Razputin

Man reading through the mausoleum is fun

I've been eyeing the TIAM post number count a while and wondering if we can still get to another 10k

6 hours ago, Moby said:

I just watched that Squid Game thing by osmosis (brother was watching and I glanced at it every now and then)

 

What a dogshit of a series. I can't believe 10 year olds like this.

It's so funny to me that the big eyecatcher for the season 3 poster is the red-light-green-light doll, i.e. a completely insignificant prop from the second episode of the first season.

I was feeling nostalgic so I got the romhack Pokemon Crystal Legacy on my phone and it's such a massive improvement over the original it is crazy. More pokemon available early, a lot of pokemon buffed to be more viable, and every single pokemon available for single player; no trading or mystery gift required. It's so refreshing to actually plan to get a Steelix on my team because it doesn't require a trade to evolve, and to put an Ariados on my team with boosted stats and a better movepool, and to have Houndour not appear exclusively in Kanto for some insane reason.

It also made me realize it's honestly kind of crazy that after 30 years, all pokemon STILL kind of suck in this exact same way. Even with the remakes they didn't address these issues, and even the best pokemon games (which I'd say are HG/SS and Emerald) lock you out of a bunch content for no reason and make a bunch of pokemon so garbage that even at pokémon's baby difficulty level they are still useless.

I just finished Frieren and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The show has so many interesting things to say, talking about mortality, impermanence, legacy and memory, it's borderline philosophy. And then it also has some very profound commentary on magic systems in fantasy (is a spell that makes a tornado of fire really that useful compared to one that can perfectly clean your clothes in an instant?).  Because of the precedent the first half of the story said, I really had to groan when the show transitioned into a tournament arc (especially since most of the side characters' visual designs kinda suck), but even that it landed with a lot of grace and with interesting things to say.

I do wish the writer put a bit more effort into their naming convention than grabbing a Japanese-to-German dictionary and calling it a day though.

Fellas I feel compelled to share that I became a dad recently

My boy is doing great and it has been awesome bar the tummy ache nights where me and my wife get literally 0 hours of sleep

On 01/12/2024 at 4:28 AM, Moby said:

 

Apparently this clip tanked shounic's best tf2 clip's contest lmao

Moby, if you didn't like Superhot, you should try its sequel, mind control delete. I had the exact same experience you had with the first one, which I thought had a really interesting game mechanic and then does almost nothing with it (and the story is stuck up its own ass). The sequel does much more with the core concept.

As for my GOTY 2024, it has to be Balatro. I haven't been so addicted to a game in a long time

I went to Chicago for a conference a few months ago and it was my first time out of Europe (except the UK lol). I was incredibly stressed about it but ended up loving it, I'll bet you Japan will be similarly amazing

9 hours ago, Rynjin said:

I'm a big Yu-Gi-Oh! fan and got back into it in a big way when Master Duel came out as an insanely affordable way to keep up with newly released cards, becoming possibly the definitive format of the game.

 

I decided to give Magic Arena the same shot at the tail end (heh) of Bloomburrow since I'd never played Magic before and one of my friends is into it. I built a single deck (Boros Mice), grinded to Mythic in the week before Duskmourne came out, and was left with the appalling realization that I would not have the resources to build a Duskmourne deck, and wouldn't be able to grind enough before the next set came out to build one either. The game is just too unbelievably stingy.

 

It's insane looking at the difference in player friendliness between the two games, and by everything I've heard that extends to the paper formats as well. YGO is far from perfect, but its aggressive reprint policy makes acquiring power cards pretty cheap if you're willing to wait a few months, but the already existing community of "investors" combined with the Hasbro acquisition seems to have turned MtG into a PURELY collector's hobby, not an actual game.

Would you believe me if I told you magic's reprint policy has actually gotten WAY better? It's one of the few things I will credit them on from the last five years. Nowadays in paper, every single chase card gets like 4 different fancy treatments, which is fucking exhausting, but also makes it so the 'normal' version keeps an acceptable price. There was a time where format staples would easily hit a 100 bucks a pop, and there even was an era (Khans block) where the entry fee for Standard (which should be the cheapest and most accessible format) was easily 1000 bucks for a deck.

8 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

I keep up with news just to watch the burning dumpster, but basically the only MtG I ever play is my friends' old cube that hasn't been updated in years and draft simulations on Forge. Basically the only one in our group who cares anymore is just an EDH whale and even he pretty much just goes to a game store and doesn't try to bring us along anymore. It's just so crazy that everything that captured my interest back in 2013-2014 was pretty much completely thrown out even if the game is still all theoretically there. 

