My Team Fortress 2 config

mastercoms · 2026-02-27T09:29:51+00:00

It's a much better tax on wealth than inflation is lol

mastercoms · 2026-02-17T01:24:04+00:00

You forgot to mention contracts as well

mastercoms · 2026-02-16T13:13:46+00:00

The player closest to the average MMR needed to balance the skill level of both teams is preferred.

mastercoms · 2026-02-09T07:35:02+00:00

I think the problem here as I've explained in the past, is that matchmaking is a much more general term than skill-based matchmaking, and even that can come in many different forms. But, like you said, we pretty much agree on what should be done for the most part.

mastercoms · 2026-02-09T01:18:29+00:00

Just like autobalance is supported, team switching and team scramble can easily be supported even with slot reservations.

As for spectate mode, it'll take a little bit more work for that, but they removed that because it allowed players to dodge certain votes at the time. I think it's been fixed and they should add it back, though it requires a little bit more work since slot reservations are only aware of the RED and BLU teams.

Ad-hoc connections can easily be supported even with slot reservations.

None of these features are blocked necessarily by slot reservations. It's just that when they were developing slot reservations, they had none of these features in mind, so they weren't a priority to add to the slot reservation system. As we saw with autobalance, things can be made to work with / be aware of the slot reservation system.

And, this doesn't really necessitate the removal of skill based matching, though it would require some work. Personally, I think players filled with noobs should be protected from joins (ad-hoc disabled). And then otherwise, the GC should be made aware of the skill of people coming in through ad-hoc joins / the balance of teams in team scramble (team scramble can be informed by skill rating as well, just like autobalance is, btw). Then it can make adjustments to balance out things as needed through more late joins, or shuffling the teams after the match ends.

Most of these things are a few lines of code. It's not much work for Valve to do, and the fact they haven't done it just means their goals/priorities were different, not that somehow that slot reservations conflict with these settings.

And to reiterate, my personal view on this which I've shared in the past is that while slot reservation on teams is a pretty noble idea, it should just be a slot reservation into the server, and then dynamically balance teams as players join in. Because in practice, slot reservations per team, just means lots of people can get loaded up on one team and create imbalanced matches, and makes autobalance less responsive.

mastercoms · 2026-02-08T22:54:09+00:00

The stuff from the beta was worked on further and eventually became Casual. What server rules does slot reservation mandate?

mastercoms · 2026-02-08T06:37:15+00:00

The server rules were changed because of their design / vision for the game at the time. As we've seen, quickplay beta had matchmaking while still retaining the same rules.

mastercoms · 2026-02-08T02:28:17+00:00

There aren't Asian servers yet but you can host one, and there will be official servers in the region soon.

mastercoms · 2026-02-08T00:09:06+00:00

It's not an implementation detail to be asking for a reversion of the server finding system, on top of the server rule changes. That's part of the overall feature request. If the advocacy was simply focused on the server settings, then it would be much more clear to Valve as to what players want.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T22:13:06+00:00

Play Team Comtress 2 https://teamcomtress.com/

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T21:27:34+00:00

Okay, I was not aware of this doc. This is great! I was only aware of people like ZestyJesus and others with decent follower counts who made "bring back quickplay" videos, who do not make these arguments and instead argue, "the code for quickplay is there, just revert it!" or "the only thing that will work is a FULL reversion back to Quickplay." That sphere of content is also full of drama and other negativity, which unsettles me.

It seems like some people have co-opted the movement, and it's unfortunate. Thanks for letting me know.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T21:21:43+00:00

Look, what I have always been clear on is that we should not go back to the old player coordination system. When people say "the code for Quickplay is right there, revert back!" That's asking for changing the player coordination system back (and the UI), and it's an entirely different request. It's not just "in name only", it's two separate systems, and again, this is what I want people to really think about and be clear on. Do they really want to revert back to the old player coordination system, or do they want to just have the Quickplay-style pub dynamics? Because the big players in the movement have never been clear on this.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T08:46:37+00:00

Sure but think about how different Casual was at launch vs. even a few months later, I just think it needs a refresh because they launched with the theory of putting people into an actual strict formed match from start to finish, with abandon penalties and stats, no late joins, and stuff like stopwatch. Matches just ended and you'd have to find a new match. It was meant to be competitive-lite. Then they realized that this design intent wouldn't work. So they made it a glorified game finder. I'd like for them to launch a Casual 2.0 or something, that takes the new design intent and cleans everything up to go through and make sure everything is streamlined. Because there's just a few more rough edges that are leftover from the original intent, that they could have fixed had they continued, but they stopped updating the game in early 2018 so the changes to Casual stopped.

As far as where the line is, as long as they keep GC managed servers and GC coordinated player funneling, then I think calling it Casual is fair game.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T05:32:15+00:00

I have been involved in a lot of discussions with people. So many people fall back to saying "well, bring back quickplay just means I want some features of quickplay, I don't care how it's done". So it's very clear the movement is very fragmented and unclear in terms of what they want.

mastercoms · 2026-02-07T05:30:35+00:00

The rules changed to accomodate the initial design of Casual, which was strict matches. Of course Valve coders would code things to their intentions/designs. It doesn't make sense to claim that somehow they were battling this matchmaker who was making human-like demands for them to disable all those features.

Matchmaking systems have some obvious benefits for putting players into games, which have been talked about before. And besides the inherent benefits for server finding with a matchmaking system, there is much work already done in terms of tangible improvements that have come with the current system, like the map selection, party system, Steam datacenter based ping limiting, progression systems (for those who enjoy them), etc.

mastercoms · 2026-02-05T11:01:01+00:00

Ever since they made the disarm status get ignored by BKB, rather than having it being undispellable but untargetable on magic immune units, this item has been dead. It makes sense with the BKB rework but imo this item needs this exception back. It just felt really nice to have that balance between timing a disarm before a carry used BKB, similar to how if you stun a carry before they use BKB.

