Retrospective 2, or what little I saw of it…

Retrospective 2 is a TF2 tournament, more like one we’d recognise, with eliminations and things like that. Normally, I see all these things advertised on the News section of the Team Fortress 2 website and I don’t honestly pay much attention to them. They’re tournaments I’m not skilled enough to play in, or they’re LANs which I’ll never be able to play in, or it’s an announcement about ETF2L. That’s pretty much it. I wouldn’t have given Retrospective 2 any further thought if it wasn’t for W0lk, the SPUF 6v6 roamer and 4v4… thing… asking me about it.

You see, Retrospective does have something for everybody, unless you want to play 4v4. It has Highlander and 6v6 for normal competitive players and Ultiduo for Soldier and Medic mains who spend too much time together. Then it has Ready Steady Pan and Arena Respawn for, well, weird people. Unfortunately, by the time W0lk had started pestering me about it, Ready Steady Pan sign ups were already over, which is very upsetting, we both fancied that. We had a couple of choices.

6v6 was out. Although there was an option for a newbie league, everyone was a bit worn out by 6v6.

Highlander means finding more people. So we passed on that.

Ultiduo seemed like fun, but I’m not a fan and W0lk found a more willing Medic to play with him, especially since Ultiduo is where a lot of the pros go.

So Arena Respawn it was. It looked like a ton of fun, and because I used to play a LOT of normal Arena, I thought it’d make a change and we’d have a chance to do something different. It was agreed from the start that we’d just be messing around and all that, this was not an event to take seriously. W0lk arranged everything, called the team HypePipe (I don’t know why) and we waited.

Sunday came along and W0lk was getting worried. Teams hadn’t been confirmed and matches hadn’t been announced. It turns out that Arena Respawn was pretty popular and all 50 team slots had filled up. That meant that 350 people (5 people and 2 subs per team) had signed up and were ready to play.

Monday comes along and W0lk’s still nervous. Sham, Davjo and I start talking about stupid strategies, since Arena Respawn allows you to ban two classes (one per team) and for a laugh, we suggest Soldier, Demoman or Medic. Turns out, W0lk somewhat knows the team we’re playing against. W0lk seems to know everyone though, so I don’t worry about it.

Later on, there’s a map change. The first map was originally going to be a dedicated Arena map called Goldtooth, a community one. It’s switched out for a map called koth_product. We dutifully download it, and I’m utterly confused as I realise that product is actually a variant of Viaduct! I should have guessed, with Viaduct and Pro. But yes, it’s a grassy KOTH map, differing from normal Viaduct_pro in terms of the placement and size of medkits. This one has a medium one in the tunnel next to the point (often called Concrete). Not a great idea for an Arena map really.

An hour before the match, Davjo, Sham, Jensen and myself mess around in a Valve server, playing Viaduct, because we can’t be bothered to rent a server running Viaduct_pro. The maps are pretty similar as it is, it’s mostly just fixed problems and the new tunnel. W0lk invites us to the Arena Respawn server 15 minutes before the match and we mess around further. We finalize the decision to ban Medic, as it looks hilarious with someone called Medic on the team. I bagsie Pyro, while everyone else can play whatever they want.

While we wait 15 minutes for the other team, we find a stupidly hilarious bug. The server has a command to change class, by typing !class *insert class here*. Problem was, it didn’t work correctly, leading to images like the below. Many laughs were had.

Finally, the other team arrive, 10pm on the nose. The team leader appears first. He looks familiar. Then the second person joins. The name is very familiar. He gets in and he’s on my friends list! Hang on! These guys are the team we played 6v6 against in week 6! They kicked our asses then. The mood has suddenly dropped a bit, since we all know what’s going to happen. The rest of the team connects, they ban Demoman after a few attempts of not writing the command correctly, and we ready up.

Five minutes later, we’ve lost 0-7. Game over.

Welp, no more Retrospective 2 for us. At least we’ll get some nice badges.