Medic Does Competitive – Week 2 6v6 and 4v4

Ah, matchmaking. A process in which you’re matched up with enemies of a somewhat similar skill level, in the hopes that you’ll have a nice, happy, balanced but challenging match. Except maybe not. This week’s competitive events were not exactly fun for everyone involved.

So, the 4v4 team known as SCUD is no more. We formed a new team called SPUF EU, consisting of myself, Confusion, Sham and Davjo, with Keith and Jensen as subs and newcomer w0lk joining the ranks. Last season, we finished off in 9th place in Euro Steel, with a somewhat okay score of 6-3. This was grounds to move us up to Euro Silver, which none of us were sure about. Sounded great, until we realised that Euro Silver consists of a lot of Gold, Platinum and Silver teams from 6v6 and HL who have made 4v4 teams and can’t move up to Euro Gold 4v4 because no such division exists. If you thought that the split in skill in Steel 6v6 was bad, it’s got nothing on Euro Silver 4v4.

To prove our point, our very first match as a newly formed team with only 1-2 seasons of experience between us were placed against a Platinum Highlander team. This week’s map was koth_Dropdown, a new addition to the 4v4 roster, normally used for TF2X10 or VS Saxton Hale.

To make matters worse for us, real life things happened too. Confusion had to rush off earlier in the week to deal with some real life problems, and Sham was forced out last minute due to more real life things. We ended up with me, Davjo, Keith and w0lk, with me calling the shots. We’d done some practicing and looking the map earlier over the few days before hand, but unless we suddenly became gold players minimum within a week, there was no chance of us winning.

Needless to say, the match didn’t last very long. We tried our best, managing to capture a couple of times, but we lost 0-4.

On the plus side, we did learn a something. When we capture, we need to hug the nearby health kits, rather than standing near or on the point. Especially on a very dangerous control point like in Dropdown, which was completely open, had no safe areas and sucked mobility-wise for non-jumper classes.

There’s more good news too. Davjo got some good double donks, we managed to make their Medic drop Uber once and I somehow managed to dominate their Scout for a couple of lives.

Let’s round things off with some different news. 6v6 news. Because there was a match for 6v6 as well, in the form of cp_Snakewater, an interesting map that lacks snakes and has very little water in it. Really, it should be called garagecrocodile or something, considering what’s in each team’s spawn room. Nice map, except when someone puts 7 sentries on last. We did actually practice for this match, with some rollouts and a quick scrim that went horribly wrong, and tactics were formed.

Unfortunately, none of those tactics were used. The other team forfeited the match, giving us the win.

Oh well. Next week, we have koth_Artefact for 4v4 and cp_Sunshine for 6v6.