One Night on Orange

It was around 7:30 P.M, Eastern Time. I was bored and in need of something to waste a perfectly good evening. That I immediately started TF2 should come as no surprise.

That evening, I was in a feisty mood. Upon entering the title screen and selecting “servers”, I entered the “crits” parameter. I was promptly presented with several servers. After some deliberation, I selected cp_orange. Who doesn’t like oranges?

‘Twas my first time on an allcrits server, and it wasn’t pretty. Shortstop Scouts, Enforcer Spies, and Sniping Snipers were several of the more frustrating opponents. After stints as Spy, Scout, and Demo, I decided to go sniper myself.

That further confirmed my suspicion that Sniper in allcrits is the possibly the single most overpowered thing in TF2, even more so than getting Black Box Scout in Randomizer (but only slightly). Even I, a mediocre Sniper at best, was able to bag several kills. When I swapped to the stock rifle from the Huntsman, which I had been using previously, my kills shot up drastically. Anything with 150 health or below is instantly killed, even while noscoped! To make matters worse, BLU had some, um, infuriating Snipers.

This clearly wasn’t working. And yet, the next choice was obvious. I went Pyro. The opposing team had a significant number of Crossbow Medics running about, to which the obvious solution was a liberal dose of reflection. I scored around five kills soon after exiting spawn due to the proliferation of bolts being sent in my general direction. Even after I reflected several, even more continued to be sent. Those certainly were some dedicated Medics! Of course, I didn’t reflect all of them, and died several times following a mistimed air last, but we were gaining ground.

The very definition of “screwed”.

Sometime after this, a bunch of players who’d been topping the score charts left, which also might have been a cause of my team’s success. We started erecting buildings, in addition to assuming control of the central, contested building. I also had the idea to call in a friend of mine to join the game on BLU’s side, and to become a Soldier. Some of you who’ve played this mod probably know where I’m going. Well, as I had discovered earlier, when you reflect a projectile, it gains the ability to home in on players. All my reflected crossbow kills certainly weren’t due to my mastery of angles and such. The idea seemed glorious: me, on too if the building, constantly reflecting a stream of homing crockets like a bunch of blu-seeking bringers of death.

Originally, we had ourselves inside. However, due to our proximity, the first rocket I reflected spun around 180 degrees and disintegrated my friend. After having a good chuckle, I suggested he head outside and fire at a window I would station myself at. We did that, and the carnage began.

Looking back, I have to say that that had to be one of the best ideas I’ve had in recent memory. Rockets would come, I would reflect them, they would go gallivanting off, sometimes in spirals, and then destroy some unexpecting Sniper. There was one time I saw when an opposing Pyro reflect one and kill one of our Heavies, but at least it was entertaining.

Of course, when you display such amazing skills, people are going to get mad. One person’s complaint was “red had homing crit rockets”. Another demanded that everyone stop firing rockets at me, which was a good idea in theory but obviously didn’t work. After I killed some people for the fourth or fifth time (I had around 6 doms at one point), some got in full-on rage mode, repeatedly using the poor, innocent caps-lock button. I was being accused of hacking so much, I was collapsing on the floor in peals of laughter. My friend shared my delight, even when a stray rocket targeted him. There was at least one time when one arrived just as I reached the building’s roof, which resulted in a hasty trip back to spawn. The timing was certainly impeccable.

Our fun kept being ruined, though. Spies kept backstabbing me while I was facing outside, reflecting. What killjoys, why can’t they just leave me alone to annihilate their team in peace? 🙁 The rest of our team wasn’t holding back, too, as my friend had a devil of a time getting far enough out and with enough time to shoot me some rockets.

The sound of having a crocket impact one of the enemy team is pure crack, I tell you. When you see it dive down from a horizontal flight, you know that sweet sound is coming, that glorious signifier of one more added to your current killstreak… I’m getting giddy just thinking about it.

Of course, all good things must come to an end. It was with a heavy heart to hat I informed my friend I had to leave. I can only imagine the level of relief the RED team felt after my departure, it must have been astronomical.

What’s the moral of the story? First, whatever you’re doing, have fun. Early on, I was doing terribly (because I’m bad at TF2), but was having such an uproariously good time that I stuck with it. What a good thing that turned out to be. The other main thing I learned would have to be along the lines of yolo$wag420blazeit. Thank you and goodnight.