Gravelpit strategies

Posted by thunDEER at 11:01 am Demos and Recordings, League Matches, Team orz Updates
Apr 242010

EDIT2: Alright kids as Sigma said, the dispenser buff is banned in ESEA. Don’t do it! :) We will refrain from it in the future. BUT if a solly is healing up and resupplying from a dispenser, I’m not going to wait until he’s at 200 or walks away before I heal him…

EDIT: unfortunately, ACE has decided to dispute the match because of us using the dispenser for permanent buffs, and has requested my PoV demo. Thankfully, my P-rec was up and working (I thought I didn’t have it turned on, which is why you see me stop for a few seconds as I frantically try to record again), and for all of you who are interested in seeing a gpit medic PoV, here you go.

Just a quick update from orz: we have now finished our 3rd week of CEVO, with a 2-0 win over ACE on gravelpit. Check out the demo HERE if you want (there is a ~20 minute scrim before that though). Our 2nd week was a forfeit win, and next week we play Top Swaggin’ on koth_viaduct.

Things to note: we do use a dispenser at spawn/B to get our permanent buffs on both attacking and defending. Even chrono gets his during attacking by taking fall damage :D On attack, we run a standard A push, with heavies going to C. If we get a pick early on, we camp the spawn to buy us a little more time. Our scouts then go through connector after capping A (sometimes with Biz, our roamer), and wait for our call for the gun to go down at B. I uber luuser through the door closest to the shady side of B, and wait for him to take down the gun, and then I run along cliff towards the sunny side, where Synthos will be waiting to pick me up. We then rotate around to the rock by the front door, and our scouts hopefully come in and clean up the sniper/engy and any other people still hanging around. Luuser hopefully follows me as we all rotate around, and biz or synthos has to be up on the roof asap.

You can see some miscommunication during a few of our pushes in the demo posted above, where we come in at the wrong times sometime – it’s crucial that you guys practice these pushes so that people get used to making calls and moving accordingly. We scrimmed gpit about 10 times over the past 2 weeks before we got our stuff down to about a 70% success rate, but even against some good fragging/DM teams, we can pull out a few wins because of practicing these strats.

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Tryouts, equalizers, ninjas in tf2

Posted by thunDEER at 5:07 pm Strats and Scrims, Team orz Updates
Mar 012010

Welcome to those of you visiting via the TWL forums page. Shoutout to holy for bumping the thread (how’s that team building going? :D ), 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.

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Why play medic?

Posted by thunDEER at 11:49 pm Random Ramblings, Strats and Scrims
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?

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Blog Intentions

Posted by Panda at 5:36 pm Featured, Random Ramblings, Strats and Scrims
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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Playoff Tonight at 10! And beyond...

Posted by thunDEER at 3:33 pm League Matches, Strats and Scrims
Feb 212010

So last night the team had quite the lengthy discussion and scrim session in which we, in a nutshell, decide to be a more aggressive and versatile team. We may not have the best DM, but we’re going to try and make up for that with smart, aggressive play, taking full advantage of any mistakes that the enemy team makes. Tonight we get to try out this new philosophy for the first time =O Panda also typed up a very nice post on our private Google Groups discussion detailing our previous ‘issue’ with our fixed, textbook strat calls and play styles and how he thinks we need to move forward, look forward to that post appearing here soon :)

As for our roster, we have come to the conclusion that we need an experienced soldier or medic to join, not necessarily in a starter role, but who will split playtime with the current starters given our real life schedules. I fully expect to be able to play on even ground with most TWL Div2 teams by the end of the offseason, before CEVO/TWL starts up again. But, we will need one more soldier/medic to help us out. Are you qualified? Know someone that is? You know who to contact :D

Baldy, Chrono, and Leia will split starter scout duties, depending on a) the time of day for hardworking Chrono on the east coast, b) whether or not Mexico or other Central American countries are currently having a civil war, preventing baldy’s packets from making it to our American servers, and c) Leia’s burrito cravings. Panda and Biznich will split starter duties with whoever we pick up (unless we pick up a solid medic, in which case I become that 3rd solly). Luuser will carry, and we will continue to train modopo as a backup scout/utility when he’s not too busy waxing his hair or slamming birdies on the badminton court.

But in the meantime, 1oEST TONIGHT! Against a fully capable, up-and-coming low/mid team as well, J4F. Should be a good one, if we don’t end up doing silly stuff. connect 206.123.125.73:27020 come watch , even if we do end up sucking :p maps will be freight, granary, and badlands.

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Rolled by - and Responding to Weird Strats

Posted by thunDEER at 7:39 pm Strats and Scrims
Feb 192010

Got rolled today by Six Guys Off running a dual heavy strat on granary, with a pyro and huntsman here and there. One of our problems is that we can’t adapt quickly to a non-standard strat – we were still running 2 scouts against 2 heavies, 2 sollies, and a demo. Things we could’ve done: ran kritz, ran a heavy of our own, ran a sniper (huntsman or regular). Our scouts are going to have to take the initiative (as do I, as medic) to change it up instantly instead of throwing ourselves at them and just dying.

Another issue we had was losing people because they were out fighting alone, and I was too far away to save them. I also had my fair share of dropped saves with uber, so I’m partially to blame. I’m not used to having to hit uber to save a group of people, I prefer pushing or popping uber when we’re not all crowded into a choke taking spam, but times like that its hit it or lose everyone.

Moral of the story: when playing matches against higher-level teams who like to change things up, be prepared to not play by textbook strats, play smart and with a good counter :3 Unlike last time, we can’t say that we ‘beat Six Guys Off’

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