PSA: if you don’t know about TF2 hats but brought Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse within the first week of release from steam, you just made ~$100. Logon to TF2, get your preorder hats, sell them on sourceop.com.
People spend a crazy amount of money on tf2 hats.
Olapool Caber is the most awesome weapon ever.
Something to note in the discussion of dry counties - VFW Posts with canteens that serve alcohol (which isn’t all of them - we’ve got a number of ‘dry’ posts or ones without bars/canteens) usually get a dispensation from local liquor restrictions due to being a restricted-membership organization, like a private club.
Unless you’re in the state of Pennsylvania which works the other way around, in which case if you’re a private club with restricted membership, you’re not allowed to serve alcohol. Stupid Pennsylvania.
And speaking of playing the cleric, I totally play the team cleric in MAG, which is a great example of how to reward someone willing to be the uber-mobile healing support character.
In games I tend to play medic (and other support classes) quite a bit for a number of reasons. Generally I’m a team-player, and healing greatly improves the team’s effectiveness. Plus, my twitch skills aren’t as good, and effective healing doesn’t require the same level of reflexes or precision marksmanship as other classes.
As a side-effect, because of the ability to self-heal, medics also tend to have better personal survivability, which indirectly contributes to a higher score. Well, okay maybe not in TF2, where people specifically aim for the medics, but hey, I’m getting very practiced at dodging rockets and grenades.
I like how when someone closes into to melee me, I whip the caber out and they instantly retreat (In arena anyway, where players usually have a stronger sense of self preservation)
I never got very much into TF2 - I don’t play the multi-players on the intertube as much as I did back in the day - but I really appreciated how the classes split out so that they all rewarded skill, but different kinds of skills, rather than just “reaction time”, “twitch speed”, and “amount of crack cocaine recently ingested”.
I have the strange ability to know where other players are going to be once I’ve played against them long enough. I’ve heard of very experienced players of an FPS getting that “feel” for where an enemy should be by now on a particular map and gamestyle, but I can get that read really quickly in some strange, back-of-the-mind way that I’m not consciously aware of. But I’m still only an average shot on my best days. Playing a demoman or medic lets me work at what I’m good at - predicting where the push is coming, and getting ready to push back - while not demanding that I be super-lightning-trigger-finger-man when it’s time to actually throw down.
i have no ability, just experience. i’ve played 400+ hours mostly on payload goldrush. i know that map pretty well. during the section with the pit and attic and two story building on the left side near the tower, i know the spots that are out of range for sentries. if red builds in the attic so it faces the two story building, the far corner on top of the stairs is a safe spot. as soldier i can kill the sentry from there. if the reds build one near the 100 metal and health across from the roof of spawn, i can go into the attic and jump on some crates and safely take it out from there.
the number of annoying things you can do as scout is awesome. my favorite tactic is to drink the soda that prevents you from getting hit when the timer hits 1 during first round, then rush the red spawn and take out the teleporter.
even without the new wrench that gives you a quicker build time, i can get a level three sentry with dispensor(level one) with teleporter (level one 100/200) if no other engineers are there. after reds fall back out of the tunnel i counter intuitively switch to the mini sentry. against a good blue team or with a bad red one, no level three sentry can be built or kept alive very long. but i shove a mini sentry in the pit, just a little in front of the bridge so snipers can’t take it out, and it hurts the blues way more than i could do with a normal sentry under fire.
Absolutely! This is why I love it so much. Just as you talk about being able to ‘know’ enemy positions, I’ve found peculiar sixth senses developing. I play Pyro pretty much exclusively, and after years of failing to spot Spies, I’ve suddenly developed an uncanny knack for spotting them when no-one else can.
The Pyro is oft-maligned for being a ridiculously simple class to play, but that doesn’t take into account two things, I feel.
Charging forward vomiting fire is not the only way to play the Pyro. Hit and run strikes, acting as a mobile choke point, and scattering offensives with blasts of flame is astonishing fun, and needs a reasonable amount of skill. Obviously not as much as the Spy, for instance, but much more than other classes.
