On Crits

Yes. That thing that’s the sparkling rocket. That thing that’s the Sniper (or the Spy’s) headshot. That thing that comes from a Flare Gun or the prenerf Axtinguisher. That thing an Engineer gets on a Frontier Justice when his minisentry dies.

Today, we will talk about the crit.

Crits tend to be very annoying, random or not. It feels very aggravating to die to one. It does not help if it’s completely random and could not have been one, ending up with you cursing your luck for the rocket that manages to take off 360 of your health.

Crits were generally made to make a game more fun, to turn what would have been a horrifically hopeless fight into one that could end up with a lucky win. Otherwise people would be off playing something like CS:GO.

However, crits still tip towards the streaker’s favor, as the one who keeps a higher rate of damage crits more often. While this looks great on paper, it renders the luck part of crits highly obsolete, as steamrollers are generally more likely to out-crit you, which only solidifies the steamroll.

As TF2 progressed over the years, people have learned to fear the crit, and associate it with general frustration, which can be summed up with a biological term: Classical conditioning, where an organism associates an occurrence with a behavior. For us, we have learned to associate the crit with frustration and a feeling of unfairness.