Your mental state is important in any competition. Losing your cool in a scrim or match can mean and immediate breakdown in the flow of your team. I’ll leave discussion about ways to improve team chemistry for another day but in this column I want to talk about ways to balance your own temperament. You might be able to get away with a terrible attitude (at least for roughly a season) if you’re highly skilled, but for everybody else, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Panda
Oct 192010
In my first two posts in the series, I covered my own struggle to find a TF2 team, and attempted to help steer players in the right direction if they were ever in similar situations. In the third installment, I’d like to offer some more miscellaneous tips for players still finding it difficult to break into the competitive TF2 scene, found after the jump.
Sep 192010
Teaching someone to play better individual TF2 is a tough task. There are certain things that simply require practice, and significantly improving one’s talent at a particular class is one of those things. However, having played Competitive TF2 for a while now I’ve picked up a few pointers about playing each class that I feel are all important points for any newish or lowish player to consider. It’s also difficult to measure your own performance because it’s such a team oriented game, and sometimes doing something right doesn’t show up as much in the end result. Still, improving your own game will ultimately improve your team’s game, if only by relieving the pressure on your teammates by creating more opportunities through your own play.
Most importantly, when reading the following, keep this in mind: It’s not necessary to actually do all of these things in order to become better at a certain class. However, I feel that all of these things are important to at least try once or twice to see if they’re a change for the better. Read on after the jump!
Last time I posted I covered the first half of my journey to become a part of a TF2 team, and offered some (hopefully useful) pieces of advice to those players out there struggling to form a team. After the jump, I’ve included the second half of a piece that became more rambly than I had hoped.
Anyway, enjoy!
(Decided to split this post into 2 parts, due to length)
Hey everybody!
When I first proposed this blog I didn’t have a clear vision regarding its use, but so far I’m pretty satisfied with what we’ve done with it. That said, I thought I’d finally try writing something myself. In what’s hopefully the first of a series of post/articles/nerd essays about Comp TF2, I want to cover a range of topics that apply more toward Low and Low/Mid teams – probably not very much regarding strategy, so if that’s what you’re looking for, you might be in for a boring read. Also, the proposed title isn’t set in stone, so if someone has an idea for a series name that’s more related to TF2, that’d be cool.
In my first post I’d like to talk a bit about something that’s proving to be increasingly difficult: actually getting into the Competitive TF2 scene, and sticking around. It’s more or less a checklist of the kinds of things you need to tackle in order to form a functioning competitive TF2 team at the entry (low/low-mid) level. Be warned, a long read follows:
Jul 272010
We scrimmed for the first time in months yesterday, and didn’t get rolled 5-0, which is a pretty good sign. We also started performing a little better later in the scrim than in the beginning, which is also pretty promising. Our schedules aren’t really ready to handle full-time Comp TF2 (and I think some of us are still testing the waters as far as how much we’re willing to play), but hopefully in a month or two things will start rolling again.
Keep an eye out for more posts!
Mar 062010
I know a high proportion of our readers are probably already familiar with Friendly Fire, but it’s a TF2 podcast that is pretty interesting and used to have many appearances by Sigma from AG. It still has Jestr as one of the regulars, though he’s not affiliated with a team right now.
Anyway, the point is their last 2 episodes have been with two individuals pretty notorious in the TF2 community, for better or for worse. The penultimate one (as of this posting) is Floor_Master, known primarily for the set of 2 TF2 griefing videos out there (which I’ll admit I found entertaining, though not that much because back then I was still a pubber 
). However, he was also responsible for a lot of the coding on TF2Lobby, which I’m sure many people find a very nice tool for finding TF2 games.
The latest episode features Mangy Carface, who designed cp_yukon, a love it/hate it map that still sees play in leagues. He also has a concept for CTF play in the works that I feel like would make the game mode much more interesting but it remains to be seen how the community will receive it.
Anyway, check them out!
http://www.gotfrag.com/tf2/forums/thread/424711/
In the first video I thought he was straight up hacking. The second and third were impressive, and had fun Scout clips thrown in. In this fourth it’s back to the feeling from the first. I think without the Sniper nerf (scope time) then the shots in this video could be a much more regular occurrence. Geeze, some people….
Feb 222010
Hey, tiny set of readers!
I thought I’d talk a bit about what I intended for this blog originally to be used for (I brought up the idea in mumble one day but I was pretty vague about it). I’m sure the big question on most people’s minds is “why would anybody want to read about a low/mid 6s team’s random blog posts? We get enough of random 13 year old kids posting, why get 8 people posting all in one place?”. I can’t honestly supply a great answer for that but I’ll briefly outline what I’m hoping we can get out of this:
We’re not the greatest team out there by a long shot, (made it to the Div 3 playoffs, then slugged it out over almost 2 hours to come away with a tough loss), but there’s also a lot of teams out there that are worse than us, but have potential. Hopefully by sharing a bit about the struggles of trying to improve as a team at TF2, then some of the other teams out there around or below our skill level might see that they’re not alone in having a tough time improving (way too many teams break up as it is when they can’t immediately hit mid-skill level).
It’s pretty impossible to emulate teams like Complexity, Muscle Milk, etc., and even teams like Apocalypse Gaming and eMazing Gaming probably employ strategies that are impossible to replicate, but something that might help teams improve is watching demos of mid and mid/low teams, with both the successes and mistakes that are made.
In my first post I thought I’d share a bit of the philosophy towards the current competitive TF2 metagame that I feel like might benefit a lot of teams. The following is a less refined but more detailed version of a little discussion I tried to spark on the team’s private group message boards:
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