Bird topic: It's not supposed to be common, as it IS powerful, and doesn't need any items to be awesome. You may need a lace if there is a damager going around, but these people need cloak and health are just making stronger. All depends on the map, the enemies, and the players. However, given it only pops up every 3 rounds or so, and you don't need to really buy items in un-crow form, normally you'll have money. Again, it depends on how you play it.

For the last paragraph of your post. Actually, you don't need your team to be winning. One strategy I have, such as on nipperhouse, is to pick a mobile race, such as beast. Get into a good position, such as the basement. Next round, switch to magician, hide in your base. Ult out, wreck chaos from behind and below. Or if you have the bomb, surprise plant. All you need to do is die in a good place, enemy base if they camp, bomb site, tight corridor. Or just a position where you can get them chasing you and pop up right behind them.

Shotgun + abilities. First, one is an ontakedamage, one is an ondeath, so it doesn't matter for those two. One is an on damage, so shotgun works GREAT with levitation. Any ability that triggers on hitting your opponent + shotgun means much higher proc range than what is shown. The Ultimate works decently with the shotgun, since you don't know if there are enemies nearby, but also restricts you from using it while spraying. Would this be OP? Nope. Does it require better gameplay by the Magician? Yup. Then there's also the fact that spawning with a weapon strengthens a class for a few rounds, makes the race stronger when you are losing, so you don't have to buy a weapon/ankh each round and can buy items, or save money for a better class. Would you gain some from having any weapon? Yup. Would you lose some power? That too.

For the clueless, I'm going guess what his reasoning is, leaving out some of the more opinion based reasons. 1. Your comment on my not having played this server/race ect. 2. Not reading/knowing how warden's ability worked, assuming it dealt too little damage. Not sure why you thought it was 3 and not 5. 3. In your spiderman post, not being clear, and sounding like you're using an old tired excuse that we disagree with. 4. Wanting to remove things because you can't use them effectively. 5. Generally making posts without checking if similar things had been said.

Much of this comes down to not knowing the history of the server, and making assumptions based upon other servers. One of these you are solving by making the posts you are making. Probably could have done a little searching to find things out as well. The other comes down to us being unique. We don't have hundreds of races, the disparity in strength of the races isn't that huge, and most where it seems to be is because they are niche races. Our leveling system is different, and some races act differently than on other servers.

Someone really should make a "this is our server's history" post sometime...

For credentials, born in '87, Started computer/board/card gaming in '89, FPS in '93, game testing in '97, programming in 98/99, the number and range of games I've played is large. Not sure when I started playing CS anymore, started playing warcraft mods about a year before CS:S was released. I've also always held "pro" gamers in most games in contempt, as many of them are niche players who need certain rules in place to win, and many can be beaten by unexpected "bad" strategies.