analysis

Being the I in Team

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One of my favorite series on YouTube is Titsonabullsteam’s Realism Expert Solo runs for Left 4 Dead 2, where he beats every campaign in the game without bots, allies, or exploits. Recently I’ve been communicating with him because I’ve gotten into L4D2 modding and wanted to help him finish the last video in the series. After watching his entire run again and reliving the amazement I felt the first time I saw it back in college, I was inspired to look into other YouTube series where enterprising players solo Valve co-op titles on the hardest difficulties. As it turns out, there are two… [Continue Reading]

Medic’s Third Ever Competitive Match – Communication and Experience, I have none.

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So Friday the 20th. My third ever official match. This was by far our hardest match, because the enemy team had SO MUCH experience. They’ve been playing 6v6 and 4v4 together for a loooong time. Season 12 or something like that. We knew from the start that we had little chance of winning, but that didn’t stop us from trying our best. So I don’t bore you, I’m not going to do a commentary of the whole match. It was quite long and involved us dying a lot. You don’t really want to hear how I died 16 times, 4 times… [Continue Reading]

Why Scout is Awful and Underpowered

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I don’t dislike any of the classes in TF2. You’d think Engineer, but honestly as a Demoman/Medic main, it’s my job to destroy their nests, and without them I’d have significantly less to do at any given moment. Sniper likewise I’ve never really cared about because I can always seem to find routes that let me avoid them. Not to mention that my favorite weapon, the Sticky Jumper, turns them into my favorite prey. So this article is kinda tough for me to write, because I don’t really hate anyone in TFC either. Pyro, maybe, but he’s too pitiful to… [Continue Reading]

Medic weapons are all strangely overpowered…

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When someone says ‘ balanced weapons’, people always have the habit of turning to us Medics and our rather small inventory. Four Medi Guns, four syringe-shooting weapons and five limb-destroying melee weapons. People say to us that our weapons are all fine and dandy, the only bad syringe gun is the Blutsauger, since it promotes Battle-Medicing, and the Bonesaw, which is useless. But hang on a second. The most useless Medic weapon is the stock melee one? I thought we were supposed to be balanced? This thought made me look deeper into Medic weaponry. And deeper, and deeper. I quickly… [Continue Reading]

Put Me In, Coach!

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I was surprised the other day, when I was futzing around with my HUD, that the coaching button still exists. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use this to any sort of effect ever. Has anyone else? Share your coaching stories in the comments, won’t you? Now, we’ll get into the real nitty-gritty here. What did this coaching function ever actually do? It’s a fairly straightforward concept, actually. To be a part of this system, you need to sign up using the megaphone icon on the homepage. There, it will prompt you to sign up as a coach, and… [Continue Reading]

What happens on cp_orange…

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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]

Passive abilities

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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]

The Lost Art of Flagrunning

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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]

A Different Gamechanger

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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]

Soldier is overpowered and we don’t care…

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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]