Team Fortress 2 stuff

[defanatic]

Who here has played it and stuff. There doesn't seem to be a (recent) thread on it.

I am enjoying it for the most part except for a couple of things:

- The critical hits system is annoying. Some players seem to get critical shots for their first shot with the soldier rocket launcher, for example.

- The "worse players means less players" thing. If a team seems to have worse players, it will also invariably have less players. For example, I remember one game where One team's top member was about equal to the other team's third from bottom player. The better team had 9 players, the worse team had 6

- The fact that people in online games become totally unable to be civil, polite, or anything like that. I had sympathy for one guy who seemed reasonably competent, and the remainder of his team was quite poor. He took it as sarcasm and annoyed me for the remainder of my time on the server. And also, no one is able to explain the above point.

I asked why the above were so (about uneven numbers). Someone said I should ask myself, since I was on the bottom of my team. I didn't imply that I was good, or even competent at the game. I just wanted to know why. :S

Well, I had my rant.

Other thoughts?

[SylasGaunt]

- The "worse players means less players" thing. If a team seems to have worse players, it will also invariably have less players. For example, I remember one game where One team's top member was about equal to the other team's third from bottom player. The better team had 9 players, the worse team had 6

This is an online gaming thing in general. Between people who have to quit normally, other people who don't keep track of how many people the other team has to keep it even, people who quit because they're losing, and people who join the wining team so they can be L33TZ0Rz this tends to crop up all over.

- The fact that people in online games become totally unable to be civil, polite, or anything like that. I had sympathy for one guy who seemed reasonably competent, and the remainder of his team was quite poor. He took it as sarcasm and annoyed me for the remainder of my time on the server. And also, no one is able to explain the above point.

Again, online generality. You get rude assholes everywhere.

[Natorgator]

I haven't figured out the critical hit system myself. Are you playing on PC or XBL? I've only had maybe one instance where the teams were really lop-sided and it wasn't fun. When that happens, better to just cut your losses and jump into a different game.

All in all though, I think TF2 is a fucking blast and it's soured me on Halo 3's multiplayer. I just really wish it had a two player option where my roommate and I both could play on Xbox live.

[InnocentBystander]

I'm fairly sure that critical hits are totally random. You just suddenly start shooting critical shots for a time every now and then.

[defanatic]

I'm playing PC, BTW. My moniker is ComradeDa, and I usually only play Australian servers.

The critical hits system is supposed to work like so:
- Critical hits are random. I have no idea what the percentage of shots that are critical hits is, but it varies from weapon to weapon (and with some weapons, you get a burst that is critical, like with the flamer or SMG)

- As you get more kills in one life, the more likely you will be to get a critical

- You can also influence getting criticals with headshots from the sniper rifle, or backstabs with the butterfly knife. Yes, this does mean that if you stab someone in the front with the butterfly knife, and it happens to be a critical, you will get a backstab point.

[Pablo Sanchez]

- The critical hits system is annoying. Some players seem to get critical shots for their first shot with the soldier rocket launcher, for example.

The criticals are a little annoying, but on the other hand a really good critical is a lot of fun for the guy who got it. For example, I once as soldier rocket-jumped over a train in Well and shot another rocket into a pile of enemies, which critted and actually kill 3 or 4 people at once.

- The "worse players means less players" thing. If a team seems to have worse players, it will also invariably have less players. For example, I remember one game where One team's top member was about equal to the other team's third from bottom player. The better team had 9 players, the worse team had 6

This is standard for online games and not really TF2's fault. Some people don't want to play on a team that gets the shit kicked out of it constantly, so they switch. These people are kind of assholes who should just learn to play the game better. As a soldier I can typically lead the boards regardless of how my team does. I die a lot but I typically kill four or more people with every life.

