I don't plan on responding on every forum so I'll just make a general post here, if other people want answers they can come to our forum. I'm sorry for any spelling and grammatical errors. I looked over it 3 times and had a friend go over it as well, i wanted to get it out before any word of the next class update which i have a feeling is coming pretty soon. A little rushed and some mistakes here and there, my bad. The audience is meant for everyone including valve. As for the attitude its written in, i wrote it like a post. It comes off a bit arrogant and I do take jabs at players, im not going to deny that. Thats the the problem of saying somethings wrong because of skill. Will i not be taken as seriously? Maybe... but it needed to be said and remember its players themselves that made this mod, not some guy that had a doctors in game design.
I specifically avoided extended talk about each class. If i wanted to do an in-depth look at each class, each weapon and their match-up with every other class we would be looking at an incredibly long paper that would look more like the art of war than anything. I do a quick overview at what each class should be able to do and how their unlocks are or should be created to help that. I said it multiple times in the paper that you shouldn't specially look at the unlocks but what it does to the class, yet people are constantly making that mistake. Its more of me pointing in the right direction than giving you a road map.
Lastly, yea i wanted to avoid competitive vs. casual in most of the paper but its still showing to be the main topic. I avoided most of the topics such as crits, random damage, class limits and map preference because that would require alot more writing and would cause so much uproar no one would look at the rest of it. I said it in the paper but if competitive play constantly gets hate then i can write something about it but not now. Honestly, the biggest part of the paper is the size and that alone gets alot of people, including valve, to read it.
Edit: I missed some questions. The needle gun would add an extra 2-3hp/sec on top of the current 3hp/sec. I would have made each unlock elegant if it were possible, I'd love to just say 'bam this is the solution" but thats not going to happen. @warning for the comment on me praising the huntsman and shunning the FaN. The fan is simply a downgrade of the scatter to me, its always better to run over someone with 6 shots then kill/wound a guy and then have to reload. The huntsman can replace the rifle if the team changes its flow. Does 120 damage uncharged so scouts that take a small blast are dead from a single body hit, it still headshots but takes a different mindset. I used it once in a scrim and managed to take out 2 players with the team and then cleaned up 3 more alone when everyone was dead. It can work in matches, the problem is that snipers aren't ran that often and a team doesn't want to change things up for such a rare occasion of running a sniper and a huntsman. We shouldn't confuse what can happen with what teams make happen. Hope i cleared that up a little bit.