27 replies to this topic

[Handrew_]

Recently I've been playing a lot of lobbies where people are permanently offclassing, it would be great to have a feature to stop that. Offclassing can be annoying and prevent a good match, I'm being a hypocrite but it does effect game play and how a match is played out, and since this is a site that helps get new (pub) players into competitive I would said that this would help people first get used to the so called 'Cookie Cutter' format that games are played in, obviously this would be in the advance options whiles making the lobby so the leader could choose. TF2Lobby had this and a drop down menu where it stated something along the lines of "Standard Classes" so this would be the cookie cutter setup ( 2 scouts, 2 soldiers, demo and medic) then it could be "Standard Classes + Utility" This would be the normal chosen config class limits whatever that might be, I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement into the TF2Center system, but I would think it would just be an rcon commands. I'm sure a lot of people would like this since offlclassing can be tedious and i'm sure it would help new players, letting them play in the standard format, also making sure they don't permanently play something they shouldn't. All in all leaders should have this as an option before they set up the lobby, depending if they allow offclasses or not, Hopefully this feature can be added. 

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this

 

 

- #H ( aka. Handrew_ ) 

 

 

[TheMattgician]

To be fair, people off-classing is an integral part of 6s (not so popular in highlander for some reason). Also, lobbies are a way to try things out and get better at some things you can't practice in official games or even scrims. I do see your point though.

 

The solution that would make everyone happy would be for the lobby leader to say whether offclassing is acceptable or not, like mumble. Though I don't know if it's really worth the extra work and hassle for devs and players.

[The Once and Future King]

To be fair, people off-classing is an integral part of 6s

 

I played a 6's lkobby last weekend against 2 heavies an engineer, a medic, demo, and pyro.  You're saying that is an integral part of 6's?  Cause I thought it was a waist of my time.

[Kenneth]

I'm on the spitty pug side of the fence, lobbies shouldn't be the place for offclassing, especially permanently. The lobbies should have a consistent quality to them that anyone can enjoy.

We've had lots of interesting discussions going on in the moderator forums on this topic so this thread will be closely watched and may very well influence how we deal with offclassing in lobbies.

[TheMattgician]

Well obviously I wasn't referring to excessive offclassing. But preventing people to offclass at all is a bit excessive to me.

[fraac]

If you could prevent people from offclassing until they had a certain rating/number of lobbies that might work. But I'm not sure how to do this without a server plugin.

[TheMattgician]

I don't think that'll work fraac, most people who offclass in my experience are well established players that use lobbies to practice offclassing.

There's always the problem with rating, which is that you need people to actually rate others for it to be effective (which isn't as obvious as it might seem).

Perhaps we can set a rule which is permanent offclassing should be accepted by the team. If the player doesn't go back to cutting cookies, they can kick him.

[naknak]

My experience is

most people who offclass in my experience are well established players that use lobbies to practice offclassing.

My 6s lobby experience is a lot worse than that: about 100% of them end up with a sniper, when maybe 5% of the time that sniper is good enough to justify losing a soldier/scout.

Because of the plague of sniper mains, I just don't play 6s, unless it's 4am and there's no choice. I'd like to see a cookie-cutter option like this, or some kind of enhanced rep that highlights consistently useless teammates.

[TheMattgician]

I wasn't saying that they're necessarily good, my point was that they probably have enough hours/lobbies that they are indistinguishable from the other players in that regard.

[fraac]

If it's an experienced player offclassing, while he probably isn't helping the team, it's a tolerable annoyance. It's worse when a new player mistakes 6v6 for highlander, you're basically a player down.

[The Once and Future King]

 

Perhaps we can set a rule which is permanent offclassing should be accepted by the team. If the player doesn't go back to cutting cookies, they can kick him.

 

Oh and I'm sure that would work. As it is, a team could easly !REP a player who is offclassing but they don't.  Any mumble lobby I am in, I try !REPing any player not in mumble and the rest of my team takes a "It's only a lobby" approach and lets them get away with no punishment for not joining mumble since !reping is the only thing that can be done until the owners of this site decide to start warning and banning people for not following the rules.  I don't see why it would be any easier to !Rep an offclasser given the general "it's only a lobby" attitude of a lot of players on the site.

[R.E.M.]

Maybe as well as having ordinary lobbies we can have a stricter classification of lobbies, similar to a mumble required lobby that has a lot stricter restrictions on what classes you can play. Because the casual lobby style can be fun and interesting, I don't like having cookie cutter lobbies only. So perhaps having both will make everybody happy and it'll also give us, as admins, an excuse to punish people for offclassing "excessively" in these stricter lobbies which I would imagine would operate on the same principles as the IRC mixes.

