• Check out the relaunch of our general collection, with classic designs and new ones by our very own Pissog!

Team Fortress 2 - The Official Discussion Thread

Kikuichimonji said:
To be honest I've never been a huge fan of wearing cosmetic items on classes that your team has multiples of, since it only serves to make you more identifiable to enemies. When someone yells out "soldier is low" and I'm looking at a soldier, there's only a 50/50 shot that the guy I'm looking at is the target being called. However, if someone calls "pothead soldier low," I can know with certainty whether I'm targeting the right guy. Also, if one scout ducks behind a corner and another one pops out a second later, there's no way to know whether there's one or two scouts behind that corner if they're identical. Ideally, both scouts and soldiers should be identical, and unless both were lucky enough to get the same hat, that means going hatless. I'm glad to have my soldier stash. I don't usually wear it, but if I'm playing with a soldier who does, it's nice for the sake of uniformity. (My other hat is the pickelhaube, which I can wear guilt free.)

In CS, you also had your choice of four different models, all functionally identical but cosmetically different, and teams would always choose the same model. Then people started using a specific model because it was thinner than the rest and you could get closer to corners without your model poking out. I wonder if people will stop using certain hats if/when they are discovered to be tactically inferior. The halo definitely seems to be a poor choice of hat as it makes you a more visible target in dark areas, especially against opposing snipers.
Click to expand...
Personally as a Medic I ask at least one of my soldiers and scouts to put on a hat (if at all possible) to make identification easier. When I get one of my soldiers screaming desperatly over mumble for heals and there's two I'd like to be able to link that voice to the pot/helm/whatever and know instantly who needs heals, without having to move my cursor over both to see whose who and who's lowest.
 
Sunday said:
When I get one of my soldiers screaming desperatly over mumble for heals and there's two I'd like to be able to link that voice to the pot/helm/whatever and know instantly who needs heals.
Click to expand...
Replace "whatever" with "medic call indicator" and you have my preferred option. Then again, that isn't without its drawbacks as well. More than once I have managed to determine the location of enemies behind walls based on their medic calls, making it easy to get kills as a scout against soldiers roaming too far from home.
 
Actually, they did go in and delete items, as I idled and got hats in game after I idled. I lost one item, but don't even remember what the fuck it was.

EDIT: Also, don't get the 360 version if you don't want to play a buggy out of date version of the game
 
Well, I got my weapons back (including my Kritzkrieg which I deleted ages ago), so I'm not too unhappy about missing out on a crappy halo.

Also, in case you haven't seen it, The G.R.U.

In progress, anyway.

(No, I'm not part of the beta.)
 
Whoa.... that is gonna be very interesting seeing as it helps the Heavy, Medic combo. interesting. we might see more heavies in comp play
 
That health drain really aggravates me, though. Chaining Heavies to a Medic buddy...
 
Note that it's only when the weapon is active. It would be a great weapon for getting INTO battle, but once you're in battle you would switch back to the minigun and have no HP drain.

Also it means no melee weapon, but does Heavy really need one?
 
The Heavy needs a melee weapon about as much as the Pyro needs one.

Seven Deadly Sins said:
Note that it's only when the weapon is active. It would be a great weapon for getting INTO battle, but once you're in battle you would switch back to the minigun and have no HP drain.
Click to expand...

Well you'd need to grab a medpack or find a Medic to refill to full health, which is the point I was trying to make...
 
TBH I doubt that screenshot's legit considering how easily I could reproduce it by editing tf_english.

Doesn't mean the GRU isn't real (it is, unless valve completely changes their mind) but I wouldn't take the screenshot for gospel, all the info in that shot is old anyway.
Seven Deadly Sins said:
A melee weapon with half damage is just about as useful as no melee weapon, especially if it drains your health.
Click to expand...
Earthquake said:
Won't the constant damage to yourself allow your medic to get a faster ubercharge?
Click to expand...
EQ hit the nil on the head. The two main problems with using the Heavy competitively atm are a lack of speed and that he's a worse Medic partner than a Soldier or Demo since he has no way to grind Uber. GRU fixes both of these. The HP drain is only when it's active anyway (like all of its effects). You're not forced to be pinned to a Medic if there's not one about - you simply don't bring your gloves out and you run at the regular speed.
Should do a good job of making Heavy viable competitively (ie. The entire goal of gru), looking forward to it.
 
That scrim was terribad. Next time lets find one for Well or Gravelpit next time :(

Also, I take some of the blame for our poor performance. The last time I played TF2 was last weeks scrim, and I hadnt played TF2 for a while before last weeks scrim as well! I'll be prepared for next weeks.

Matty, where are ya bro?
 
If we can play at some time other than terrible o'clock on mondays I can play for you guys. I'm on pretty much all day on weekends, and during most weekday evenings. I play a decent pretty much everything except Spy. I specialize in Sniper, Demo, and Medic.
 
For soldiers/demos and maybe scouts that want to get better, I recommend hitting up ammomod and soap DM.

