f13.net

I'll cowboy up and start a new thread, having this in two or more places is soon going to approach ridiculousness.  I don't think we have enough material in the current threads to warrant moves of posts, so I'll just get this going from scratch.

First off, it's awesome.  Second, it seems to crash a lot for some people.  Not me.

I'm a noob.  I like the scout, so my first question is whether the bat is loads better than the scattergun.

The bat's chief advantage, other than making a satisfying "CONK" noise, is not needing to be reloaded.  I think if you're close enough to use a bat, the scattergun will do just as much damage (at point blank it seems like a couple of hits will knock anything down).

Bat does more damage on average unless you get a critical hit. It also "fires" about 3 times as fast. Remember, you can get a partial shot with a rifle. You can't get a partial with a bat.

Partial, did not know that.  The thing that limited my BOUNCY DEATH was the horrendous reload on the scattergun, so I will definitely give the bat a whack (keke).  I'm going to have to try out all of the melee weapons, I totally ignored them.

I actually suggested it in thread three because of this:


I was thinking with all the geeks here that it would find a solution faster than other places, but ok maybe this can be the "walkthrough/spoilers" thread, but I also think eventually maybe a tech thread for it would be needed too. Then it's approaching having it's own forum, but then I always wondered why there wasn't a geek forum for PC hardware questions here, because the console crowd and PC hardware are diametrically opposed.

Nah, we can mash it all in here.  Except the 360 version, that's just silly.  The News thread is in a funny place, and the other one is The Orange Box thread and will have lots of HL2/Portal shit very shortly, also Steam complaints.  So, tips on gameplay or preventing a forest fire in your E-Machine, it's all game.

Mine has not crashed possibly because I did not bother to dick with the visual settings and am running at default, which seems to be 1024x768 and FSM-knows-what-else.  My rig is pretty standard: Intel C2D 2.18, ASUS mobo, GF7950, onboard sound, Win XP SP2 + latest patches.  Oddly, the sound is flawless in TF2 where it often crackles in everything else.  I have a real sound card in a box on the floor but so far have not been assed to install it.

This is the "PLEASE FIX MY PC" forum.  People should know that by now.  And no, I have no inclination to discuss this fact further. 

Off topic/forum shit tends to find its various threads. That's the way of things here.

This is making me almost want to preorder the Orange box on the offhand chance that it'll run well.  The whole Hellgate thing isn't going so well.

This is a quick and dirty post talking about how I play. It's not the only way to play, but it seems to have success. I'm not going to go over the basics; you can figure those out on your own. I'm going to detail specific tips and tricks for each character; Add your own!

So you want to be a Heavy Weapons guy?

Great. Find yourself a Medic and stick with him. You're the front of the attack wedge and you're really only useful when you have a medic at your back or can camp near a heal+ammo item spawn. Watch for the medic to get his uber heal charged, then run in -- you're invincible for about 5 seconds. Target any turrets you see. Your weapon isn't very good at long ranges, so use corners to your advantage. Fear snipers.


So you want to be a Pyro?

Flame all your teammates -- You're the spy locater. Hide behind corners and run in flaming. This can be used to great effect at the gate starts, hide out of sight, and when the map start timer goes off, run into their spawn and do as much damage as you can.


So you want to be a Medic?

Good. Teams always need medics. Find a heavy or soldier and stick on him like glue. Your healgun has quite a range so you can stay somewhat behind them. On the start, if possible, have a fellow soldier fire rockets at his feet and heal up his damage. If they do this, you can get an uberheal almost at the start. While prepping, heal the soldiers, scouts, and heavy weapons, in that order. Heal soldiers at first, then at 10 seconds switch to scouts, and then at 5 seconds switch to the heavy you're going to heal. This gives the scouts a boost to try and get a quick cap.  Always heal at the prep time so you'll have an uberheal soon after start. This gives you an easy push.

Watch your and your healee's health, and pop the uberheal only when one of you is about to die. There's no need to walk into the maw with it on, you can often get a few critical seconds damage soak out of your heavy partner.

Your syringe gun is incredibly strong and accurate at medium to close range. Aim for the head for victory. You can camp the top of stairs very easily with them as they arc downwards.


So you want to be a soldier?

Aim for the feet.