 

It is literally irreversible at this point, you'd have to create an entirely new format if you wanted to try and recapture the bygone era of the game when everything wasn't power crept to shit. I still remember people talking about how you'd need 20 or so bans to "fix" modern years ago and now it's just like not even worth discussing, and even formats dedicated to being full of old broken stuff get rotated by new cards too.

 

They've been saying more or less directly to the players that had concerns about the power creep that the game isn't for them anymore. At least those players can always proxy block constructed or cubes from sets where everything didn't generate some kind of massive value swing for just existing in your deck

EDH has to be the most thoroughly ruined format of all of them. Like ok Modern is now just MH block with hard rotation and Legacy has to deal with the random insanely busted commander card that was clearly not balanced for 1v1, but you're still playing the same game. Comparatively, the entire spirit of EDH is just gone, It's just straight up constructed net decking now, you're no longer hardcasting derpy 6drops, you're winning on turn 4. There's hundreds of legendaries specifically designed to be your commander so the creativity of it is gone, and you either pick the 4 color legend with 3 paragraphs of value generating text, or you pick something that is so strictly inferior you lose the game the moment commanders are revealed.

Also I'm not sure if that means anything to anyone here, but they recently actually unbanned Splinter Twin in Modern. And it doesn't matter, because the new cards are so busted that twin is just passé in comparison

Who here is still on the magic train?

I was the last of my old playergroup still hanging on but with the recent announcement that we will get three crossover sets this year and they will be legal in all formats, I'm finally tapping out. I've been selling my collection over the last few weeks, and nowadays when I play I just play with a borrowed deck. I've seen three LGCs drop magic events entirely, and the only group still around here is a bunch of diehard Legacy fans who organise their own events. It's honestly insane how fast WotC/Hasbro has burnt down the heritage of a 30 year old franchise just for a quick buck. It's also funny going back into this thread a bit and see how excited I was for Modern Horizons, when those sets ended up obliterating all formats they are legal in. Talk about a monkey's paw.

On one hand I was kind of already out anyways given that I just don't have the opportunity anymore to keep up with magic like I used to (especially not with its new absurd release schedule), but I'd be lying if I said I'm not upset to see magic 'die' like this. And with 'die' I mean make a trillion bucks off of a playerbase with zero retention before collapsing.

I'm really happy we actually did get the final comic, it was a great little send-off.

Between the bot crisis being over and the comic finishing I'm incredibly content with this being TF2's final state. I hope they keep up the bot maintenance for a while longer, that's all I would've ever dared ask for

Happy new year ol' subspuffers! I hope 2025 will be great for you all

I haven't seen a bot for like a week this is crazy

On 05/04/2024 at 3:59 AM, John Caveson said:

What do you think objectively is the Golden Age of TF2, and what is your personal Golden Age with your time with the game?

That's a really good question.. the most objective measure would probably be the state of the game itself, which would be briefly after the Pyromania update I'd say. Casual matchmaking worked like a charm, comp matchmaking was still kind of alive, and I have to give it to Valve that, although it sucks they abandoned TF2 after pyromania, at least they left it in the most balanced state it has ever been in, mostly because of the flamethrower and airblast overhauls. 

Subjectively speaking I have several ''eras'' of TF2 that I look back on very fondly, mostly because of the people I played with more than the balance of the game itself. The #1 without a doubt that way was very early on, when I played TF2 with a bunch of high school friends. We'd have LAN parties and play all night surviving on kitkats and pizza, it's the super stereotypical 'good old days' but it sure as hell was the best. I'm still in contact with most of them and after everyone dispersed to college we still occasionally played TF2 together. By now, only one of them still sometimes plays TF2, but we still play other things together, so considering we're all boring 30 year olds now I really lucked out with that gang.

I also played 6v6 for a while which I still highly recommend everyone to try, it's basically an entirely different game from pub TF2 but it's just so fun. I've played on several teams but the team I played on the longest really was a gang of guys I all liked, and it was a blast to play with them. I have this very vivid memory of playing scout vs soldier MGE on granary last while all hanging in mumble and someone from the team strutting on his guitar, it was the absolute best. The team eventually hit some drama and team members got replaced, and not much later I stopped because I had to focus on university.

