Disable hlx stats points notifications by default on official server

I think it's somewhat antithetical to tf2c's game design to constantly be tracking and telling everybody what their rank is, and clogging up the chat. I don't think it should be on servers that are supposed to be the official "vanilla" experience, since it can change people's perception of how they're supposed to play the game. I think it can still be tracked and stay as an option for those who want that, but I think it should be hidden by default, especially for new players.
(This was originally written for the suggestions channel in the TF2C, but suggestions for VaultF4 are technically supposed to be here I guess)

i believe that yes, they can be annoying to look at within the perspective that it can clog up the chat and make people play differently, if they really care about it, but at the end of the day, you can always turn it off; there's also the fact that a lot of people come from the casual/quickplay aspect of TF2, where they wouldn't really care about it. even though the game points can be flawed, they are only really presented as a psychological reaction lol. in the end, they have no game impact, since it's not used to scramble teams in VF4 servers anymore. they can also be a good form of feedback to your gameplay

I agree if for no other reason than seeing my points fluctuate after each misc death was very much driving me up the wall and I didn't know that I could turn the notifications off until someone told me that I could.

...They also incentivize really ineffectual and like. Safe play-styles if you're in the market of increasing your number due to the massive number losses from users with particularly low scores. In an asymmetrical team based game that sometimes has you on the team where there are plenty of cases where "run in, get a couple of valuable kills and die," is often legitimately good play. I figure the point notifs kind of disincentivize that that as the default manner of play.

I know the things don't technically matter or directly affect play, but it can be a bit discouraging to see the numbers that decree how good or bad you are without really taking the current game state into account every death.

Filly said:

I agree if for no other reason than seeing my points fluctuate after each misc death was very much driving me up the wall and I didn't know that I could turn the notifications off until someone told me that I could.

...They also incentivize really ineffectual and like. Safe play-styles if you're in the market of increasing your number due to the massive number losses from users with particularly low scores. In an asymmetrical team based game that sometimes has you on the team where there are plenty of cases where "run in, get a couple of valuable kills and die," is often legitimately good play. I figure the point notifs kind of disincentivize that that as the default manner of play.

I know the things don't technically matter or directly affect play, but it can be a bit discouraging to see the numbers that decree how good or bad you are without really taking the current game state into account every death.

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from what you're saying i think it's mostly a skill issue, you are taking bad plays and blaming hlx for deducting points whenever you die, which is a separate thing. a major benefit of the points is that it can denote consistency in players, ks and deaths, it's even harder to accumulate points due to the influx of new players that usually steal 25 points whenever they kill someone high up in the ranks. the playstyle you have in mind would not be the kind that would be rewarded in the system of hlx because it shows inconsistency with keeping up with your ks and deaths, in other words what hlx represents is your overall consistency. if i were you i would separate those two forms of scoring

I don't care about the points, personally at all (I just ignore the mechanic all-together) but I think the things you gain/lose them for is hilarious asynchronous with what "good play" looks like. The highest scoring players use extremely funny strategies to mass farm points and I can tell you those strategies do not typically involve prioritizing your team's victory; maybe they can result in that as a byproduct but it ceases to be the main focus of the game. In a very objective way it is shifting the focus of the game from winning matches to doing a series of tasks that net points; the min-maxing strategies bring the absurdity to a new level. I suspect most players don't care about the points, like me, thankfully.

Mr.Pie said:

from what you're saying i think it's mostly a skill issue, you are taking bad plays and blaming hlx for deducting points whenever you die, which is a separate thing. a major benefit of the points is that it can denote consistency in players, ks and deaths, it's even harder to accumulate points due to the influx of new players that usually steal 25 points whenever they kill someone high up in the ranks. the playstyle you have in mind would not be the kind that would be rewarded in the system of hlx because it shows inconsistency with keeping up with your ks and deaths, in other words what hlx represents is your overall consistency. if i were you i would separate those two forms of scoring

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This is like... A really reductionist reply. The easiest way to amass points is to constantly make safe plays that get you single kills from a distance on classes like sniper or to play on maps that constantly award points for things like capturing objectives. These aren't invalid forms of play, but they're expressly safe methods of doing so and the system showing your number go up every time you do so while minimizing the amount of times you see your score decrease by default incentivizes said safe play styles. If you're not really even getting valuable picks near the objective, it's questionable if you're really doing all that much beyond padding your score out. You can get a lot of points for yourself by sitting in spawn or capturing points in domination and allowing them to be recapped, but I wouldn't say that doing that is actually contributing a lot of value to the team if that makes any sense.