Practice firing rockets than ducking back behind corners; this is your best strategy for taking down things like sentry guns and heavies. If you are fast enough, sentry guns won't even get a hit on you and your 4 rockets kills a level 3 sentry dead.

Abuse rocket jumping on 2fort.


So you want to be an engineer?

All turrets have a range of attack that's given by a red globe that you can see when you place it. Make sure that it goes to the far wall of whatever corridor/area you are
guarding -- you don't want people to be able to sit outside the globe and snipe your sentry.

Place turrets in oblique areas where they would fire on the back or sides of people coming across them, but not close enough for demos to lob grenades around a corner and be able to hit it. You want a few free kills before the wise up and figure out where your sentry gun is. Also, build them them so they are in range to hit anyone capping points -- this stops scouts from just diving in and instant winning. This doesn't stop spies, so watch out!

When placing turrets on high places, place them back from the edge a bit - only the top of the turret has to be visible to your target. This is also a benefit since level 2 turrets are slightly taller than level 1 turrets - this gives you the ability to upgrade turrets to level 2 before they target, fire, and give away their position.

Either build your dispenser next to your sentry (to heal/resupply you while you heal your sentry and your sentry kills) or blocking a crucial corridors like the one before the ramp room in 2fort.


So you want to be a spy?

Learn to kill sentries and the engineers that man them, they are your bread and butter. be an engineer. Heavies too. Be a medic. Stealth to traffic corridors, find an out of the way spot, and decloak, slowly advancing towards your base, acting cautious at every door. This allows people to overtake you, and then knife them in the back. Remember that you can assume a character while cloaked, and your last one is 'b' - this helps a lot. If you want to play teamwork, go ahead of your main force and sap sentry guns just before they enter.

Thread your way to unguarded (or only guarded by one person) capture points, kill the guardian and capture. This is often very easy, especially early game when people are focused on the front lines.


So you want to be a Scout?

If you have twitch reflexes, run circles around people and hit them with the bat. 4 hits kills a heavy, 3 a pyro, 2 everyone else but other scouts which die in one hit. Use double jump to get quickly to capture points. The shotgun isn't terrible.

You can also Decloak spies in a small radius around you, so, if you're on defense, sit near a corridor in sight of a sentry gun. The sentry will kill spies that run past you.


So you want to be a Demoman?

Abuse the hell out of grenade bouncing. If you liked the grenade launcher in any other game, you'll love this guy. You can also use your alternate weapon to seed popular places (like capture points) and blow them all up at once.


So you want to be a Sniper?

Remember that when scoped, everyone can see the dot. Practice aiming at a wall or object that isn't visible to enemies coming into line of sight with you. Find weird places to partially hide behind and hit them from across the map. You should aim for the head. A full charge headshot kills anyone in one hit.

Wow, I haven't even played yet, but that is the same advice you could give someone in old TFC.


Which means, I won't be so rusty when I pony up for this.  :evil:

Tip for spies: You have a pistol for a reason. Just because it's not a one-hit kill, doesn't make it useless. I got into a spy vs spy duel last night and I won solely because I pulled out my Walther* while he stuck with his butterfly knife.

*Yes, I know it's not really a Walther PPK. Let me keep my 007 illusions going. :)

My impressions from one night of TF2:

I need to get my FPS chops back. The game is quite fun and look forward to rockin it out with the f13 guys some more.

I never played TF , so its all new to me but really all I need to do is learn how to deal with sentries better, and learn the maps and I'll be a solid player. The spy class, though I probably wont play it much, is quite entertaining and it is a good feeling to spot and kill one, just on gut instinct.

First of all, that six shooter is the best PISTOL in the game. It's not just a reason, it's a way of life. 3 shots kills any turret, one headshot kills a soldier, spy, or scout.

Ooooh! I'm a lobbing and bouncing machine. Might have to pick this one up if it's got a good grenade class, that's always a blast (heh). Used to get compliments in BF2 for my leet arcs, I could lay in grenades across huge distances perfectly on target rather than newb spam or artillery march (though those are both good tactics, too). Precise when you need the kill, general carpeting can't be beat for suppression fire unless you're up against someone with great timing.

I really need to work on my demo skills, the grenades don't bounce and roll the way I want them to, but I want to be good at it.

