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.
Oct 192010
Oct 012010
As I was casually browsing ebay this morning, I came upon this gem. Continue reading »
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.
I was watching this video recently and I had so many thoughts that I had to stop only 15 minutes in and write it all out. It’s Jaeger’s analysis of the badlands mid fights in a Blight vs. EG game.
At the beginning of the video, we see Blu pulling off a strat that orz likes to call “ravine jump”. On rollout, the soldiers and medic go through ravine rather than house. The soldiers jump onto the enemy train when the combo reaches maintanence. The medic makes his way to the point to pick up the scouts and demoman, and hopefully through all of that, a lot of enemies die. It can be a useful strat for catching people off-guard, since you’re throwing your soldiers at the enemy combo. The tricky bit, though, is (usually) what the medic should do during/after the jump. It seems foolish for him to lose seconds of charge walking up alone and unprotected, so last year we tried working on getting a scout to escort him up to the point. I was thinking about this decision as I watched this video, noticing that Blu didn’t do it, and wrote up a bit of anlysis on the situation:
Continue reading »
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:
Aug 282010
Aug 162010
Last week I was linked to this article (by Tom Crowley of Couch Athletics) and even though it deals mostly with elementary techniques that I’m sure everyone knows, hearing these techniques named and explained sparked some interesting ideas.
The author makes an excellent point with the statement “Ultimately the goal of every class is deterrence, and that’s really what area denial is all about – deterring the enemy team from entering a space”. Really, every aspect of one’s role in competitive TF2 comes down to deterrence. Continue reading »
Aug 112010
PC Gamer has news on the next big tf2 update. Seems we’ll be getting a new game mode, trading, AND loads of stuff from the polycount competition.
Polycount winners are:
Expect it all early 2011.
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