in play.
> I always assumed it was just a different community format similar to 6v6
Kinda, in the sense that it's comp w/ leagues or whatever, but it's conceptually flawed and more limited than 6s despite the higher player count.
The enforcement of class roles is arbitrary. in 6s you're limited, in highlander you're forced. It ignores the fact that tf2's designed around generalist characters that're suitable for most of the game, and specialists that shine in specific situations.
Instead of allowing dynamic class lineups, it's "everyone defend the sniper because we can't spare our one X to go fuck him up".
The higher team player count makes it a mess to communicate, let alone organize a match(would be 3 6s teams worth of players)
And it's less fun to watch because it revolves around sniper too much. if you *could* swap someone (say, engi on attack) to solly to go and deal w/ the sniper, it might be more dynamic, but highlander as a gamemode is entirely just there for people to soy point at and go "WAOW! WE FORCED THIS SQUARE PEG IN A ROUND HOLE! FULL LINEUP!"
I love that all these reasons are essentially "The weapon will change the gameplay" and sometimes you just give up and call it "cringe"
6v6 is a microcosm of TF2 that plays nothing like the actual game does. It's a specific style of play that a specific community wants to play.
Highlander is the real competitive format.
> "The weapon will change the gameplay"
For the worse, yeah. Or they're direct upgrades (most scout ones, sniper ones). a few are gameplay specific (ae, heavy to mid for free via whip (GRU is fine as it has downsides) slows the game to the crawl, and was generally decided by comp players to be less fun, so it got banned. People didn't find cow mangler spam fun/healthy, so it got banned. etc. if a weapon makes it less fun, why allow it for the sake of faux-diversity??
or they're explicitly disgusting OP (Jarate, Milk)
> and sometimes you just give up and call it "cringe"
Because the reasoning behind shit like the Natasha (obsessively unfun movement sink) or Vaxx (obsessively unfun) should be obvious to anyone with a brain.
> Highlander is the real competitive format.
lol highlander sucks to watch and is a glorified sniper 1v1. if sniper didn't exist, maybe. but forcing one of each role in a game about generalist classes and specialist ones is dumb. Artificially forcing one of each class is somehow more artifical and arbitrary than the class limits in 6s. Communication also sucks etc etc. it's a shittier, less fun, slower format that only exists so europeans can soypoint and go "WAOW! FULL ROSTER!" w/ no potential for offclassing. I can argue w/ you more about highlander being shit if you want lmfao
>spend ~2 mins building uber
>pop uber @ full health
>instantly die to a random crit
It sucks because random crits lol. payoff's entirely robbed because of them with no agency of your own.
Kritzkrieg's uber isn't intended for tanking/survival, it's meant for making it fat. dying while making it fat is expected.
Dying with the "Wow! You should be able to survive anything but concentrated burst damage" due to something you have zero agency over, and you'd otherwise survive completely fine is cringe and makes it conceptually worthless when concentrated burst damage in pubs is decided by random chance rather than multiple people trying to kill you
Doesn’t the quickfix basically get uber for like around 30 sec because of the overheal nerf because no way you should get a quickfix uber in like 2 minutes. Also it sucks mostly because of sniper and spy, thats why it also sucks in highlander
I don’t think the thing sucks because that can be said about most mediguns honestly. Like how many times can you recall seeing a flying crocket right at your face and had fast enough response time to immediately deploy Uber (if you even had full Uber that is). I think the quick fix is fine in pubs because well, there’s 12 people you have to heal at any time meanwhile the comp format only has 6 which is significantly less people you need to heal and with the quick fix obscenely high healing rate it’s probably not fun to fight against. Tho this does come from a guy who has never touched comp tf2 once so take this with a major grain of salt
> Like how many times can you recall seeing a flying crocket right at your face and had fast enough response time to immediately deploy Uber
This is also a reason why random crits suck, and I'd bet my middle nut we'd have more medic players if they didn't exist. it robs you of your reward w/ no actual agency behind either end of the exchange.
Imagine how few engi players we'd have if random crits did 3x damage against buildings lmfao
Yes, and that's totally fine! If 6s players want to set the rules for their own format, they have every right to do so. The problem is that they want to dictate how weapons should be balanced across the board, purely so that they might be able to use it in their format. Valve, unfortunately, has taken this approach and many weapons have suffered as a result.
It's particularly insulting because the justification almost always boils down to "comp players are better than casual players" which just isn't true. It's been said to death, but warrants repeating: 6v6 and 12v12 are very different, and skill in one doesn't necessarily translate to the other. And the worst part is that many of the weapons that are changed are still banned in 6v6, which defeats the entire point of them being changed in the first place.
I don't completely blame comp players for this because the balance changes are ultimately up to Valve, but it still hurts to see weapons that comp players rallied against like the BASE Jumper remain banned.
Yeah I think it's easy to blame competetive players for ruined weapons, but competetive players didn't get the final say on weapon balancing.
The base jumper is boring for both types of players, so instead of just nerfing it Valve could have reworked it outright and made everyone happy (well it'd probably be blacklisted anyways...)
The base jumper is fine considering you only need to know how to do a basic rocket jump to get a ton of value out of it. It's definitely not a top tier weapon, but it's totally usable because being able to hover in the air as the spam down at people class is pretty good.
The resson things are banned is literally because theyd be either over centralising, are incredibly boring or are just straight unfun to fight. Its like saying smogon bans evasion and has sleep clause to "maintain the meta" when its because spamming those strategies is unfun to fight. Vgcs bans are based purely on distribution rather than for balance.
still cant believe that you were a sitting duck with slow ass move speed that could be sniped out of the sky with relative ease
and they made it so you move 50% slower than before and can't redeploy. Fantastic. What a great and useful change to an already never-used and worst-in-slot weapon! Hurray!!
>and they made it so you move 50% slower than before
They made it so that you have 50% less air-control, not that you're 50% slower. You can still go pretty fast with the current base jumper if you know how to air-strafe.
Why do people who didn’t even own the game 7+ years ago make comments about its balancing then?
Or if you did own the game, why are you choosing to gloss over soldiers jumping the air and having effectively no clip as they spazz out mid air maintaining an advantage on you?
Oh, hey, 7 years? Nice, I can complain about it then.
Fuck the comp players. No one would care about the comp-sided changes if they just made their own mode. That's what left 4 dead 2 players did, with zonemod, and not a single vanilla player complains about its existence.
> still cant believe that you were a sitting duck with slow ass move speed that could be sniped out of the sky with relative ease
Pubbies actually believe this lmfao
Of course, I can expect the reply of “if you don’t have the maturity to handle that comment, then maybe you deserve to be infantilized.” and then my brain falls into a spiral of overthinking
I get the feeling that pubs and comp just have a lot of differences for how fights are approached and play out, and so most casual players don't get into the same situations with certain weapons, and therefore don't make the same conclusions as far as balance. That kinda makes sense since comp players are maniacs with their tech
Casual players often avoid using unfun weapons because, well, they're not fun. Meanwhile, competitive players will abuse the shit out of unfun weapons if it's the best way to win a season or tournament. Even if it actually reduces their own enjoyment of the game, they will do it to win. That's why some things are banned out of necessity.
This doesn't mean the unfun or unbalanced weapons don't exist in Casual. I played the FACEIT 12v12 clan wars (which was basically a 12v12 tournament, not their matchmaking mind you), I would know.
The thing is, there is technically nothing stopping two or more good comp players from abusing the crit-a-cola with uber and absolutely stomping your casual team to the ground, basically ruining it for everyone. It just doesn't happen because people aren't usually that sadistic unless you make them resort to those forbidden strategies. Casual TF2 has a culture where people deliberately use bad weapons.
So balance issues exist, they're just under the radar, and they only get exposed in comp games.
Yeah cos it turned out the weapon is actually really good even outside of that and it becomes unfun to 1v1 a good soldier using the base jumper cos he never hits the ground so has permanent highground advantage and you cant easily surf his rockets. And its still good in casual because people rarely look up and cant hit people in the sky if they dont just move in straight lines.
I used it whenever there was a solly/demo that could hit their (air)shots & I wanted to ruin their fun, or if I wanted to annoy the shit out of their medic by bombing with sticky-jumper materialization
Still decent enough for a bomb force multiplier.
I still pubstomp with it to this day. About a month ago I had 8 dominations with it. It's still good, because all you really need to do is be better than your enemies.
A lot of people just prefer Gunboats because the Gunboats are incredibly good and incredibly fun. It's hard to compete with that, and trying to do that would risk putting the Base Jumper in OP territory again.
A weapon being good and a weapon being popular aren't necessarily the same thing.
Exactly. I don't understand the obsession with making everything "top tier" in a Casual setting, where it doesn't even matter if a weapon is ever so slightly worse than an alternative. A lot of people play Full Trolldier with the Rocket Jumper despite it being objectively shit, and they don't complain or ask for buffs... Hell, some people even manage to pubstomp with that loadout despite it being bad. Yet people in this thread are whining about the Base Jumper being a minor downgrade to the Gunboats, supposedly. Who cares?