Ah so I just noticed that the demo can break his beer bottle, which made me laugh out loud.  Also, I was able to grenadejump from a run.  Sweet.

Ya dude. I cracked it on a scout that was landing from his double jump and it shattered.  Fucking awesome.

Also, I have discovered the joy of the baseball bat.

Now that I've upgraded my system I can play a Scout effectively, but I found it took more like 8 Baseball Bat hits to take out a Heavy.  I know this because he was standing still.

Still, running around and beating people up is fun.

You're doing it wrong.

Typical.  Says I'm doing it wrong but doesn't say how.

Stop missing every other hit?

It really does only take 4 hits. I've done it a large number of times. Unless they changed it between 6pm yesterday and now.

Not sure how I could miss against a target that was standing still.

I'll try it again later but even a Sniper was taking 3 solid hits.

Sniper takes 1 fully charged shot to the noggin.

schild only hits people in the head, every time, always. Without fail.

So, I have decided that I totally suck at this game. The only class I can even be semi useful with is the Medic, which isnt horrible, as I ended up rallying my team and myself and a demo man took us from 0-2 to 3-2 win in CTF.

Also, their VoIP is great. Its the most clear VoIP I have ever heard in a game before.

Holy shit the pyro + medic combo is powerful.

Is it wrong that playing TF2 gives me a semi?

Id love running pyro with a dedicated medic. :) Also I find that spraying some enemies with flame then fast swapping to the street sweeper pays dividends.

The pyro's shotgun is not to be fucked with.  After I sprayed the defense point with fire, killing off those roachlike spies, I then went off and decapitated a sniper with some shotgun in his ear.

Practically every class has a damn shotgun, I just realized. What makes the Pyros so much better?

It isn't. Seems to be the exact same as the scouts. The spy revolver, however, is different from everyone elses pistol.

It is mostly just better than the flamethrower unless you are looking for spies, as far as I can tell.  I think I just caught him at the right place, now.

I have spent some time today trying to bat people in the head.  Apparently you have to plant it right across the eyes, which can be tough.

Incidentally I did some awesome maneuvers in 2fort today.  I de-snipered the other fort via scout, which was super.  Shortly afterward we pulled off a suicide-relay with me and another scout.  I'm getting better.

I think I mowed down a friendly turret, though, so....

I'm still struggling with the game, even on the faster rig.  Once I get it home with the gaming mouse and keyboard (It was built at work and doesn't have uber peripheals), maybe that will help, or it could be I just suck at TF2.

I keep getting a strong sense of claustrophobia with this game, even on the more open maps.  A lot of choke points that are extremely tiny.

I've been trying to figure the spy out first, it's the most fun to me.

I've found disguising as a medic is bad news. People wait for you to heal them, and when you just stare at them they start shooting. Engineers too. There's no reason an engineer should be wandering aimlessly in the base, so you arouse suspicion. I find I get a free pass most frequently as a soldier or sniper. Somtimes as a spy too, it lets you cloak around with impunity.

Apparently if you call for a medic while disguised, the other team sees it, and snappy medics will run over to heal you get stabbed in the face.

That is true. Generally, engineers are a free pass to the backwards part of the base, as they are always going back for more metal and hanging around sentry guns. Remember that your speed is restricted based on your class, you move much slower if you're a heavy or soldier.

99% of the time I disguise myself as a spy or scout. Both sides expect you to be a dumb motherfucker as either class.

Sometimes, if it's frontlines, I'll be a heavy. Engineer if I'm taking a base.

Heh.

Turns out I'm a pretty good sniper.  So when I need to play spy, I turn into a sniper and pretend to be staring off into my own base.  No one suspects.

Blue or Red?

Blue4Life over here.

Is Blue the new Alliance and Red the new Horde?

Last night was fun, even with the turtlefest at 2fort.

We probably had 12+ f13 guys there and around 8-10 on teamspeak. If you get a few more we can basically take over an empty server. That rocks.

schild: Is there multiple channels on that TS? IIRC there was just the one. If we actually got 20 guys on there it would be cool to have a red room, and a blue room.


I have some buddies that I havent invited to TS cause, well, they arent f13ers. I may invite a couple so we could actually fill a server.


