Dr. Pea's Weapon Balance Ideas Mk. II

These are all ideas for TF2 weapon balance ideas that I just wanna have somewhere so I can easily organize my thoughts and just to give my general opinion on most items in the game
The Goal here is not to make every weapon completely 100% perfectly equally as good as one another, that's an unrealistic expectation that’s likely not even possible. The goal is to make every weapon viable, fun to use, not too frustrating to fight against, to prevent any avoidable problems, then our work will be done.
Some people have helped me with some of these ideas. Notably my good friends SquimJim 💪, and Oddibee 🐝 they will be credited on ideas they came up with.

All changes here are made with 12v12 casual TF2 in mind primarily. If a weapon isn’t mentioned, assume it is remained unchanged

General Gameplay

Shotguns and Scatterguns
Removed random bullet spread on all Shotgun and Scattergun based weapons.

Reason: Removes an unnecessary randomness factor that has no reason to be in the game

Random Critical Hits
All weapons are now incapable of dealing random critical hits by default

Reason: You know why.

Default settings:

Cl_interp is now set to 0 by default and is locked at this value in all Valve servers
Auto reload is now permanently active at all times

Reason: Simple QOL improvements and prevents anyone from abusing interp in a game.

Capture the Flag:
Successfully capturing the Intelligence briefcase no longer grants critical hits to the capturing team.

Reason: Unnecessary snowball mechanic that punishes the losing team even harsher for losing.

Misc. Gameplay Changes

The “Pass to me!” Voiceline has been replaced by “Sniper!” All classes can use this voiceline.
The Pyro and Engineer now have Payload related voice lines.
All classes now have MvM specific voicelines for events outside of Mannhattan, instead of being exclusive to Soldier, Heavy, Engineer and Medic
All knockback can be airstrafed
Melee weapons will prioritize hitting enemy players over teammates
Holster Penalties now apply until another weapon is fully deployed and ready to fire
Spawning outlines have been disabled and instead show an outline of the current active control point outside of

Versus Saxton Hale mode and Mann vs Machine

Reason: General changes to fix some issues that some weapons might have, and to be able to communicate with your team

Vote Kick System Changes

Vote Kicks will now automatically pass or fail if a majority (60%) of available voters vote Yes or No respectively.
Players will now have to wait 25 seconds after joining the server to be able to call vote kicks (Previously defaulted to 90)
If a player is Vote Kicked from a server more than 15 times in the span of 24 hours, that player will receive a temporary matchmaking ban from Casual, Competitive and Mann vs Machine mode. Ban duration doubles for each repeat offense.
Added an option to restart the current wave in Mann vs. Machine mode
Players vote kicked from Mann vs Machine Mann Up and Boot Camp games are now blacklisted temporarily from that server they were kicked from, being unable to rejoin that server until the Game restarts or finishes.
Vote Kick menu now displays the player's class as well as profile picture.
Vote Kicks can now be called on players on the Spectator team in Mann vs Machine mode

Reason: To be clear, these ideas specifically were made back when the bots were at their peak in early 2024. Since then, the bots have been M.I.A. for a while now, but I still standby all these changes. Both because they're generally very good and improve and cut away the fluff of the vote system, but also can act as a stand in band-aid for when bots get out of hand again.

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