Then there was when mann vs machine dropped, and cmndr hosted a server on which we could all do the missions together. That was short lived but it was a really cool way to experience that gamemode, especially considering how toxic the MvM community is if you've ever tried to play a game with randoms. So that definitely deserves a shoutout.

To round it out, as cheesy as it is, current TF2 on Uncletopia is just... kind of everything I want from the game? I like the ruleset, there's skilled players, and from where I live there are like 20 servers that I can access. It's a shame the servers were born out of the bot crisis, and I haven't really connected much with many of the players on Uncletopia, but I can say for sure that if it wasn't for those servers I would have dropped TF2 by now.

2 hours ago, hugthebed2 said:

Are there any weapons you outright refuse to use out of spite? It bugs me how often I play pyro and I'm like "man the scorch shot would be optimal here..." cuz that's one weapon I haven't equipped in 10 years. 

I never use the Wrangler as I both find it unfun to use and incredibly broken, same with the Vaccinator but to a lesser extent (IMO vacc is only broken when played very defensively, it's very poor to push with). I also never equip the Short Circuit on payload offense; IMO the payload should only give health, not ammo (also stops perma-firing heavies that makes spy even more impossible). Honestly I think Phlog and Scorch Shot get too bad a rep, phlog is obnoxious but very bad unless you time it with an uber (although you shouldn't be able to cap whilst having the crits), and Scorch Shot is spammy but that's half the cast of TF2. Also any obnoxious equip that provides some counterplay vs sniper (so vac and scorch shot) get kind of a pass from me. Speaking of Sniper, I do enjoy playing him quite a bit even though I also think he is the most major TF2 balance issue nowadays.

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My final question if you can read this is if you think there's any sleeper busted or overrated weapons. Comp 6s brain I think has truly poisoned people's mind that the Escape Plan is the best soldier melee (though based on your market gardener comment you probably feel similarly). I can't deny it's good for selfish soldier but the whip is more than a "get to front lines faster" weapon...

Given that my stats show my top 3 classes are the 3 comp combat classes, you can see I definitely have comp brain; however I'm also not entirely sure what the comp meta is right now?

I think basically all the Scout secondaries are great and a lot are underused, I still see most players exclusively use the pistol. Especially the Winger surprised me with how many sneaky flanks it can get away with. The Baby's Face Blaster is also really good on certain maps (although Scattergun is just one of the best weapons in the game so it's hard to top).

For Soldier I do actually really enjoy the Liberty Launcher despite what I said above, you just get so many rocketjumps whilst still being able to have a secondary. As for Soldier's melees, I've always seen the Disciplinary Action and Escape Plan as sidegrades (although I am an Escape Plan enjoyer most of the time). However even though I am really bad at Market Gardening, I'm starting to believe it might just be the best Soldier melee. It's not that hard to hit someone with and you get to start your bomb with a oneshot.

For Demo I think Loch-n-Load and Quickiebomb Launcher are actually really good and I use them a lot, it's just that their effective range is kind of weird, much further than feels natural. I also think the Loose Cannon might be lowkey overpowered if you're really good with it (I'm not).

For the other classes I don't really know, I do think that as Sniper you should equip the Cozy Camper 90% of the time, but I'm not sure if that's an established take or not... oh, and I actually think the Bushwacker is not worth using even in combination with Jarate.

Also, I've never seen those Uncletopia stats pages, that's really cool

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It's kind of fun to see this come up because it's one that I constantly think about. The Dragon's Fury is frustratingly close to a powerful option that you can run full time but its airblast is so bad (feels worse than the backburner which has its own bevy of issues). The Gas Passer is one of those ones that is in the opposite direction, where it's not even close to powerful and it's hard to easily figure out what made them think it was in a shippable state. The hot hand... melees are a pain in the ass to design so I almost can just accept this one being a troll weapon, but still, couldn't it have just been a disciplinary action-like?

Dragon's Fury is so close it's crazy. It would be my favourite pyro primary by far if it didn't have such jarring flaws (Shoutouts to Darwin's Danger Shield). Gas Passer I barely used, I don't really know what its function is supposed to be? Honestly fire goes out way too easily anyways and its potency should be buffed without sticking it to a wonky unlock (IMO airblasting should not extinguish teammates for example to stack onto my airblast nerf wishes). At least it's funny how much it pisses off MvM players. The Hot Hand being a joke unlock was honestly just insult to injury. As for the Thermal Thruster, I just think it should be made straight up better at what it does, yes a bombing pyro is powerful but you give up your secondary slot for it which is huge, especially for pyro.