P.S. - bhodi: I musta pissed this guy off in some posts, cause he sure has a hard on for trying to knife my ass. :D  Most the time I make em eat shotgun, so it's good times all around! lol   Hopefully see ya all tonight. I'll probably be drunk, f34r ze drunken Slay!!!

I was really an equal opportunity knifer. My knife is indiscriminate, there's nothing personal about it, except for the glee I feel at your fallen corpse. :)

Sorry to Nix too, who ended up getting the pointy end quite a bit.

I got you a couple times.  So it's all good.

Do have "4-click-6" bound somewhere?  I hardly ever saw you in spy form after the stab.

When does the orange box come out, you fuckers?

You can hit 'b' to change form to your last selected one. It only takes about two seconds. Since you can also do it while cloaked, you knife someone, then cloak and change, run to an unobserved spot, and decloak.

And yes, perforations (or deformations of the head) were to be had by all.

I've decided that there needs to be more achievements, and much much more stats and visuals and comparisons of stats amongst the community.

I hate you.

With real scorn.

How do I join the same game as you guys are playing. I was on at the same time as everyone, but I couldnt figure it out.

(http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/121/20070921ys5.jpg)

Words of wisdom.

Ok, just got the Orange Box.  Prepare for the worst competitive FPS player ever.

In the friends menu, you should be able to right click on the name, then join game.

I suggest you actually load up TF2 and do it from within the game using the overlay, that way the time between detecting an open slot on the server and actually getting in the game is minimalized.

Is there any way to join a game from the f13 group or do we all have to add everyone to our friends list?

You can, theoretically -- sometimes the option "Join Game" is greyed out with people who are in f13, sometimes it's not. I don't know why.

I just added schild as a friend and I follow him around like a lost puppy. <3 schildy

Ok, so maybe you guys can help me with this.

I use Kaspersky Internet Securities. It fucking HATES Steam games. Like they are its mortal enemies. So far to play TF2 I have to disable Kaspersky. I dont enjoy having to do that each time.

I have had Kaspersky create rules saying the game is ok, and all that stuff, but each time I launch it, it pops up its little window asking if its ok to run the game, and that minimizes the game, and if I tab back in the game crashes.

Help?

Uninstall Kapsersky, buy a router.

Ok, here's how to make Steam games work with KIS.

First, Anti-Hacker must be set on Low Security level. Then delete every single entry in the settings for any steam game. Reboot computer. Enjoy.

Runs great. No crashes (just had one on launching a map) after I bumped down the DX level and upgraded my vid drivers.

This is fun shit.  I need to get a new mouse though, mine isn't going to cut it (wireless).

Much fun was had.

I was up until 2:30 am. I get up for work at 6:30am. Oh well.


We need to organize more on Cap Point maps; trying to win matches during Sudden Death is not reliable.  :evil:

Are all you guys buying through Steam, or is the box out on the shelves yet?

Steam preorder thingy deal, it's not "out" yet.

Yep, helluvah lot of fun. Nix, Slayer, Bhodi and myself were rockin the shit earlier today.

After the inevitable time I was playing on a team-kill enabled server, and sneaked through some tunnel or other, came out amoungst my own team, forgot I was blue, and slaughtered everyone; I decided I'm sticking with Red from now on.

Grublet, you are not me. Why do you use picture of me. Why.

Also, I've been collecting tons of screenshots of people killing me and such. If you want me to crop them down for avatars, just say so.

Edit: Example:

(http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/4752/mrhatheavypt7.jpg)

I do, of course, have full size screens. f(o_O(f  <};_;<} If I don't have a picture, I'll take one in the next game we play together, of course, we play regularly enough that I'll probably end up taking it anyway. Fuck this game has style.

I know how much you love it when I call you s-child.

I was in for a bit but never got to kill SChild. I did kick some serious ass before he showed up.

Quite a bit? I believe you had a streak of 5 before someone killed you. YOU HATE ME AND YOU KNOW IT!

Heh, no one ever plays medics. What's also weird is that no one ever plays heavies.

I see all you bastards playing via Steam all the time. If I buck up and buy, you will all disappear as per usual, right?

....Eventually.

I was on for like 6 hours last night and the Heavy has the most playtime of any class so far on my stats thingie.

