14 days of TF2

14 years ago

Ok, as promised here is the follow up to my 7 days of TF2 thread.

— Before I start, I’d like to just say a few things. I don’t cheat. I was hoping that by doing this I’d attract more comp CSS/COD4 players and I am not doing it for the attention. 99% of my playtime has been in the last 14 days, everything before (trying on a friends account, free weekends) was negligible. —

The evening before I posted my 7 days thread one of my longest gaming companions Greg (of twistedplay) headed off on holiday for a week. I met Greg through the TwistedPlay organisation when its only claim to fame was operating a small series of Counter Strike Source public servers and have since played almost every title under the sun with him. It was how much he enjoyed the past few months of playing comp TF2 that drew me to it. I think his last message to me when he left was something like ‘dont be bad when i get back’.

I threw up the thread the next morning and was really suprised at the response. Despite all the flame I had quite a few teams and players contact me which was really nice because it gave me more contacts than just the population of the TwistedPlay mumble to mix with. This allowed me to play in more skill brackets, both lower and higher, than I had done in the previous week, and allowed me to much better benchmark my performance.

Playing alongside better players I noticed a few things.

Firstly medics are not all born equal, or near equal. The medics i played with from higher divisions were vastly superior to those of the lower divisions or those that didn’t main medic. Being constantly buffed and not having to prompt the medic to do it makes your life so much easier, and the cosmetic effect of being buffed appeared to make me a lot more threatening to the opposition and reduce pressure on me.

Secondly, the better teams seemed to keep constant pressure on the enemy team and almost think two push/hold decisions ahead rather than deciding when they got to a choke point. This really changed the style I had to play with because it gave me much less time to play my own little micro game and forced me to play as part of the team a lot more.

Some people may not agree with me here however from what I can tell, better scouts are easier to hit. I found that the higher the opposition was rated, the greater my accuracy was against them. I have a number of theories for this, it could be because the the less you concentrate on your movement 1v1 the easier it is too aim, and when your aim very solid it makes more sense to prioritise it over movement. It could also be because the ideal movement for a scout 1v1 actually makes them very vulnerable to other classes assisting, think scouts that use lots of almost stationary shuffling from side to side. This is not to say good scouts don’t have great movement, just that they choose to use it very situationally because focussing on two meatshots in quick succesion is generally going to be much more lethal. Little example, I found this scout on DM yesterday who was almost impossible to hit, he was almost always jumping fowards and backwards, swinging about with a high sensitivity, and moving in an absolutely unpredictable pattern. And yet the overall result when we clashed was us both running away, I could hardly hit him, and he couldn’t hit me because his screen must have been a blur. As being able to kill things is much more useful than being almost harmless but unhittable he didn’t have a lot going for him competitively and when i checked him out he was very much in div6.

I have spent a huge amount of my time in deathmatch this week, mainly due to being invited to play with some quite highly thought of players and fearing being completely out of my depth aim wise. I have felt it noticably improve to the point where I have a lot more confidence going 1v1 with a soldier. When I first started I always steered well clear of soldiers 1v1 and had to be reassured that if two equally skilled players matched up solly vs scout on flat terrain the soldier should win. However the more I play the more I see those often fleeting situations when as a scout you have the edge. I assumed initially that the best way to 1v1 a soldier was from distance, the sort of range you can land four good shots for 50-60. However it would appear I was very wrong, seems to me now that actually standing at point blank range (preferably behind them for obvious reasons) gives you much better odds. At point blank range, every class bar heavy is effectively the same, two-shottable. When you appear in a soldiers face they just fire rockets straight forwards, assuming equal reaction time you should end up killing the solly before he brings out the second rocket (which even if fired probs ends up killing both of you anyway). Also comboed with a strafe around them or a quickstrafe each way you can normally make them fire a rocket parralel to the floor thats not actually going to pose anyone a threat. This situation seems to occur loads in matches and practicing close range fights with sollys in DM i now end up getting a majority of my kills from them rather than the scouts/demo/sniper.

Natascha heavies have continued to annoy me.

Also this week I’ve began to found some consistancy, last week and earlier this week I could play very well, very average or very badly, it didn’t make a big difference how skilled the opposition were. However I’m beginning to be able to consistantly dominate lobbys, which is fun. I think maybe that is because my knowledge of the wider game; where the enemy mass is likely to be, where the scouts are likely to be etc, has developed a fair bit. I was tempted to raise my sensitivity but resisted to try and protect this.

I finally got round to sorting out my Q auth and getting a pixelpickup invite confirmed by my beloved dougie so i think this next week is going to focus on playing pickups and hopefully getting people to rage at my for my positioning, my major weakness at the moment.

Playing higher skilled opposition this week I didn’t get quite enough highlights to make a video. But I’ve uploaded a few demos which anyone actually interested in can watch, they are obviously some of my better games of the week and whilst they contain occasional fail it is not quite as great as in other games I played.

Some russians, dunno if they are very good but I felt I played quite well paticuarly further on in the demo:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10944304/arcy_badlands_russians.dem

And this one is of a lobby and whilst the players involved are obviously not very good, it meant a lot to me because it was one of the first games where i felt at the end that i had contributed much more than just my 1/6th despite spending the first 5 minutes getting used to fighting scouts with 300 ping.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10944304/arcy_badlands_lobby.dem

Thankyou for reading :)

Thanks to:
Cobby
Toby
Dougie
Greg
Inuy
Sam
Vaz
Sponge
Dan
Josh
Jabba
wOllie
Swifty
antyy
Morphine
Ben
Steve
fainT
lofty
Stark
woody
ghent
Nitro
Ed
adam
WildCard
Gambles (chooser of breakfasts)
seb
subwaye
and everyone who doesnt flame me