This thread got even worse while I was away.
This shouldn't be a question of personal preference.
It doesn't matter if you think crits, damage spread or cone of fire are unabalanced, unbalancing, cheap, unfair, or stupid, because the game was designed to include them. It doesn't matter if you hate random chance.
It's not a matter of "adding dice to chess", cripes what a terrible analogy. The dice are already in TF2. It's a question of weighting the dice so they always roll seven so long as you are smart enough to roll them at all, which is ridiculous.
At it's core, TF2 is a casual shooting game that benefits from team play. A random crit killing the intel carrier shouldn't matter because your team should be there helping you if at all possible. If a random crit kills you and no one can grab the intel, you were going to die anyway. It's ridiculously foolish to assume anything other than that Valve balances maps with all random effects on -- that's a logical assumption. If you, as a community, wish to make maps that can one day become official, it is in your best interest to follow their example in that regard.
I get mad at this shit all the time. I still don't want to turn off variability.
Again: it doesn't matter if you think crits or cone of fire or damage spread unbalance the game or make it unfair. It simply does not matter one little bit because that's how TF2 is meant to be played. You are not correctly balancing a map if you are not taking into account all the variables and it is impossible to take into account all the variables if you turn them off. Playing a map twice -- once with nothing, again with everything -- is a ridiculous suggestion.
What I see in this thread is people I've never seen posting before advocating for how other people's maps should be tested. This is perhaps the most annoying thing out of all of it.
I don't care what you do, in the end, but I'll always request my maps be played with all random effects because I want to actually make a good map. If anything, people making competitive-oriented maps should be requesting random effects be turned off, not the other way around.