I wouldn't say it's on its last legs when there's no shortage of people to play with and against at all skill levels
also that nerf was just reverted
I wrote that post before the nerf was reverted, and for the record I am extremely ****ing ecstatic they rolled it back, but nevertheless, the competitive scene in that game has been in overall decline for quite a few years. With Tip of the Hats and i46/49/52 it has been actually growing for the first time in a long time, but it never has compared to
any other competitive game in terms of popularity. The international i49 tournament,
one of the only
two times there has ever been global competition for TF2, only peaked at I think 7k viewers. League of Legends gets 100k viewers on their weekly LCS matches for either region. (NA/EU)
And not just in terms of popularity, there actually
is quite certainly a shortage of people to play against at all skill levels. The top players in Invite have pretty much been the same 20 or 25 people for the past 7 years. It's pretty unheard of to have a crazy superstar from Japan that plays a thought-to-be garbage character and brings him to 9th place in a major tournament. That just doesn't happen in TF2. ESEA has been pretty stale for years. Lots of invite-capable players or even players with invite history even just sandbag open because that's more fun then literally never making the top 4 in invite.
Also not to mention there isn't a circuit-with-tournaments type of scene like there are for a lot of other games. Competitive TF2 is played in Leagues, and extremely unfortunately it happens that it's fairly monopolized by ESEA. They are the only
good prominent TF2 league that actually has a LAN or any money in it at all. And you know what ESEA did last summer? They mined bit coin on players' computers via the ESEA client that is mandatory for all league official matches. And people are still playing in that league. Why Because the comp TF2 scene is very close to dying and we have no choice but to cling to ESEA to keep it afloat. EVO
has been on the rise, thank the good lord, but for the longest time, that was the ****storm that was competitive TF2.
TL;DR I'm sorry to blatantly disagree but, yes, it very much on its last legs, undeniably.
Are you saying you would be against balance updates for Smash melee if it were possible?
Okay sorry to blatantly disagree here, and I might sound like a bit of an elitist here but I have been around competitive gaming since I was in elementary school and these are just some things I have gathered in my experiences.
Balance is overrated. Not only is it overrated but it is also not necessary in the slightest to the success and competitive viability of a game. In fact, I would go so far as to say that imbalance is necessary to make a game competitively viable, and also cater to a casual audience.
I am sorry to everyone on the rest of the thread to keep bringing up this example, but if you look at competitive 6v6 in TF2, the Demoman is the single strongest class in that meta, nay, in the entire game. The Demoman can dish out massive amounts of damage like no other class can, bar none, hands down. The Demo does
the most damage in the game undeniably. So why was everybody so up in arms about the Demoman nerf? Because the game worked perfectly fine with an asymmetrical class balance. Yes the demo did ******** amounts of damage without even needing to aim that precisely, but the Demo had one weakness, and it was that he had absolutely
no way to defend himself. A good Demoman was able to position himself correctly within his team so that he had adequate protection at all times, and likewise with the team, they would protect their demo at almost any cost. Every other class in the game can beat the Demoman in a 1v1 though, rather easily. So this creates a meta of playing around your Demoman explicitly, realizing his massive damage output, preserving his life as long as possible, and playing off of that.
Both teams have a Demoman.
And then there are classes that are just objectively bad. Slow, not a lot of damage output, gimmicky, not well rounded, etc. Such as Pyro, Spy, Heavy, and Engineer. The game is not balanced whatsoever. But you know what? Its a
class-based first person shooter. What is the point of having different classes if they are all balanced? What is the point of having different classes if they don't excel at certain aspects of the game over other classes? What is the point of having
different characters if they are all balanced exactly the
same?
Then you look at games like League of Legends where there are only probably about 3 to 5 viable champions for each role. Some would argue that is perhaps a bit too unbalanced, especially when at TI3 in Dota2 only 5 heros remained unpicked in the entire tournament, but the fact of the matter is that if you want to cater to both a casual and competitive audience, that is just the way that "balance" goes. You don't want to create a game that only has 5 or 6 characters in it, because that isn't as much fun for casual players, but it is close to impossible to create 100 different characters in a game that are different and unique in their own way, and are all actually viable.
As much as some people might like to deny it or wish it were different, in every video game you play there
IS a "best" way to do any given thing. A most efficient, most pragmatic, strongest, most consistent way to do something. There is a combination of items, spells, talents, weapons, whatever, that is the strongest for one thing, or many things. And that is the bottom line. Find me a game that has any success that is truly balanced, where every character, strategy, weapon, whatever, is completely balanced so that it works just as good as
all the other ones in all situations that can possibly occur. You won't.