Contrarily, your team might get a lot out of a pyro running into a fight and clearing the objective and dying to the stragglers, but if that straggler was of a particularly low rank, you're likely to run into the good ol' "-25 points" notification. A heavy medic pair making a suicidal play that ends up stalling the objective long enough for the rest of the team instead of running back into spawn but dies in the process is going to be more valuable for the team than the same pair sitting in spawn while the objective captures. Whether or not you made a good play, it feels bad to see the death notification. It's less of an issue of skill in cases like this and more a matter of the notification just being kind of frustrating to a certain type of player.

I never even really said that I was upset with losing points for dying. I'm not like, a high ranking player, and I don't actually spend a lot of time trying to raise my rank on the tables, but in my experience I typically trend decently positive by the end of matches in spite of my shoddy kill-death ratio. I don't really even consider myself to be particularly good at the game. I was pointing out that whether or not that's the case, it feels bad to see the way the score has changed in the moment on death, and that it's probably a reasonable idea to have the notifications off by default. It's not really a skill issue, it's a psychological issue. I'm not trying to raise my score, because... I mostly have other things to focus on improving in the long run out-of-game, I just really hated seeing the on-death notifications and they were making my experience with the game a lot worse in a way that I imagine a decent number of people would also experience.

Filly said:

This is like... A really reductionist reply. The easiest way to amass points is to constantly make safe plays that get you single kills from a distance on classes like sniper or to play on maps that constantly award points for things like capturing objectives. These aren't invalid forms of play, but they're expressly safe methods of doing so and the system showing your number go up every time you do so while minimizing the amount of times you see your score decrease by default incentivizes said safe play styles. If you're not really even getting valuable picks near the objective, it's questionable if you're really doing all that much beyond padding your score out. You can get a lot of points for yourself by sitting in spawn or capturing points in domination and allowing them to be recapped, but I wouldn't say that doing that is actually contributing a lot of value to the team if that makes any sense.

Contrarily, your team might get a lot out of a pyro running into a fight and clearing the objective and dying to the stragglers, but if that straggler was of a particularly low rank, you're likely to run into the good ol' "-25 points" notification. A heavy medic pair making a suicidal play that ends up stalling the objective long enough for the rest of the team instead of running back into spawn but dies in the process is going to be more valuable for the team than the same pair sitting in spawn while the objective captures. Whether or not you made a good play, it feels bad to see the death notification. It's less of an issue of skill in cases like this and more a matter of the notification just being kind of frustrating to a certain type of player.

I never even really said that I was upset with losing points for dying. I'm not like, a high ranking player, and I don't actually spend a lot of time trying to raise my rank on the tables, but in my experience I typically trend decently positive by the end of matches in spite of my shoddy kill-death ratio. I don't really even consider myself to be particularly good at the game. I was pointing out that whether or not that's the case, it feels bad to see the way the score has changed in the moment on death, and that it's probably a reasonable idea to have the notifications off by default. It's not really a skill issue, it's a psychological issue. I'm not trying to raise my score, because... I mostly have other things to focus on improving in the long run out-of-game, I just really hated seeing the on-death notifications and they were making my experience with the game a lot worse in a way that I imagine a decent number of people would also experience.

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Yeah this is pretty much what I had in mind with my last post. The points system presupposes that staying alive is always synchronous with "being the best play" which is not the case; even if there was not a penalty for death people who wanted to compete in the points game would still alter play to maximize actions that reward the most points; unless that most-profitable action was winning the round for your team, the focus of any points-minded player would be necessarily being taken off of that goal. If the most profitable thing was killing players or something, focusing on that would likely cause your team to win a lot of games, but regardless it wouldn't be the focus anymore. There would be room for error.

I don't believe the points system is trying to necessarily have parity with players making decisions that yield team wins, which is a problem all it's own, after all if it *were* trying to do this, it would certainly be adjusted as emergent gameplay styles that do not win games cropped up. Truly, what we are left with is a points system that either purposefully distracts from the goal of the vanilla game or a points system that is willingly ignorant of the goal of the vanilla game and simply gets lucky with some arbitrary frequency.

