TF2 is not competitive, never was and never will be. Balancing should never be done around this tiny minority that consists of not even 1% of the player base, their formats and various half-measures and alterations to the base game. TF2 is casual, but that doesn't mean anything goes.

Balancing is done for the minority of the community (not to be confused with the comp minority) that actually understands it and can detect its flaws, find solutions and filter out the bad ones. The rest is content with whatever, as is evident by them happily consuming the slop Valve left to fester since 2017.

Everything is based on punishment and reward. For someone to get rewarded, someone else must get punished. An unfair punishment hurts more than a fair one and an unearned reward doesn't feel as good as an earned one. Achieving this is crucial and this is why we balance.

For this reason, the vast majority of mechanics which operate on randomness should be removed. Precisely none of them make this a game of imperfect information like poker. This is a game of a thousand variables of which you can only see a few at a time and process even less. You have to make split-second decisions all the time and time to think is a luxury most actions don't get. You cannot account for the variance in shotgun damage because of random pellet spread, random crits, fall damage and so on and so forth.

Movement is crucial and is as important, if not more, than even the concept of cover. Most weapons are very hit or miss by design, short-medium range, a lot of them fire projectiles, and rockets even benefit from having high ground. This makes dodging very effective and staying on the move integral for gameplay. There exist weapons and mechanics with the sole purpose of inhibiting movement. This mechanic cannot be done well as it is far too dependent on map geometry, tide of battle, affected class, affected player's skill level and many other things. Many bad compromises have been made for this purpose, and as such, movement-inhibiting weapons should be removed.

Lingering effects are something that's been very poorly done. All DoT effects inhibit aiming, which has similar issues as inhibiting movement. The other effects are used pretty much exclusively for revealing spies. Spy is a weak class as is, and lingering damage is easy enough to balance as direct damage, so lingering effects should be majorly cut down on.

What mostly determines how viable a weapon is is how it performs against an opponent of equal skill, taking into account the alternatives. A common faulty argument is that a weapon is good because a good player can use it effectively in a low-skill setting. To keep the weapon's power in check, it should be comparable to other weapons in its slot, and the comparison with the most weight is with the alternative most seen used; when balancing a medic melee, you don't look at the bone saw, you look at the uber saw.

Most weapons perform damage in bursts. When all it takes to kill is 2-3 bursts, damage thresholds are both extremely important and extremely limiting. Grenades losing 1% damage has more impact than them gaining 24%. Changes to thresholds, if at all present, are always massive and very hard to justify. As such, changing damage of these weapons should be avoided.

High RoF weapons don't have relevant thresholds, so damage changes can be applied far more liberally. It's common to see in community balancing damage changes often paired with RoF changes, where one goes up and the other goes down, and they always conflict and cancel each other out partly or completely. This is pointless and clutters the stats display. What matters is DPS, and that goes up or down with either stat individually.

A crutch weapon is one that rewards more / punishes less bad players than good ones. Every other weapon is a crutch to some degree, and that can only begin being an issue when taken to an extreme. Backburner and l'etranger are proper crutches, but only the former is problematic because it directly rewards you with damage while diminishing your ability to extinguish teammates.

What differentiates a class shooter from a hero shooter is the number of characters. We all like TF2 as a class shooter, even though it's not far from a hero shooter with how many classes it has. Weapons have a similar effect to having more classes, and TF2 has a lot of weapons. Weapons should be unique and not blur class lines, and many fail at that.

Weapons with accumulation mechanics are problematic in that they tend to punish the wrong player - accumulation gained on one player can be used on an other. If possible, the accumulation should be limited in some way.

150+ weapons have been tried and tested, some for as long as 18 years. We know what works, when it works and hopefully why it works. It's best to keep changes in line and restrict them so they resemble something already in the game. Crazy, transformative ideas could work, but it's impossible to have a discussion with 50 ifs and 30 hypotheticals.

It's very much possible to balance the fun out of things, the best example being matchmaking. Implementing a system that tracks some score, and exclusively puts you in servers with player which match your skill (not considering the issues of even making such system possible), would create a competitive environment, and that is not TF2. Such system introduces a component of progression, making players take the objective much more seriously, play overall more seriously and gravitate towards certain weapons, which would have a snowball effect of making other players do the same. Imbalance of player skill to be found in a server is a core attribute of the game as much as the nine classes are.

Multiplayer shooters tend to have low time to kill. TF2 is very unique in that regard because the vast, vast majority of damage sources cannot kill in one shot. The game goes so far with this that there's only one example of a non-sniper weapon which can headshot, and even that one is incapable of one-shotting anyone unless they're running the kunai. That said, sniper and spy defy this high TtK rule. Sniper's way of doing it is very free and unrestricted, and is as such an incredibly controversial class. Spy's way of doing it is heavily restricted, but it still does pose problems, however, sniper is so much more problematic that they're typically not discussed. Adding low TtK weapons and mechanics should be avoided and doing anything with them should be restricted to established examples.



For more specifics and examples, go to Astyl's profile (profoundly evil man) and look for the balance file (TF2 Rectified). If you see anything wrong or disagree, feel free to comment.

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