sluggo, have you tried playing on the iO servers? I’ve noted a higher quality of player there than elsewhere.
These responses baffle me. It’s like you guys don’t even understand the basic concept of what a game is.
Let’s go back to my basketball analogy. Say you’re playing a casual 3v3 game at the playground, but there’s one guy who just wants to run around like crazy and see how long he can dribble the ball without shooting or passing or have it stolen. He’s not playing basketball, he’s doing something else altogether and fucking up the game.
According to you guys, that behavior is just fine, and I’m the crazy guy for being annoyed with the guy for being a douchebag. Apparently I should go join a formal league.
You guys are nuts.
TF2 doesn’t allow a single non-competitive player to lock up the game like your basketball example does. Also, instead of yelling at the guy on the court, you could go play another game of basketball at any one of the thousands of other courts currently in use. Or, yes, you could join a league which would guarantee you the degree of competitiveness you want.
Also, unlike basketball, you can just switch servers, or start your own.
But here’s the problem that’s sailing way over everyone’s heads: In TF2, when you join a public server with 24 people, HALF those people are being douchebags.
Every. Single. Server.
And you guys are cool with that.
What a joke.
I’ve tried looking for these a few times, as people have mentioned them before, but I’ve had no luck. At the moment, I only see two servers, which are both empty and I have 200+ pings to.
If you were talking about any other game, you might have some sympathy, sluggo. But TF2 is the most casual-friendly multiplayer FPS I’ve ever known. It’s practically impossible to have a negative effect on your team.
Your basketball analogy would only work if it was some kind of game where everyone got their own basketball. In which case, one guy spending the time practicing his dribbling isn’t a problem at all. Particularly if an equal portion of the other team is doing the same thing.
I used to get frustrated with people just playing team deathmatch on 2Fort, and not trying to achieve the objective. But I realised that’s just a problem with 2Fort and Capture The Flag. It takes a considerable amount of teamwork and focus on the objective to meaningfully contribute to capturing the intelligence. I think that’s why there was only 1 CTF map when the game came out, and why Valve never made any more.
But something like Payload allows everyone who just wants to wander around and click Mouse1 to accidentally contribute to the objectives. Fighting people in the middle of the map is a necessary step to winning, which is a thing it’s very hard not to take part in. The spawn positions, respawn times and map layout typically funnel both teams in to the same area as the cart. It makes the objective something big and visible and physical on your screen, and makes pushing it into the same action as restocking on health and ammo.
I really can’t imagine getting as frustrated as you at the amount of cart-pushing going on in any TF2 match I’ve seen.
I don’t think anyone said it’s fine, just that it is avoidable with some easy steps you can perform in your own home. There are thousands of people who devote their lives to removing every bit of silliness from the game! And I am sure you would get along famously with those guys.
and I’m the crazy guy for being annoyed with the guy for being a douchebag. Apparently I should go join a formal league.
Here is a thing : if you think you are on a team with a bunch of ten year olds, it is entirely possible you are actually on a team with a bunch of ten year olds. A lot of people who play this game aren’t actually very good at it, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I get annoyed these days if I don’t top the scores as demo/medic/scout/pyro, but I suck horribly at most of the other classes and I am sure I annoy the piss out of my own team with my failspy routine.
It’s just a game. One that is - entirely on purpose! - totally silly and with a bunch of designed in mechanics to try and balance out the skill delta between people who suck and who don’t. There are going to be a lot of people who suck at playing the game, playing the game. Don’t get too mad if … people suck somehow.
You guys are nuts.
I don’t know mate, I would normally assume that someone would do something about this situation at some point during their first 30-40 spleening posts on the subject. But perhaps everyone else is crazy for just not catching on to how remarkably effective this thing you are doing actually is.
It’s not sailing over there heads because:
A: That’s not really true, just find a better server, I prefer the Gamers With Jobs and Older than Dos severs which tend to have good moderation, skilled players, and few douchebags.
B: You have shown yourself to be a huge douchebag in this thread, so your mere presence is probably throwing off the douche to cool ratio irrevocably. In other words, you’re polluting the sample with your own superhuman douchiness. Seriously you have like the douchebag powers of five hipsters. You should get a giant douche costume and fight crime, because no mere mortal could withstand the supreme concentrated power of your douchebaggery without seriously reconsidering their life choices.