Pyros are scary. Especially to other Pyros. We don’t catch on fire, so it becomes a firey war of attrition, dancing around in circles blasting flame and shotgun shells. But I think to any other class, especially Spy, seeing that hazmat suited monster come charging out of a tunnel, the wall of flame in front of it, is a pretty intimidating sight.
Question: Are there servers that only run with stock weapons and no hats? Do admins even have the ability to run such a server?
I was a TFC junkie back in the day. My number 1 multiplayer game, for sure. And when TF2 came out, I played it a ton. Then I went without a decent internet connection for about a year. I came back and there were all these new achievements and unlockable weapons and new maps. It was a headache trying to learn it all (especially playing on random public servers, as my standbys were no longer around). So, after a few days, I stopped playing. Then, months later, I try again and there’s even more stuff with the hats and all that stuff. And now there’s even more things.
I realize, for people who have been playing longterm, this stuff being released incrementally adds to the game and keeps it from getting stale. But for some one like me, it has kept me from playing. When I jump into a server now, it feels like a completely different game from the one I loved back in late 2007/early 2008. One of my favorite things about TFC (or Counter-Strike, or maybe other games) was that you can stop playing for a while, then come back and pick up where you left off. With TF2 it’s like the game changes tone every 6 months. If I want to play the game I loved from back then, is it even possible now?
Definitely! Engineers do not need good aim at all (although engie’s w/ good aim will fair better again spies and have more success with mini-sentries). Soldiers and demomen have nice explosive radii. The best spies hardly ever aim at all. But if you do have great aim, you can be a huge boon to your team via Scout or Sniper.
Some servers run Vanilla, which sounds like what you want. Also, the TF2 beta has almost no hats (I think it even has none right now) and is free.
So this seems like as good a thread as any to link some of my favorite TF2 videos.
First is OMFGNinja. He’s a good spy. Good videos to learn some tips from.
Next up is DispleasedEskimo. A good all around player, but he has some particularly good Pyro reflect videos. More for fun than to learn anything, really.
And my personal favorite, tf2worms. His X00% Skilled Airshot series has made me love a terrible Pendulum song. And this Sick Pwnage video makes me laugh every single time I watch it. If you only watch one, watch this one because it is so good and only 28 seconds.
As for TF2 videos, Evil Daedalus has some great (if dated) strategy guides for the spy and pyro classes. And of course, there’s Team Roomba for your dose of TF2 schadenfreude.
So this is off the topic of TF2, but I wanted to comment on notatiger’s job as a text to speech operator. When I got my first prepaid cell phone (was trying to do an all WiFi phone thing, failed) the cell was previously owned by someone doing something illegal. I assume it was a drug dealer who owed somebody a lot of cash and had switched phones to avoid his debts. About twice a week for two months I would get terrifying phone calls in which death threats would be dished out by a perfectly monotone telephone operator voice.
Something about having an accent-less, completely calm voice tell you “Were coming to your crib, get ready to die <insert racial epithet>” is pretty hilarious in retrospect.
Hey, Eugene OR! I’ll be in Springfield this weekend visiting my son over the 3-day. Small world.
So I just recorded a full podcast with Shieldwolf that, if I do say so, was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, it fell prey to the same effing technical problem that killed the last movie podcast. :(
I’ve got a trouble ticket in trying to figure out what’s going on, and in the meantime I’ll be exploring other options (getting different software, trying it on a different computer, etc.). Shieldwolf has volunteered to record again later, but unfortunately, there won’t be a weekly Qt3 Games Podcast this week.
-TomOh man, what a pain that must be for you guys. :/ What game was the subject of the podcast?
I’m willing to brave the bad podcast if it just means content. How bad are the technical issues? I confess to not reading the movie podcast thread so I don’t know the extent of the problems.
Thanks, Tom! Your laid-back conversation was easy to understand with no comprehension-impairing audio artefacts.