Yeah, I used to play with the POE folks at 330-350ms and could still do an acceptable (mvp list) medic :)
TF2 is actually pretty good about making things nice at ~100ms+. The drop to 15ms is nice in some ways - but there are really only a few things it seems to help with. The drop seems to be more about making things less laggy to the server and only really affects my client > server sorts of interactions (detonate stickies, rocketjump, interact with sentries, level geometry/setup sort of stuff) and doesn’t really make it that much easier to shoot or avoid being shot by players. And people much laggier than me are much harder to deal with than before, somehow.
On servers where I ping 200+, the game is a slideshow for me. It’s not a smooth experience where I’m just a few extra milliseconds behind the action, but the game is fillled with constant mini-lag spikes where players pop in and out of position, which makes basic aiming hard to do. This seems to be a common complaint from other players, and just a quirk of how TF2 handles high pings, and it is a big deal. It’s not playable, it’s not enjoyable.
Chet’s been on my friends list for years. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him playing TF2 (as he mentioned, he plays under different accounts), but I did spend time playing on the POE servers a while back, and my main recollection was that they liked to play custom stuff like Hall of Death, which was a cute novelty but not a real substitute for regular maps, and they had a lot of guys who liked to sit on the mic and jabber expletives the whole time. I have no idea if that’s changed, but it wasn’t for me.
That’s odd about your ping, I don’t notice any problems until it hits 300 or above. Have you tried checking your rate settings? At one point mine were overwritten somehow and I couldn’t play on 95% of servers without experiencing lag issues.
I’ve never really considered anything wrong with my connection, just that it’s not a fat T1 line or anything. I’ve had it for years and have played tens of thousands of hours of various shooters and Xbox Live games with very little in the way of disconnects, so I’ve never felt the need to do any technical troubleshooting on it.
I’ve flirted with upgrading my connection many times over the years, as this DSL was the only option when I initially moved in, but every time I call AT&T to talk about an upgrade, they only want to sell me some 4-in-1 package with cable TV and other crap. When I tell them I only want to upgrade my internet, it’s like they’re completely unprepared for this request and wind up transferring me to 8 people until I eventually end up at the same person I started with trying to sell me a U-Verse package, and I end up saying screw this, my current connection is good enough. :)
I know this and you know this, and it’s certainly not specific to TF2. I can recall lots of frustrating moments in WoW where someone would fail to move out of fire or whatever, and people would ask later why they didn’t listen to chat messages telling them to move, and they’d act incredulous at the idea of reading chat during a fight, like you’d just asked them to juggle two chainsaws and a poodle. For a lot of players, it’s just too much to ask. If anything, I find the occasional block of text that says PUSH THE CART PUSH THE CART PUSH THE CART, while obnoxious, actually turns out to be kind of effective, because people notice it.
The irony is, while people claim I take the game too seriously, I refuse to hook up a mic and start giving instructions because, to me, THAT would be crossing a line to taking it too seriously. Do I really care about winning or losing enough to strap on a headset and start giving directions to strangers who may in fact be 10 years old? Of course not. Any recent venting I’ve done in this thread stems from the frustration of joining server after server where it seems half the people think they’re playing team deathmatch, and wishing Valve would make some tweaks to nudge people in the right direction. I don’t think that’s an outrageous complaint, and if that makes me a douchebag, so be it.
Chat text is a funny thing. I had a bit of a disagreement with a friend I was playing CoH against because he felt very clearly that I ought to be able to read/assimilate/reply to chat while playing (particularly during lulls or whatever) which, to me, was like asking me to juggle two chainsaws and a poodle. I’d be happy to somewhat distractedly talk via skype, but turning on the textual-communication lobe of my brain while in the RTS zone? Not going to work for me.
Sluggo, so your complaint is you have a tool that can help you solve a problem - you know your current tool is not up to the task and switching tools is… taking it to serious? You make it out like “STRAPPING ON A HEADSET” is such a foreign idea or outside the norm - i find that odd. You don’t need to strap it on, you can just place it on your head like millions of other gamers who socialize with voice chat while playing a game.
We had a recent thread here about PC headset usage, and the majority fell in line with my own feelings – that it feels weird or overkill to use a headset when you’re playing with random internet folks, that voice chat is more for friends or organized play. That seems true with TF2, where a very small portion of the population on random servers uses voice chat.
So it does feel like a weird line to cross for me, that putting on a headset to try and focus a bunch of random strangers would be taking things too seriously. You totally have a different view on it as a fun meta game, which is cool, but I don’t think that’s something I would have the patience for.
We used to joke around about playing “civil war” mode, where everyone was using unzoomed sniper rifles (back in the days when there was no crosshair when unzoomed).