Skelly said:

I don't care about the points, personally at all (I just ignore the mechanic all-together) but I think the things you gain/lose them for is hilarious asynchronous with what "good play" looks like. The highest scoring players use extremely funny strategies to mass farm points and I can tell you those strategies do not typically involve prioritizing your team's victory; maybe they can result in that as a byproduct but it ceases to be the main focus of the game. In a very objective way it is shifting the focus of the game from winning matches to doing a series of tasks that net points; the min-maxing strategies bring the absurdity to a new level. I suspect most players don't care about the points, like me, thankfully.

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would you mind specifying on what funny strategies people do to mass farm points and what you mean by min-maxxing strategies? also, idk if "mass farm points" is a proper term for it regardless of what you said beforehand since you can get banned for that and ppl have before. hlx rewards players for winning as well or just doing the objective, capping points, moving the pl, ubering/krizting and other stuff alike which makes the strong point that i don't think that the system strongly encourages or even a little bit playing safe and more passively ie. playing sniper deep into a backline, going rejuv med when it's been fixed already, going engi, etc.

Mr.Pie said:

would you mind specifying on what funny strategies people do to mass farm points and what you mean by min-maxxing strategies? also, idk if "mass farm points" is a proper term for it regardless of what you said beforehand since you can get banned for that and ppl have before. hlx rewards players for winning as well or just doing the objective, capping points, moving the pl, ubering/krizting and other stuff alike which makes the strong point that i don't think that the system strongly encourages or even a little bit playing safe and more passively ie. playing sniper deep into a backline, going rejuv med when it's been fixed already, going engi, etc.

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I've seen some particularly crazy players vote for the same dom map over and over again, play as scout since he runs fast and captures control points fast, and run between the control points over and over. The crazy part is that you actually *want* the enemies to cap the control points back so you can cap them again and get more score points. I've also seen people play super defensively as long range classes so they never die but can pick off low threat targets to get the points while staying minimally endangered. I've also heard of players who will play game modes which reward you with points for playing/winning and then sit in spawn. One time I saw this civilian do it while making loud sounds over VC, it was making people uncomfortable enough to report them.

Skelly said:

Yeah this is pretty much what I had in mind with my last post. The points system presupposes that staying alive is always synchronous with "being the best play" which is not the case; even if there was not a penalty for death people who wanted to compete in the points game would still alter play to maximize actions that reward the most points; unless that most-profitable action was winning the round for your team, the focus of any points-minded player would be necessarily being taken off of that goal. If the most profitable thing was killing players or something, focusing on that would likely cause your team to win a lot of games, but regardless it wouldn't be the focus anymore. There would be room for error.

I don't believe the points system is trying to necessarily have parity with players making decisions that yield team wins, which is a problem all it's own, after all if it *were* trying to do this, it would certainly be adjusted as emergent gameplay styles that do not win games cropped up. Truly, what we are left with is a points system that either purposefully distracts from the goal of the vanilla game or a points system that is willingly ignorant of the goal of the vanilla game and simply gets lucky with some arbitrary frequency.

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I don't really understand your point here. I completely disagree to that being the best play. Objectively, making a play that you will knowingly die to, is most of the time a bad play. Unless, you plan on wiping the whole team or securing a win in those conditions then it is genuinely a skill issue.

The point system (when working as intended) rewards players for actions that help towards their team's success. These type of actions include kills, capping, uber drops, ubering, sentry destruction, etc etc. None of these actions distract from the goal of the game, nor is it an "arbitrary frequency", most if not all of them can attribute to a team's victory. This is due to the actions encouraging plays while also rewarding players for making good plays. Specific goal-oriented actions like pushing the payload, defending points, and winning the round further enforce this.

Additionally, most actions also encourage classes to play to their roles, with good examples being teleports, saps, ubers, sentry destruction, uber drops, deflects, and extinguishes exemplifying this. There isn't a surefire way to exploit the system other than airshot stickies as far as I know. However, even then, airshots being broken don't distract or shift focus in a significant way. Not sure what silly strategies your even referring to.

giggleslop said:

I don't really understand your point here. I completely disagree to that being the best play. Objectively, making a play that you will knowingly die to, is most of the time a bad play. Unless, you plan on wiping the whole team or securing a win in those conditions then it is genuinely a skill issue.

