And the video:

We’re playtesting a 5 CP version of Gorge right now (it was actually designed & built as a 5-CP push map originally, and then converted into a short Attack/Defense to see how the community reacted). It’s working out well, so it’ll probably be in the next update. As usual, we’ve got other prototypes in the works, including a new map built around the new game mode we’re working on.

It’s a interesting read. I think the tf2 beta is definitely a step in the right direction. I remain hopeful for the new gamemodes. KOTH is a relatively new gamemode that has made its way into comp. If they can come up with a few other good modes, I think it’ll breathe life into tf2 like hats never will be able to.

I was hoping they would talk about the new demo system they announced was being worked on over a year ago, and never said anything more about it. Am I the only one that remembers that?

Projectile

For projectile dodging, generally if you look at their rocket launcher you can see if they are leading you or are going to flick to you. If they’re leading you, it’s quite easy to see that they are doing it and change directions. If they’re not tracking you with their mouse (aka: flicking to you) generally you can time your dodge with the cooldown on their rocket or they won’t be as accurate anyway. Generally you never want to jump unless you’re trying to reduce splash or ride a rocket away (excellent if you can time it right against bombers). If you’re getting solo bombed and the Soldier or Demoman is going above you directly, if helps your survivability if you move forward, assuming someone is there to protect you from a push, even if don’t have someone forward if you have uber it opens up a lot of possibilities if you walk forward a start a dodge. An example would be BLands choke. If someone jumps you and goes long going forward will cause at least 2 of his shots to miss and he has to turn around to hit you. If someone is still watching choke you’re pretty golden. On an unrelated note, if you’re retreating with an uber take any chance to rj off their rockets. Sticky dodging is a bit different, take longer dashes and be erratic and unpredictable. After he realizes you’re not backing into stickies he’ll probably lay down some at your perimeter, can’t do a whole lot about this unless you just outsmart him. Keep track of their ammo because if for whatever reason you’re trapped it’d do you good to dodge out their ammo and make an escape when they’re forced to reload.

Hitscan

Hitscan dodging is tricky. Note if your LOS is perpendicular to the Scouts LOS you will take less damage from Scatter shots. A ground airstrafe is very effective. If you’re confident enough with your stutter step facing the opposite direction of the Scout will throw him off as your Medic cape is not part of you hit box and will be very misleading. Also something to note you sometimes will internally mimic a Scouts movement if looking at him giving him an easier shot, another advantage to the method above. Generally I switch between looking at him to readjust a body block and then back to the method above. Generally you want to judge his position by his tracers. For Snipers abusing crouch twice while in the air and looking down and spinning is fairly safe if you can air control well. I occasionally flick my mouse back and forth giving the effect that I’m constantly turning; this will screw up his shot.

It’s a little bit old and not very well worded so the next post will be a couple videos explaining a lot of these theories. Bear with me .

Firstly, you’ll have to decide on a good sensitivity. I would greatly recommend disabling mouse acceleration for Medic as it will make airstrafing much easier. For PC players go into your control panel run mouse options and go to the pointer options tab and deselect enhance pointer precision. The next task for you is to find a sensitivity where you can comfortably look around while at the same time you are able to turn 180 degrees quickly and easily every two seconds. This will be important in holds and in general can be applied in spam fights as well.

The next thing you should concern yourself with is your autocall option. Basically autocall will cause your teammates to automatically call out for Medic when they reach or go below a specified percentage of health. Go into advanced options under the multiplayer tab and adjust your autocall. I don’t use this option because I generally have a good gamesense and I find it clutters the screen with useless calls. For example if someone is going to do an impulsive push they’re probably smashing their Medic key. I can react more quickly to their decisions that way. At any rate I wouldn’t raise the percentage higher than 50%.

That’s pretty much all for Medic settings. As long as you have your net settings fine then you’re pretty much off to a good start. m0re’s FPS config has very good net settings and reduced graphics that many people enjoy. Stay tuned for more.

Here’s the video .

The first jump requires a decent hop and can be done by 300 vel classes. The second one is pretty simple. And the third jump requires a hop from the very edge of the railing on Granary last. All in all fairly simple and nothing too complicated yet .

