I’m bummed about the Quake 4 rocket launcher thing. I have a retail box of Brink and got the hoodie; I have a retail Quake 4 and got zippo.
Does the Steam version of Quake 4 even work in Windows 7? There does not appear to be any Win7 64b support for the original boxed version.
A suggestion: Hat Scraps.
Requirements: a match must have at least 8 people per team, and you must be present for the entire match.
Rewards:
100 hat scraps = random hat.
100 hat scraps + class token = hat for that class.
The goal: get people to care about winning. Get people to understand that lurking away from the action and scoring 3 points in 12 minutes is not the right way to play.
Disclaimer: I’ve given this 90 seconds of thought.
People certainly try to win on the iO servers. Man, every time I play there I get -wrecked-. :)
Dear God, that would be horrible. TF2 shouldn’t be mandated to be played as a high-pressure game. The ability to come and go w/o penalty makes the game more casual and encourages pickup games.
Yes, god forbid people actually attempt to play the game correctly.
Let me ask you guys a question: What is a game if half the people there aren’t trying to win? Is it just an activity where people run around aimlessly and occasionally a whistle blows and the setting changes? Is that still a game?
You know worst about even having to ask that question… TF2 is used to THE environment that had convinced people to play as a team even when they weren’t trying to. Just using your class made your team better.
Then they added crafting, hats, silly shit and it all went down hill…
Regardless of the merits of this idea, the TF2 team has said that they don’t want to punish people for losing/not doing well.
You still need to find some good servers if you are running into games where half the players are goofing off.
It wasn’t really a serious idea. I’m sure if I thought about it for five minutes, I’d come up with a bunch of implementation problems. It was just a random thought that floated through my head after watching yet another Blue team spend 7 minutes completely indifferent to the idea that Payload involves a cart that needs to be pushed.
My thought was, “if there was even 1/100th of a hat attached to winning a map, you’d be unable to separate every person here from the cart.”
I would say, for me, where two teams are actively fighting each other, a reward for winning seems pretty appropriate…
You can take that as you lost something if you are on the losing side, but I contest that you are currently getting nothing already.
Have you tried coaching people/getting them focused? It ends up being a pretty fun challenge to get a team that is losing to winning… I have an anon account I have been doing this with - pretty fun meta game.
it’s fun when it works, like when the heavy you’re healing listens to you when you say back up back up! when the uber starts running out.
it’s frustrating when your red engie runs off with a sentry he built at spawn exit…and no tele. or when the red newbie doesn’t realize he’s on defense and waits at the gate outside red spawn instead of rushing to the blue spawn. or, “don’t turn the corner, there’s a sniper out there!” guy runs out and gets head shot. (repeat three times with three other people shot in rapid succession) and my mike was in fact working.
I played on a 2Fort server earlier in the week. Someone managed to get the flag all the way to our side before dying. Someone else picked up the flag and managed to run all the way back before it was pointed out that he had the flag. I hadn’t witnessed that in years. What blew my mind is that the person that pointed it out wasn’t frothing at the mouth calling him names, but said “Dude, don’t worry about it!”
<3
If you’re asking if I’ve used the in-game coaching tool, the answer is no.
If you’re asking if I’ve ever tried to give a losing team basic advice that any simpleton should be able to follow and had it repeatedly ignored, over and over and over again, the answer is yes, more times than I can count.
Ultimately, I can spam “GET ON THE CART PUSH THE CART EVERYONE JUST GET ON THE CART CART CART CART CART CART CART” over and over and people still won’t bother pushing it. We’ll have no medics or teleporters and I’ll suggest the three snipers at the bottom of the scoreboard should switch classes and they’ll tell me to go fuck myself. We’ll have a team getting rolled on defense and I’ll suggest we need more engies and heavies instead of scouts and it’ll fall on deaf ears.
I think a lot of players are either incapable of playing and reading chat at the same time, or simply want to run around aimlessly and don’t care about winning. So the whole coaching thing doesn’t hold much appeal for me. I think I have as much to offer TF2 players as anyone in terms of strategy and decision making, but I have no interest in trying to teach people who have no interest in learning.
I really hope I never join a game with you, Sluggo.
I really hope I never join a game with you, Sluggo. You take it all far too seriously.
I have often gently suggested that some of the 10 snipers on my team might be more useful as other classes, and about a third of the time somebody does switch. But I’ve never been told to go fuck myself in response, so I suspect you’re not phrasing it terribly politely yourself.
If I go down to the gym to play some pickup basketball, I don’t expect the guys there to be NBA level and be able to execute complicated plays. But if they all want to take half-court shots and bounce the ball of their head and stand in a corner and twirl around, yeah, I think that’s kind of annoying.
So in a game where the objective is to push a cart, I don’t think expecting people to try to push the cart is “taking it too seriously.” I just want people who are making a minimum attempt to play the game. If you have no problem with people running around and doing whatever they want, congratulations, you’re part of the problem.
Also, this:
I’ve tried the gentle approach. “Hey, can someone go medic? We need ubers to break through their guns.” “Can someone switch engy and get a teleport running?” That doesn’t work. Which leads to this:
“hey, can one of you snipers with 2 points switch to medic or engy?”
“fuck u”
It can get annoying to be on a team that hasn’t even worked out that it is being rolled, for sure, but it really sounds like you just take things too seriously to reasonably expect that pug/f2p games will be satisfying for you anymore.
Is there some reason why you aren’t joining a clan or switching to scrim/comp matches? It seems to me that this would take a lot less time to get you in a game you enjoy than waiting for valve to completely change the pickup game / point / drop system to your liking.
Personally I think the drop system works fine, tying it to wins/points would produce some pretty shitty incentives. If you think the guys playing sniper to get their huntsman from the first milestone achievements are annoying, wait til half your team is engies farming points by taking each others teleports the whole match.
I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of taking TF2 seriously enough to let a crappy team bother me.
I’ve played in a server with a player just like that. Well, I guess we all have, but this guy would constantly rage on other people for no reason at all, then warn about videoing others to get them banned all because they weren’t playing the game how he wanted them to play it. Only know of one person who got banned though.
Really sluggo, you’d be best going into competitive games if you aren’t there to join in and be a part of the sort of antics that pub matches provide. Some of my most easily remembered matches in TF2 include the ones where we would try and win as a single class eg: all medics, all heavies etc. Even better is when we’d win (all heavy is close to unbeatable).