[TheMattgician]

This really is just part of a bigger problem, which is people don't take lobbies seriously. I don't think anyone should be punished for their play-styles or skill level, because it's against what TF2C is about.

However, if there was another section of TF2C with serious lobbies (with rankings and everything), the these things could be dealt with. This wouldn't happen in the near future, but stuff like the ranking system is being worked on at the moment.

[The Once and Future King]

Maybe as well as having ordinary lobbies we can have a stricter classification of lobbies, similar to a mumble required lobby that has a lot stricter restrictions on what classes you can play. Because the casual lobby style can be fun and interesting, I don't like having cookie cutter lobbies only. So perhaps having both will make everybody happy and it'll also give us, as admins, an excuse to punish people for offclassing "excessively" in these stricter lobbies which I would imagine would operate on the same principles as the IRC mixes.

 

Do you mean punish them the way you do with people who join Mumble lobbies and not mumble?  Which is by doing absolutely nothing about it when they are reported in the ban section?

[R.E.M.]

However, if there was another section of TF2C with serious lobbies (with rankings and everything), the these things could be dealt with. This wouldn't happen in the near future, but stuff like the ranking system is being worked on at the moment.

 

But I think of my idea as a temporary fix to a much longer and more complicated solution. We can work on the ranking system in good time but seperating out lobbies and mixes is an easy thing to do as it can be done in a similar way to the mumble required lobbies (i.e. by just adding some kind of logo/symbol)

 

Do you mean punish them the way you do with people who join Mumble lobbies and not mumble?  Which is by doing absolutely nothing about it when they are reported in the ban section?

 

Actually that's rubbish. I've personnaly banned people for making/joining mumble lobbies and then not joining the correct mumble channel. If you feel the admins aren't banning people who are reported on the forum bans section then I have nothing to do with that and maybe you're right but I've never seen you write an actual complaint/thread about this on the forums so instead of making sarcastic comments maybe you should've made an actual thread about it and tried to help us improve. Heck you could go and find ban threads where you feel that we should've banned them for this and I'll look at them, not that I'm actually allowed to change their status but I'm actually interested in trying to help the site and it's users.

 

Oh and by the way we're still working on a proper way of permenantly enforcing mumble for mumble required lobbies and this is something you should know because you're a member and you can see the threads where we have discussed this in the members section.  You also probably know that we have literally 100s of ideas and bugs to worry about and only 5 part-time developers to do it.

[Kenneth]

We should go get smoothies.

 

I went through the last two pages of ban request archives (yep, I did http://puu.sh/8FZXw.png), and came up with this http://forums.tf2cen...opic/609-radar/

 

I think it warrants discussion, but not here. Please make a post in the members section if you would wish to continue on this conversation. All I would like to say about it is, as a mod, we want to create the best environment for playing some good ol' TF2, and if our members drive a rule change, we can certainly get behind it because they are the people that we nominate to be our eyes and ears of the community. That's half the reason you guys got accepted.

 

Same goes for offclassers, we need you guys to drive that forward or we will just end up going with what "feels right", which can often vary from mod to mod.

[rhK]

IMO there should be be a spitty cfg which is a straight 2 scouts and 2 soldiers. No offclassing allowed. When you join the lobby it is known and thats the end of it. Its an option to play with. Spitty pugs were great because it required team play with the 'proper' 6's class'. No sniper 4k frag movie shit that happens so often. Or engi/pyro/heavy like what happened on my team last week

Its a tickbox that disables other classes in the advanced tab 

[R.E.M.]

IMO there should be be a spitty cfg which is a straight 2 scouts and 2 soldiers. No offclassing allowed. When you join the lobby it is known and thats the end of it. Its an option to play with. Spitty pugs were great because it required team play with the 'proper' 6's class'. No sniper 4k frag movie shit that happens so often. Or engi/pyro/heavy like what happened on my team last week

Its a tickbox that disables other classes in the advanced tab 

 

No pyro/heavy would make it pretty hard to defend some last points like say badlands. We should just allow people to control their own lobbies and if people misbehave then they can be kicked/reported from the lobby and if it keeps happening eventually banned. Mixes lobbies should a much stricter control on offclassing but not an all out blocking of them because that isn't even how proper 6s is played.

[Brisk]

I've noticed from the thread that people don't have a problem with off-classing,  its more of a problem with constant off classing or off-classing in excess.  I think i good way to mitigate part of the problem would be by having the 6s config limit off classes to 1 each.  This would allow for forward-spawning and off-classing as required and hopefully cut down on off-class only defense.

[ninjaMooCow]

Wow this conversation comes up frequently.  IMO frequently enough to do something about it.

 

I wonder if a notice could help.

 

Handrew, I like your idea.  Maybe indicating that, at the leader's discretion, inappropriate offclassing will result in !rep.