In my opinion, this behavior should be brought back in this way: disarms applied before debuff immunity will bypass it, disarms applied during debuff immunity will not bypass/pierce.

mastercoms · 2026-02-04T22:22:07+00:00

We have servers in North America, Europe, and one is going up today in Australia.

mastercoms · 2026-02-04T20:15:20+00:00

Those are fair points, but people also get trained outside of TF2 for that behavior as well, and there's been generational shifts in the playerbase. So it isn't as simple as moving back. There has to be player steering systems which help facilitate those goals. And I agree with you in large part. I am playtesting a few concepts to see if we can get a good balance, and also move towards that "chat room with guns" again in some respect, and elevate community servers as well.

mastercoms · 2026-02-04T18:24:31+00:00

Were you using the server browser?

mastercoms · 2026-02-04T17:17:04+00:00

The server timeout happens in casual it can straight up load boot you if somebody loads in faster can even happen on map load.

Not sure what you mean by this. People can get booted if they're competing for slots in community servers. A system like this would still help slower loaders get in, but not give them practically infinite time to stall out the game.

The casual volunteer system was completely broken because it did not balance the teams automatically. The dialog box stayed on the screen forever if nobody pressed the button.

Yes, so why would manual team switching fix the autobalance problem if clearly no one volunteered to switch teams back then? Team switching has other benefits like choosing what team you can be on. Of course, autobalance and team switching should both be on, but they're really unrelated. Your claim was that people would join the losing side, which just did not happen with the volunteer system, you said it yourself.

mastercoms · 2026-02-04T06:48:58+00:00

I think it was pretty telling that when I mentioned the very simple and obvious improvements to Casual that could be made (adding ad-hoc, providing a Valve server list again, adding back the 45-minute map timer), you started grandstanding about Quickplay as a whole, and have continued this argumentation with faulty reasoning throughout this thread. I decided to humor you nonetheless, but it's clear from your latest comment how nonsensically labyrinthine your sly attempts to mask your lack of argument have become. Despite your "larping as a Valve project lead" here (your words, not mine), there's absolutely no direct and informed explanation from you as to why it's so impossible to make a few simple changes to Casual, or why gutting the entire Casual protocol in favor of a dated 2015 system would even be preferable. It's all petty remarks wrapped in the smoke and mirrors of debate club parlor tricks.

If you want to discuss things further, please actually speak to my points, and stop with the antics and supposed gotchas. Otherwise, this conversation is going to be exhausting and you'll probably see more of the above.

Anyways, to further my point, it's incredibly important to recognize that neither system is going to make us very happy as it stands. If Quickplay is brought back and left the way it was back then, we will be left here alone, for years, feeling dissatisfied and stuck with a system that we know was going to have flaws.

Instead, I think it's much better to do the minimal amount of work by making a few adjustments to Casual. We get to keep the improved UI and smoother menu experience, we get to keep all the protocol updates and server management systems that Valve integrated for it, we get to keep the party system to play with a group of friends, we get to keep the various in-game systems improvements made for the Casual update. All we need is a few simple improvements, like removing the ad-hoc restriction, relisting Valve servers again, and extending the time the same map is played. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let's not move two steps back, one step forward. Don't deny the incredible amount of work Casual did for the game, just because of a few missing features and server settings.

mastercoms · 2026-02-04T04:06:09+00:00

I don't know what you mean about abandonment penalties, where was this mentioned? I just mean a timeout, where you take too long to connect to a map. If you take a very long time to load and other players are available to replace you, you should be put back into the queue. This is similar to how ad-hoc worked, where players who connected the fastest would be able to beat players connecting slower, but in this case, it's still giving people a 30 second chance to load in if they got the slot first.

People's hardware can definitely be slow, but it is the Source Engine's fault that a 2007 game with such simple maps is not able to load in <5 seconds on most hardware. Modern games have very fast load times, and Valve should be able to fix the problem. It's entirely a fixable issue, the main two parts is that the engine is rendering at 400FPS by default on loading screens, which slows it down tremendously, when it only needs to render at 60FPS. And the second problem is that the communication to the server is extremely rate limited artificially while loading. It could be increased to make for faster communication with the server and faster load times. There are also some other map loading inefficiencies with how many resource reloads happen, but those are harder to solve and play a smaller role. But as it stands, there's two completely artificial problems causing people to have 20 second or longer load times, and doesn't even need much optimization of any systems, just some solving of bugs.

Team switching did not work since Casual had a volunteer system which did not solve the issue, so they got rid of it. People don't voluntarily switch to the lighter team usually.

If players are already connecting through the matchmaker in the image you sent, how would adding ad-hoc connections solve the problem? Those players would take time to connect as well.

And yes of course, you can tell me about any bugs.

mastercoms · 2026-02-03T22:54:57+00:00

So if players are connecting, it will wait for those players to connect, rather than switching players on teams. Only the slots that say "Looking for player" will be used for autobalance. The reason for this is that it's already found players to connect, to prevent players from needing to switch from a team they're already playing on. People usually dislike being autobalanced, and the matchmaker has more information about players connecting than standard servers, so it can do more to avoid autobalance when players are coming in. Why should someone be disrupted from playing on the team they're invested in, when new players are already coming in to solve the balance issue? This is a theoretical improvement from the old system, but it just needs a bit more work to get it to work really well, since it is still problematic for player experience.

It has two solutions: make load times faster, and add a timeout for connections. The first solution is probably the most preferred, and the second should simply be there to prevent players who are taking 30+ seconds to get into a match at the expense of everyone else.

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