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Can't agree more honestly. I hate the dead ringer, I hate the Kunai's gameplay patterns, I hate how the class's meta is the antithesis of stealthy and moreso just abusing speed buffs to trickstab people and surf whatever the enemy team's weakest links are. At least they have to be near you unlike sniper. Also sometimes provide a fun use case for the Backburner since they usually just completely crutch on the resistance to let them outrun you.

I exclusively play on Uncletopia nowadays and it's hysterical how big the difference is in spy's potency versus new and experienced players. I've had it happen so many times on valve servers where I quad pipe a Spy but he heals faster by stabbing oblivious idiots than I can deal damage. Also, something I've come to realize is that in TF2, oneshotting someone with a backstab isn't even that impressive. Most classes twoshot most classes anyways, and if you get flanked, the time to react you get between the first and second shot barely matters. And yeah, Sniper is of course a whole other can of worms

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I've wracked my brain for a long time trying to think of a fitting and viable passive for the Buff Banner but I never really managed to think of one. Do you have any?

My idea was always reload speed; conch's passive and active give healing, backup's passive and active give survivability, banner's should give you more DPS. +~15% reload speed would be a big deal, but you give up a lot for it and I think it would be very satisfying to use.

9 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

The buff banner really makes me sad. The only times I have really good plays with it is when I banner on a Heavy (usually Wicket) and basically act like a jank kritz. Even on the slightly-more-organized-than-casual uncletopia servers it's very hard to play with and not feel like you're not gimping yourself for not just packing a shotgun.

 

You know, every TF2 player with thousands of hours has their spicy ideas on balancing weapons. If you have them, what's your spicy takes for the categories of a buff for a underpowered weapon, a nerf for an overperforming weapon, and a complete rework for one of any type?

Solly just has really good secondaries, and the Buff Banner can't really keep up. The other banners, shotty and gunboats are all items I equip when I am playing 'optimally', but the buff banner always feels like I'm gimping myself. It should have some kind of passive like the other two banners.

I definitely have a bunch of controversial balance ideas, the biggest one being that I think airblast shouldn't be able to push players around at all whilst projectile reflects can stay as they are. Soldier needs a proper heel and there is a lot of interesting counterplay against a reflect happy Pyro, but getting your entire Uber stuffed, or being pushed off a cliff, or getting stuck in a corner by someone holding mouse 2 with the most generous hitbox in the game is not good gameplay.

For buffs, there's just such a massive inventory of useless items in TF2 it's kind of hard to start on it. The question is also whether you want them to be really viable or just fun to play; for example the Force a Nature can be fun to use, but if you were to try and turn it into a true sidegrade to the Scattergun, it would have to become obnoxious as hell. On the other hand you have stuff like the Sun on a Stick that just serve no purpose whatsoever.

I think the weapons most in dire need for a buff are all the Pyromania pyro unlocks, which just all either fell barely short (Dragon's Fury being able to be reflected and missing an airblast makes you killbind) or just turned out kind of garbage (all the other ones). It's depressing the second banana was actually the most truly viable unlock with TF2's last real update.

For a rework it would probably be Spy in its entirety, I really dislike how the 'meta' Spy has turned into Kunai and Dead Ringer abuse. It's quite funny how that combo can give Spy the highest effective health and movement speed in the game and still leave him the weakest class. In my opinion the big issue with Spy is that even if you get a reasonable amount of kills with him, you're still not applying as much pressure as a Soldier/Demo/Heavy shooting down a hallway. Getting kills doesn't mean much in TF2 if you're not gaining ground with it so in 12v12, an invisible spy is just a player down. If Spy was able to provide pressure like the other classes and then go invisible to try to make a play on a flank, he'd feel a lot less absent

5 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

How many hours on mario_kart?

Maybe like 20 or so, I played that kind of maps more when I played TF2 with a group of friends. I actually have some footage recorded of us having a few nostalgic games of prophunt and mario_kart from 2 years ago that I never edited because I forgot editing costs time and effort

2 hours ago, hugthebed2 said:

thoughts on 
brass beast 
classic
thermal thruster

-Brass Beast: should be more extreme, make it unable to move at all and make it deal even more damage. I also rarely play heavy

-Classic: is an awful sniper rifle which means it's still pretty dang good, being able to instagib someone from anywhere

-Thermal Thruster: it's pretty clear valve was scared of bombing pyros because they made this way too restrictive, I wish this was just better because it is quite fun.