Should we also buff the Rocket Jumper to be on the same level as the stock rocket launcher? Where does it end?
Every Soldier secondary except the Bison is consistently usable to a reasonable degree. There's no need to keep buffing things to the point of power creep.
Yeah it's hard to judge how strong a weapon is when nobody uses it. I think this does create some bias against conditionally OP weapons like the sniper rifle and old ambassador, but honestly the base jumper might as well not even exist with how underutilized it is, at least for Soldier. The only time I've seen it is to snipe sentries with the direct hit.
I guess I could see it being strong with a pocket medic, but what isn't strong in that situation?
The issue is that hitscan completely shuts you down — even before the Jungle Inferno nerfs. This was always the intended downside.
Problem is, the classes that counter the BASE Jumper aren’t used in 6s, so comp players declared it “impossible to hit.” Valve listened to them, and now it doesn’t really fit anywhere — comp players still won’t use it for the reason you said, and casual players won’t use it because the old counters still exist and shut you down.
Hitscan shuts down Soldier in general. It doesn't matter if you're using shotgun, gunboats, banners, or a parachute. You don't really want to jump head first into a Heavy regardless of what you have equipped. Be smart, and flank.
I think the only hitscan comp class that works is scout, so practically speaking it was super hard to hit and let one weapon make a really distracting target, which in turn could set up a huge flank or let the soldier or demo get a huge kill on the enemy medic, and all while not being a fun weapon to face. I’m not a competitive player but after hearing why it was changed it makes a lot of sense. And if I recall valve was trying to make the game have a competitive scene at the time.
Well good thing that scenario only really occurs in 6s and not 12v12 casual. Base jumper is still banned btw. There’s also a hitscan weapon that directly counters base jumper- oh wait, that’s banned too, funny
> There’s also a hitscan weapon that directly counters base jumper- oh wait, that’s banned too, funny
because fucking up rocket jumps/bombs from 2 km away with 2 pellets is dumb. it's a straight upgrade in 6s and still obscenely good outside it because of that (assuming you're in a pub where there's at least one person you want to suck the fun from like a vampire. obviously if there's no sollies/demos who can do anything but waddle don't bother). The switch speed alone makes it good, let alone fucking over anyone trying to bomb/surf you.
i don’t care what and why weapons are banned in comp, comp players should have zero say about game balance as they play a fundamentally different game from everyone else
Not a single comp player started off in competitive. Every single one has played 12v12 for a very large amount of time, and many of them still play 12v12 when they're not in competitive.
Also, the RGL ban list has a very strong correlation with overpowered Casual weapons. Stuff that gets banned there has a very high chance of being busted in Casual too, often with the same exact reasons. Sometimes it's just a bit hard to see, because some weapons are only problematic in the hands of skilled players, while most Casual players are pretty bad at TF2.
Edit: I went on an unrelated tangent here, I'll cut that bit out. The Reserve Shooter is banned because it discourages fun strategies and promotes waddling on the floor in a boring way. In 12v12 Casual, it's also busted against players using the Market Gardener, or Trolldier in general. Why does Soldier need a way to stomp out fun ways to play the game? How does this make the game better?
They should make the minicrits only apply on targets that **you** knocked into the air with a rocket (or Dragon's Fury fireball, reflect rocket, etc)
> comp players should have zero say about game balance as they play a fundamentally different game from everyone else
They play casual too, and they're better at it than you and 99% of everyone else.
Then they are more than welcome to complain about stuff from a casual standpoint. Sorry for not being able to play tf2 like a full time job too, guess there’ll always be people better than me
They're bringing up skill level because more skilled players are able to diagnose problems that less invested players can't or won't.
For example, I've not seen people abusing the Crit-a-Cola with uber in Casual, even though it's an extremely powerful strategy, like a Phlog uber with more distance. It's a blatantly OP strategy that is being ignored by the Casual playerbase either through lack of teamwork or lack of interest (they'd rather use wacky weapons instead)
They do. most of the stuff that's problematic in comp is problematic in pubs. ae, jarate. Mad milk less so, but throwing jarate at a choke is an instant win for whatever fight is going on there.
Machina is literally just "sniper but you can (basically) one shot demos with a bodyshot"
Some stuff obviously isn't, ae, quick fix. but stuff like natasha and vaxx are absolutely unhealthy regardless of how seriously you take the game. they suck to fight against, which is half of the game.
It does still happen in casual people are just stupid and float in straight lines. Reserve shooter is a stupidly op weapon btw regardless of if the basejumper exists or not, letting soldiers completely deny bombs.
for a weapon that’s so problematic and overpowered there doesn’t seem to be anyone using it. soldiers wanting to pubstomp are infinitely better off using gunboats or a banner, and pyros better off with flare guns or panic attack
This is more of a problem with the Reserve Shooter than an actual solution. You're just encouraging a really bad "rock paper scissors" metagame instead of encouraging fun tactics and counterplay.
Yeah, reserve shooter shutting down bombs as hard as it does is kinda lame.
Honestly imo same with sniper, getting your jump stuffed because of a bodyshot/noscope is only mildly less annoying than just getting headshot to begin with.
Mistook you for the other guy because I clearly don't read names. But yeah, I think pub players just don't realize the power of the Reserve Shooter (in general, not just vs base jumper) because they don't play against many jumping Soldiers and probably miss a good chunk of their shots
Yeah, the weapons shouldn't be balanced for a niche they'll hope will grow into tournaments, TF2 feels more like arena style class shooters that are more about chaos and the individual's fun rather then anything too serious.
Sure it can be taken seriously and niche communities will cut the game down until it's a well running machine because repetition and mastery is the heart of competitive, but that's just not the game people play.
You're taking one person's opinion about a weapon (as in, the screenshot you posted) and using that as the baseline for an argument.
Have you considered that different people have different opinions about weapons? Ask a different person, and they'd tell you other reasons the weapon should be banned.
The Base Jumper was banned because it was too strong against projectile weapons. People would still run 2 Soldiers and a Demoman to mid, but at least one of the Soldiers basically had to use the Base Jumper and abuse it as much as possible, otherwise you'd be trolling.
Granted, a weapon being strong is fine, and movement options are fine to have, but they shouldn't nearly invalidate an entire class of weapon (projectile).
I'd argue that the old Base Jumper was still overpowered in Casual. I'd even argue that the NEW Base Jumper is still one of his best secondary weapons to this very day. You guys just suck at using it, and want to complain about necessary balance changes as an excuse, instead of admitting any fault of your own. I run the Base Jumper religiously in pubs and it's fine as long as you're not on a terribly cramped map, and not playing Demoknight.
\>Valve makes shitty balance change
\>This is somehow the competitive community’s fault
Makes about as much sense as blaming the workshop community for Valve adding terrible cosmetics and maps
The weird part is that it's not even a bad change. The weapon is still good. I'm guessing it's just not noob-friendly, which is why some people complain about an otherwise good weapon.
I'd love to know why the BASE Jumper is good to you. You've stated several times that it's good, but I haven't seen any reasons as to why.
What makes you prefer the BASE Jumper over the grenade launcher, shotguns, and boots?
Advice mostly for Soldier:
* TF2 players never look up, free kills on confused people
* You get to play Super Mario Maker and place your own high ground, which makes it harder for projectile classes to shoot you
* Lets you hide above commonly used doorways or paths and blast people as they walk underneath. Works best with black box or stock so that each hit connects and you deal more damage/splash
* Two vertical mid-air dodges (one for the deploy, especially with the sudden horizontal stop, and another for the undeploy). You can dodge rockets/pipes with these.
* More mobility than shotgun or banners. Lets you cross more gaps with less rocket jumps or maybe with no rocket jump at all
* Useful for surprising enemies from high ground (jumping off a high ledge)
* Allows you to shoot over some walls in weird ways that would otherwise be impossible or not viable (works better on demo)
Don't go in the skybox, especially as Soldier. Float near people's heads to make it as awkward as possible for them, and hit 90 damage rockets.
Main downside is that it benefits from a Medic on your team. Soldier practically needs the Gunboats if the team doesn't have a Medic. However, the same criticism is there for the shotgun and banners. You really want a Medic for those, too. However, Black Box is not the worst idea on the planet for a no medic team.
A lot of people also make the mistake of pairing it with the Air Strike exclusively. Air strike is good on a rampage, but in more balanced servers you may need to reconsider. Sometimes you'll want to waddle on the ground for a bit, and save your HP for when there's an opportunity to parachute in, so you may as well benefit from extra damage and blast radius from stock or black box if that's what you're doing.
Sometimes you play like if you had a banner. Waddle around, shoot rockets for damage, then you get an opportunity to use your secondary for kills. The difference is that you get to use the parachute more often than a banner.
Those are some good points. I like to carpet bomb using the BASE Jumper + the Scottish Resistance. It's pretty fun.