Nothing like a Heavy + 2 medics to put The Fear in you.

One spy is all you need for that, but that assumes they aren't moving all over the place and you don't get stupid fucking special backstab manuever that might take an extra second and throw your aim off instead of regular slash attack that hits instantly and is much more accurate.

Schild: Awesome.

I had Grubs following me around earlier.

Pocket healer ftmfw.

I played mostly heavy which is awesome when you have a medic behind you, there were some great moments where I mowed down half the enemy team.  I can't see it in the stats though so I guess our server doesn't do that or it takes a while to update.

Oh and if your playing engineer the Heavies will give you big sloppy kisses if you build teleporters so that we don't have to waddle all the way to the front line :).

Edit: In the stats page where all of those "Most whatever" fields are is that per life or round?

Broke down and bought it the other day.... game refused to run.  Updating the video drivers only worsened the problem.  I hope to join you guys soon if I don't throw this damn computer through the window. 

In the game properties add -w (width) -h (height) and put in your native resolution numbers. The game should load then you'll be able to change things to what you like.

I can't remember the last time I've sucked so bad at a FPS ... but it's also been a long time since I've played one this addictive. It's amazing how no one class feels even slightly overpowered, they all take their own kind of skill.

Pyro's a bit underpowered I'd say.

Spy is just too much fun.  I suck so bad with the scout it's just horrid.

This is a good server to play on.

The Pyro would be about 30000 times better if they tripled the length of the flame from the flamethrower. It's like try to burn someone with a fucking bic lighter.

I did some damage with the demoman back on the 21st.  Not so much at short range, of course, but turrets went boom.  I'm at the beach now, Fripp Island SC, and I can't wait to get back for some TF2.

This may very well be the best multiplayer game I've ever played. UT2k7 has some goddamn competition. Having played this, it's worth $50 alone.

The perfect simplicity of it with the great map design and the just staggering amount of style clenches it. I don't know if I've seen a better animated/textured/designed set of characters than the ones from TF2. It's like playing some sort of twisted Pixar movie.

Oh just me I've done about every launch property imaginable.  Regular HL2 won't even run now.   Re-downloading the whole thing and if that doesn't work I'm just gonna reinstall windows... it's times like this I wonder why I haven't just broke down and bought a console. 



Update some magical correct order of installing motherboard drivers, another version of my video card drivers and my sound drivers again fixed my problem.   I think I installed my video card drivers around 4 or 5 times before getting it to work.  Had a hell of time playing on the f13 server last night even if I was stuck on the wrong side for most of the night.

The shit's unplayable on both my wife's and my machines. THey really need to fix whatever the fuck is causing the sound loop lockup. And by fix I don't even mean adding a bunch of shit in some initialization file. That was okay 10 years ago. Nowadays they need to make it so steam fixes it for you without having to even do anything.

So is there a fix yet? Everything is the latest version already driver wise.

Disguising as a spy will stop working once people learn2play. Problem is that you're shown as an undisguised spy, leading everyone around you to think "why the fuck is has that fucking roach not chosen a disguise?".

In the meantime, it's great, because if someone catches you decloaking, instead of thinking "soliders don't decloak, KILL THE FUCKING ROACH", they think "huh, yeah, a spy, they decloak all the time, also I was dropped on my head as a child and so I'm not concerned that he isn't disguised".


Moral of the story, shoot at undisguised roaches - for they are not the good sort of cockroach.

What the regular spy disguise should look like to the other team is a randomly facemasked disguised spy. That would be MONEYZ.

That said, turrets, still overpowered. Mostly ONLY noticeable on 2fort.

Btw, when the mani_admin plugin gets released for TF2, we're going to be giving people powers. Please play with [f13] in your name so you're identifiable and made useful. And for those people with above a 200 ping, you're going to be autokicked. Apologies. It's not your fault you're in Botswana. Maybe it is though. Game is unplayable at that point anyway.

Why autokick? That's lame.

Valve's netcode does this weird shit to compensate for players. If they're at around 150-300 ping, you'll see them IN GAME stuttering like made. Everyone else will be moving regularly but the guy with lag will be a single frame jittering accross the screen. They're so easily identifiable, that it actually brings the game down a bit. I'd say probably 90% of the CS and ZS and GMod servers autokick above 250, but really, with TF2, anything above 150 is suicide anyway.