The point system (when working as intended) rewards players for actions that help towards their team's success. These type of actions include kills, capping, uber drops, ubering, sentry destruction, etc etc. None of these actions distract from the goal of the game, nor is it an "arbitrary frequency", most if not all of them can attribute to a team's victory. This is due to the actions encouraging plays while also rewarding players for making good plays. Specific goal-oriented actions like pushing the payload, defending points, and winning the round further enforce this.

Additionally, most actions also encourage classes to play to their roles, with good examples being teleports, saps, ubers, sentry destruction, uber drops, deflects, and extinguishes exemplifying this. There isn't a surefire way to exploit the system other than airshot stickies as far as I know. However, even then, airshots being broken don't distract or shift focus in a significant way. Not sure what silly strategies your even referring to.

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"Objectively, making a play that you will knowingly die to, is most of the time a bad play."
So, in your own terms, sometimes it is not a bad play? doesn't sound very objective
I also strongly disagree that plays which get you killed are "objectively" bad, most of the time it is advantageous to stay alive obviously but if you make a play that kills a high value player who is significantly more skilled than you where you die afterwards, or a play where you kill the VIP for example and then immediately die, or a play where you cause a med to drop uber and then immediately die, these are all examples of ways you can choose to trade your life for something constructive, and often times these trades do not have feasible ways of surviving.

"None of these actions distract from the goal of the game"
The goal of the game is to win, there are hypothetical situations where focusing on something that gains you points is no synchronous with focusing on something that gets you closer to winning the fastest/most efficiently. One example is to let an engineer build buildings before you detonate your sticky bombs because you know you will get more points. Another example is letting enemies capture control points that you know you will be able to recapture for the bonus instead of defending them.

"most actions also encourage classes to play to their roles"
Trying to win the game also encourages classes to play their roles, typically.

"There isn't a surefire way to exploit the system other than airshot stickies as far as I know."
You get points for hitting enemies with the brick as scout for "airshots" (possible glitch?), you could play a payload map, let your team push up until spawns shift, and then have a friend on the enemy team sit outside of your previous spawn with you as you toss bricks at them, running back inside to get more to throw at them. This could be cycled for the whole round if the player being bricked was a heavy with the sandvich or of a health kit spawned nearby, or even if they were a medic and used the passive heal over time. Could even build an uber for getting past the enemy team >.>
Are these strats stupid? yes, but they are points-oriented, they will get you a lot of points and minimize the danger of you losing points since you are unlikely to be killed so far behind the action. PL_Frontier would be perfect for this by the way because the final point is very defensible and the map is large with spawns that go very far back. Your heavy friend and you could just rack up dumb brick 'airshot' points.

"Not sure what silly strategies your even referring to."
I wrote about a couple of them in a reply to Mr. Pie you can check out if you'd like, I don't believe the list in exhaustive.

Skelly said:

I've seen some particularly crazy players vote for the same dom map over and over again, play as scout since he runs fast and captures control points fast, and run between the control points over and over. The crazy part is that you actually *want* the enemies to cap the control points back so you can cap them again and get more score points. I've also seen people play super defensively as long range classes so they never die but can pick off low threat targets to get the points while staying minimally endangered. I've also heard of players who will play game modes which reward you with points for playing/winning and then sit in spawn. One time I saw this civilian do it while making loud sounds over VC, it was making people uncomfortable enough to report them.

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as corny as it sounds like, it's a democracy and voting system, map pools are a preference thing so if you just say in VC or chat F1 then people are more likely to vote for those maps; even i myself sometimes get tired of playing on dom maps lol. dom is a DM oriented mode, people are obviously more enticed to be playing said DM classes like scout, demo and soldier. out of the top 10 NA players or anyone for that matter i have never seen anyone willingly let people cap points in dom/cp maps to recap and get points, that can also get you banned iirc as it is point farming in some ways. only real "long rage classes" you can be here is sniper or maybe using the rpg which even then they rarely exclusively pick off "low threat targets". yeah these "strategies" are silly but not really efficient for going up or even winning

