Medic’s Third Ever Competitive Match – Communication and Experience, I have none.

So Friday the 20th. My third ever official match. This was by far our hardest match, because the enemy team had SO MUCH experience. They’ve been playing 6v6 and 4v4 together for a loooong time. Season 12 or something like that. We knew from the start that we had little chance of winning, but that didn’t stop us from trying our best. So I don’t bore you, I’m not going to do a commentary of the whole match. It was quite long and involved us dying a lot. You don’t really want to hear how I died 16 times, 4 times from Kritz and every other time from dive bombs.

We started off the week worrying about Confusion. He’d disappeared. He’s better now, not 100% but much better. I decided to take action and organize a scrim. Being a competitive nobody though, the only person who wanted to scrim was the team we were scheduled to play on Friday. On Wednesday, I organized a scrim on KOTH Airfield and arranged everything. Thankfully Confusion returned, but I’d called Jensen (who played on the team last year) to see if he could fill in, just in case.

Let’s just say, the scrim went badly. Although everything was organized and happened on time, we got our asses handed to us. We played 3 rounds. I only managed a single Kritz and a single assist and spent more time dead than alive. We had no focus and ended up caught in a respawn trap – because we weren’t waiting for each other, we rarely had all four of us alive at once. The biggest issue was the constant divebombing, jumping straight over whoever I was healing and killing me. Because Airfield is somewhat cramped, there’s little room for surfing unless you’re actually on the control point.

We weren’t too upset though. After the match, we decided to mess around and play Ultiduo, which was fun. Apart from the constant missing of my Ubersaw. DAMN YOU HIGH PING. That horrible moment when you hear the sound of saw hitting flesh, but no hit sound. I also discovered that Medics have no choice what so ever in Ultiduo. You can only use Stock Medi Gun, Stock Syringe Gun, Bonesaw or Ubersaw. And maybe Blutsauger. I dunno, none of us wanted to really use it. The others found out how bad a Soldier I was, but I did warn them beforehand.

So after our really bad scrim, we decided we had nothing to lose. The map was Viaduct_Pro. We had ideas.

Friday afternoon was spent discussing ideas with Confusion. At 7pm GMT (9pm for me), we hopped on to a rented server, discussed all the callouts and worked on some rollouts, something we didn’t do in our scrim. We also discussed class usage and weapon choices. Although I was essentially stuck using Kritzkrieg, we decided to run Battalion’s Backup. Kritz nullifying? Heck yes.

Unfortunately though, we never really got to use the Backup. Thing is, UGC is such a mashup of different skill levels, that rolls like this are pretty common. There was much more pushing back than before, but there was no way we could have won against such an experienced team with amazing comms who had a third of the ping that we had.

Seriously, the ping was bad. All of us had 50+ ping. They all had like 40 ping. I hate living on this island sometimes. Not that the ping would have made us win or anything, it’s just interesting to mention.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. The dominations were far less than in our scrim. In the scrim, we were all getting dominated left right and center. We’d barely be able to make it to the point. This time though, we contested the point a few times and got pretty close in the second round. Our communication was much better and I managed to pump out more Ubers. I also managed to escape more often, running back to the safety of spawn. Their Medic was downed more regularly too, and Sham managed to scare off their Sniper with his own counter-sniping. Oh and I got a Solemn Vow kill. Yay.

And after the match, we did a single dicking around round. Amazingly, we won. But that may have been because half of them leaving with 30 seconds left on the timer. Or maybe they were scared of me playing Heavy. Probably the former.

We did learn a lot from that match. And I finally feel that I’m not an awful player. I’m not a great player, but I try my best. I just need a lot of looking after.

Hopefully next week, we’ll have a more equal opponent. The best matches are always the close ones. Steamrolls are never fun to watch.