In fact my biggest problem is the insufficient teamwork instinct of people on public servers, mainly when dealing with the offensive. I'll punch a hole right through the other team, killing their Sentry Guns and support classes, giving my team a beautiful opportunity for a push, and even informing them of such over team-chat, but I'll quickly find myself alone because my team just can't get their shit together to follow me.

[defanatic]

Oh, yeah... There have been a number of times when I was first on my team to the middle capture point, and I was a soldier. Sometimes, your team seems to unanimously suck.

I'm not a good player (I am an ok spy, and pyro), but I do things like shoot at my own spies if they are trying to get into an enemy base, or destroy sentries, or cap points if no one else will. I remember one run of gravelpit... I won the first two rounds for my team (i.e. I got the first point and second point on the first two rounds without help), and then my team spent the remaining 20 minutes trying to capture the last point on the level. I got kind of annoyed.

[NeoGoomba]

I'm a heavy 95% of the time, and nothing pisses me off more than when I have a medic with 100% uber on me, ready to go, and when I round the corner where its a given that there are a few enemies to punch through including turrets, the medic vanishes and I get smeared.

Other than that, I think the game is a blast to play. I have noticed, though, that one team usually decides to turtle very very early on in Well, and usually there isn't much I can do to change their minds. Nothing like joining a team with 6 engineers on it, with turrets all over the place in the rafters, no desire to push at all.

[Anarchist Bunny]

I love the game. I think it is the first FPS I have ever played where the Flamethrower was not a shit weapon.

Pryo is my favorite class easily, even though they are offense they make a great defense class when you exit your base then re-enter it behind some guys and torch them. And hands down Uberpryo is the most dangerous force in the game. However I can rarely get a Medic to heal me, much less uber me, they always latch onto a Heavy and rarely accomplish much with an uber.

[Sea Skimmer]

I played it a few times, and I don’t like it one bit. Frankly I can’t think of anything I like about it at all, not the maps not the class weapons, not the need for nonexistent teamwork, and the lack of grenades is just really damn annoying. Sure doesn’t help that every server I join lags, even when I have a very low ping, which makes me suspect it’s just yet another game with concentrated shit for net coding.

Now I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original Team Fortress, but I do like teamwork shooters. I don’t know, Maybe I’ll try it again in a month or two, when it should have more servers and more good players around, but right now I’d much sooner play through Episode 2 again or fire up any version of Battlefield.

[Braedley]

There are plenty of good servers.

It helps if you have a group of friends to play with, 'cause then you can do medic-heavy with a friend, and can set it up to talk directly to them. That's part of the reason why my friends and I are consistently at the top of the boards when we play together.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Sea Skimmer, have you tried Dystopia? Free mod, although the game requires alot of team work, as the maps are all assualt type.

Check it out if ya haven't

Edit: Suppose I should comment on this game too.

TF2 is decent... Better balanced, though I think that the graphics cause some of the lag. The utter lack of grenades is annoying, especially as heavy, because it removes alot of the tactical choices for the different classes.

IE: Everyone but spies must now stare down turrets to destroy them, which puts alot of weight onto such a fragile class. (Especially since every engie worth his wrench guards his turret and dispenser.)

Speaking of dispensers, it's kinda annoying, even as an engie that they don't have to be reloaded, at all, anymore. Makes him a one man armory. Also, his old EMP grenade used to be able to actually take out heavies...

Spies are the only ones who got a really worth while upgrade. Steath is so much better than feign death...

Medic's ubercharge is nice, if you get it at the right time, or other people are intelligent enough to charge when you use it on them... (Or they're smart enough to follow you with their invulnerability...)

Sniper's funner, not having to hold the shoot button to charge up is nice. Seems a little easier to headshot folks, while not being as ridiculous as CS:S. (One round managed six in a row, then missed or body shot every other time that round.)

Pyro got a decent damage upgrade, though fire still lasts way to long with no way to put it out on most maps.