67.202.71.165:27015 -ammomod

208.71.114.17:27017 - soap DM.
 
If we were ever going to enter "real" competitive leagues, TWL seems like a logical place to start, since it's probably the lowest possible tier of Team Fortress 2 leagues.

Important details for the next season:
Default match time: Mondays at 9:30 pm est
Sign ups end: Wednesday, October 21st
Season begins: Monday, October 26th
Maps (order not yet set): Granary, Gravelpit, Badlands, Yukon, plus four other customs (TBA). Well will (probably) not be used, I'm expecting to see some Waste and Gullywash.

Are people interested?
 
Seven Deadly Sins said:
How long does a match last, on average? I should be able to do it then, as long as matches don't take more than 60-75 minutes.
Click to expand...
The game itself will never take more than an hour, as push maps are played in 30 minute halves and the timer on gravelpit only allows for 13 minutes including setup. Push maps are played first to 5 points or most points after two halves and the former occurs more often than not, so the average playtime will probably be less than an hour.

Each team is allowed 15 minutes "grace" period to show up after the official match time before the game is considered a forfeit. Also, each team is allowed a 5-minute pause if one of their players drops and needs time to rejoin. So absolute worst-case scenario for match time would be 60 minutes of actual playtime plus 25 minutes of waiting for people to show up. In reality I don't think it's very likely for matches to ever approach this length, they should finish 60-75 minutes after the official match start time.

If, through some quirk of fate, we make it to the playoffs (highly unlikely), matches could last up to 30 minutes longer as playoff matches are played best 2/3 with 30 minutes on each map.
 
yeah that scrim was pretty disasterous, but i do think it was a slight improvement over last time, we were just facing a much more organized and experienced team.

personally i think we should get in a couple of practise sessions throughout the week, on something like wednesdays and saturdays, to make sure we all get some practise and arent rusty like me and esc were (id only played a couple of quick pub games during the week). it wouldnt matter hugely if someone couldnt make it, but it would do everyone who could get there some good. id suggest the same time as the monday scrims (9:30 pm GMT), and we could either talk tactics, play some less serious scrims, try some different strategies and see how they pay off, etc.

as far as leagues go, would we have to have a strict line up of players? because so far we usually have myself/esc/thunderpup/kuiper/grey, but the final slot has been changing quite alot. right now, i dont think we're ready for anything like a league, but maybe come october we'll have improved a bunch, so im not ruling out the possibility.
 
Stoo said:
as far as leagues go, would we have to have a strict line up of players?
Click to expand...
Six players is the minimum roster size and you can have more than six people on the roster and switch them in and out as needed (like if someone is gone for one week and needs a substitute), I think most teams have 7-8 people on their roster. TWL also allows mid-season roster changes up until the 7th week, so we could pick up more people as the season goes on.
Stoo said:
personally i think we should get in a couple of practise sessions throughout the week, on something like wednesdays and saturdays, to make sure we all get some practise and arent rusty like me and esc were
Click to expand...
For general warm-up, I usually like to play a bit on soap's tf2dm server. It runs a mod that spawns you at random points in the map and gives you an ammo and health boost whenever you get a kill. It also runs tftrue, which has hitsounds a la Quake. IP: 208.71.114.17:27018
UniversalSnip has also started a dm/ctf server that runs a ctf version of badlands (map download here), it's basically tf2dm plus an objective. IP: 206.123.125.68:27015

As for scrims, I think that we need to figure out a lineup that we'd use during a league season and try to stick to that lineup. If our dedicated soldier is gone, we should call for a soldier ringer instead of getting a medic ringer and letting the team medic play soldier. If things need to be shuffled around, that's fine, but we should try to find a lineup that works well and stay with it. This can vary by map. For example, if our main demoman really dislikes playing demo on Granary, he can swap with one of the soldier for all games that are played on that map, but if this is going to happen we need to plan it ahead of time.

If people need additional practice to adjust to the format, I think it would be better for them to get it on their own since that way they aren't as limited in the number of games they can play or when they can play them. (There are some afternoons when I'll play four or five gathers in a row.) A how-to guide on pickups/gathers can be found here. Recommended channel for Europe is #mpuktf2.pickup, recommended channel for North America is #tf2.pug.na (requires mumble instead of ventrilo). If you need help with this process PM me on Steam and I'll try to walk you through it.

Also, some recommended viewing for those new to the 6v6 format: Jaeger of team Loaded has been recording and releasing match demos and voice comms for Loaded's matches this ESEA season. I recommend watching these to get a better idea of how high-level teams do things.
 
Ya sorry again. Hopefully I'll be back fairly soon, however I probably can't scrim with you guys on Mondays since I have a busy school schedule that day.

Here's hoping though
 
Sunday said:
Should do a good job of making Heavy viable competitively (ie. The entire goal of gru), looking forward to it.
Click to expand...
I thought the goal of the gloves was making the Heavy more fun to play, so it was no longer the least-played class by a large margin.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top