The first thing to establish is that the speed cap on bunny hopping is 170% (prior to the bunny hop fix in 2007 you could bypass this, now if you go over the cap it brings you back to base speed that’s why you can’t hop off of a rocket jump or sticky jump). That said a Medic can achieve 544 horizontal velocity from a base of 320. This value is misleading because people often confuse velocity for displacement. When you bunny hop  you’ll be strafing left and right on an angle of approximately 60-90 degrees. You can argue you can maintain a decent speed with circle hops instead of strafe hops (a circle hop is a bunny hop where as you land you hit the opposite direction key and strafe the other direction for a split second until you jump again), however, my results still indicate approximately the same displacement slightly above Scout speed (400 velocity). There are a couple maps where you can abuse this to roll out faster. The most vibrant in my mind right now as I write this is Granary where I have clocked 2-3 seconds faster than walking. With an 80% success rate you can get Scouts to middle with around 170 and the Equalizer soldier can get to mid about a second earlier. There’s a couple other maps where you can benefit from bunny hopping during your rollout and I’ll go over those in depth in the next article.

Alright let’s get to the video . This one focuses more on situational jumps rather than bhops but be patient. I also apologize for the black border I’m still working out some quality issues.

1. This jump is pretty simple, although the latter part is kind of tricky. You have to get used to strafing out for a split second and then back inward.

2. It’s just another strafe jump, pretty simple.

3. This is the only bhop in this collection. You bhop from 2 on GPit B to the pack. You start from the top of the ramp and hop about two thirds of the way down towards the small pack.

4. This jump is really easy. Approach the window from the right, go out the left side, and strafe.

5. This jump is probably the most difficult as it requires a lot of precision and a maxspeed strafe jump from a small platform. I’ve managed to get it to 50% accuracy and have used it to escape a couple times.

6. This jump is very similar to the first jump as you have to strafe out and in precisely. It’s basically a safer version of 5 and the Blu team version of 7.

7. This one is easy. Just strafe out and inward once to avoid the sign and then once again to land on the machine.

I’ll be doing a lot more in depth instructions (perhaps even key presses in the video) when I actually do difficult stuff. This is just a taster with jumps that really don’t require too much practice. The only one I left out is the A tunnel jump on GPit which I’ll probably add in the next video. Until then enjoy and happy hopping.

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Source Engine Changes (CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, HL2:DM)
[Windows] Added support for raw mouse input. Raw input reads directly from the mouse, bypassing Windows control panel mouse settings. This addresses issues with high DPI mice, and provides for a more reliable controller experience at various resolutions
[Windows] Improved custom mouse acceleration
[Windows] Updated mouse configuration UI to support raw input and acceleration; added tooltips to some of the options
[Windows] Fixed UI tooltips so that they display correctly on first hover

Team Fortress 2
Added the “Team Spirit” paint can.
Added Telltale Games items:
Dangeresque, Too?: Strong Bad’s styling glasses (equipped by the Demoman)
License to Maim: Max’s Badge (equipped by all classes)
The Iron Curtain: The Heavy’s first love (equipped by the Heavy, obviously)
The Enthusiast’s Timepiece: Tycho’s favorite timepiece (equipped by the Spy)
Updated some item capabilities:
Employees badges can now have custom names.
The Stickybomb Jumper can now be gift wrapped.
The Spine-Chilling Skull and Voodoo Juju hats are now paintable.
Improved the Spine-Chilling Skull and Voodoo Juju hat positions on the Sniper.
Added the original Ubersaw taunt to the Vita-Saw.
Fixed an issue that prevented the game from running on Fat32 systems.
Fixed a problem with the Sackston Hale achievement sometimes not being awarded correctly.
Fixed the holiday gamestartup sound files being included in the random startup selection after the holiday is over.
Fixed numerous WebAPI issues.
Fixed a Heavy exploit that let him run at full speed while shooting.
Fixed a Frontier Justice exploit that let Engineers have infinite crits for their current life/round.
Fixed the shotgun reload animations for the Soldier/Pyro/Heavy looping endlessly.
Fixed the Medigun charge percent for other players being steppy.
Fixed not being able to light arrows after the first arrow is fired unless they’re drawn back.
Updated the localization files

This will also be a little introduction post. I alias as Mike nowadays but used to alias as Healbot. I played Medic for countless fail teams with Midnyt before finally joining some form of vPolice for a couple weeks. After that I pretty much went on and off as Medic and Scout for sometime. I now play off-Soldier for orz and usually Sniper/Spy/Heavy . We will also be welcoming Gravegun, who will be playing Scout, to the team a good friend of mine and long time sexual partner.

