The Button That Broke MVM [TF2]

I knew there was something different about that button. Coming back to the game after half a decade, I remember thinking that you weren't able to do infinite refunds before, but just dismissed it as an imperfect recollection.
Devil's advocate here: I'm sure they know about the problem by now, but when they decided to stop issuing updates, they just left it in to let people rack up thousands of tours with little impediment.

For those who don’t understand when you lose a wave you have the same amount of money that you gained from killing the robots.
If you went to the upgrade station clicked refund. You would have double the money which was insane.

buddy i never EVER buy resistances iits entirely a waste of credits.

lol, i didnt know about this button until i saw that video

I never refunded upgrades because i didnt realy mater

I mainly play scout in mvm and constantly abuse the refund button. Changing my resistances depending on whats coming up by refunding them. It also lets me just swap off scout at the end when money isnt an issue for literally free.

your video aged well as heck because people now found an exploit to refund upgrades infinetly also work at MANN UP just look up infinite money exploit tf2

"when you think of mann vs. machine, chances are that you just joined a casual server and was sniped by multiple bots"

this aged well

They gonna make inf credits a feature now lol.

This video proves that MvM wasn't solely about the loot, which a lot of people don't seem to understand sadly.

To solve the inf refund problem they could have just added a game mode with 1 refund token, hence solving the spectator glitch for inf tokens (as why would you be playing this game mode then?) and keeping the opportunity's for people to mess around or correct their mistakes in inf refund mode. Solving every issue revolving around refunds.

The refunds could be balanced by making all waves have more than one class that is required to counter, and since you can’t refund nor change classes during the wave, this would allow for the fun part of refunding while not breaking the team strategies part of it

Why do you sound like a ia voice?

Oh no, he's doesn't like the gass passer, that means he's a high tour baby

Could balance it by refunding 80% back and/or a cooldown on refunds to only once every 3 rounds or something

Or could give refund opportunity to you if you die x amount of times.

Also when I was a new player, finding a lobby where ppl just rolled the bots was boring af.

I’ve never used the refund button. But only out of pure laziness

Wait, you play with refunds?

Refund is undoubtedly a good mechanic that allows you to have an actual build earlier than without it, end of story.

I thought this video was gonna be about an infinite money glitch

I played MVM a lot in 2014-2015 and everytime I come back to it I'm just left disappointed at how much easier the game has gotten. MvM matches were almost always a game of attrition; constantly losing ground and last stands at the hatch were the norm in lobbies of even competent players. Tanks were more than a nuisance and would normally take two or more players away from the front for extended periods of time because switching to pyro at will wasn't possible. Games usually wouldn't go perfectly unless you had a full lobby of high tours. Now whenever I play most teams almost never lose any ground even without high tours. Infinite upgrades and explode on ignite ruined the fun of MVM. But most people are fine with their mindless loot grinding being made easier, so fuck me I guess.

Honestly... I don't think the refund button is a bad idea!
It's mainly because casual mvm players have NO fucking clue what the waves are like.
You're only told what will appear before it appears, and during a wave, you are completely blind to what's ahead to kill you.
Not everyone is a god at mvm and knows everything about every wave in every mission for every difficulty.

I very specifically remember the days when refund tokens were a thing. Then years after, I played MvM with a few friends. They asked me if they should refund, and I told them not to waste their refund token. Then they told me that they could just refund all they wanted, and I was immediately confused. With that revelation, we beat the whole thing easily.

skill issue

you guys need to refund to win mvm ?

No wonder pretty much all high tours are pdf files. They had everything they love taken from them and they have nothing to lose.

bruh why didnt they just make refunds cost credits?

Even before refund tokens there was the dark magic of... Somebody leaving the game and a fresh player joining in. Got full unspent credits

I don't mind it being removed, seriously I don't find it fun thinking that much in fps game.

In tactical shooters or team building games like GO or Xcom I agree it's needed, but MvM being so skill based for almost no reward is just... So bad. I also assume lowering skill base made aussies and other mvm items more common aka less bs expensive.

Also also if you want challenge you can play potato tf or moonlight tf for extra challenge, they have nutty hard missions

I guess I'm a bit split on this, because, you make a great argument about the initial design being based around a trade off system sort of, with you sacrificing either current or future survivability in order to have a bit of easier time against a wave that's dominated by a specific damage type, but, that form of it also feels like you'd either need to know each and every wave like back of your hand in order to potentially not permanently handicap yourself for something you didn't know would happen (like pyros only in the first wave like you showed in disk deletion) or, potentially more likely, need to do a bunch of research ahead of time, which I think many would dislike having to do, along with, as others have made mention of, basically locking you into a class an entire mission if you don't want to use the strategy you make mention of with your example about spy

(Though, this is coming from someone who joined long after two cities came out, so, I have zero experience with the pre-refund system)

I remember getting yelled about me buying upgrades that werent good when mvm first came out and there was no refund button lmao

seeing this, I had an idea about it, at the beginning of a mission you have a limited quantity of refund tokens you can use throughout the wave, whether you have the same number of refund tokens as waves, allowing you to optimize the entire mission, or you had exactly one or even 0 throughout the mission. With math set up so that if you typed "retry" in the console, it would calculate the number of tokens you should have being "mission credit # - current wave # + 1", and your loadout and upgrades being saved to the server after wave 1 so you couldn't just "retry" to remove those upgrades even if you had no tokens.
This would allow the easy missions to still be easy, with the difficult missions either going for absolute spam but with a large amount of refunds so your refunds have to count to make it through the mission, or have minimal refunds so you have to think about what you should upgrade per wave, like how mvm originally was.
An option to either allow infinite refunds or to make them sparse or nonexistent would spice up how future missions would be made.

What I hate about MvM is that people immediately give up and leave if there is a single second of actual challenge that faces them.
Every (most) game is always just a boring snooze fest of just watching bots die .1 second after they enter the area.

This isn't an issue of the refund being OP but of the missions being too easy.

10 years later, mvm players still find ways to cry about their gamemode

The refund button didn't break the mode. Having to 100% stick with your upgrades would just punish you for not being clairvoyant. "Oh, what's that? You put two points in fire resist for a wave of pyros? That sucks. This round is crit soldiers. Enjoy not having those 300 points for the rest of match. Those were the last pyros btw."

I feel like the obvious solution is to have refunds not work for last round's upgrades. I thought of that in like ten minutes but Valve hasn't thought of that in eleven years.

Who the fuck told you mvm originally didn’t have upgrade

I’ve never used the refund button(because I didn’t notice it), I run bigger bazoka soldier and focus on reload upgrades first, and I it’s still fun to play even though it really is just a button masher

I didn't even know there was a refund button lol

Refunds honestly feel like a non-issue, if not better for MvM as a whole. I would never in my life touch a gamemode where not perfectly researching every single wave and coordinating with complete randoms (which is nigh impossible most of the time) led to getting softlocked out of progressing further than halfway through the mode. That sounds less like a “difficult to master” game mode and more like downright masochism.

what if they only added the refund feature to bootcamp

Rip MVM balance

Also I miss when people played mvm and not just mann up

This is true even in Uber Upgrades MvM, only exception is that you're more overpowered and you're more likely to have a soldier who has a nuke launcher. (Referring to being a specialist class)