Hopefully UT2k7 will compensate for lag a different way.

Yeah, I noticed that, also. I played on a few US servers to play with guildies, and it was freakin' impossible to hit stuff.
Of course I can always play on the euro servers with sub-100 pings, but it still sucks...


-- Z.

Yea, it's not a personal thing, it's just a bad way to handle lag. :( Shame, really.

I don't remember seeing that in CS: Source. Is this a change they made in the last couple of years? Basically if you set it autokick at 200ms I'm not going to be able to play on the server if I ever get the game.

There is absolutely no way you will have a ping higher than 200. Yoru had a 19 ping at one point.

I need help guys. Please.

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/help1190554994.jpg)

At this point, I suppose I should get a TF2 icon.

You don't know my connection. I don't have any Source games to test this on at the moment but I'm almost positive that my ping will go above 200ms at times. I'm at the maximum possible distance for regular ADSL which means my bandwidth is a piddly 384 kbps. If my machine or any of my many machines on my network are downloading anything at the same time my ping will jump up. That's just the way it is.

(http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/3134/steamstatsvr2.jpg)

(http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/4585/tf2achieveud7.jpg)

My favorite ZS server upgraded to 1.07 thereby ruining the game. So, yea, that's that.

Edit: 384kbps? Jesus.

Edit 2: The f13 community has played a combined total of 427.9 hours of TF2 since it came out Tuesday at 00:45PST.

I thought I was bad with my 22 hours. Thanks to you guys for making my addiction look tame.

I'm in bumfuck NJ, and I manage to hover near 100ms.

Also, I'm in a condo, without a direct line to the box outside, so my connection is somewhat borderline to begin with.

Have hope, Trippy.

Where is the server physically located?

Arizona.

Here's the infobits from my connection here in VA... traditionally, a lot of networks are named based on the closest physical airport code. Consider it a hard and fast rule. You can trace the path based on this.

I live near Dulles Airport (iad, #7, #6). The big latency jumps are #8->#9 is going across the country, from dca (Regan National airport, VA)  to iah (George Bush, Houston TX) and then bounces to above.net which I assume is in AZ. The rest is data-center specific routing which doesn't add any real delay.

 6  so-4-0-0.mpr1.iad2.us.above.net (64.125.30.118)  11.221 ms  4.144 ms  5.210 ms
 7  so-4-0-0.mpr2.iad1.us.above.net (64.125.29.133)  7.756 ms  8.032 ms  8.091 ms
 8  so-6-0-0.cr2.dca2.us.above.net (64.125.27.210)  8.209 ms  8.279 ms  8.336 ms
 9  so-1-0-0.mpr3.iah1.us.above.net (64.125.28.50)  47.580 ms  43.983 ms  46.483 ms
10  64.125.25.10.available.above.net (64.125.25.10)  86.456 ms  86.729 ms  86.780 ms
11  available.above.net (64.124.147.30)  86.892 ms  86.957 ms  87.013 ms
12  ip-208-109-112-137.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.112.137)  83.940 ms  86.644 ms  86.706 ms
13  ip-208-109-112-161.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.112.161)  89.224 ms  89.103 ms  89.277 ms
14  ip-208-109-113-157.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.113.157)  89.393 ms  85.826 ms  85.067 ms
15  ip-208-109-113-170.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.113.170)  85.036 ms  83.210 ms  83.269 ms
16  ip-72-167-40-67.ip.secureserver.net (72.167.40.67)  85.943 ms  86.196 ms  86.253 ms

Yep, the server is solid. I'm playing from NE Indiana and I hover around 60 - 70 ping without fail.

I can attest to this.  Getting around 60 ping from SE Michigan.

Well after their most recent patch I've managed to play the end of a game for two minutes without crashing, which is actually nice.

Then it's just WOOP WOOP WOOP as soon as it changes maps.

EDIT: Oh wait, guess not. This time it crashed in 12 seconds. Last time in about 35.

Did you set it up to kick down to DX 8.1 on initialization?  I did it this morning and played all day without a single lock-up.

