Official Team Fortress 2 Thread

[MatDef]

Sometimes we have a little too much fun.



Edit: I also found this, some of these I've never heard before:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGLgbHNZJVI

 

[acidic]

Ever had the biggest 'OH SHIt' moment?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RE0blCV84

 

[l3ender]

Ha, I like that.

 

[spotpuff]

I agree with you spotpuff, almost 100%.

The Pyro seems good in combat now which is nice but this whole "flame you once and leg it while you burn to death" bollocks has to stop. Everytime I run into a Pyro and kick his ass I never have enough time to quite make it back to health or water, or even a medic.

The flames burn for too long, they need to burn for 1/2 the time so that only if you're on 1/3 health or less will fire kill you on it's own, the pyro needs to do some work on you with a shotgun or something to make up for it, if they dont want to do that then at least remove 25 health from the pyro, considering his speed and damage up close he really needs to be a bit weaker, sometimes 3 well placed rockets isn't enough to take one down, vs the soldier is left close quaters with only a shotgun left, kinda pathetic.

On the more general note of the lack of offensive players, I agree, this is a massive gameplay breaking problem. Motivating a team to actually push foward and attack is like a 2nd job, I don't want to have to teach the basic gameplay mechanics to my team everytime I join a server, people just don't ever risk a decent push unless they're likely to survive the encounter. This means decent pushes only ever happen where the teams are stacked one way, this results in 2 things, stalemates, or total dominations, niether are desireable.

Sudden death HAS TO GO, I've been in so many decent matches where it's been a struggle push backwards/forwards and we've finally got them down to the last point and victory is just within our grasp but then YAY sudden death pops up and now we reset the whole damn game only to spend 3-4 minutes in a round where everyone camps and no one attacks simply because no one wants to spend 3 minutes spectating the match, it's boring as hell.

That's a good point about sudden death as well; the way it's been implemented encourages turtling. You can give up the first capture on well as long as you turtle at point B. I don't mind gravel pit as it is asymmetric, but well is a symmetric map with no inherent advantages or disadvantages for either team. But because sudden death doesn't care if you have captured any CPs and will reset the game, there is still 0 incentive to push forward at all. "Winning" would normally be an incentive but again in pub games no one gets that. So it ends up being a huge turtle fest. You can be on the last CP and then sudden death hits and it doesn't even matter; in fact the 2nd last CP in well has inherent advantages to the turtle team so there's no incentive to go in there and get your ass handed to you. It's a far more imbalanced defensive point than the mid point of well.

And yeah, pyros are so annoying.

One minor gripe for me is the way they seem to have assigned class roles. Pyros are NOT an offensive class. They never were. Their flamethrower is a short range weapon and they rely on corners to surprise people, light them up and run away. But for whatever reason pyros are grouped on offense. The lack of a strong ranged weapon is what hurts them here, and even in TF1 the napalm rocket launcher thing was extremely weak against sentries. But why the pyro is grouped into offense instead of defense is beyond me; the best use of a pyro is on defense to soften up the enemy team's offense so they're very weak getting to the flag (unless there's a medic). In TF1 it made more sense since you couldn't feasibly get armor back on offense but with the lack of armor in TF2 medics means a medic perfectly counters a pyro in most situations except the medic will be almost dead in a group fight.

Hopefully they're working on it, but I find it hard to imagine how the original TF1 team working at Valve could seemingly get things so wrong. Every map seems to be defensive oriented with only 1 or 2 choke points the offensive team can go through to get across the mid point. I don't mind chokes in the base, that's necessary for defense, but a soldier has to lose 20-25% of their health to get around those in 2fort and there are 0 ways around it on other maps. On Hydro, there's the one TC fight where you have to go through the mid rocky part with the large fissure in it and capture the satellite dish and pyros/demo spam completely rule that area not to mention hwguy/medic. Soldiers can't shoot around corners so you get stomped if you decide to try one.