3 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

Anything you've usually not touched in ages that randomly just became really interesting to you? This happened to me with the Huntsman when I started really coming back to the game a year or however long ago and now I can't put the thing down

The last few months I've been trying out a bunch of weapons I rarely used, with varying results. Conclusions:

-Every Scout primary that isn't the Scattergun feels awful to me

-The Winger and Cleaver are actually pretty neat

-I thoroughly enjoy the Liberty Launcher until the second it fails to kill something my intuition says should be dead, in which case I hate it for a week

-I really wish the Buff Banner was better

-Is.. is the Market Gardener the most optimal Soldier melee?

-The Loch-n-Load is really fun to orbital strike snipers with

-Huntsman is fun until I get headshot by a 'real' Sniper exactly once and then I switch back

2 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

Show dem class hours

I should've made screenshots of the class hours at the other 1000 milestones, I would've liked to see them change over time. Most played belonged to Scout for quite a while, then I swapped to Demo as a 'main' and the last few years it's been Soldier. I also used to play Spy quite a lot but now I hardly ever touch, I feel I play Pyro and Engie much more often. I think Heavy has basically always been the least played.

1 hour ago, Raison d'être said:

How many hat drops have you gotten in 6000 hours? One? TWO? THREE???

6, you get one every 1000 hours.

According to Steam, I purchased the Orange Box on April 1st, 2009, meaning I played TF2 for approximately an hour every single day since then. There's definitely been times in the past where I played it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much to get to that number; nowadays I don't have time to game that often anymore and it's just my comfort game.

Anyways I thought that was a good reason to start a subspuf thread, see how y'all are doing, and maybe talk about TF2 a bit

My gf and I have been on a disney binge during the holidays:

-Hercules: not as good as I remembered, Hades and the Muses are great but otherwise it was kind of dull

-the Hunchback of the Notre Dame: best songs, I kind of wish this was made with an older audience in mind (holy shit are the gargoyles annoying and out of place)

-Pocahontas: one of the 'super classics' I never watched; I found it dull and surprisingly ugly for a movie mostly set in lush forests (a lot of rotoscoped animation too)

-Emperor's New Groove: has to be the funniest Disney movie

-Moana: we wanted to watch a modern disney movie to compare; very pretty but otherwise boring

-Princess and the Frog: excellent music and some really funny characters (mostly the crocodile) but it has no plot; half the movie feels like filler

-Mulan: Very good but we found Mushu to be really obnoxious; Eddie Murphy should've really cooled it a little bit

-Aladdin: Probably my favourite of what we've watched; gorgeous, well-paced, funny and great music. Robin Williams just gave 200% as the Genie

We still have a week of holidays so I'll probably extend the list

I'm not sure how many SPUF related items I still have (I believe I have some items crafted by Huff), but I do have a few items from my comp TF2 days that have sentimental value

-My Strange Scattergun still references my name from when I played 6s Scout

-I have a pocket Medic gifted and named by my team's Medic when I played 6s Soldier

-I coached someone to play 6s Scout and when they quit TF2 they gave me their cosmetics set

And unrelated to that a random person in a Valve server gave me the Heavy bear hat just because I was named 'a bear'

Happy New Year subspuffers! I wish y'all a nice 2024

Sometimes I dream of a TF2 balance update, but I also wonder if that wouldn't be a huge monkey paw wish. There's a lot of things I would like to still see changed in tf2, like sniper, vaccinator, sniper, airblast, sniper, sniper and sniper, but there is also so much that could go wrong. I honestly think that even though tf2 is far from perfect right now (mostly because of sniper), it is also in the most balanced state it has ever been. Like what if we would get our balance update, Valve goes "alright that's the last one" and TF2 ends up for the worse? Maybe we're better off just getting some new maps and cosmetics for the rest of time

On 18-1-2023 at 6:24 PM, hugthebed2 said:

 

People also just need to curate where they visit better. I typically stay in higher quality discords and follow not a lot of people on twitter and I can avoid 90% of the boolshit.

 

But I still see that kind of stuff elsewhere or it can slip through the cracks on some discords I'm obligated to stay in, but I just don't bother most the time with that kinda stuff.

I yearn to be able to slam a pencil hard enough into the back of my eyesocket to forever destroy the neurons that make me aware that Taylor Swift recently broke up with her boyfriend