In a similar vein, there’s the Degroot Keep map, which is medieval themed and is melee- and crossbow-only. So it’s not uncommon to see a bunch of snipers volleying arrows. :)
I’m a pretty good support class guy; Snipers and Offensive Engineers are my preferred classes. Give me a safe spot that i can snipe away from and i can make a very meaningful contribution. As an Engie, give me some time to build up, and i can be useful.
I just got out of a server where the average score on the opposite team was about 75, and the average score on my side was about 12. Needless to say, i could hardly poke my head around a corner without being headshotted, or go off for a minute by myself without getting backstabbed, or even look out onto an overlook without watching half a dozen explosive projectiles hurtling toward me. Even if i manage to stay alive myself and make a kill or two, the rest of my team is dying horribly. I’m not near good enough to contribute the half the kills by my side that would be needed to stem the tide; so i try a random class, get horribly mauled from 10 directions because my team’s lines have completely collapsed, and end up being as useless as the rankest newbie. In those situations there’s really nothing i can do but fight and die furtively alongside the rest of my team.
There is also some weirdness about lag; on some servers, i just cannot hit people. It’s as if i have to wait about 0.5 second in my sniper sight before the shot registers. I noticed that there is some kind of hiccup because occasionally but frequently enough to not be rare, when building teleporters at the spawn one or two wrench hits “dissapear” and i lose something like 12 or 13 metal into the void, getting my building off the perfect 200 metal per upgrade jab and forcing another trip to resupply. There are just some servers i cannot make a meaningful contribution because it seems like some latency issue that makes some servers extremely easy to play and some servers unusually hard.
Very well, it is a weird line to cross. In my experience, playing with a headset really added to the game though, the simpleness of being able to laugh and joke with other players who were wearing mics on the same time really made a difference to the enjoyment aspect.
Likewise, text will fail. All the time spent as medic caused me to ignore what was happening in the lower part of the screen. Trying to follow who was shouting out medic was just too much. And likewise, by the time someone has managed to type in something in the text, it could well be too late anyway to respond to in some way. At least voice is instant, and people hear it, provided of course they haven’t muted other players.
I agree it can seem that way, but I’m surprised the amount of times where it seems like you can turn things around on your own. Not so much in terms of making up the skill deficit but in terms of provoking a change from the opposite team. The prospect of there being a deadringer spy, or a bonk scout, or a backburner pyro around will often force a change from the opposite team into a class mix that lets the rest of your team do better. A lot of “good” players are actually kind of pussies about dying, and it usually only takes a couple of kills or mere possibility of someone harassing them in the back lines before they ragequit or switch up. I will happily rack up a couple of engineer nemesis if it pisses them off into moving that sentry or makes their medic switch to pyro.
Not accusing anyone here (naturally :)) but the other thing I see a lot in raging players is this kind of, “you other 11 guys just aren’t playing as a team!” attitude. I lose count of the times I see guys going “we need a pyro” or “we need a medic” who will never actually switch to that class themselves. If you are the smart guy who sees a gap in the lineup, go do that thing! Whining about it in text will just bum people on your team out.
I agree, and think this is one of the less understood subtleties of the game. A lot of players often seem afraid to push forward, and it’s not hard to take advantage of. One Red demo between points A and B on Badwater laying stickies all over the place can scare an entire Blue team away without actually detonating anything. If just one Blue would charge forward and sacrifice himself, the rest of his team could advance, but most players sit back and wait for someone else to charge in, which allows Red to kill off lots of time. It’s an incredibly effective strategy that buys time for Red engys to build up sentries and stuff.
Here’s something I’ve never understood, and maybe someone here can explain. There’s 30 seconds left in a match, it’s really close, and one big charge could probably win the round. And you watch teammates in spectator mode, and instead of trying to win the game, they’re already running away looking for a hiding spot, because they don’t want to get killed after the round is over. What’s the deal with that?
TF2 doesn’t actually track your KDR. It has points, which can be earned by killing, capturing, assisting, revenge killing, pushing the cart and any number of things. Sometimes, your points are even based on your number of kills. I know as the medic, I can often get some of the highest points in the game, without actually having to kill anybody, or be the medic on the guy that kills people.
Yeah, you’re getting points for healing/overhealing/extinguishing players (which is also a great way to get points as degreaser pyro - I’ve gotten like 10 points from two airblasts like that!). Engies get points for their dispenser healing/resupply and teleports as well. It’s sometimes hard to see it racking up because several things count as a fraction of a point for each occurrence.
One reason people hide - you gain gain two nemesis or lose 2 dominations from being killed after the match ends. But yeah, the fixation with kills/being killed is pretty weird - you even see this on instaspawn servers where it has almost zero impact at all.