While there are flaws in the game, I still have fun playing. It doesn't hold the same feeling as TF1 did with its clunky graphics and mechanics (bunny hopping... axing people to heal them) but it fun. I just feel like it could be so much more.

 

[Direwolf20]

It's a great game, but yes, Pyro's suck.

Last night I went up against one as an engineer, and I shotgunned him a few times. He flamed me down to 70~ health, and then I slowly ticked down to death running around looking for a medpack. Nothing. Dead.

I think 70~ is a bit excessive.

 

[Roufuss]

It's a great game, but yes, Pyro's suck.

Last night I went up against one as an engineer, and I shotgunned him a few times. He flamed me down to 70~ health, and then I slowly ticked down to death running around looking for a medpack. Nothing. Dead.

I think 70~ is a bit excessive.

Just use a dispenser to get your health back, eventually the flames do stop after a time, or maybe I just imagined it.

 

[spotpuff]

They do, but yeah if you're not near your disp you're screwed. Then again an eng should always be near their disp!

I think the problem exists more due to the fact that it encourages turtling; though, TC_hydro has one point where there's health packs soon after the mid chokes, so it's not horrid, but on maps like 2fort if you get lit up you are pretty much dead. It would be nice if the duration of the burn was linked to how many flames you actually got hit with instead of just being set; you get hit with 1 flame and you burn for 40.

 

[Martyr]

pyro is offensive because of what a medic + pyro can do.

also, to make people charge, lead from the front. nothing like taking a soldier and just running straight down the enemies throat.

 

[spotpuff]

Against a turtle team that just tends to get you killed, though.

Pyro/medic tends not to fare as well as medic/heavy due to limited HP and the fact that a pyro has to wade into harm's way to do damage; medics can hide behind a heavy but if a pyro runs in then you have to run in with them to heal, which likely results in both of your deaths.

I try to lead the charge, and I usually lead in points, but that doesn't win the game, completing the objective does. And completing the objective as the only offensive minded person is hard, as a lot of people have already attested too.

If there is an [H] group/server that would be great : )

 

[Direwolf20]

Just use a dispenser to get your health back, eventually the flames do stop after a time, or maybe I just imagined it.

This was before I had a chance to drop a dispenser...and I can't really just drop it anywhere. I usually try to put things in decent spots.

I play the offensive Engy. I go up to the front lines, and drop a teleporter exit, dispenser, and turrent. The teleporter entrance is at our spawn point. This way everyone who dies runs out of the spawn, hops onto the teleporter pad, and is right back into the battle.

 

[WesM63]

To be honest, i haven't played many different classes, but I love pyro.

You can always tell when a pyro's coming because everyone on your team is running backwards shooting franticly.. then you see 1 or 2 more running around yelling for a medic while on fire.

 

[Monkey God]

This was before I had a chance to drop a dispenser...and I can't really just drop it anywhere. I usually try to put things in decent spots.

I play the offensive Engy. I go up to the front lines, and drop a teleporter exit, dispenser, and turrent. The teleporter entrance is at our spawn point. This way everyone who dies runs out of the spawn, hops onto the teleporter pad, and is right back into the battle.

Offensive engy's are critical sometimes to break stubborn defenses.
2 sets of teleports, dispensers and sentries make a good jump off point/fall back for an attack.

Many of the maps have areas setup for just that purpose with the one way doors.

 

[markt435]

so i went into TF2 today and found 32 player servers back in the list. anyone else notice?

had me some spammy fun on dustbowl

 

[Slade]

my only complaint about TF2 now is that it NEEDS MORE MAPS.

I've gotten offense and defense down to an art, all you need is at least 1 other person that knows their roles and you can really wreak havoc by carefully watching the scoreboard for deaths and failed group assault attempts. One team softens them up, another mops them up and goes for the objective, while scrambling back the mop up team holds their own and gets reinforced until the soften team returns and effectively dominates.