Scout... the lack of conc grenades removes about half of their mobility. (This from someone who viewed it as a mechanics exploit... but since they made it easier for soldiers to rocket jump, I don't think it's fair that scouts lost their only means of matching that mobility.)

Demo doesn't seem to be hit as bad. Somehow doubt they still have the map route opener demopacks... but the maps that had those areas aren't in the current version anyway. They're still very good defensively, and pack enough punch to go offensive.

And Soldiers... Rockets seem more effective, but they're also hit by the lack of grenades. Which mean that Demos are the only people who don't need LoS on a target to kill it...

[InnocentBystander]

The idea is that 1 player should not be able to deal with any problem that comes his way. What good is a turret is every other class has a weapon which can bust it easily? What good is a heavy if every class can murder him? You'd have to be crazy to *like* the grenades from TFC. It was a grenade spam fest; why did half the classes bother carrying guns when the grenades were about 1000 times more useful and powerful?

[TheFeniX]

- The critical hits system is annoying. Some players seem to get critical shots for their first shot with the soldier rocket launcher, for example.

As annoying as crits are, the bet solution is just to stay mobile. Yes, you'll get "single-shotted" by a crit rocket or nade and it's annoying, but it makes sure to keep you moving. When I see a player on the opposite team who seems to be doing very well and scoring numerous crits, I generally try to get a spy to take him out. Spies aren't just for sentry killing. The are perfect for taking out snipers and medics (before they get uber or can use it).

I love sitting behind enemy lines as spy and waiting for a medic to meet up with his team for a "push," then kill the medic (and a heavy or two if I can before dying or running away) and watch my team crush the push I just warned them about.

- The "worse players means less players" thing. If a team seems to have worse players, it will also invariably have less players. For example, I remember one game where One team's top member was about equal to the other team's third from bottom player. The better team had 9 players, the worse team had 6

As was said, you see this on a lot of servers. It's hell, but you've got to find a short list of good servers. As an admin, I've found that if one team is "steam-rolling" the other, a quick run of "mp_scrambleteams" is a God-send.

- The fact that people in online games become totally unable to be civil, polite, or anything like that. I had sympathy for one guy who seemed reasonably competent, and the remainder of his team was quite poor. He took it as sarcasm and annoyed me for the remainder of my time on the server. And also, no one is able to explain the above point.

Find servers that cut out that kind of crap. We run have a "no cussing/insulting other players" rule not because we can't deal with "potty-mouth," but because we just don't want to deal with it. In my experience, players who won't stow the "WTF LAG!" and "OMG you're an idiot" are generally players who don't worry about teamwork anyways. They either shape up or are removed.

TFC public servers have the same issues: people just want to worry about their own score without a bother to who caps the point or the intel. I've lost count of the number of servers where I've said "They have our flag" and the response is "So what?"

IE: Everyone but spies must now stare down turrets to destroy them, which puts alot of weight onto such a fragile class. (Especially since every engie worth his wrench guards his turret and dispenser.)

That's because spies shouldn't be trying to "rambo" turrets on their own. One of the best assaults I've seen involved a spy sapping three separate sentries (clustered stupidly together) over and over. While the engies were busy breaking the sappers off, two soldiers with medic back-up jumped down and hammered the entire location with rockets, taking out the sentries (and just about everything else) and securing the cap.

It's all about teamwork. The team needs spies to disrupt the enemy team and the spy needs the team to capitalize on that disruption.

[Steel]

- The "worse players means less players" thing. If a team seems to have worse players, it will also invariably have less players. For example, I remember one game where One team's top member was about equal to the other team's third from bottom player. The better team had 9 players, the worse team had 6

This doesnt have to have anything to do with skill.

Imagine a situation where its 2 v 1 and asssume the people just stand there and shoot each other.

In the time it takes the 2 to kill the 1, the 1 will only have done 50% damage to one of the other players. So this in fact means that over time the team with 2 players will get 4 kills for every loss, despite only outnumbering by 2:1.

