So today someone sent me this interesting animation that illustrates circle-strafing. Basically, the idea is that when Red (the one being circle-strafed) shoots at where Blue is he misses because Blue is constantly changing location, but when Blue (the circle-strafer) shoots at where Red is he always hits because Red is standing still. Of course, this situation assumes that Red does not alter his shots to account for Blue’s movement–he always shoots at where he currently sees Blue–so it is not a perfect model, but it at least could function as an explanation for why one takes less damage when attacking a sentry via circle-strafing instead of head-on.
May 312010
May 202010
Saw this thread over at GotFrag and figured I’d mention some of my medic settings. Consult the TF2 Medic wiki pages for other tips and useful scripts that you can look at, see what works for you and go ahead and copy it into your own personalized config.
The first one (which I actually never got around to doing!) is having a fake ubercharge call – voicemenu 1 7 is the command you want. So somewhere in your configs, type in:
bind “key” “voicemenu 1 7″
Where key is the keyboard button of your choice.
For enemy teams that haven’t been paying attention to the time since you spawned, or for teams that you want to trick into thinking you have kritz. This can be the difference between them pushing while you don’t have charge, or them holding off because they don’t think they have an advantage anymore.
Having a script to say random stuff to hide your ubercharge is nice but less useful – good teams will catch on immediately. Still good in a pinch though when you want to try a sneak push as soon as you get the uber.
As for my team damage auto-call percentage: I actually have it set to around 20%ish (which according to that thread is super rare). The only other person in the thread with a number that low is Pure from coL. My reasoning? My teammates will call out when they’re trying to push in and want heals, usually while hurt. I don’t need redundant information. It’s when someone drops below 20% that I need to flash them ASAP to prevent them from dying. The auto-call pointer tells me the most critical people I need to heal. It’s definitely a super cool feature though.
Click to heal or hold down mouse: I actually have it set to hold-down to heal, I tried click to heal for a while (where you click and it’ll keep healing the same target) but I feel more involved I guess when I have to hold it down XD There really isn’t a tactical reason for this, except it makes you more… conscious? About who you’re healing and when to change and stuff. I dunno, go with what you’re comfortable with.
Needlegun instead of blutsauger. This is one I always thought about changing, because A) I’m actually pretty confident in my needling skills and B) I’m a pretty conservative medic during holds and such. If I take lots of spam, 90% of the time it’s because we have uber and need to push so I’m ok with popping uber to save myself. It’s rare that I’ll actually wish for auto-regen to heal me faster, but there have definitely been times where I was thankful that I was running away with 10 HP and had that regen keeping me alive as I ran away. If you find yourself being aggressive a lot, and rely on and trust your soldiers to kill stuff, you might want to stick with the needlegun. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to finish off pesky scouts or jumpers with my needles, and remember: only pull them out if they’re targeting you, if they’re targeting your soldiers who are already in the red, please don’t needle them, keep your sollies alive. You can needle them if your sollies die and you’re alone, but not before.
Ubersaw: some medics go to ubersaw before needles, I use my ubersaw once every 15-20 games and 90% of the time it’s to kill a scout. In almost every other situation needles do more damage while keeping you away from meatshots, unless the scout is 2 feet away and you have very little health left to have the time to needle. But I would still go needles unless you’re very confident in your melee mindgames and can lure the scout close enough. Some medics are more confident with the risk/benefit of sawing, I personally can’t justify it with my crappy melee skills hahah.
Viewmodels: ON. You definitely want to know what weapon you have out, and as medic your view should be constantly moving anyways as you check everyone’s health – you won’t have a problem with people being blocked by your viewmodel.
HUD: flame’s version of the community hud. I like seeing the stuff in the center of my screen instead of down at the bottom.
Anything else I’m missing? Any other suggestions? I know quite a few medics read this blog 
Some spots to use splash that you may not have thought of
Mar 172010
A lot of people probably are familiar with the map cp_freight – it’s a popular map, often played in competitive 6 vs 6. It is unique, though, in that the final version of the map, cp_freight_final, which can be found here at FPSbanana, is actually NOT the version commonly played. Most people agree that the changes made to the last and 2nd/4th point were unnecessary, which is why it never really caught on. Most leagues and servers use cp_freight, the previous incarnation, for their map rotation. Given that it is not the official final version, there are only scattered uploads of the map across various sites; for those of you trying to find it, we are now hosting cp_freight here, click HERE to download. 
So if cp_freight is so great, why was it updated? Three main reasons, which are somewhat linked: 1) there are serious issues with the respawn time for defenders at last, 2) you can shoot rockets through the top part of the garage doors between 1st and 2nd caps, and 3) the nature of the point layout, somewhat like freight, and also because of the spawn times, means that it is nearly impossible to push out and retake 2 from last, unless you have a clear man advantage and start capping before the attacking team can get their spawns up, which like granary is only a short distance away.
Mar 052010
I mentioned before in our looking thread that while we’re all usually the most lovable and chill team you could find, we do have our moments in scrims where we get frustrated and ragey at each other. Case in point: a few days ago we needed modopo and Leia to fill in, with Baldy on soldier to get a scrim in. That’s already 1 of us off-classing, plus modopo, having scouted maybe a total of 5 scrims before, was not very familiar with his expected role, and Leia wasn’t exactly warmed up. The map was badlands, the scenario – our initial push to mid, and our push onto spire from mid.
Hey all just an update on what we’ve been up to. We decided to keep me on med, and to pick up an active backup solly. We are talking to someone (with experience on a mid/high team) who is interested in filling in for us and helping us out with some strats, but I won’t know for sure until a week or so later. If you still think you’d like a chance at a tryout, talk to me anyways and we’ll try and fit one in for you.