On the defense, a set of engineers with a pyro, demo or heavy can really defend fairly well. The engineers can turtle while the heavy and pyro can spray. The demo works great because he can drop the stickies in the doorways which only make the turrets job even easier.

 

[spotpuff]

so i went into TF2 today and found 32 player servers back in the list. anyone else notice?

had me some spammy fun on dustbowl

Someone posted the files you need to do this on Digg apparently. I don't know why valve didn't want 32 person servers, though after joining one I can see why: it was a total spam fest and people were running all over the place.

It makes defense very tough the more people you have; I was having a field day as a sniper and spy though and I usually suck at those classes, but the more people there are running around the better those classes tend to do.

 

[saan44]

Someone posted the files you need to do this on Digg apparently. I don't know why valve didn't want 32 person servers, though after joining one I can see why: it was a total spam fest and people were running all over the place.

It makes defense very tough the more people you have; I was having a field day as a sniper and spy though and I usually suck at those classes, but the more people there are running around the better those classes tend to do.

I understand valve's reasoning behind blacklisting the 32 slot servers, but at the same time, I don't really understand why it was a big enough issue to warrant such a move. I think valve did a great job balancing the game the maps work supremely well with 24 people in them. That said, if some people want to play in the mayhem of a 32 slot server, more power to them. I just won't be one of them. It's not like they're hard to avoid in the server browser.

 

[Slade]

ohhh time for some 32 player mayham

 

[whrswoldo]

Ever had the biggest 'OH SHIt' moment?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RE0blCV84

Fucking awesome. Best TF:2 video ever.

 

[Mansize_tissue]

I tried searching, but it may have come up before: I was wondering, why do some people have their name as "NULLNAME"? When I was playing earlier, I realised that I was called NULLNAME for some reason, and I have no idea why.

 

[Zick]

Were you by chance a spy in disguise? I read that when a spy is disguised as a member of the opponent team you will also take the name of a member on that team of the same class. But if your a class that the enemy does not have, you will get a random name.

 

[jmackay]

I tried searching, but it may have come up before: I was wondering, why do some people have their name as "NULLNAME"? When I was playing earlier, I realised that I was called NULLNAME for some reason, and I have no idea why.

Were you by chance a spy in disguise? I read that when a spy is disguised as a member of the opponent team you will also take the name of a member on that team of the same class. But if your a class that the enemy does not have, you will get a random name.

No, you will still get a name from their team, just a random team member.

I think what he is talking about is a bug where your assigned name from the steam community can't be retreived, so it gives you the generic one.

 

[acidic]

No, you will still get a name from their team, just a random team member.

I think what he is talking about is a bug where your assigned name from the steam community can't be retreived, so it gives you the generic one.

I think when you disguise as a class that the enemy do not have, you will get the name of whoever checks you. So it would be a dead giveaway

 

[jmackay]

I think when you disguise as a class that the enemy do not have, you will get the name of whoever checks you. So it would be a dead giveaway

It just randomly assigns you the name of one person from their team.

 

[jaegertech]

Anybody else notice that matches on pubs seem to go one of three ways?

Engie Porn: Each team is at least one third engineers, sometimes better than half, and little things like being on offense do nothing to change this ratio. Progress is nearly impossible as your offense will undoubtedly be missing at least one critical class and the combination of lots of turrets and close enemy respawns will eventually mousetrap you.

Blowout: One team is vastly better than the other and sticks together map change after map change. Because one team is so much better, nobody who can help turn the tide is going to stick around long enough to help turn the tide. Often enough, a blowout is the result of a good team vs a group of turtles.

A goddamned brilliant game: Teams have a good balance of skill and classes. You'll find a medic healing you without having to run about screaming for him. The teleport will actually be deployed and lead to a spot with a bit of cover. Offense and defense will mass at critical locations. You'll see disappointing stalemates and sudden deaths occasionally, but getting there is damned fun.