ESEA S7 LAN News TF2

ESEA S7 Grand Finals set

Since coL had the 1st see coming into the LAN finals they were given a bye for round 1:

eMg vs Blight koth_viaduct

eMg vs Blight cp_coldfront

Round 2 the winners go on to play in the finals and the loser plays the in the lower bracket finals:

eMg vs coL cp_badlands

eMg vs coL cp_gravelpit

Round 3, lower bracket finals:

coL vs Blight  cp_gullywash_imp3

coL vs Blight cp_granary

coL vs Blight cp_coldfront

The grand finals have yet to be played.

I’ll throw in a nice LAN prediction article from a very respected Medic, Sigma, which can be found here. That’s all right now in the world o NA TF2. We’ll be updating a lot more hopefully since we’ve pretty much hammered out our team .

Update: The finals have been played. Congratulations eMg.

coL vs eMg cp_granary

coL vs eMg cp_coldfront

Regarding CEVO playoffs, you can check out the newspost here, which also includes a link to the future brackets. 2 matches per week, with viaduct, gullywash, and coldfront being the first 3 maps played. There are a bunch of decent teams that are set to make playoffs as well, most notably Dinosaur Bones/Team Explosion, who forfeited to us on freight I believe to focus on their ESEA matches, which are both on Thursday (match day for CEVO as well). Natures with yaug seems to be the other team to beat in playoffs. Apparently, winning CEVO-A means we get a chance to go up against a Valve team, so we shall see if we end up with that chance

I’m a pretty competitive and emotional guy, and I’ve struggled with not letting the outlet of anger, frustration, disappointment etc. be my team. I have raged on multiple occasions and I guess I’m lucky that I play for a team that is willing to put up with that kind of bullcrap. How, then, do you become a better person, at least in the world of competitive gaming? There’s actually several ways to help deal with it (unless, of course, you’re a chronic A-Hole, in which case you’re doomed to a life full of the dark side of the Force).

• Prepare mentally before every scrim/match. This could take as little as a minute and really only needs at most 5 minutes. Take time to listen to a calming song, take deep breaths, and clear your mind so you can focus on the game rather than anything else outside of the game that might be stressing you out. If you come into the game focusing on the game, you can assess why things are going well/poorly better. You also get to start with a mentally clean slate before the night’s games.
• Absolute, unwavering, and completely unwarranted confidence. This one is a little weird. Basically, you need to psych yourself up and convince yourself that you’re a giant badass who will slaughter all comers – and keep up that confidence in the course of the game. You need to be stupidly confident. You need to believe that you absolutely will win, and if you don’t, that you’ll win the next round. Basically, get in a mental state where you don’t need to bounce back from difficulty – because you’re already perfectly capable of handling it. Post-scrim/match is the time for reflection and analysis – during the match, you need to believe that you’re the best player in the server.
• Visualize. Before a scrim or match, close your eyes and picture the kinds of situations that you excel at. Personally, I do best when the team is pushing 5 on 5, or I’m cleaning up after a hectic battle that has mostly wiped out both teams.  Also picture high-stress situations – when you’re fighting to push back from your own last to the enemy’s first, when your team is 4 down and you desperately need to get a forced uber or med pick, or when your team has a numbers disadvantage and the other team is pushing. Get comfortable with stressful situations, even in your imagination, and you can deal with them better when they actually come up.
• Take a break between scrims. This one is kind of up to your team and how many scrims they string together in a row, but on a personal basis you are perfectly capable of getting up off your chair, taking a walk around your house, using the bathroom, and in general doing something to cool down – and especially to get rid of any residual feeling about the previous match.
• Get a rage buddy. Find a friend you can complain to (as well as be that same person for that friend and listen to their rage). Rage about the game, or something outside of the game that’s pissing you off. Vent, let it all out in that setting so you don’t bring that to your scrims and matches.
• Get healthier. This is a really important point that many gamers probably overlook. A healthy body is a happy body. Get some more sleep at night. Eat healthier (maybe even cook for yourself). Get regular, daily exercise. Talk to people face-to-face. Do the kinds of things normal people do – and then at night get ready to shit all over baddies and drink the blood of other nerds.
• Take a break. This seems to be a recurring theme for me, but it’s really important you find something outside of the game to put energy into. Maybe another, more casual game (Minecraft), maybe an activity you really enjoy (building scale models of Japanese robots), or a sport that you have fun with (Swimming/Jogging). And if possible, take a few days off from TF2 completely every once in a while.

Now obviously these kinds of things don’t work for everyone, so if anger and rage are common problems for you, find your own best way of addressing it and then, more importantly, actually carry it out so that it stops being a problem for you.