On Being Genuinely Bad at Team Fortress 2

I never considered myself great at Team Fortress 2. Granted, I knew a lot about the game, and I was a half-decent player. But I was never great. That being said, I could at least hold my own. At the very least, while I may have struggled with pure aiming skill, I did my best to make up for it. Over the years, I learned about a lot of other stuff. From the damage that weapons dealt, to each class’s movement speeds, to being better at dodging. My head was filled with Team Fortress 2 trivia.

Sure, I was never a particularly good Sniper. Sniping has never been my strong point. I sucked ass at Scout and Spy as well. But any other class? I’d do alright. Not bad, not amazing, just alright. At the very least, I wasn’t a drag on my team, unless I was playing Scout, Spy or Sniper. I was just alright.

Heck, I even played competitive TF2 for a bit. Then again, pretty much anyone can do that. And anyone CAN do that now that we have a ranked competitive system.

However, as time passed, I lost interest in Team Fortress 2. The game became stressful to me. I had other things going on in my life. I slowly stopped playing. While I still continued writing about Team Fortress 2, I barely actually started the game up. By the time the Meet your Match update came out, with brand new matchmaking and a ranked system, I had stopped entirely. Which is odd, because I had played in the Competitive Beta, even winning a 5v6 game that we should have lost.

Now though? It all disappeared.

I briefly played some Team Fortress 2 with a friend. Rather optimistically, I thought that some of my skills would come back to me. Or at least that some of that old knowledge would come back to me.

Nope. All my knowledge and skill vanished. I may have remembered how Payload worked, but I couldn’t get my head around Mountain Lab’s layout. Mountain Lab is a map I’ve played before, it’s an old map. We couldn’t even capture the first control point, and I managed to deploy all of one single Ubercharge. I didn’t even manage to hit anyone with my crossbow, which I switched to on the second map.

The only thing I remembered was bumping into Spies. And even then, because all my settings had reset, I still managed to accidentally heal a spy while trying to click between team mates. Weirdly though, despite all my default configs being reset, there was one thing that remained the same. My custom Medic configs still worked. Well, three of them did: a team-say thing that typed “Uber Deployed” in team chat, and the “Spy!” and “Incoming!” commands on my scroll wheel. Everything else had reset.

Not that it really mattered. As soon as we got into our third match, we were inundated with aim-botting, hacking snipers, who just vote-kicked anyone who tried to, well, join. Yeah, the bot and hacking problem is still a massive issue in TF2. And I don’t believe for a moment that it will be fixed any time soon. Even with a “supposed update” “in the works”.

So how do you not get bad at Team Fortress 2? Or any game for that matter?

It’s really simple. Just don’t stop playing. Well, don’t stop playing entirely. You can take breaks and all that, it’s completely fine. But the bigger the break you take, the more you forget. And, clearly, after all this time, I forgot how to play TF2.

And you know what? It does hurt a little. But all I can do is blame myself.