Now, one thing I've noticed, and I do believe it is causal, is that I have never seen a really good game where there were more than two engies on a twelve man team. I really don't like to think about what this might do to my life, but after the turtles get bored and go back to Starcraft, I think this game might actually get BETTER!

 

[LawGiver]

lmao i tried demo for first time last night and damn, i thought the pyro was kinda cheap but demo takes the cake. its SOOOO easy getting kills with the demo man. i dont even have to be close to my targets and sticky bombs will take care of them. anyone that dared take ground from me my sticky bombs were waiting for them. throw nades/stickies, take cover, press alt fire, rinse and repeat. its just ridiculous.

 

[whrswoldo]

lmao i tried demo for first time last night and damn, i thought the pyro was kinda cheap but demo takes the cake. its SOOOO easy getting kills with the demo man. i dont even have to be close to my targets and sticky bombs will take care of them. anyone that dared take ground from me my sticky bombs were waiting for them. throw nades/stickies, take cover, press alt fire, rinse and repeat. its just ridiculous.

Truth. Pyro in this iteration isn't even comparable with pyro in TFC. I always loved seeing free kills-- I mean pyros-- in TFC.

It seems like I've been playing pyro a lot more on defense than offense, depending on the level. Nothing pushes back an enemy advance like an ubered pyro.

 

[Blackstone]

The best is yet to come for this game. I just played a few custom maps for the first time and there is no doubt that there is going to be no shortage of awesome maps to play, especially capture the flag. The two I played were Turbine and Stronghold and both were a blast.

I think the maps that were included with the game are really just the tip of the iceberg.

 

[acidic]

yea pyro totally dominate spies. If i get annoyed with spies, i roll pyro and burn the living crap out of everything and the thin air.

 

[Sobek]

I just started playing tonight since I've been playing Portal (x2) ,Ep2, and Minerva: Metastasis mod. I love it! I was playing and got so caught up I didn't realise 3 hours had gone by. I can't play UT2K4 that long without my eyes getting very tired from all the particle effects. Pyro and demo are my favs right now.

 

[Frosteh]

Pyro and demo are my favs right now.

I love the taunts for these guys, the Pyro just seems like a complete maniac, I burn a room clean often killing 3-4 people and then just do the taunt where he holds his flamethrower above his head and shouts, it's great. Also...

KA-beeeeeeeeeeeeewm!!

 

[spotpuff]

Was on a 32 player server last night where one team decided to go total turtle fest. It was extremely frustrating.

Their defensive setup was two sentries right at the base entrance; one on the top of the grating on the 2nd floor one at the mouth of the "L" junction. They had 1 more sentry in the ramp room on the top floor outside the respawn, then 2 wandering pyros, 2 demos sticky bombing the bridge and spamming the front area of the base (where the two ramps are) with grenades, 1 demo at the front to sticky bomb the entrance and 2 more snipers. There were still 6 more people too I just have no clue what they were doing.

Needless to say it was incredibly frustrating. We won via caps eventually but it was absolutely ridiculous. I shot a sentry with 3 crit rockets in a row and it wouldn't go down; not to mention the grenade/pyro spam made clustering to go in as a team impossible. I tried going spy but due to the turtling, and heavy spy checking, one spy check from the 4 or 5 people around would mean death, and a pyro would light you up. The sheer number of people meant that going invisible would result in you running into someone most of the time, who would then start to shoot randomly in the air and cause their whole turtling team to shoot wildly around until you were dead.

Frustrating!

The worst parts were the demos piping the bridge and the entrance and the sentry guns basically holding everyone off. Simple fix is make sentry guns not block splash damage so the engineer dies if he's hammering away at it to fix it; he shouldn't be able to hold off soldiers indefinitely while he stands behind the gun and whacks at it until you die from 2 bullet hits per rocket.

 

[Mansize_tissue]

spotpuff, what map was that you were playing?

 

[Frosteh]

Anybody else notice that matches on pubs seem to go one of three ways?