I'm so fucking over that 2Fort map already. As for the ping thing, I've always got over 200 ping and have not had a bit of trouble with the f13 server. Do I seem to be stuttering to you? Because it's smooth for me... and I have had no trouble getting a decent number of kills.  :roll:

Oh yeah, where do I change my name ingame? I haven't played a Valve MPFPS in ages, and ~ doesn't bring up le console.

I dont get much over 26 ping. I like the server.

Well if I set it to directx 7.0, set all the graphics to minimum, turn off the sound, and play at 800x600... it only crashes every 15 minutes.

The game's playable, and the cartoon character style doesn't suffer much from the lower graphics nor, I think, do my lousy FPS skills suffer anything with the sound off. WOW I am bad at this game. I believe I got two kills once. Ever. It keeps congratulating me for getting close to my top team of a couple minutes.

I feel patronized.

The style really sold it for me.  Various friends were spewing about it, I watched the trailers on the orangebox site, and immediately broke down and bought it.  Haven't played a FPS in ages, I suck pretty badly, but damn if it isn't a lot of fun.

- Q

Well even though I suck at FPS games I've just purchased the Orange box and am dloading as I write. Looks too much fun to pass up and I need something to play on the PC until halloween anyway. See you soon I guess.

This is the major factor keeping me from having interest in this... I have no desire to look like a Pixar character, I also don't want to play versus (or with) a bunch of Xbox people, and I certainly don't think this game encourages skill with it giving different health amounts to the different classes.

Stupid design, combined with crappy release, and it costing money to even try.  PASS

When the "orange box" and ET:QW are next to one another in box form, I honestly can't even fathom spending $50 on another crappy HL2 episode that I beat in 4 hours and a Pixar FPS kiddy game.

Come play ET:QW or get schild to get a server for that, because this game is not a true FPS in comparison.

This is not the TFC you were looking for... Move Along

Does anybody know if the Xbox 360 players get aiming assist? I can't imagine how you would play a Sniper on an Xbox 360 against PC players without it.

You haven't played the game.  This much is obvious.

More than that is obvious. Not to mention the glaring fact that 360 and PC people won't be playing side by side.

Are you sure? Cause it's certainly doable technically:

http://www.gamedrift.com/articles.php?a=392

I actually haven't seen a definite anywhere that 360 and PC people won't be playing together, and that is the only reason I can fathom for not making it a graphical powerhouse on par with the HL2 Engine. I can't find any site or news claiming that Xbox and PC gamers on TF2 won't be together, and I completely expect this to be their "test case" of making the two platforms overlap.

No I haven't played this game, but I'm also not a sucker putting $40+ into "pre-purchasing" something that I likely won't enjoy. I played FPS games 5 years ago that were more innovative than this game, and I certainly wouldn't pay money for a game with tactics from 1998 with the only change being "Incredibles characters".

I'm one of those stodgy characters that dislikes WoW's art and plays WW2 flight sims. I am having a blast in TF2 precisely because it doesn't even remotely pretend to be complex. WoW, with people min-maxing to get the next pair of 3 foot high shoulder pads, gets silly, and not in a good way, but TF2? Come on, its finally a game that's just meant to be pure fun.

If you're not into HL2 expansions, sure I can see you thinking TF2 isn't worth it, but you are cutting yourself out of some stupid silly fun. Its not CS with pixar graphics. Its nowhere near as 'serious'.

1996 was when the original (Net)Quake version was released. TFC was released in 1999.

Wuh? It supports alll the Source engine fancies like HDR and it has higher recommended specs then HL2 or Ep1.

You really just don't know what the hell you're talking about. Just... stop.

Yeah so? Or are you saying nobody played the game for 2 years until 1998?

What the fuck is it about people on this site not wanting people to disagree with them, and then saying stupid things while telling me to stop. I know full well what I'm talking about, and it's an opinion or preference of mine. If you feel differently FINE, it still doesn't mean I can't post my reasons for not being a sheep following the F13 flock into a game. You'd all be embarrassed when I kicked your asses anyway (someone pay $45 for me and I'll come in and school yas).

