Medic’s Sixth and Seventh Ever Competitive Matches – I don’t know any more!
As the season is now over and there’s no more matches, I’ve decided to combine these two articles, as a quick overview of both week 8 and week 9. Both somewhat interesting, both pitting teams of hugely varied experience against one another. Week 8 was the last official match week, and week 9 was the start of the playoffs. The skill levels are all over the place, man! All over the place! And so is the ping. Also included is week 7, which was stupid.
Week 7 was a blow out, the other team forfeited. They messed us around, unable to get a date set. First it was Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday. We’d done a little scrim on Thursday, against a different team, which was fun, but it was a shame not to follow it up with an official match. A tip to any newbie teams, don’t piss off other teams, set a date and play. Get mercs/ringers if you have to. Delay by 15 minutes if you need to. But don’t repeatedly not show up and don’t ignore team captains adding you.
Week 8’s map was KOTH_Badlands, the ONLY map this season that’s an official one, rather than being a community map. Made a change to play a map that I know really well, as opposed to another map in which I run around like a headless chicken. We spent a long time messing around waiting for the other team to turn up, including an awkward five minute silence, while Keith and his mum were talking. Confusion said Keith’s mum would have to speak to him if she wanted to join the team, and I spent 3 minutes snickering. Then we tried to play Pyro Tennis as we waited for our opponents.
Unfortunately, the other team were having player issues. They were down a player and couldn’t find anyone to fill in. We wanted to offer them Davjo, who was in Mumble with us, messing around, but that would have seemed rather dodgy. They declined anyway. We started off the match playing 4v3, but half way through the third round, after spawn-camping the poor guys, their fourth member turned up and we politely reset, because we like fairness. The 4v4 match though continued on in our favor. This team didn’t have the same average amount of experience as we did. We won 4-0, but don’t worry, the experience factor was about to completely screw us over.
Week 9 on the other hand was the playoffs, and we didn’t even know we’d be playing. Our scores for the last few weeks hadn’t been reported, so we were handing around 20th in EU Steel, so you can imagine our surprise when we saw that we were suddenly fifth and due to play in the playoffs. We somehow managed to fit in a scrim on the week’s map, koth_Brazil, with some team off Confusion’s ‘Scrim List’, and they kicked our asses then promptly disappeared.
The official match wasn’t much better – Everyone apart from me was perfectly good at death-matching, but we had zero team work, and the map design made it VERY hard to push back. It’s a piece of cake to defend a control point when it’s 3m up in the air, and the only paths onto it are either via a small choke or up two slopes from which the defenders can just rain rocket death on you. We didn’t play very well either. Confusion was having his normal crappy 600 ping fluctuations, and Keith was in a bad mood. At least he was killing people though, I could barely build a single Uber, and their Medic was in the same position – both of us had far less hours than everyone else, but his team had more hours and teamwork. Curse you, people with 3000+ hours in TF2!
On the plus side, since we knew we were fucked, I used this chance to play Heavy in the last round, and we did push back briefly, but Heavy’s not very good when half the enemy team can blindly spam at you from above. We lost 0-4, same as the other koth match we lost. Definitely not one of the better 4v4 maps around though, since defending the point is SO easy.
And that ends Medic’s first competitive season. I won’t go into any more detail, since you’ve already heard me ramble on about it elsewhere.