Engie Porn: Each team is at least one third engineers, sometimes better than half, and little things like being on offense do nothing to change this ratio. Progress is nearly impossible as your offense will undoubtedly be missing at least one critical class and the combination of lots of turrets and close enemy respawns will eventually mousetrap you.

Blowout: One team is vastly better than the other and sticks together map change after map change. Because one team is so much better, nobody who can help turn the tide is going to stick around long enough to help turn the tide. Often enough, a blowout is the result of a good team vs a group of turtles.

A goddamned brilliant game: Teams have a good balance of skill and classes. You'll find a medic healing you without having to run about screaming for him. The teleport will actually be deployed and lead to a spot with a bit of cover. Offense and defense will mass at critical locations. You'll see disappointing stalemates and sudden deaths occasionally, but getting there is damned fun.

Now, one thing I've noticed, and I do believe it is causal, is that I have never seen a really good game where there were more than two engies on a twelve man team. I really don't like to think about what this might do to my life, but after the turtles get bored and go back to Starcraft, I think this game might actually get BETTER!

Starting to think a truly good game in TF2 is a near impossibility.

I find one of the following tends to happen.

1) One team turtles with engineers everywhere, opposing team lacks coordination enough to destroy 4-5 turrets and can never win, the first team doesn't have enough offensive classes to make progress, match ends in stalemate.

2) Balanced game, these are the best games, but while they last...because of the small time limits, it doesn't give a balanced server time enough for one team to eventually push back and win, and it goes through to sudden death despite that fact that one team would probably win eventually they just need another 5-10 minutes.

3) Lop sided, one team is awesome, one team is terrible, no one ever swaps, round ends fast and instead of there being a re-jig of players to make sure the next round is more interesting, the same boring ass round is played out again. Losers get crushed, winners have no real challenge.

More often than not, 1 and 3 crop up, every now and again you hit a 2 bang on the nose and it's a great fight with lots of back and forth, recapping that valuable middle point, Hydro battles going back and forth...but eventually the time runs out and sudden death hits and you can't help but feel the entire 15-20 minutes was a massive waste of everyones time as sudden death seems to almost always end in stalemate.

The big problem here is team balance, in other games a single decent player (ie someone with a score of 120 when others have scores of 20-30) can help pull the team up, unfortunately with such massive respawn times (relative to small maps) it means that the good players can make a difference (take down a turret, kill a medic/HWG combo) but if the team isn't smart enough to take advantage of that then by the time you're alive and back on the playing field the enemys are all setup and ready to go.

With little to no respawn time I can get my ass back out there as a scout 100mph across the map, find the engineer who's licking his wounds and re-building his base BEFORE he gets a level 3 turret set up, and can actually take advantage of my previous actions.

With a good 20 seconds spawn and 20+ seconds to the front line, engineers get chance to rebuild, essentially as soon as you die it's like a big red flashing reset button, you know by the time you're back in the fray that your previous actions (destroying turrets, poking holes in good defences etc) have all been setup.

Unfortunately team work is just coincidental, it's just a case of what players are on what team, you can give your team all the chances you like and sometimes they just WILL NOT TAKE THEM, it's about the most frustrating thing on earth....you're like....yeah guys...just removed 4 turrets ON MY OWN, could you at least start moving foward now, and you respawn and not one of them has made it onto the CP...

As much as I dislike the idea, if Im going to keep playing this game it's probably going to have to be a clan, I just get too frustrated.

And for those who say "its just a game" and "you dont have to win"...I agree, but the problem is, with a bad team, the good players are left more or less alone on the front line, which means as an individual experience you feel like you're fighting the better part of the enemies whole offensive side, which is a lot to expect from any 1-2 players.

 

[spotpuff]

spotpuff, what map was that you were playing?

2forts. I miss nail grenades.

 

[ServerKing]

Does anyone have good links on how to change my fov and other cfg tweaks for this game?

 

[Frosteh]

it's...

desired_fov #

where the # is a number I think 90 max and god knows what the min is.

