analysis – Page 12 – The Daily SPUF

What happens on cp_orange…

January 29, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, balance, maps

cp_orange_x3 might just be my favorite custom map in all of TF2, for entirely the wrong reasons. It was there for me, man. From the beginning. And it’s always been there for me. cp_orange_3’s immortal popularity is no surprise to me; it’s a memory featherwight. You can play it on anything. For two months after graduating college I lived in a 125-square foot apartment with two roommates in San Francisco. I didn’t even have room for a desktop, I could only use my laptop on my bed and steal internet from the hotel next door. The only map I could play… [Continue Reading]

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Passive abilities

January 25, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, demoman, engineer, heavy, loadout, medic, pyro, scout, sniper, soldier, spy, weapon

TF2 doesn’t feel like a game with a lot of passive abilities. There are few obvious ones, such as the scout’s double-jump and the Pyro’s afterburn immunity, but when you look into things, it turns out that almost every class has at least one. First of all, its debatable whether “more than 125 health” counts as a passive ability. Even though its pretty clearly the baseline for TF2, some people might consider speed and health a form of statistics instead of abilities. It’s also debatable whether any ability that requires equipping a weapon would count, like “can remove sappers” or… [Continue Reading]

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The Lost Art of Flagrunning

January 15, 2015 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, comparison, game mode, medic, scout, TFC

This article is going to take the same pensive tone of the similarly-themed “The Art of the Backcap“, except whereas backcapping isn’t completely lost, flagrunning by and large is completely absent from TF2 in the game’s current incarnation. It was largely dead from the getgo. Flagrunning is the act of playing with one objective in mind; reaching the enemy’s flag, grabbing it, and getting it as close as you can to your team’s capture zone before you die. It may sound odd for me to claim such a simplistic act is completely gone from TF2 (after all, matches do end… [Continue Reading]

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A Different Gamechanger

January 14, 2015 Medic 0 Comments analysis, balance, class, comparison, medic

Dedicated healers in games generally get the short end of the stick. Whether it’s having to rely on the skill of your team mates or your inability to keep up, being a healer is generally a thankless job, hence why many games go with the Combat Medic, someone who can heal but can also look after themselves, capable of surviving in a one on one fight just like anyone else. Turning back to the Team Fortress 2 Medic, he seems a tad out of line. A designer at Riot, the company behind League of Legends, once argued that it’s no… [Continue Reading]

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Soldier is overpowered and we don’t care…

January 11, 2015 Medic 0 Comments analysis, balance, class, criticism, soldier

In any class-based video game, you generally have some form of balance. Agile classes come with a lack of health, while power classes exchange speed for pure power, with other classes scattered between them. So the idea of a mobile, strong ace of all trade class appears to spit in the face of all this. In any other game, people would say that Soldier is overpowered. What few consider is that he may actually be so. If you look at his base stats, Soldier does seem rather mundane. High health, low walking speed, high damage weaponry with average reload times.… [Continue Reading]

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Flaring Up

December 14, 2014 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, balance, pyro, request, shotgun

Poor Pyro can’t seem to catch a break. Ever since his Team Fortress Classic days people have derided him as underpowered, unbalanced, gimmicky, over-reliant on newb opponents…the insults are as varied as the tools Valve has bestowed upon the poor unintelligible merc. Plenty of people have written opinions on why Pyro is underpowered (here’s mine) and even more people have written theories on how to fix that problem. Before I go into that, I want to try and sum up some fundamentals that are often brought up. Firstly, Pyro’s short-range emphasis is seen as one of his major problems since… [Continue Reading]

Featured The Competitive Corner

Why I’m not sure 4v4 works

December 13, 2014 Medic 0 Comments 4v4, analysis, competitive, criticism, theory

4v4 is the third or fourth version of TF2 competitive, after 6v6, Highlander and, whether you consider it or not, Ultiduo. Thing is, it doesn’t quite work. Or at least, I feel that it doesn’t quite work. Alright, I am by no means an expert, I’ve only played a couple of matches, but since I am a somewhat intelligent person, I quickly saw the flaws in what I played. Before we start, there are a LOT of positive things behind 4v4. It is much easier to organize eight people over sixteen or eighteen people, and getting them into a server… [Continue Reading]

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Gunslingers vs. Highlanders: an analysis

December 4, 2014 aabicus 0 Comments analysis, demoknight, engineer, event, Highlander, medic, scout, theory

There was recently something of an upset when the Highlander team swept the Gunslingers in the recent tournament, and it rightly seems to have attracted something of an interest in the SPUF community. (I notice there hasn’t been a single thread arguing the Gunslinger is OP since the event…) Since I’ve participated in two of these events, playing Medic for Season 2 (the first time the Gunslingers won) and the most recent Season 5, I’ve got a pretty good perspective from which to analyze the two teams. On a fundamental level, the first major reason that Highlanders performed so much better… [Continue Reading]

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Ah, Geoff.

November 29, 2014 Medic 0 Comments analysis, glitches, medic, weapon

Ah Geoff, the Medi Gun for the person who hates building Uber and overhealing and wants to make his life needlessly complicated. I’ll be honest, my relationship with Geoff has been veering towards the bad side of things more and more and more. It wasn’t until I completely and utterly fucked up my binds for the Vaccinator (I forgot that I no longer had reload bound to Mouse5) that I realised why no one else was stupid enough to use this thing against hordes of grenade-knights. I wasn’t even meant to play in that match anyway… Anyway, rants and stuff… [Continue Reading]

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An Attempt to Explain Metal

November 25, 2014 DapperApples 0 Comments analysis, economy, trading

Keys risen up to eleven refined metal! Oh Noes! The price of keys relative to metal has risen rather steadily over the past couple of years or so. Apparently every time the price goes up by a refined, someone has to make some sort of thread about it. Honestly, I don’t really care that much, dealing with the traders is too much of a pain for me anyway. Nonetheless, I will make an attempt to theorize what is going on in the market of metal as a currency. In standard macroeconomics there are a couple formulas used to estimate the… [Continue Reading]