Mr.Pie said:

as corny as it sounds like, it's a democracy and voting system, map pools are a preference thing so if you just say in VC or chat F1 then people are more likely to vote for those maps; even i myself sometimes get tired of playing on dom maps lol. dom is a DM oriented mode, people are obviously more enticed to be playing said DM classes like scout, demo and soldier. out of the top 10 NA players or anyone for that matter i have never seen anyone willingly let people cap points in dom/cp maps to recap and get points, that can also get you banned iirc as it is point farming in some ways. only real "long rage classes" you can be here is sniper or maybe using the rpg which even then they rarely exclusively pick off "low threat targets". yeah these "strategies" are silly but not really efficient for going up or even winning

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As far as I am concerned people being banned for "Point Farming" is silly. The fact this has happened at all illuminates the very point OP, Filly, and I were making. There are pro-point behaviors that are disruptive to the game. I say its silly that people are banned for this because it is a systematic issue and not a player behavioral issue. The system encourages players to behave inappropriately, all the more reason the points system should probably be reworked. If the senior admins weren't busy with stuff I'd be inclined to forward this opinion to them but honestly, I don't think its a very high priority thing :v
Would rather see technical goals met, server health upkept, and violent/harassing rulebreakers dealt with instead of micromanaging the silly number minigame.

Speaking of harassing users, I processed those people who were harassing you about a week or so ago in-game. I'm genuinely extremely sorry that happened, and that it may have taken a while for them to get removed. Harassment is never appropriate or acceptable on the VF4 servers. If anyone harasses you in the future you can feel free to use the /report command in game to anonymously let us know. The report for these users came from another player, so I just wanted you to know :3

Filly said:

This is like... A really reductionist reply. The easiest way to amass points is to constantly make safe plays that get you single kills from a distance on classes like sniper or to play on maps that constantly award points for things like capturing objectives. These aren't invalid forms of play, but they're expressly safe methods of doing so and the system showing your number go up every time you do so while minimizing the amount of times you see your score decrease by default incentivizes said safe play styles. If you're not really even getting valuable picks near the objective, it's questionable if you're really doing all that much beyond padding your score out. You can get a lot of points for yourself by sitting in spawn or capturing points in domination and allowing them to be recapped, but I wouldn't say that doing that is actually contributing a lot of value to the team if that makes any sense.

Contrarily, your team might get a lot out of a pyro running into a fight and clearing the objective and dying to the stragglers, but if that straggler was of a particularly low rank, you're likely to run into the good ol' "-25 points" notification. A heavy medic pair making a suicidal play that ends up stalling the objective long enough for the rest of the team instead of running back into spawn but dies in the process is going to be more valuable for the team than the same pair sitting in spawn while the objective captures. Whether or not you made a good play, it feels bad to see the death notification. It's less of an issue of skill in cases like this and more a matter of the notification just being kind of frustrating to a certain type of player.

I never even really said that I was upset with losing points for dying. I'm not like, a high ranking player, and I don't actually spend a lot of time trying to raise my rank on the tables, but in my experience I typically trend decently positive by the end of matches in spite of my shoddy kill-death ratio. I don't really even consider myself to be particularly good at the game. I was pointing out that whether or not that's the case, it feels bad to see the way the score has changed in the moment on death, and that it's probably a reasonable idea to have the notifications off by default. It's not really a skill issue, it's a psychological issue. I'm not trying to raise my score, because... I mostly have other things to focus on improving in the long run out-of-game, I just really hated seeing the on-death notifications and they were making my experience with the game a lot worse in a way that I imagine a decent number of people would also experience.

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again, to one of the points i made a while ago; from the top 10 players or even 50 on the leaderboard no one really makes these constant safe plays that you guys are talking about. from what i've seen no one really goes out of their way to go play engi, sniper or med which are the most "passive/safe" classes, regardless if we already have 2 or more of those classes. sure getting sole kills as a form to rank up if you're high up on points is brutal since you get about 2-5 but how do you think those people are that high up in the first place, because ironically, they have some of the most aggro playstyles since it's good to keep up with your ks. this isn't just something i think of, plenty of other people have seen it too and practice it. well, for that minority of players who get mad at that notif you can always just turn it off. sorry for the misunderstanding of you not getting upset at losing points. i understand that hatred of seeing the dreadful -25 but at the end of the day i get over it and improve on what i did wrong and maybe you can too. if it's that bad of an experience you can also swap off servers which is always an option, not all servers really use this system but i'd understand the appeal to it since these are official servers.

