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Revive Quickplay alongside Casual. Add "Communities" to Steam Workshop for TF2.
Casual is it's own thing. Though imo, it's not really casual from everything I've seen and heard about it.
SSBBrawl's online play was casual.
Casual Mode in TF2? It's just competitive without EXP ranking.
Quickplay before MYM was casual. And casual is a huge selling point for a game.
Why?
The average gamer is casual.
I run a Versus Saxton Hale server, that game mode where it's 1 boss vs 31 mercenaries. From my experience in trying to balance that game mode these past few years, it is impossible to make it to where an average player can win reliably without decent or pro players overwhelmingly dominate every time they become the boss. But the alternative is that average players almost never win as the boss and that only decent or pro players stand a chance.
But "only decent or pro players" is merely 10% of my playerbase. And I'm sure competitive players are only 10-20% of TF2's playerbase. In any game, only an upper 90th percentile of players will be the best players.
And TF2 before MYM worked well around that.
So why not keep it?
They should dedicate servers to Quickplay, Casual, and Competitive.
But there's another stick in the bush. Community. What I hear all the time from fellow server owners in TF2 is that Valve has been hurting community servers all along. I got into this gig after quickplay came, which apparently is one of the big things that hurt is. So it doesn't phase me all that much. But now the word "community" is gaining a bad rep on its own.
Why?
Because of the few bad communities people end up joining that run a bad setup with ads and intrusive plugins like those pointless and antagonistic "click yes on our rules pop-up or we auto-kick you" menus some people run.
Aside from Valve fixing their own set of servers, a big step in a good direction I think they could do is to support community servers better and introduce a way to officially sanction us. And Valve certainly does officially sanction modding of the game. I especially love stuff like what they've done to make custom huds more organized with "versioning".
It could be like Steam Workshop for communities. I'm personally waiting to see Valve implement GLST to TF2 (Game Server Login Tokens). What GLST does is force a server operator to register their server with a Steam account ... or something like that. It makes it easier for Valve to track community servers and is something CSGO already does in order for them to blacklist certain plugins from being ran in CSGO (like the knife skin changing ones) which I might stress I hope never becomes a restriction to TF2 because TF2 lives on modding.
Why do I want Valve to be able to have more control over community/third party servers? I'm one of the moddiest modders around, wouldn't this restrict me? Well. TF2 is much different from CSGO. I can only hope that it will also be maintained differently. The reason I want Valve to have more control over community servers is to help actually give players a more consistent experience - such that regular players can join random communities and not be "overwhelmed" by servers running a bad choice of mods and be turned off by the actual good communities out there.
I also hope that by Valve having more control over how they restrict us, they can give the more recognized modders and communities more freedom with our modding.
Now back to the "Steam Workshop for communities" statement. All in all there's a limited number of TF2 communities out there as far as I know. And there is no real organized place to find any of us. We all rely on luck and the off-chance of a popular youtuber featuring us to bring anyone to us now. Many communities have steam groups... but how do those get found? Forums? Etc? My main server only really got anywhere by word of mouth between players who liked my stuff, for the most part. And also because I give a very unique gameplay experience.
So what if Valve added "Communities" to TF2's workshop? They added maps. They added merchandise. What if you could check out a neat organized list of all the communities out there? You might just find some cool servers you never knew about, like Glubbable's Slender Fortress, or Red Sun Over The Paradise, or TF2Data. Certainly Skial would be up there too. As the owner of TF2Data myself, I think it'd be neat to "have my community rated", as that is a form of feedback over development of my community and my servers. Simultaneously, Valve would be able to moderate communities a little bit closer and ban our workshop or something if we were doing stuff we shouldn't that almost no player likes or wants (like ads). Or things that hurt Valve, like making buyable cosmetics given through a plugin.
Those things TF2Mods / TF2Mappers are doing with their Frontline updates would be huge, and even better if they were like an officially featured TF2 community recognized by Valve. Having our own Steam groups for this is nice, so maybe the workshop could link to our steam groups or function as a steam group if we don't already have one.