I mean, really, normally only obscure strategy games drive me out of lurk mode, but you’ve managed to piss me off enough with your sheer douchiness that I just had to call you out.
At the end of the day, all I want is to be able to jump on public servers and occasionally not feel like half my teammates are drooling morons with their heads up their ass.
Is that really such a high bar to shoot for?
Well, what would that something be? I don’t have an awesome connection so I don’t have a wealth of servers that I can get a decent ping to (a lot of friends of mine play on servers that I have massive lag issues with), and I don’t want to join a formal league. I feel like I’m just stuck with public servers, which obviously I find less than optimal.
Nope, it’s not a high bar at all. In fact, I play on vanilla servers with solid teamwork, good moderation, and a community I like. Those are the only servers I play on. I accomplished this feat by playing on lots of different servers, and then I used the handy-dandy favorites feature to save the ones I liked. These days I can even blacklist the ones I hate. After the first few weeks, I had a list of vibrant servers and I didn’t even have to use the server search any more.
I assume most people who still play TF2 have used a similar technique to improve their gaming experience. Then again, most people aren’t burdened with epic levels in the douchebag prestige class.
I have a favorites list and many servers blacklisted as well. It hasn’t really helped me, because ultimately those servers are still public where anyone can join them.
But keep up the insults. They really support your douchebag argument.
I am sure this whole thing would have gone in a totally different direction very early on if it was phrased as “my connection sucks too bad to play tf2” rather than “everyone who plays tf2 is a dickbutt”.
The something I suggested would be to find some people who play seriously! But this is not something you seem to want to do. I am sure if you go post about connection problems in the hardware and technical stuff forum there will be people who haven’t seen this performance who will be willing to help out. It’s quite possible this will help, I had a fair amount of problems in this place getting below 100-130ms, even to quite close servers, until I looked up how to properly set and exclude useless DSL modes on this thing and found 15-35ms to most places was well within reach.
Technically, it’s not that “my connection sucks.” It’s just that – as I’ve mentioned a number of times in this thread as people have suggested particular servers – I have a modest DSL connection where I don’t get sub-100 pings to many servers. So I usually have a few dozen servers I can choose from at any given time, but that pool obviously isn’t as big as others.
Sluggo - text chat will fail. New players aren’t processing it. I use a mic and make it light hearted - we only have 5 snipers - why aren’t the rest of you going sniper? Play 2 fort - first question - does everyone know what the intel is? Why its important?
I’ll jump in and play D with a soldier or demo until we can control our own base. Pretty simple to do that effectively even on a team of idiots. Then start asking who can go get the flag? You gotta remember in 2fort if the base is overrun no way any newb is going to be able to understand what to do. Each map has that - remove the confusion first.
I try and encourage engineers upstairs but only do that if i can protect them while they setup or they get frustrated. etc. etc. etc.
My other mini-game inside of that is - you can’t die. I’ve gone as high as 32 kills with zero deaths by playing D and helping the team.
Are there bad players who just run around? Sure, but if a few people are on board you can turn it around.
10 snipers? at that point you’re better off just giving pointers on napoleonic tactics.
“ok, march forward, line abreast: volley fire!”
A couple of my favorite servers have the number of snipers capped.
Fine with me I never play sniper.
I play almost exclusively payload, the objective is clear and how to do ahceive it is clear. I never use a mic, pay attention to voice or text or have any issues with teamwork. Its fun to push lettel kart.
what’s fun? low population server. payload map. newbie red team, especially newbie engie. play as heavy, with fists of steel, and start pushing the kart. eat a sandwich to boost hp to 350 if you want. do not open fire on the reds.
watch as the reds fire stickies, nades, and rockets but fail to do enough damage to stop you. after you push the kart 3/4 of the way before dying and then your team finally wins it, let them know how to beat fists of steel. bonus fun: hide behind the kart while going past the sentry so it never actually opens fire.
A ping in the 200s isn’t that big of a deal. Accept that get to work on your friends list. Chet plays Team Fortress and has low friend standards, so I’d start with him.