Skelly said:

As far as I am concerned people being banned for "Point Farming" is silly. The fact this has happened at all illuminates the very point OP, Filly, and I were making. There are pro-point behaviors that are disruptive to the game. I say its silly that people are banned for this because it is a systematic issue and not a player behavioral issue. The system encourages players to behave inappropriately, all the more reason the points system should probably be reworked. If the senior admins weren't busy with stuff I'd be inclined to forward this opinion to them but honestly, I don't think its a very high priority thing :v
Would rather see technical goals met, server health upkept, and violent/harassing rulebreakers dealt with instead of micromanaging the silly number minigame.

Speaking of harassing users, I processed those people who were harassing you about a week or so ago in-game. I'm genuinely extremely sorry that happened, and that it may have taken a while for them to get removed. Harassment is never appropriate or acceptable on the VF4 servers. If anyone harasses you in the future you can feel free to use the /report command in game to anonymously let us know. The report for these users came from another player, so I just wanted you to know :3

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yeah it's silly to get banned by it but it is justifiable since it is a rule to not abuse/exploit it. there are plenty of exploitive point behaviors but not ones seen in actual games. i don't think they disrupt the game itself since when someone does this they do it on dead servers with friends thus leading them to get banned lol. i don't think i've seen people get banned to it though in a long while. yep, someone told me that you handled it and i appreciate it since it was pretty quick, ty

Mr.Pie said:

again, to one of the points i made a while ago; from the top 10 players or even 50 on the leaderboard no one really makes these constant safe plays that you guys are talking about. from what i've seen no one really goes out of their way to go play engi, sniper or med which are the most "passive/safe" classes, regardless if we already have 2 or more of those classes. sure getting sole kills as a form to rank up if you're high up on points is brutal since you get about 2-5 but how do you think those people are that high up in the first place, because ironically, they have some of the most aggro playstyles since it's good to keep up with your ks. this isn't just something i think of, plenty of other people have seen it too and practice it. well, for that minority of players who get mad at that notif you can always just turn it off. sorry for the misunderstanding of you not getting upset at losing points. i understand that hatred of seeing the dreadful -25 but at the end of the day i get over it and improve on what i did wrong and maybe you can too. if it's that bad of an experience you can also swap off servers which is always an option, not all servers really use this system but i'd understand the appeal to it since these are official servers.

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"Who" is a player on the leaderboard who routinely beats your score, you guys trade like every other day. They predominantly play sniper. I'd contest that Engi is actually very passive or safe in TF2C just because of how many unlocks are so hostile to him specifically, RPG, Dynamite Pack, Pyro's flames being buffed versus Live, Heavy being generally stronger, not to mention all the live tf2 items engie lacks here in tf2c. Med isnt popular because you get points fast for fragging and capping so it makes more sense to play scout on dom maps or sniper on teams that you suspect will win (You can ensure this by simply leaving if your team is bad, or by covertly steam stacking, again niether of these really seem like behavioral problems to me as much as problems within the game's systems)

I think it is reductive to say point loss is a skill issue, death in this game is unavoidable and many players contribute a lot even without nescesarilly having a positive K/D. To be sure, if you are bad at the game you will lose more points, but this is a "Every square is a rectangle/ not every rectangle is a square" situation

Skelly said:

"Who" is a player on the leaderboard who routinely beats your score, you guys trade like every other day. They predominantly play sniper. I'd contest that Engi is actually very passive or safe in TF2C just because of how many unlocks are so hostile to him specifically, RPG, Dynamite Pack, Pyro's flames being buffed versus Live, Heavy being generally stronger, not to mention all the live tf2 items engie lacks here in tf2c. Med isnt popular because you get points fast for fragging and capping so it makes more sense to play scout on dom maps or sniper on teams that you suspect will win (You can ensure this by simply leaving if your team is bad, or by covertly steam stacking, again niether of these really seem like behavioral problems to me as much as problems within the game's systems)

I think it is reductive to say point loss is a skill issue, death in this game is unavoidable and many players contribute a lot even without nescesarilly having a positive K/D. To be sure, if you are bad at the game you will lose more points, but this is a "Every square is a rectangle/ not every rectangle is a square" situation