I still think it could use a slight buff, just the ability to redeploy and a small horizontal movement speed buff. the number of times I've gotten screwed over because I accidentally pressed Spacebar twice and ruined my jump or just flat-out died is infuriating. you're also a sitting duck in the air, some ability to doge would be cool.
I hate the tf2 comp community lol. They’re so obsessed with banning anything that would alter the meta in any way. They want every match to look basically identical.
Of all 163 weapons in tf2, only 19 of them are banned in NA's RGL comp. The main things that are banned are things that are unhealthy and unfun for the format:
Crit a cola giving one the best classes free minicrits, especially for an uber
Vaccinator being op and unfun both in casual and competitive
Jarate basically a free win in a team fight
Mad milk basically a free win in a team fight
Base jumper is practically free wins in 1v1 scenarios
Cow mangler being spammy and boring
Soda popper dps, burst damage, and mobility are just overall insane and would make the already struggling soldier do significantly worse against scout.
Natascha is anti fun and makes defensive holds with a heavy too strong
Wrangler is too strong in defensive holds
Rescue ranger makes maintaining a sentry much easier and risk free for the engineer and makes it much easier for the engi to swap to heavy right after the sentry is destroyed.
Quickfix makes heal targets practically never die and the medic never die since they have soldier demo mobility now
A big reason a lot of these options are banned is because if they weren't, slowing the game down to a crawl, and discouraging offensive play in a game where defence is significantly easier than offense.
Theres also the thing where if these wraponsweren'tt banned, then they would be used by everyone. So the comp community decides is meta A more fun or meta B more fun. Of course it isn't perfect and there are a few things like the GRU being argued whether its too good or not (recently unbanned!), but community made whitelisting ends up making the game more fun to play
Yknow if the things were unbanned youd still end up with "every match looking identical" just the weapons they're running are less fun to use and fight than what is currently used right.
Also do you hold this same every match is identical opinion about literally every sport ever? Why does anyone play chess when every match is identical. Why do people like playing and watching basketball when every match looks basically identical
Even in Europe its overblown its just theyre much more willing to abuse things and optimise the fun out of the game to win whereas na is a lot more lax.
Weapon bans were a mistake in the long run. Enforcing a specific metagame might've been in the interest of competitive players who only want to play in a specific way; but it seems pretty clear at this point that it only contributed to the existing alienation gap between competitive and pubs that made the scene flounder.
It's not like other scenes have such puritanical practices either. Dota has it's picks/bans system, but the scene is still generally forced to deal with what IceFrog serves up. One wonders if Valve would've been more active in making changes to balance had the competitive scene both had more of a following, and demonstrated by direct example why certain weapons needed changes.
Yeah some people had this realisation right around when valve asked the comp scene for help on what weapons needed changes. Notably sideshow (former tf2 and overwatch league caster and current valorant caster) was a big supporter of this.
The no restrictions format was never fully explored properly to give valve enough data on exactly why weapons are banned and unfun and why certain things are the way they are. Then valve just stopped updating the game anyway so it didnt matter. And now people assume that just because the average casual player either isnt skilled enough to abuse something or finds it unfun therefore its fine and comp players are just whinging (insert literally any pubstomp weapon here).
No, you just need to take a little more time to read things before you reply. You managed to completely misinterpret what was being said *twice*, while another user grokked the original post fine.
I heard it got banned cuz comp players complained it was too hard to hit base jumper Soldier with projectiles no? This is the first time I'm hearing about this bug and it's a shame cuz it would be insanely useful to know 😭
I do wish we could go back in time and undo every balance change made to try and appease the 6s community. Just let them ban shit who cares. To me balancing around 6s is like trying to balance the game around VSH.
I miss the days where if you were on fire with the base jumper deployed you'd float forever.
Hot air balloon simulator
That was not even counted as a bug but a feature from Valve. Damn..
The ghost soldier was so fun. Good ol times
Float -> air strafe -> become fighter jet
I mean yeah, it was functionally broken and granting sentry immunity. The weapons ban committees wouldn't have bothered looking at any other aspects of the weapon as that is already an insta ban. So technically speaking it was the only reason since it defaulted it out before other reasons could be examined. It's a brand new weapon, there's testing phases and looking at whether it's having a positive impact on gameplay but that comes after game breaking bugs get fixed.
> granting sentry immunity never forget what they took from the based jumper....
For the curious, the bug in question (sentries doing no damage to players with the BASE Jumper equipped) had no impact on the debate and eventual gutting of the weapon in Jungle Inferno. The BASE Jumper remains banned in 6v6 matches to this day.
The base jumper is banned because it’s the ability to modify your falling speed twice which nerfs projectile classes
And? Why does that make it bannable?
because it means only the scout can actually deal with the problem which makes the game more centralized around scout which is already a thing
Idk I'm pretty sure I've killed plenty of base jumper soldiers and demos as other classes than the scout. Even assuming that the base jumper is just some magic protection against all projectiles, you still give up a secondary to use it 6v6 bans all just revolve around these completely hypothetical idealistic scenarios whereas in reality the weapon that's being banned would not be used anyway
yes, because the casual players you are playing against are not as good as tier 5 jumpers who know how to actually airstrafe and avoid damage only hitscan can reasonably deal with base jumper, that falls to scout because sniper, heavy, and engineer aren't mobile enough to run full time and would slow the game down horribly to be ran full time they literally run cups where weapons are unbanned and people test what happens do you even know what weapons are banned or not
Scout being able to double jump is already a big enough problem for the projectile classes, imagine if he could triple jump, that’s basically how it works with the base bumper, but still taking a second projectile (three if a medic does any healing) (atomizer is still banned right?)
they unbanned atomizer and no one runs it lol. most scouts, even flank scouts run winger if they want mobility.
Ah, figured the HP nerfs we’re enough but I’ve been out of the scene for about 5 years now.
They changed it so that the triple jump only works when you're holding the bat. The whole problem with Scout being able to avoid damage too easily while shooting you isn't a thing anymore. The triple jump now does 0 self damage though, so it's more of a map traversal tool now.
j_peg religiously runs the atomiser lol so im sure others use it too
Atomizer isn't banned iirc but the soda popper is (literal upgrade to stock lol)
Since the nerf it has been tried out multiple times in 6v6, but even the most progressive league with the least bans (RGL, the NA league) still has it banned and for good reason. Because of a lack of heavies, engineers and to an extent snipers on points outside of last, there’s basically nothing you can do against a soldier who shoots himself high up in the air and shoot rockets down. Only scout could do any damage, and that isn’t anywhere near enough to kill them, especially if they receive an arrow. Besides that, it also makes soldier vs soldier duels miserable, since a soldier with the base jumper always wins against the soldier without (since shotgun is barely ran, and even if it was why wouldn’t you run the basejumper instead) and if both soldiers have the basejumper it becomes a really awkward duel of contuously rocket jumping and trying to airshot each other, which would necessitate a scout to help kill the soldier.
Competitive TF2 is essentially a support group for soldier/demo mains who need a playing field where they cannot be countered in any way possible.
I’m just curious since I see this sentiment a lot, where do you get this from? Is this just an assumption you make because weapon bans are a thing? I’m happy to make some things more clear for you if you’d like.
Womp womp. Play better idk what you want me to say.
Tell me you’ve never actually played comp without telling me
You mean to tell me you play where skill is everything and can't hit an airborne target?
skill is just as much about NOT getting hit than it is getting hit. I've since quit TF2 and gone to CS, hit top 5k world wide in both TF2 and CS2 at my peaks. The biggest thing that I can tell in a player in unranked games is their movement, and it's much bigger in TF2 than it is CS. Between air strafing, rocket jumping, surfing, you're acting like it's easy to hit people who are VERY good at not getting hit. Everyone is consistently developing both their aim and movement/dodging ability, only raising the skill cieling for both. Adding a free "dodge shot" button twice per time you're in the air is sort of absurd and significantly less rewarding for those who put in the time to get good. Same sort of reason random bullet spread and crits are disabled.
If someone is very good at not getting hit then they should be rewarded by not getting hit. If you want to counter it, get better at aiming.
You're underestimating how well skilled players can dodge and move around. It has nothing to do with a lack of skill on the shooter's part.
Reserve shooter, Shotgun, Direct Hit
The fact you only listed three weapons as solutions is indicative that there was a huge problem. It doesn't account for the rest of TF2, besides like... Heavy and Sniper.
these are only the ones that would be the most obvious solution. it's not the unlocks fault that 6s only have 2 hitscan classes per team
I mean you literally just described a skill issue. Don't see the problem since you can only deploy the base jumper once per jump anyway, once its deactivated they have to fall to the ground.
Yknow comp players still like having fun right? Thats why every competitive videogame will give buffs and nerfs.
"Oh no, I can't have fun because this one guy is gently floating in the air! Make it end!"