So from this simplified example given a situation with 2 teams of equal skill, the larger team will have an advantage and appear to have a larger advantage than merely the ratio of the sizes would suggest.

[Anarchist Bunny]

From what I understand, grenades were a last minute removal from the game because it was too difficult to balance them. And I am fine with that, because I think the game is very well balanced. Sure I'd like to see them eventually implemented if they were balanced(especially if those are smoke grenades on the Pryo, it would give me a lot more ability to get into close range).

There are times where grenades would be nice, but instead I either need a change of strategy or teamwork to accomplish it rather that being able to solo it. I really haven't seen anything in the game that couldn't be countered. Its sort of like WoW, everyone bitches about everyone being overpowered.

Crits don't bother me too much. Though rarely seen and much harder to time for, I've cleared through a demoman, two heavies and a scout with a Crit on the flamethrower. And a crit on the shotty has turned a 1v1 against a soldier from improbbable to victory, even though I didn't 1 shot him.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

The idea is that 1 player should not be able to deal with any problem that comes his way. What good is a turret is every other class has a weapon which can bust it easily? What good is a heavy if every class can murder him? You'd have to be crazy to *like* the grenades from TFC. It was a grenade spam fest; why did half the classes bother carrying guns when the grenades were about 1000 times more useful and powerful?

Hey, I said it's better balanced. It just hit the heavy and scout hardest with the utter removal of grenades.

That's because spies shouldn't be trying to "rambo" turrets on their own. One of the best assaults I've seen involved a spy sapping three separate sentries (clustered stupidly together) over and over. While the engies were busy breaking the sappers off, two soldiers with medic back-up jumped down and hammered the entire location with rockets, taking out the sentries (and just about everything else) and securing the cap.

It's all about teamwork. The team needs spies to disrupt the enemy team and the spy needs the team to capitalize on that disruption.

Yeah, and it's not like turrets are terribly hard to kill with a decent force. I just wish people would work more as a team in Pubs, but I know that's incredibly unlikely without a clan stack.

[Exonerate]

I managed to play a bit by borrowing my friend's Steam account. I have to say while it's nicely done, it lost it's novelty value after a couple of hours. Maybe it's because I spent years playing TFC, but the basic gameplay is something I'm very used to - it seems like the only change is in game mechanics. The skill ceiling of this game isn't really that high either, so that also decreases the replay value.

Personally, I don't like forced teamwork. It's one thing to give different classes advantages and disadvantages, and another to make what is essentially an unsurmountable wall to some classes. For example, two Soldiers can take down a SG fairly reliably if they're aware of it's location - if you replaced that with six Scouts, they'd be pretty much fucked no matter what. I had some random pubber try and tell me that the game is "the best balanced ever" because every class has a specialization. Bullshit. As a completely symmetrical game, it's balanced between the two teams, but each class certainly does not have the same value. In nine out of ten situations, a Soldier will have more utility than say, a Pyro.

As amusing as it is to kill half of the enemy team with a string of lucky crits as a Soldier, I have to say it doesn't really belong. From a competitive standpoint, random chance is something you want to avoid - losing a game because the random number gods looked down on you (supposedly your chance of a critical hit rises the more hits you score in a single life) isn't fun.

We run have a "no cussing/insulting other players" rule not because we can't deal with "potty-mouth," but because we just don't want to deal with it. In my experience, players who won't stow the "WTF LAG!" and "OMG you're an idiot" are generally players who don't worry about teamwork anyways.

That seems like a very broad generalization to me. Personally, I think a player's value to the team is how well he plays. You could have a loudmouth who's an incredible teamplayer, and somebody who isn't as talkative, but, frankly, sucks at the game. There's a server for another game that I played that had decent gameplay that prided itself on being a "mature" community yet couldn't handle four-letter words or negativity of any kind, no matter how well justified. [/quote]

[Hamel]

I don't care about skill ceilings or whatever. High level play in TFC is just as much about scripts as it is about skill. I for one have been having a ball with TF2 since the first day of the beta. To me the presentation and execution is perfect ~ everything fits including the voice acting and visual design. The fun factor is there and you can still strategize, but you're not going to be doing it by taking advantage of engine bugs or console commands or flying through the air like a rocket as a medic.