Author: Chdata
https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/4vnh1e/revive_quickplay_alongside_casual_add_communities/
http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comment...side_casual_add_communities/?ref=search_posts
Casual is it's own thing. Though imo, it's not really casual from everything I've seen and heard about it.
SSBBrawl's online play was casual.
Casual Mode in TF2? It's just competitive without EXP ranking.
Quickplay before MYM was casual. And casual is a huge selling point for a game.
Why?
The average gamer is casual.
I run a Versus Saxton Hale server, that game mode where it's 1 boss vs 31 mercenaries. From my experience in trying to balance that game mode these past few years, it is impossible to make it to where an average player can win reliably without decent or pro players overwhelmingly dominate every time they become the boss. But the alternative is that average players almost never win as the boss and that only decent or pro players stand a chance.
But "only decent or pro players" is merely 10% of my playerbase. And I'm sure competitive players are only 10-20% of TF2's playerbase. In any game, only an upper 90th percentile of players will be the best players.
And TF2 before MYM worked well around that.
So why not keep it?
They should dedicate servers to Quickplay, Casual, and Competitive.
But there's another stick in the bush. Community. What I hear all the time from fellow server owners in TF2 is that Valve has been hurting community servers all along. I got into this gig after quickplay came, which apparently is one of the big things that hurt is. So it doesn't phase me all that much. But now the word "community" is gaining a bad rep on its own.
Why?
Because of the few bad communities people end up joining that run a bad setup with ads and intrusive plugins like those pointless and antagonistic "click yes on our rules pop-up or we auto-kick you" menus some people run.
Aside from Valve fixing their own set of servers, a big step in a good direction I think they could do is to support community servers better and introduce a way to officially sanction us. And Valve certainly does officially sanction modding of the game. I especially love stuff like what they've done to make custom huds more organized with "versioning".
It could be like Steam Workshop for communities. I'm personally waiting to see Valve implement GLST to TF2 (Game Server Login Tokens). What GLST does is force a server operator to register their server with a Steam account ... or something like that. It makes it easier for Valve to track community servers and is something CSGO already does in order for them to blacklist certain plugins from being ran in CSGO (like the knife skin changing ones) which I might stress I hope never becomes a restriction to TF2 because TF2 lives on modding.
Why do I want Valve to be able to have more control over community/third party servers? I'm one of the moddiest modders around, wouldn't this restrict me? Well. TF2 is much different from CSGO. I can only hope that it will also be maintained differently. The reason I want Valve to have more control over community servers is to help actually give players a more consistent experience - such that regular players can join random communities and not be "overwhelmed" by servers running a bad choice of mods and be turned off by the actual good communities out there.
I also hope that by Valve having more control over how they restrict us, they can give the more recognized modders and communities more freedom with our modding.
Now back to the "Steam Workshop for communities" statement. All in all there's a limited number of TF2 communities out there as far as I know. And there is no real organized place to find any of us. We all rely on luck and the off-chance of a popular youtuber featuring us to bring anyone to us now. Many communities have steam groups... but how do those get found? Forums? Etc? My main server only really got anywhere by word of mouth between players who liked my stuff, for the most part. And also because I give a very unique gameplay experience.
So what if Valve added "Communities" to TF2's workshop? They added maps. They added merchandise. What if you could check out a neat organized list of all the communities out there? You might just find some cool servers you never knew about, like Glubbable's Slender Fortress, or Red Sun Over The Paradise, or TF2Data. Certainly Skial would be up there too. As the owner of TF2Data myself, I think it'd be neat to "have my community rated", as that is a form of feedback over development of my community and my servers. Simultaneously, Valve would be able to moderate communities a little bit closer and ban our workshop or something if we were doing stuff we shouldn't that almost no player likes or wants (like ads). Or things that hurt Valve, like making buyable cosmetics given through a plugin.
Those things TF2Mods / TF2Mappers are doing with their Frontline updates would be huge, and even better if they were like an officially featured TF2 community recognized by Valve. Having our own Steam groups for this is nice, so maybe the workshop could link to our steam groups or function as a steam group if we don't already have one.
Author: Chdata
https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/4vnh1e/revive_quickplay_alongside_casual_add_communities/
http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comment...side_casual_add_communities/?ref=search_posts