We’ve also been watching the ESEA-O playoff series, with Gpit this week leading to 3 upsets, unfortunately including AG 
Definitely an intense game, most of us were in mumble watching most of the 3 rounds (joining the party late because of a scrim that dragged for a while). Gravelpit is definitely one of those funky maps that benefit from some funky strats – spies, snipers, engies, natasha heavies kritz, suicidal pushes, the whole deal. Also a good deal of airshots because of the verticality of the control points – you gotta get control of the roof at B if you want to have a chance to hold/capture. It was pretty neat to see how different teams came up with their own unique set of tricks to get an edge – sniper picks on med are extremely deadly on B, so be sure to watch both B and C entrances. Panda always reminds us to stand on the C-side cliff while defending B to prevent a lucky sniper from getting a headshot. This also allows you to make them pop uber (if they come from C) early on, and away from the gun that is usually on the shady side of B for defense. We can definitely put up some of our gpit ideas in a separate post too.
I don’t know how many people have heard of it (I found the link on CommFT, so I may be the only one who hadn’t seen it yet), but there is this nifty thing called the Quake Bible that details exactly how one goes about… well, to put it bluntly, it describes how to become pro (or at least very good). It specifically discusses elements of Quake, but most of the concepts can easily be applied to TF2.
It’s a long read, so make sure you don’t need to be going anywhere for the next hour, but it is well worth it.
Welcome to those of you visiting via the TWL forums page. Shoutout to holy for bumping the thread (how’s that team building going? ), and G-mang: yes Leia plays TF2 in Spanish for fun. Go ahead and sign up on the right – eave those comments here as well That applies to all you lurkers as well. As of now we have an average of 30 visitors a day but only 3 subscriber accounts. More fun site stats? We have 111 unique visitors in the past week, with ~300 page views, so I know there are people out there reading the blog!
To give a preview, I’m currently working on a collection of rocketjumping tips I’ve picked up over the months, and I think luuser will put up some of his favorite stickytraps as well for you guys to take a look at. I’m sure other people on the team have ideas that they’ll be sharing as well. We also owe some of you an explanation about a nice little freight mid strat (courtesy of Sigma), as well as some other things we’ve been working on. The fun thing about running through random/crazy strats – sometimes it just works, given how your team plays. Some teams have a deadly scout combo, some have an aggro demo, some have sollys that airshot everything and do work, some have medics that drop ubers; it all comes down to picking what works and not trying to do something that relies too much on, say, scout DM skills when you know your scouts aren’t exactly at the top of the league in that department.
Feb 252010
TF2, at its core, is still categorized as an action game, a borderline FPS with a quirky twist to the usual point and shoot dynamics. Most people who pick up the game do so to, in a very general sense, ‘point’ and ‘shoot’ and hopefully ‘kill’ something. The game definitely keeps it interesting with its variety of classes, but those of us who have moved onto competitive play generally restrict ourselves (when we’re not raging!) to the standard soldier/demo/scout, who are more than capable of dealing damage to the enemy in a satisfying manner.
There is one class though, that seems to lack this satisfaction that can be gained from playing a competitive action game – the trusty medic. While scouts are never in short supply, being a hitscan class that makes use of skills acquired from traditional FPS games, and a decent amount of soldiers owe their skills to oldschool Quake games, medics are usually the hardest to find for a quick pug or lobby game. True, this may be due to the ratio of 1 medic to 5 other classes per team, but while most medics are more than competent fraggers with at least one secondary class, you would need a little more effort to find a scout or demo main who is willing to medic in a pinch.
So why play medic? What can anyone gain from playing this often underappreciated and overly raged-at class? I will be honest and say that I too enjoy my fair share of rocketshooting or scooting, but having played medic for the majority of the past season, I have come to appreciate some of the nuances of medic-play. It is not uncommon to hear the phrase “it’s easy to medic, but hard to be a good medic” tossed around on forums and discussions, and there is definitely some validity to this statement. But generalities and cliche phrases are easy to spit out: why exactly is this true?
Feb 242010
Hey all – sorry for the lack of posts and such – homework (and being a TA) has been keeping me busy; I haven’t even touched TF2 in 2 whole days (I know right, isn’t that horrifying). Today I just wanted to mention a couple of server things on our end, for those of you who might not yet have your own private server for competitive scrims and matches.
The FF podcast had an episode with some information on maintaining a 24-slot server; I just wanted to reiterate a few things from them. I personally use HLSW occasionally when I’m not ingame yet and want to change up the map or the password without booting up TF2 or getting into AIgaming’s control panel. The rest of the time, just hop ingame (if you’re not already) and use rcon to change settings, quick and easy. As for FPS and tick and all that: 500 FPS. You won’t regret it. 1000FPS is only necessary to make people shut up when they complain about how crappy the server is.
We run a 500FPS Team Fortress 2 server from AIgaming, and I’m not going to lie: I am 99% satisfied with it. We’ve had minor blips in downtime (once every month or so), and only one update wouldn’t install immediately in the past 5 months. The rest of the time, smooooooth and stable. If it ever gets choppy, restart the map (worst case, restart the server), it should get rid of the choppiness that results from having the map/autorecord on for a long time. It’s a 14 slot server + SourceTV, which is enough for 6v6 plus one in-game spectator for each team (and as I learned recently from Sigma, you can even kick the STV temporarily and it’ll come back when you change the map). We pay ~32 dollars a month for the whole package; split that between 6-10 people and it’s definitely worth it.
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