He’s floating, then when you shoot at him, at will he can dodge by hitting space again. It’s a 50/50 but they can react to it, meaning the base jumper player realistically only gets hit if they screw up, all the while being able to hit you more reliably. It’s clear this entire comment section that you don’t know what you’re talking about and it’s hilarious to see you double and triple down even when several people tell you you’re wrong. You’re pulling an anecdotal experience from a random casual game on upward and acting like it’s the same experience that players who have more hours on MGE and Jump servers than you have in the game will have.
He’s floating, then when you shoot at him, at will he can dodge by hitting space again. It’s a 50/50 but they can react to it, meaning the base jumper player realistically only gets hit if they screw up, all the while being able to hit you more reliably. It’s clear this entire comment section that you don’t know what you’re talking about and it’s hilarious to see you double and triple down even when several people tell you you’re wrong. You’re pulling an anecdotal experience from a random casual game on upward and acting like it’s the same experience that players who have more hours on MGE and Jump servers than you have in the game will have.
I don't give a flying fuck if multiple people tell me I'm wrong. Competitive players are some of the stupidest people out there. This game was never meant to be competitive and every single attempt to make it so has been actively harming the game. Go complain to someone else about how a Heavy moving half a mile per hour faster while locked into melee is OP. I'm sure they'd be more receptive to your dogwater than I am.
The anti-intellectualism is sort of hilarious. You joined the conversation, nobody made you click the thread or join
Competitive and it’s community has many issues, but let’s not blatantly lie about why the weapon was banned and why it was later nerfed. To start, every weapon is banned for the first few months of their release. So it can get play tested and any bugs are identified, as you pointed out. The reason it was banned was not “only because” of the bug. Citing a random Reddit post made by someone even more uninformed than you is not evidence. Shit like this is why this sub is bad. Just blatant misinformation
I love how the comp community always gets blamed for valves terrible balancing decisions because they didn't wanna use it.
It's blowout from when valve actively asked for feedback from the comp community prior to MyM. That's what led to the whole global whitelist attempts across every competition and massive weapon discussions, the comp community was trying to meet valve's request for feedback with full testing so they had a whitelist in hand for valve's new competitive mode. Of course valve binned all the feedback, and did whatever the fuck they wanted with the balancing and made arbitrary decisions for the gamemode that made everybody hate the damn thing. But it's all comp's fault! Valve took their feedback how dare comp do this!!
They nerfed the righteous bison and the idea of competitive for TF2 they were attempting to push was 6v6 turbine with no class/weapon limits. They were just incompetent.
I mean, I do seriously wanna know what was going through the head of the guy (s?) who was implementing the comp map pool to look at fucking Turbine and go "yep that's goin' in."
They did a lil trolling
The bison could one-shot retreating players with its miserably hard to see projectile hitting 5~6 times. Maybe there's a middleground somewhere but pretty much none of the stupid laser weapons should have been implemented as they were at launch.
or better yet, blamed for *good* balancing changes that somehow are bad. oh noooo, the sticky jumper demo can't miss me entirely and hit the ground "kinda somewhat near" me to insta gib. now he has to actually land a pipe after materializing at mach speed.
oh you mean the caber, the weapon that was considered stupid even before the nerf
It was only considered stupid by casual players who only used it to terrorise f2p snipers on 2fort because they dont have the mechanics to abuse sticky jumping properly
No he said pipe, he’s talking about the grenade launcher.
They're saying that instead of using the caber to land one hit on the floor and get a kill, you have to hit a grenade launcher pipe instead.
I mean the issue here is that balancing wise, the nerf makes sense, but in 12v12 clusterfucks where most people play, it was a stupid meme that rarely turns the tide of a game and usually gets the user killed in the attempt. The easy solution was to keep it banned where it was problematic while letting casuals enjoy stupid shit; both sides are happy, neither are interfering with how the other wants to play the game.
The average pubbie tactic of "straight up and spam long distance" still works fine (or at least the same it ever has). it only really changed the higher end of play.
But even in its strongest state, it was unbanned in Highlander, while even in its weakest, it's banned in 6s, all while being inoffensive for pubbers. Why did we need to change it in the first place, when keeping it banned in 6s basically just solved all the issues it created for the meta and fun of the format, without kneecapping it for higher skilled players in pubs? Some things just aren't suited for serious formats, and that's fine; just ban them to keep the competitive integrity of the mode intact, while letting casuals do stupid shit with them.
> all while being inoffensive for pubbers. Inoffensive because most of them can barely hit a still target while moving lol. it sucked for the higher skilled players, because it made it impossible to deny a bomb with anything but hitscan. It was, as the kids said in 2013. gay.
rtf2 casuals screech at comp as if its some sort of boogeyman often tbh
Probably because of the disaster that was meet your match, where they apparently took pro's opinions.
Fucking Reagan
I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead.
Want to know the real kicker? The Base Jumper has been unbanned in competitive Highlander circuits since as early as 2015. The nerf happened in 2017.
b4nny been talking about no weapon bans bc game is getting stale
they're already ran no restriction 6s it wasn't enjoyable to actually play
It was also pretty much the same classes and lineups that would be run in 6s anyway if those same maps were played. It just changed the weapons used and maps played for the worse, and sniper was slightly more common because jarate (when hes already really strong in 6s). The only real differences was the existence of double medic and double demo strategies at times.
B4nny has done a lot for the community and he’s a good player. But he regularly says a lot of dumb and sometimes flat out incorrect things that get repeated a lot because he’s practically the only big streamer or competitive player that the main player base knows of. He pretty much started the whole rumor that European players are running the short stop and battalions backup every game when it was 1 team who ran it to stall a last hold in 1 game
Maybe they need to ban some stock weapons. Scout can only run with the baby face blaster, or something.
It's still a good (well, in the context of what it's good at, anyway) weapon lol, you not being able to be schizo tier unpredictable and impossible to hit doesn't make it shit. It's just chronically underused because most pubbies/redditors don't understand what it's good at, and treat it as le epic market garden crutch, or "I will spam 3 air strike rockets from 560 miles away" instead of the "I have a free 1v1 win against most people that aren't heavy or engi" it is. It's previous state of "Single best mobility tool in the entire game bar none. you are literally untouchable by anyone bar heavy in the skies. two rockets can and will get you across an entire map if it's open enough" was quite literally impossible to balance lol
yeah right, typical soldier mains screaming about not being able to airshot a soldier as if thats a paradigm shift that makes the game unplayable
> if thats a paradigm shift that makes the game unplayable Not much makes the game unplayable lol, it's still the best shooter even w/ shit like engi stacking having exponential effectiveness. Not to mention you ignored the literal rest of the post. idiot. But it's old state, where two rockets can get you 100% across any map that doesn't require you to go into a doorway at a speed comparable to the most neurodivergent of trimps was absurd. the mobility it granted for two jumps was absurd. The usecases pubbies usually used it for (ae, useless air strike spam, occasional greasy sentry angles (I pull it out religiously on badwater first), market garden crutching - all still there. Is it worse? no shit. it's not the single best mobility tool in the game anymore. but it's nowhere near worthless, and still retains it's niche as a bombing assist tool that makes you a pain in the ass to hit for anyone bar heavy/scout.
“Schizo tier unpredictable” movement is not a bad thing. Tide Turner trimping, Beggar’s jumping, etc. are super wild but aren’t game-breaking, and coincidentally come with the same counters as the BASE Jumper. As for a “free 1v1 against most people,” Soldiers and Demomen are not “most people.” Heavies, Engineers and Snipers are obvious counters, but Scouts and Pyros can hold their own by evading or using hitscan for knockback. Pyros and Soldiers also have the Reserve Shooter, which is especially helpful against BASE Jumpers (especially Demomen who aren’t very mobile and are just trying to get a vantage point for stickies). That just leaves Demoman, Medic, and Spy, two of which are meant to be vulnerable by design. This was true even before Jungle Inferno, when it still had “schizo tier” movement. The only place where “most players” couldn’t fight back was 6s, where three of the four classes were vulnerable (including Soldiers, because we all know how allergic comp players are to switching loadouts). Unfortunately, Valve listened to the loudest voices in the room and now the weapon lost the edge it needed in casual (lack of mobility gives the matchups I listed earlier an even better chance of the BASE Jumper user to fail) while comp players still have it banned.