[Anarchist Bunny]

Also whats really great is finding a Server with Alltalk. Where everyone, alive and dead, red and blue, can hear each other.

[Vendetta]

Personally, I don't like forced teamwork. It's one thing to give different classes advantages and disadvantages, and another to make what is essentially an unsurmountable wall to some classes. For example, two Soldiers can take down a SG fairly reliably if they're aware of it's location - if you replaced that with six Scouts, they'd be pretty much fucked no matter what. I had some random pubber try and tell me that the game is "the best balanced ever" because every class has a specialization. Bullshit. As a completely symmetrical game, it's balanced between the two teams, but each class certainly does not have the same value. In nine out of ten situations, a Soldier will have more utility than say, a Pyro.

Hang on, you're trying to say that the fact that a team almost entirely comprised of a single class is doomed to failure by a simple counter and that this is a bad thing?

That's one of the most retarded arguments I've ever heard. Class based games that don't doom single class armies to abject and merciless failure are the shit ones, because it means they fucked the class balance up.

[defanatic]

- The critical hits system is annoying. Some players seem to get critical shots for their first shot with the soldier rocket launcher, for example.

As annoying as crits are, the bet solution is just to stay mobile. Yes, you'll get "single-shotted" by a crit rocket or nade and it's annoying, but it makes sure to keep you moving. When I see a player on the opposite team who seems to be doing very well and scoring numerous crits, I generally try to get a spy to take him out. Spies aren't just for sentry killing. The are perfect for taking out snipers and medics (before they get uber or can use it).

I love sitting behind enemy lines as spy and waiting for a medic to meet up with his team for a "push," then kill the medic (and a heavy or two if I can before dying or running away) and watch my team crush the push I just warned them about.

I dunno. When I round a carner, and don't actually have time to dodge a crit rocket that blows me up wherever it hits, it annoys me. If I obviously have a tactical advantage, and have been shooting at an opponent constantly until they have no health, I don't feel like being instantly killed by a crit melee attack. Especially if it is a medic that has just left the base and hasn't killed anyone yet.

But the rest of the game is lots of fun.

Today, I had a case of spy wars. I was trying to sneak behind my opponent's front line, and a pair of spies kept trying to sneak into my base (this was the last stage on dustbowl). There was quite a long series of backstabs and stuff, until my team lost, at which point i was disguised, so didn't die.

[Uraniun235]

Sea Skimmer, have you tried Dystopia? Free mod, although the game requires alot of team work, as the maps are all assualt type.

Last I checked, Dystopia was a dying community with fewer players than Team Fortress Classic (this was before TF2 came out) because the developers were locked in a big circle-jerk and not doing much at all to fix what were becoming significant gameplay flaws.

[Anarchist Bunny]

By the way:

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SDN

SDN group.

[Exonerate]

Hang on, you're trying to say that the fact that a team almost entirely comprised of a single class is doomed to failure by a simple counter and that this is a bad thing?

Don't strawman me. I'm saying that I don't like games where class advantages/disadvantages create a situation where player ability has an negligible effect on the outcome. If I wanted a game where one class could be countered by another under nearly all circumstances, I would go play an RTS. A FPS where a good player has the same chance as an untrained monkey at winning because he is one class and the opponent is another doesn't hold my interest.

I don't care about skill ceilings or whatever. High level play in TFC is just as much about scripts as it is about skill.

I really don't want to get into a debate about scripting, so I'll just say this: scripting is just a scapegoat. You might not care about skill ceilings, but I do - part of a game's replay value is how long it remains a challenge to me.