 

[spotpuff]

it's...

desired_fov #

where the # is a number I think 90 max and god knows what the min is.

Min is 75 which I believe is the default as well.

 

[six_storm]

I hate being a spy because there is always that one Pyro you can't avoid that always does "spy checks". Makes me so mad!

 

[Citizen86]

Maybe we should start an [H] clan, just casually, not necessarily clan battles or anything, but I think we have enough good players here that we could mostly populate one side of a server and kick some ass

 

[whrswoldo]

Starting to think a truly good game in TF2 is a near impossibility.

I find one of the following tends to happen.

1) One team turtles with engineers everywhere, opposing team lacks coordination enough to destroy 4-5 turrets and can never win, the first team doesn't have enough offensive classes to make progress, match ends in stalemate.

2) Balanced game, these are the best games, but while they last...because of the small time limits, it doesn't give a balanced server time enough for one team to eventually push back and win, and it goes through to sudden death despite that fact that one team would probably win eventually they just need another 5-10 minutes.

3) Lop sided, one team is awesome, one team is terrible, no one ever swaps, round ends fast and instead of there being a re-jig of players to make sure the next round is more interesting, the same boring ass round is played out again. Losers get crushed, winners have no real challenge.

More often than not, 1 and 3 crop up, every now and again you hit a 2 bang on the nose and it's a great fight with lots of back and forth, recapping that valuable middle point, Hydro battles going back and forth...but eventually the time runs out and sudden death hits and you can't help but feel the entire 15-20 minutes was a massive waste of everyones time as sudden death seems to almost always end in stalemate.

The big problem here is team balance, in other games a single decent player (ie someone with a score of 120 when others have scores of 20-30) can help pull the team up, unfortunately with such massive respawn times (relative to small maps) it means that the good players can make a difference (take down a turret, kill a medic/HWG combo) but if the team isn't smart enough to take advantage of that then by the time you're alive and back on the playing field the enemys are all setup and ready to go.

With little to no respawn time I can get my ass back out there as a scout 100mph across the map, find the engineer who's licking his wounds and re-building his base BEFORE he gets a level 3 turret set up, and can actually take advantage of my previous actions.

With a good 20 seconds spawn and 20+ seconds to the front line, engineers get chance to rebuild, essentially as soon as you die it's like a big red flashing reset button, you know by the time you're back in the fray that your previous actions (destroying turrets, poking holes in good defences etc) have all been setup.

Unfortunately team work is just coincidental, it's just a case of what players are on what team, you can give your team all the chances you like and sometimes they just WILL NOT TAKE THEM, it's about the most frustrating thing on earth....you're like....yeah guys...just removed 4 turrets ON MY OWN, could you at least start moving foward now, and you respawn and not one of them has made it onto the CP...

As much as I dislike the idea, if Im going to keep playing this game it's probably going to have to be a clan, I just get too frustrated.

And for those who say "its just a game" and "you dont have to win"...I agree, but the problem is, with a bad team, the good players are left more or less alone on the front line, which means as an individual experience you feel like you're fighting the better part of the enemies whole offensive side, which is a lot to expect from any 1-2 players.

I have experienced a lot of the same frustrations, and so I've been playing almost exclusively Dustbowl as of late. This map is a lot more pub friendly it seems. Also, I try to pick a team to join that has people on it whose names I recognize, that I know use vent and that I know aren't ass terrible. You'd be surprised how a few people that know what they're doing can turn a game around. Since this game is alternating defending/capturing, there isn't as much back and forth, and only one team is really against the clock.

There is nothing more satisfying when you're on defense than doing an ubered pyro drive to the entrance of the enemy base, and camping outside killing everyone that walks out the door.

Actually I take that back, last night the team I was on had pushed the enemy back so hard that I was able to build a sentry right outside their spawn. I think I had 30 kills with that sentry.

I think you have the right idea about joining a clan, this is definitely a team game, and can be quite frustrating if your team isn't working as one.