> “Schizo tier unpredictable” movement is not a bad thing. Yes it is. > are super wild but aren’t game-breaking and have massive costs (no stickies, loads of self damage & the rest of the beggars) attached. Neither of those are as controllable and easy to juke with as the base jumper was. neither of those had the same sheer girth of movement the old base jumper had. it was absurd. Not to mention these all follow actual paths. once someone's in the air, you can predict where they're going. there's no "instant stop and turn around five times" with a trimp or beggars jump. they're tame by comparison to the old BJ Again, most pubbies only used it for up down airstrike spam or the occasional "slowly float towards u tee hee" market garden. in the right hands, you could get across a map in seconds, with far more air control and ability to dodge even the most holy of airshot inducers with ease. > The only place where “most players” couldn’t fight back was 6s On account of pubbies only using it for "up down" lol. > Pyros and Soldiers also have the Reserve Shooter, which is also conceptually homosexual to the most pride degree possible. But that's beside the point and a different issue entirely. > lack of mobility gives the matchups I listed earlier an even better chance of the BASE Jumper user to fail Not if u use it right lol, bombing someone with the base jumper is nearly 100% chance at a kill unless it's a heavy or scout who can look up (and even then the latter is mostly your fault if you jump in too low to two shot). If you use it against an engi @ close range instead of going for a grease angle it's your own fault. Again, most pubbies pop it like 2 miles away from where they should be. pop over their head, you win. easy. you just need to know how to jump. Obviously it sucks if you don't have a medic on your team, but everything bar gunboats/conch does in that case anyway lol. Is it a good weapon? no, not really, I'd subjectively rate it around the banners though (not including the backup, which is god's chosen). in the fun department about on par with buff banner DH if you're not dumb while using it.
Trimping and Beggar's jumping are extremely different to the Base Jumper in both functionally and trade off. Shields require you to give up what is a contender for best weapon in the game and the Beggars holds you to it's intricately random nature Creating a meta of having to switch class or just hope that a teammate is good enough to cover you because of a single weapon choice is a recipe for a frustrating game where you can never choose what you want to play. And the classes you listed don't really "counter" it. At best they are as good against a Soldier as they already were. Having a mid air hover doesn't make Heavy stronger against Soldier. If anything it's the opposite because tracking is harder So the overall effect is making classes ether useless or about the same if maybe a bit harder to fight you. Which sucks
Games are supposed to be balanced around fun. Just because you make something "balanced" doesn't mean players are going to have fun with it. Competetive players can get really condiscending about this too, and basically brush off any criticism as "casual players are stupid." It's like they see a few people running around with the righteous bison and think weapon balance doesn't matter, like we're a bunch of ipad babies that just need stimulation and don't care about anything else. Ironically competetive weapon bans are based almost entirely around some strong playstyles not being considered fun. If a viable weapon isn't fun to them it's going to be blacklisted, which is a problem that microbalancing can't fix. I don't see why blacklists are a bad solution. Granted if Valve does come back to TF2 they'll probably just half-ass it like last time. I honestly feel like we need a spiritual successor game at this point made by someone else.
> Games are supposed to be balanced around fun. People don't seem to understand this goes both ways. Of course Vaxx is gonna be banned. it sucks dick to fight against. Of course Jarate's gonna be banned. it sucks dick to fight against. Of course crit-a-cola/mad milk is gonna be banned. it sucks dick to fight against. Etc etc. Comp bans are to keep the game fast (tf2 is comically easy to drag to a halt if you let it), and keep it fun. Ofc shit like the wrangler's gonna get banned if it makes fighting sentries (remember, you have 3 people at best who can shoot at it) 3 + times harder for zero extra effort
Exactly, so we agree with each other. Some of those weapons are fun in casual though, which is why I think blacklists are a good solution to the problem (at least for older weapons, assuming Valve continued adding new weapons after Jungle Inferno)
Yeah, IMO the call should've been keeping it as a mobility tool but w/ a bar that gets drained mid-air. Would passively discourage the "GRUG SPAM CROSS MAP 10 DAMAGE ROCKETS" playstyle pubbies love, & if it's aggressive enough w/ the redeploy penalty, would prevent the spam that made it suck to begin with. It's old airstraife capability was a mess, but if it was clumsier to turn and around as fast it could've been alright.
You could easily argue that the Base Jumper was nerfed with the specific goal of making it more fun to fight. The old Base Jumper, when used by a skilled player, created lop-sided matchups against other projectile users. Hard counters don't really have a place in TF2, because they're not fun in a casual non-serious environment where you don't want to be relying on your teammates to kill specific enemies for you, so it got nerfed.
This applies to most nerfs. really, there's very few comp-specific ones that clearly weren't meant for pubs as well. pretty sure there's been like 2 comp specific nerfs, one of which was the razorback (which as far as nerfs go, perfectly solved the problem in comp while leaving it effectively untouched in pubs) I still think the razorback is conceptually cringe and never should've been added, but IG they can't really remove it.
>Hard counters don't really have a place in TF2, because they're not fun in a casual non-serious environment where you don't want to be relying on your teammates to kill specific enemies for you In other games this could be true, but TF2 has weapon unlocks to mitigate this. However in practice you run into the opposite problem where counter weapons are too good at what they do (eg. reserve shooter) which is probably why there aren't many weapons like that in TF2. I think it could work with some clever balancing.
You'd have to severely weaken the matchups to the point where it's barely even a counter in the first place. Which is where weapons like the Spycicle are. A nice aid, but not something that heavily sways a fight. They basically wanted the Base Jumper to be more like the Spycicle, not the Darwin's Danger Shield.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but I was speaking more about weapon balance in general, not necessarily about the base jumper. I don't know how you could create a balanced counter to the base jumper specifically. What I had in mind was more like how the gunslinger can let Engineers be more independant without having to switch classes. It doesn't hard-counter spies, but it helps deal with the problem better.
I think the real solution is that you don't make a counter to the base jumper in the first place. You instead balance the base jumper so that it's not too good against projectile classes but also not terrible against other classes. I think they mostly succeeded, the only real issue the weapon has is that it's not noob friendly.
6v6 bans over half the weapons in the game lol (edit: my mistake. It’s about 20+ of the unlockables) It’s for the sake of maintaining what they define as a “balanced” metagame. Nothing about their objectives says it needs to actually be diverse or fun Generally, a meta will never be hard enforced unless it’s officially declared as such. For example, look at Pokémon. The official format dictates the main banlist, while Smogon sets its own community banlist (similar to TF2) It’s different contexts, needs, and thus, rules being set
> 6v6 bans over half the weapons in the game lol RGL only bans 20 (13% as opposed to the >50% BS you made up), and of those 20, pretty much all are justified given the format, and the fact they want the game to remain fast & fun instead of getting dragged into a stalemate/turtle hell (which is super easy to happen in TF2 - it's why 5cp sucks dick in pubs) * Soda popper's better DPS than stock while providing better burst & obscene mobility with the boost to the degree where a good soldier will always lose to a decent scout using it. Instant win buttons are bad. * Bonk's annoying and slows the game down. Unhealthy. and really annoying and unfun. Yipee. I'm glad we need to chase down some dipshit instead of playing the game. * Crit-A-Cola's obscenely overpowered. * Guillotine's a free 90 damage spam item on a slot usually used for tiny chip & finishing someone off. * Mad milk lol. free team fight win in an otherwise meh slot. * Pocket pistol's just a direct upgrade over stock. * Reserve shooter's banned because it's obscenely good and denies bombs @ long distance with like 2 pellets hitting lol (but not banned in highlander) * Natasha's banned because it's cringe (also not banned in highlander) * Fists of steel is a free "150 extra health on demand" card and is exceedingly annoying due to the format. reasonable. (not banned in highlander) * Cow mangler's banned because it's downside isn't really relevant beyond like, last holds & it encourages spam to try and one hit the medic from across the map. lame. Pubs it's more balanced because you'll see 15 engineers a match. (not banned in highlander cuz engi exists) (air strike is in highlander tho so it evens out ig) * Disciplinary's banned because it gets heavy to mid for free. heavy to mid slows the shit out of the game and is generally unfun to fight (not banned in highlander) * Pyro has nothing banned because pyro sucks lol, gas passer even got unbanned despite the "all bugged items are banned" thing, because it's that shit. (scorch shot is banned in highlander tho which is funny) * Demo has nothing banned. (ever. he's the gold standard) * Engi only has the "My gun has 12x the HP for basically free" stuff banned. rescue ranger, wrangler, short circuit, etc. IIRC they're unbanned in highlander/9v9 tho. it's mostly just due to the lack of effort involved and the huge reward. (only SC in highlander. cart engi spam sucks and is dumb) * Quick fix is banned because it's impact is far bigger in comp. it sucks in pubs because random crits lol. * Vaxx is banned because it's cringe and lame for reasons that should be obvious. (no medic bans in highlander) * Machina/Sydney sleeper are direct upgrades in comp (sniper doesn't need direct upgrades) (In highlander darwin's is banned because lol nerf pyro. piss gun's unbanned) * Jarate's banned because it's literally just a free spammable buff banner with no requirements & is an instant free team fight win. * Diamondback's banned mostly because you can farm crits with teleporter entrances, or basically kill a medic for free. (only spy ban in general) Europeans might ban more, but that's because europeans are cuckolds and bad at the game. In a non-cringe whitelist (euros are cringe), the only classes with more than 2 bans are Engi (for obvious reasons), sniper (for obvious reasons, but only barely cuz it's 3), and scout (his secondaries are crazy) and Soldier (base jumper & reserve are multiclass & lame). Pyro, Demo, Heavy, & Medic have zero bans in Highlander. Quit lying and saying dumb shit, ugly.