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klonoa , yes we trade blows a lot on the leaderboard lol. we have to take into consideration that he was a very very early player in this mod. idrk much of the live engi items but from my pov it's an equal footing engi has to counter most if not all of those classes with the rpg really being the annoying one since you can delete a dynamite pack, no pyro is walking up to a sentry unless he's ubered (which any class can really destroy a sentry if ubered) and heavy having falloff. overall he can be pretty passive with correct and proper placement of your buildings. med can be good but obviously depending on the circumstances of the team composition, map, etc. he isn't the best pick, nah but can be for that safe and passive playstyle especially with rejuv even if the point system on it got reworked. yeah death in any fps game will always be unavoidable but it all comes down to how much you can mitigate it and how consistent you can be at ks's and yes that also happens a lot in fps games especially in hero shooters where someone can be doing a lot ie. getting a lot of kills but their team still ends up losing and yes, if you're bad at the game or just putting very low effort into your team and yourself you will end up losing points

Mr.Pie said:

again, to one of the points i made a while ago; from the top 10 players or even 50 on the leaderboard no one really makes these constant safe plays that you guys are talking about. from what i've seen no one really goes out of their way to go play engi, sniper or med which are the most "passive/safe" classes, regardless if we already have 2 or more of those classes. sure getting sole kills as a form to rank up if you're high up on points is brutal since you get about 2-5 but how do you think those people are that high up in the first place, because ironically, they have some of the most aggro playstyles since it's good to keep up with your ks. this isn't just something i think of, plenty of other people have seen it too and practice it. well, for that minority of players who get mad at that notif you can always just turn it off. sorry for the misunderstanding of you not getting upset at losing points. i understand that hatred of seeing the dreadful -25 but at the end of the day i get over it and improve on what i did wrong and maybe you can too. if it's that bad of an experience you can also swap off servers which is always an option, not all servers really use this system but i'd understand the appeal to it since these are official servers.

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The point isn't that I want the point system removed or that I want to play on a different server. I've solved the problem for me personally. As you've said, players are able to individually turn the points gained and lost notifications off. You still gain and lose points, you just aren't notified of it. I agree with OP in thinking that the messages being off would probably be healthier for your average player. The only reason I brought up the points system having the given flaws in the first place was that I was trying to demonstrate that they're a game-able system if you just want to top the table.

What I find a problems is that I can't imagine that most people know how to turn the notifications on or off. I only found out because I live with someone who does. Heck, I'm convinced that most people probably don't actually know how to report users despite the periodic notifications on how to do so being given in chat. That, or players are adverse to doing so.

I don't think the points system needs to go, and I have a fine enough time playing on the official servers. I like that I know they have moderation. I just don't think that the points notification being on by default is actually healthy for your average player who isn't really looking to rise to the tops of the table or anything like that, whether or not they complain about it.

As a fellow HLXstats enthusiast, I don't really think there is a way to "game point-farming" other than just being good at the videogame. Obviously, due to it far from a perfect system, such as with Domination maps' constant point exchanging granting Quite A Lot to the capping team plus the capper, sometimes people just earn more, but the same map gives the same opportunity to all players on it. Even in situations where you can mostly kritz-pocket a good player to amass quite a bit of Medic assists, there's still skill required in being a good Medic that I see a lot of players lack. All in all, points feel to me as being way more about impact than purely performance. You eliminate a high skilled threat - good, have a bonus. Lower skilled threats are not worth as much. It is irritating though that it takes a long time for incoming players that are already good to balance out to their level, due to it being more of a flat comparative system, rather than something like the typical Glicko-2 Elo system. But again, doesn't matter much as TF2C is closer to an arcade game rather than a game of pure skill (CS, Chess, osu!, etc.) and perhaps the uphill climb might be enticing to some.

I'd also like to shoot down the "safer plays are required to go up in ranking" argument. You can absolutely die less but still go in for flashy plays if your movement and aim are better than the enemy's. It is entirely possible to go 50:14 KD on non-harvester twin-barreling Pyro in a 12v12 game of 5cp, constantly pressuring the enemy - I've done it a few weeks ago. The risk to reward trade still stands, especially on classes like Scout. It's just mentals, relative skill and positioning that go into play.

As for the point visibility, my take is that in the modern world it's better if it stays on, as it helps the more progress-inclined individuals (many modern gamers) find something to return to. But I do believe that there should at least an occasional automatic announcement in chat about the ability to turn off point notifications, that much is true.