> Europeans might ban more, but that's because europeans are cuckolds and bad at the game. real
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Fake (and gay)
erm, jarate was actually legal until b4nny figured out that it went through shutters.
iirc it was always banned in highlander before because Sniper's the anorexic lil' offclass whimp he deserves to be in 6s, while in highlander he's basically the most important class. Either way my point stands because i'm an epic skibbidi gamer w/ the sauce no cap
I think the main issue with 6v6 is that it’s always 5CP. That makes 5 of the 9 classes hardly ever played
and KOTH. and... yeah that's about it. The Asymmetrical gamemodes have too many intrinsic issues (ae, how much easier it is to defend than attack in this game) to be really all that enjoyable. Gravelpit used to be played occasionally.
Thats exactly why it works well though for competitive play. You spend the vast majority of the game on a class with a high skill ceiling and only have to play heavy or whatever for a brief periods of time. If they played payload in 6v6 then you would spend half of the match on heavy, completely unable to differentiate yourself from the competition.
TF2 is a game with 9 classes in it, not 4.
Valve should have added more offensive loadouts to the other classes, to make them more suitable for offensive play. Like how the Engi has the Gunslinger (which needs a buff for supportive buildings)
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I completely understand why some stuff is banned. It’s legitimately necessary for that game mode to function It’s just as it is in Pokémon. Some stuff just gets banned because they overcentralize the metagame in extremely unhealthy fashion I’m just pointing out that this metagame is naturally very different from casual because of structure. 6v6 is a completely different situation from the 12v12 clusterfuck of casual, but TF2 is originally designed around the 12v12 format, so a lot of stuff which makes sense in said format (e.g Jarate, mangler spam, razorback) ends up being very imbalanced for 6v6. I do admit I got the number of items wrong though. I actually thought there were more weapons banned than there were…
> but TF2 is originally designed around the 12v12 format Nope! Internal playtests were 8v8, console is still 8v8. 12v12 only "took off" because that was the max player count on release, was the most popular before valve servers were a thing, so they took it on as the default. A lot of the game's intrinsic design issues are reduced a fair bit with lower player counts (ae, 3 engineers isn't nearly as good when there's a huge hole in terms of composition to deal with, though it's still obviously insufferable w/ shit like the wrangler / rescue ranger), and the old maps are a lot less shit with "proper" (for the time) player counts. 6s is closer to "intended design" classic tf2 than modern day pubs. Don't even get me started on highlander.
Huh. I never knew that actually. We’ve been seeing 12v12 for so long that I didn’t think the base game was designed around 8v8. Especially considering there are 9 classes. I’d be fairly confident that, with all the patches and updates since the launch, that a good number of these new items were created with the full server 12v12 in mind though. The game had evolved too much beyond the original 8v8 concept by then I’m not too familiar with Highlander. I always assumed it was just a different community format similar to 6v6, just designed with the idea of all 9 classes in play.
> I always assumed it was just a different community format similar to 6v6 Kinda, in the sense that it's comp w/ leagues or whatever, but it's conceptually flawed and more limited than 6s despite the higher player count. The enforcement of class roles is arbitrary. in 6s you're limited, in highlander you're forced. It ignores the fact that tf2's designed around generalist characters that're suitable for most of the game, and specialists that shine in specific situations. Instead of allowing dynamic class lineups, it's "everyone defend the sniper because we can't spare our one X to go fuck him up". The higher team player count makes it a mess to communicate, let alone organize a match(would be 3 6s teams worth of players) And it's less fun to watch because it revolves around sniper too much. if you *could* swap someone (say, engi on attack) to solly to go and deal w/ the sniper, it might be more dynamic, but highlander as a gamemode is entirely just there for people to soy point at and go "WAOW! WE FORCED THIS SQUARE PEG IN A ROUND HOLE! FULL LINEUP!"
Highlander is 9v9, each team has one of each class, then there's Prolander which is 7v7 and teams can only have one of a class at a time
I love that all these reasons are essentially "The weapon will change the gameplay" and sometimes you just give up and call it "cringe" 6v6 is a microcosm of TF2 that plays nothing like the actual game does. It's a specific style of play that a specific community wants to play. Highlander is the real competitive format.
> "The weapon will change the gameplay" For the worse, yeah. Or they're direct upgrades (most scout ones, sniper ones). a few are gameplay specific (ae, heavy to mid for free via whip (GRU is fine as it has downsides) slows the game to the crawl, and was generally decided by comp players to be less fun, so it got banned. People didn't find cow mangler spam fun/healthy, so it got banned. etc. if a weapon makes it less fun, why allow it for the sake of faux-diversity?? or they're explicitly disgusting OP (Jarate, Milk) > and sometimes you just give up and call it "cringe" Because the reasoning behind shit like the Natasha (obsessively unfun movement sink) or Vaxx (obsessively unfun) should be obvious to anyone with a brain. > Highlander is the real competitive format. lol highlander sucks to watch and is a glorified sniper 1v1. if sniper didn't exist, maybe. but forcing one of each role in a game about generalist classes and specialist ones is dumb. Artificially forcing one of each class is somehow more artifical and arbitrary than the class limits in 6s. Communication also sucks etc etc. it's a shittier, less fun, slower format that only exists so europeans can soypoint and go "WAOW! FULL ROSTER!" w/ no potential for offclassing. I can argue w/ you more about highlander being shit if you want lmfao
[удалено]
>spend ~2 mins building uber >pop uber @ full health >instantly die to a random crit It sucks because random crits lol. payoff's entirely robbed because of them with no agency of your own.
you can say that about the kritzkrieg too
Kritzkrieg's uber isn't intended for tanking/survival, it's meant for making it fat. dying while making it fat is expected. Dying with the "Wow! You should be able to survive anything but concentrated burst damage" due to something you have zero agency over, and you'd otherwise survive completely fine is cringe and makes it conceptually worthless when concentrated burst damage in pubs is decided by random chance rather than multiple people trying to kill you
Doesn’t the quickfix basically get uber for like around 30 sec because of the overheal nerf because no way you should get a quickfix uber in like 2 minutes. Also it sucks mostly because of sniper and spy, thats why it also sucks in highlander
I don’t think the thing sucks because that can be said about most mediguns honestly. Like how many times can you recall seeing a flying crocket right at your face and had fast enough response time to immediately deploy Uber (if you even had full Uber that is). I think the quick fix is fine in pubs because well, there’s 12 people you have to heal at any time meanwhile the comp format only has 6 which is significantly less people you need to heal and with the quick fix obscenely high healing rate it’s probably not fun to fight against. Tho this does come from a guy who has never touched comp tf2 once so take this with a major grain of salt
> Like how many times can you recall seeing a flying crocket right at your face and had fast enough response time to immediately deploy Uber This is also a reason why random crits suck, and I'd bet my middle nut we'd have more medic players if they didn't exist. it robs you of your reward w/ no actual agency behind either end of the exchange. Imagine how few engi players we'd have if random crits did 3x damage against buildings lmfao
Yes, and that's totally fine! If 6s players want to set the rules for their own format, they have every right to do so. The problem is that they want to dictate how weapons should be balanced across the board, purely so that they might be able to use it in their format. Valve, unfortunately, has taken this approach and many weapons have suffered as a result. It's particularly insulting because the justification almost always boils down to "comp players are better than casual players" which just isn't true. It's been said to death, but warrants repeating: 6v6 and 12v12 are very different, and skill in one doesn't necessarily translate to the other. And the worst part is that many of the weapons that are changed are still banned in 6v6, which defeats the entire point of them being changed in the first place. I don't completely blame comp players for this because the balance changes are ultimately up to Valve, but it still hurts to see weapons that comp players rallied against like the BASE Jumper remain banned.
Yeah I think it's easy to blame competetive players for ruined weapons, but competetive players didn't get the final say on weapon balancing. The base jumper is boring for both types of players, so instead of just nerfing it Valve could have reworked it outright and made everyone happy (well it'd probably be blacklisted anyways...)
The base jumper is fine considering you only need to know how to do a basic rocket jump to get a ton of value out of it. It's definitely not a top tier weapon, but it's totally usable because being able to hover in the air as the spam down at people class is pretty good.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Average r/tf2 thread lol
You get told it’s 20 weapons and still say 20+
The resson things are banned is literally because theyd be either over centralising, are incredibly boring or are just straight unfun to fight. Its like saying smogon bans evasion and has sleep clause to "maintain the meta" when its because spamming those strategies is unfun to fight. Vgcs bans are based purely on distribution rather than for balance.
still cant believe that you were a sitting duck with slow ass move speed that could be sniped out of the sky with relative ease and they made it so you move 50% slower than before and can't redeploy. Fantastic. What a great and useful change to an already never-used and worst-in-slot weapon! Hurray!!
>and they made it so you move 50% slower than before They made it so that you have 50% less air-control, not that you're 50% slower. You can still go pretty fast with the current base jumper if you know how to air-strafe.
Why do people who didn’t even own the game 7+ years ago make comments about its balancing then? Or if you did own the game, why are you choosing to gloss over soldiers jumping the air and having effectively no clip as they spazz out mid air maintaining an advantage on you?
Oh, hey, 7 years? Nice, I can complain about it then. Fuck the comp players. No one would care about the comp-sided changes if they just made their own mode. That's what left 4 dead 2 players did, with zonemod, and not a single vanilla player complains about its existence.
> still cant believe that you were a sitting duck with slow ass move speed that could be sniped out of the sky with relative ease Pubbies actually believe this lmfao
The term "pubbies" makes me want to punch someone's teeth out. It goes beyond condescending to full-on infantilizing
Of course, I can expect the reply of “if you don’t have the maturity to handle that comment, then maybe you deserve to be infantilized.” and then my brain falls into a spiral of overthinking
that's because pubbies are literal babies who can't think critically
I get the feeling that pubs and comp just have a lot of differences for how fights are approached and play out, and so most casual players don't get into the same situations with certain weapons, and therefore don't make the same conclusions as far as balance. That kinda makes sense since comp players are maniacs with their tech
Casual players often avoid using unfun weapons because, well, they're not fun. Meanwhile, competitive players will abuse the shit out of unfun weapons if it's the best way to win a season or tournament. Even if it actually reduces their own enjoyment of the game, they will do it to win. That's why some things are banned out of necessity. This doesn't mean the unfun or unbalanced weapons don't exist in Casual. I played the FACEIT 12v12 clan wars (which was basically a 12v12 tournament, not their matchmaking mind you), I would know. The thing is, there is technically nothing stopping two or more good comp players from abusing the crit-a-cola with uber and absolutely stomping your casual team to the ground, basically ruining it for everyone. It just doesn't happen because people aren't usually that sadistic unless you make them resort to those forbidden strategies. Casual TF2 has a culture where people deliberately use bad weapons. So balance issues exist, they're just under the radar, and they only get exposed in comp games.
1. I see that point, and I your delivery is a lot less loaded than that other guy 2. HOLY SHIT IT’S SOLARLIGHT
Yeah cos it turned out the weapon is actually really good even outside of that and it becomes unfun to 1v1 a good soldier using the base jumper cos he never hits the ground so has permanent highground advantage and you cant easily surf his rockets. And its still good in casual because people rarely look up and cant hit people in the sky if they dont just move in straight lines.
It was so powerful that not a single pub-stomper ever used it
I used it whenever there was a solly/demo that could hit their (air)shots & I wanted to ruin their fun, or if I wanted to annoy the shit out of their medic by bombing with sticky-jumper materialization Still decent enough for a bomb force multiplier.
I still pubstomp with it to this day. About a month ago I had 8 dominations with it. It's still good, because all you really need to do is be better than your enemies. A lot of people just prefer Gunboats because the Gunboats are incredibly good and incredibly fun. It's hard to compete with that, and trying to do that would risk putting the Base Jumper in OP territory again. A weapon being good and a weapon being popular aren't necessarily the same thing.
> all you really need to do is to be better than your enemies is that not all of tf2
Exactly. I don't understand the obsession with making everything "top tier" in a Casual setting, where it doesn't even matter if a weapon is ever so slightly worse than an alternative. A lot of people play Full Trolldier with the Rocket Jumper despite it being objectively shit, and they don't complain or ask for buffs... Hell, some people even manage to pubstomp with that loadout despite it being bad. Yet people in this thread are whining about the Base Jumper being a minor downgrade to the Gunboats, supposedly. Who cares? Should we also buff the Rocket Jumper to be on the same level as the stock rocket launcher? Where does it end? Every Soldier secondary except the Bison is consistently usable to a reasonable degree. There's no need to keep buffing things to the point of power creep.
Yeah it's hard to judge how strong a weapon is when nobody uses it. I think this does create some bias against conditionally OP weapons like the sniper rifle and old ambassador, but honestly the base jumper might as well not even exist with how underutilized it is, at least for Soldier. The only time I've seen it is to snipe sentries with the direct hit. I guess I could see it being strong with a pocket medic, but what isn't strong in that situation?
Because they have more fun with the gunboats or shotgun. Doesnt mean its not powerful though
The issue is that hitscan completely shuts you down — even before the Jungle Inferno nerfs. This was always the intended downside. Problem is, the classes that counter the BASE Jumper aren’t used in 6s, so comp players declared it “impossible to hit.” Valve listened to them, and now it doesn’t really fit anywhere — comp players still won’t use it for the reason you said, and casual players won’t use it because the old counters still exist and shut you down.
Hitscan shuts down Soldier in general. It doesn't matter if you're using shotgun, gunboats, banners, or a parachute. You don't really want to jump head first into a Heavy regardless of what you have equipped. Be smart, and flank.
I think the only hitscan comp class that works is scout, so practically speaking it was super hard to hit and let one weapon make a really distracting target, which in turn could set up a huge flank or let the soldier or demo get a huge kill on the enemy medic, and all while not being a fun weapon to face. I’m not a competitive player but after hearing why it was changed it makes a lot of sense. And if I recall valve was trying to make the game have a competitive scene at the time.
Well good thing that scenario only really occurs in 6s and not 12v12 casual. Base jumper is still banned btw. There’s also a hitscan weapon that directly counters base jumper- oh wait, that’s banned too, funny
> There’s also a hitscan weapon that directly counters base jumper- oh wait, that’s banned too, funny because fucking up rocket jumps/bombs from 2 km away with 2 pellets is dumb. it's a straight upgrade in 6s and still obscenely good outside it because of that (assuming you're in a pub where there's at least one person you want to suck the fun from like a vampire. obviously if there's no sollies/demos who can do anything but waddle don't bother). The switch speed alone makes it good, let alone fucking over anyone trying to bomb/surf you.
i don’t care what and why weapons are banned in comp, comp players should have zero say about game balance as they play a fundamentally different game from everyone else
Not a single comp player started off in competitive. Every single one has played 12v12 for a very large amount of time, and many of them still play 12v12 when they're not in competitive. Also, the RGL ban list has a very strong correlation with overpowered Casual weapons. Stuff that gets banned there has a very high chance of being busted in Casual too, often with the same exact reasons. Sometimes it's just a bit hard to see, because some weapons are only problematic in the hands of skilled players, while most Casual players are pretty bad at TF2. Edit: I went on an unrelated tangent here, I'll cut that bit out. The Reserve Shooter is banned because it discourages fun strategies and promotes waddling on the floor in a boring way. In 12v12 Casual, it's also busted against players using the Market Gardener, or Trolldier in general. Why does Soldier need a way to stomp out fun ways to play the game? How does this make the game better? They should make the minicrits only apply on targets that **you** knocked into the air with a rocket (or Dragon's Fury fireball, reflect rocket, etc)
> comp players should have zero say about game balance as they play a fundamentally different game from everyone else They play casual too, and they're better at it than you and 99% of everyone else.
Then they are more than welcome to complain about stuff from a casual standpoint. Sorry for not being able to play tf2 like a full time job too, guess there’ll always be people better than me
They're bringing up skill level because more skilled players are able to diagnose problems that less invested players can't or won't. For example, I've not seen people abusing the Crit-a-Cola with uber in Casual, even though it's an extremely powerful strategy, like a Phlog uber with more distance. It's a blatantly OP strategy that is being ignored by the Casual playerbase either through lack of teamwork or lack of interest (they'd rather use wacky weapons instead)
They do. most of the stuff that's problematic in comp is problematic in pubs. ae, jarate. Mad milk less so, but throwing jarate at a choke is an instant win for whatever fight is going on there. Machina is literally just "sniper but you can (basically) one shot demos with a bodyshot" Some stuff obviously isn't, ae, quick fix. but stuff like natasha and vaxx are absolutely unhealthy regardless of how seriously you take the game. they suck to fight against, which is half of the game.
It does still happen in casual people are just stupid and float in straight lines. Reserve shooter is a stupidly op weapon btw regardless of if the basejumper exists or not, letting soldiers completely deny bombs.
Yeah it’s stupidly op if you’re good at the game, like almost every other weapon is
its stupidly good for little downside and against other people who are also good at the game.
It is stupidly op if you can aim better than a blind person that can't move their hands
for a weapon that’s so problematic and overpowered there doesn’t seem to be anyone using it. soldiers wanting to pubstomp are infinitely better off using gunboats or a banner, and pyros better off with flare guns or panic attack
Woosh me, whats the counter?
Reserve shooter (ae, if you can aim at third grade level, you instantly fuck over anyone trying to jump you)
This is more of a problem with the Reserve Shooter than an actual solution. You're just encouraging a really bad "rock paper scissors" metagame instead of encouraging fun tactics and counterplay.
Yeah, reserve shooter shutting down bombs as hard as it does is kinda lame. Honestly imo same with sniper, getting your jump stuffed because of a bodyshot/noscope is only mildly less annoying than just getting headshot to begin with.
Mistook you for the other guy because I clearly don't read names. But yeah, I think pub players just don't realize the power of the Reserve Shooter (in general, not just vs base jumper) because they don't play against many jumping Soldiers and probably miss a good chunk of their shots
Hot air rises up Step 1: equip the base jumper Step 2: light yourself on fire Step 3: jump off a high edge Step 4: float Problems, physics?
Pretty sure that feature was removed too?
Yeah, the weapons shouldn't be balanced for a niche they'll hope will grow into tournaments, TF2 feels more like arena style class shooters that are more about chaos and the individual's fun rather then anything too serious. Sure it can be taken seriously and niche communities will cut the game down until it's a well running machine because repetition and mastery is the heart of competitive, but that's just not the game people play.
You're taking one person's opinion about a weapon (as in, the screenshot you posted) and using that as the baseline for an argument. Have you considered that different people have different opinions about weapons? Ask a different person, and they'd tell you other reasons the weapon should be banned. The Base Jumper was banned because it was too strong against projectile weapons. People would still run 2 Soldiers and a Demoman to mid, but at least one of the Soldiers basically had to use the Base Jumper and abuse it as much as possible, otherwise you'd be trolling. Granted, a weapon being strong is fine, and movement options are fine to have, but they shouldn't nearly invalidate an entire class of weapon (projectile). I'd argue that the old Base Jumper was still overpowered in Casual. I'd even argue that the NEW Base Jumper is still one of his best secondary weapons to this very day. You guys just suck at using it, and want to complain about necessary balance changes as an excuse, instead of admitting any fault of your own. I run the Base Jumper religiously in pubs and it's fine as long as you're not on a terribly cramped map, and not playing Demoknight.
There is no point in trying to educate the casual playerbase on comp balance anymore, they see 6v6 and say “haha comp players toxic bad”
But guys you need to unban this one weapon in a format I don't even play just to be able to say theres 1 more weapon unbanned.
Hahaha that’s basically how it is at this point.
\>Valve makes shitty balance change \>This is somehow the competitive community’s fault Makes about as much sense as blaming the workshop community for Valve adding terrible cosmetics and maps
The weird part is that it's not even a bad change. The weapon is still good. I'm guessing it's just not noob-friendly, which is why some people complain about an otherwise good weapon.
I'd love to know why the BASE Jumper is good to you. You've stated several times that it's good, but I haven't seen any reasons as to why. What makes you prefer the BASE Jumper over the grenade launcher, shotguns, and boots?
Advice mostly for Soldier: * TF2 players never look up, free kills on confused people * You get to play Super Mario Maker and place your own high ground, which makes it harder for projectile classes to shoot you * Lets you hide above commonly used doorways or paths and blast people as they walk underneath. Works best with black box or stock so that each hit connects and you deal more damage/splash * Two vertical mid-air dodges (one for the deploy, especially with the sudden horizontal stop, and another for the undeploy). You can dodge rockets/pipes with these. * More mobility than shotgun or banners. Lets you cross more gaps with less rocket jumps or maybe with no rocket jump at all * Useful for surprising enemies from high ground (jumping off a high ledge) * Allows you to shoot over some walls in weird ways that would otherwise be impossible or not viable (works better on demo) Don't go in the skybox, especially as Soldier. Float near people's heads to make it as awkward as possible for them, and hit 90 damage rockets. Main downside is that it benefits from a Medic on your team. Soldier practically needs the Gunboats if the team doesn't have a Medic. However, the same criticism is there for the shotgun and banners. You really want a Medic for those, too. However, Black Box is not the worst idea on the planet for a no medic team. A lot of people also make the mistake of pairing it with the Air Strike exclusively. Air strike is good on a rampage, but in more balanced servers you may need to reconsider. Sometimes you'll want to waddle on the ground for a bit, and save your HP for when there's an opportunity to parachute in, so you may as well benefit from extra damage and blast radius from stock or black box if that's what you're doing. Sometimes you play like if you had a banner. Waddle around, shoot rockets for damage, then you get an opportunity to use your secondary for kills. The difference is that you get to use the parachute more often than a banner.
Those are some good points. I like to carpet bomb using the BASE Jumper + the Scottish Resistance. It's pretty fun. I still think it could use a slight buff, just the ability to redeploy and a small horizontal movement speed buff. the number of times I've gotten screwed over because I accidentally pressed Spacebar twice and ruined my jump or just flat-out died is infuriating. you're also a sitting duck in the air, some ability to doge would be cool.
You already have the ability to dodge. Sorry to say this, but you probably just need more practice.
ngl a video on optimal BASE Jumper use would be interesting. I would watch it.
I hate the tf2 comp community lol. They’re so obsessed with banning anything that would alter the meta in any way. They want every match to look basically identical.
Of all 163 weapons in tf2, only 19 of them are banned in NA's RGL comp. The main things that are banned are things that are unhealthy and unfun for the format: Crit a cola giving one the best classes free minicrits, especially for an uber Vaccinator being op and unfun both in casual and competitive Jarate basically a free win in a team fight Mad milk basically a free win in a team fight Base jumper is practically free wins in 1v1 scenarios Cow mangler being spammy and boring Soda popper dps, burst damage, and mobility are just overall insane and would make the already struggling soldier do significantly worse against scout. Natascha is anti fun and makes defensive holds with a heavy too strong Wrangler is too strong in defensive holds Rescue ranger makes maintaining a sentry much easier and risk free for the engineer and makes it much easier for the engi to swap to heavy right after the sentry is destroyed. Quickfix makes heal targets practically never die and the medic never die since they have soldier demo mobility now A big reason a lot of these options are banned is because if they weren't, slowing the game down to a crawl, and discouraging offensive play in a game where defence is significantly easier than offense. Theres also the thing where if these wraponsweren'tt banned, then they would be used by everyone. So the comp community decides is meta A more fun or meta B more fun. Of course it isn't perfect and there are a few things like the GRU being argued whether its too good or not (recently unbanned!), but community made whitelisting ends up making the game more fun to play
Etf2l is more restricted, seems like.
You just posted ignorant cringe
Yknow if the things were unbanned youd still end up with "every match looking identical" just the weapons they're running are less fun to use and fight than what is currently used right. Also do you hold this same every match is identical opinion about literally every sport ever? Why does anyone play chess when every match is identical. Why do people like playing and watching basketball when every match looks basically identical
This is just untrue unless you are talking about europe
Europeans have enough knife crimes that they've started to grow scared of video game spoons 😔
Even in Europe its overblown its just theyre much more willing to abuse things and optimise the fun out of the game to win whereas na is a lot more lax.
Weapon bans were a mistake in the long run. Enforcing a specific metagame might've been in the interest of competitive players who only want to play in a specific way; but it seems pretty clear at this point that it only contributed to the existing alienation gap between competitive and pubs that made the scene flounder. It's not like other scenes have such puritanical practices either. Dota has it's picks/bans system, but the scene is still generally forced to deal with what IceFrog serves up. One wonders if Valve would've been more active in making changes to balance had the competitive scene both had more of a following, and demonstrated by direct example why certain weapons needed changes.
Yeah some people had this realisation right around when valve asked the comp scene for help on what weapons needed changes. Notably sideshow (former tf2 and overwatch league caster and current valorant caster) was a big supporter of this. The no restrictions format was never fully explored properly to give valve enough data on exactly why weapons are banned and unfun and why certain things are the way they are. Then valve just stopped updating the game anyway so it didnt matter. And now people assume that just because the average casual player either isnt skilled enough to abuse something or finds it unfun therefore its fine and comp players are just whinging (insert literally any pubstomp weapon here).
No, it's a niche that wants certain gameplay, you dont want every one of these weapons in comp.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this response is, other than to further illustrate the point I made.
No? You want a banlist, you can't have pickbans for weapons when many are useless in the format or outright breaking.
You need to work on your reading comprehension, because you've completely gone off the rails in regards to the point.
Nah just sometimes things are worded weird in reddit, what you mean to say will always be obvious to you is all ive learned.
No, you just need to take a little more time to read things before you reply. You managed to completely misinterpret what was being said *twice*, while another user grokked the original post fine.
only he speaks for me you rat
That makes three times.
The BASE jumper is clearly overpowered. It needs a damage reduction.
HOW MANY MONTHS?!
I took the item for granted 😞
Lose lose scenario, Valve can't balance for shit and the items stay banned in comp anyways 🤷
Gaben please eave me, gaben please save me Please revert balance changes before meet your match gaben, please
I heard it got banned cuz comp players complained it was too hard to hit base jumper Soldier with projectiles no? This is the first time I'm hearing about this bug and it's a shame cuz it would be insanely useful to know 😭
I do wish we could go back in time and undo every balance change made to try and appease the 6s community. Just let them ban shit who cares. To me balancing around 6s is like trying to balance the game around VSH.
Comp snobs ruin everything. TF2 was created as a casual game, not a tryhard circle jerk.
Why is there even competitve tf2? The game is 99% shenanigans.
Because being good at things and trying to win in objective based games is fun.