Yes... It supports the Source engine, and HDR. Yes.. It has higher specs, but it's because it's packaged with Ep2. The graphics style, the character models and the gameplay for TF2 are not what I wanted from an upgrade to a game mod that's 10 years old!! I can't say they were specifically done this way for a reason, but my guess is instead of making it more realistic or looking like HL2 does (resource intensive) they made it cartoony (so it would cross platforms better).

No I am saying that this is the same game I played in 1998. What are you saying?

Just like those damn lazy impressionists!

No, it's fine that you have an opinion that's negative about a game's visual style, it's your opinion after all. I asked you to stop because it seems you both have an aversion to style in any form and were bordering on conspiracy theorist.

Edit: Grammar.

To change your name right click on the steam icon on the taskbar and click settings.   Click on the Friends tab and change your nickname to include the [f13].  I am sure you can get the console to work by simply adding a bind in the cfg page for ~ toggleconsole but i can't be bothered to check right now since I'm drunk. 

Your reasons being...you don't like the art?  Because that's the only opinion you have any justification holding.  You can't say much else about it if you haven't played the game.  I've played QW: ET, TFC, and TF2, and TF2 is the superior of the three when it comes to gameplay.  Since you haven't played TF2, you can't say that, because you have no idea. 

personally I'd like to think they made it so stylized because it's not boring as shit. nobody needs another faux-military assbasket simulator like the old TF2 design. objective fact. the team has put together enough character stereotypes to blow up the moon along with a dramatic countdown lady and underneath it all is solid, polished gameplay.

I didn't have any interest in this game but seeing literally everyone on my Steam list playing it made me stare wistfully for a second before I punched in credit card numbers. whatever, I was waiting for Portal and Ep1/2 justify the purchase (along with a friend that doesn't have HL2, and poor spending habits).

if you did at one point enjoy TFC there is no reason not to enjoy this, presentation be damned. it's the same core ideas with class tweaks and a few other differences that promote skillful (team)play. it's ballsacks of fun, tons of shiny happy people are playing it and you are well within your rights to bind "BONESAWWWW" to a key for medic melee kills. ballsacks.

I'm not chiming in to try and argue, I just wanted to use foul language several times and be on-topic. pisslick. cuntleby.

Going right back to the first post like this you made. And invoking the FurBruce clause:



Visual aesthetics are a personal preference. I like these. I also like the humans in QW. I like different things. I don't think we're playing against XBoxers, certainly not at this stage. The point about skill and different classes is a silly one, each game balances itself in different ways. If it works, it works. Here, it works.



As said, visual aesthetics are a personal thing. I think it looks great. The game design is pretty good as well, for fast-paced fun. The crappy release was over in a day and it's now more stable than, say, WoW was months after release. Not wanting to pay for a demo, fairy 'nuff.



Calling it a kiddy game is a strawman argument, and a pretty shit one at that. After trying the demo, I have found ET:QW to be ok at best, but not something I'd pay money for when I already have BF2/2142. Twitchy, confusing, meh. Personal pref and all that. Though I do like the humans.



I tried QW. It failed the FUN test for me. Not a true FPS? Now while opinion is fine and good, now you just sound like a fucking dickhead. The "not a true FPS" makes you sound like one of the fuckheads playing Vanguard who also decided to talk smack about how WoW is a kiddy game because it doesn't involve pounding nails into your dick and hitting your nutsack with a hammer every quarter hour. ALL GAMES MUST LOOK TEH SAME is not a valid argument.

Enjoy QW, by all means. If you don't like TF2, that's also fine. Just don't be a dickhead about it. mmmkay?



It works for me. maybe it's not the TF1 you were looking for though...

Fuck that. This is what TFC wants to be. None of the everyone has a grenade bullshit and the levels are skillfully redesigned to be about, oh, I don't know, 10x more fun. I have now logged 42.1 hours in TF2.

I'm a big fan of what I've seen in QW through its two beta phases so there are more subjective or just apples-to-oranges areas where I prefer QW's design, but when it comes to the raw action of gameplay and its engine for it, I'd have to agree; TF2 definitely takes the edge there over QW and likely most every other recent FPS. It's so damn smooth and polished. Everything from the movement to action to the collision or hit detection feels exactly as reactive and precise as it should be.

While I do agree that ET:QW is a good game in and of itself and have pre ordered it. TF2 is not only superior, it has a serious bid for online game of the year.

Not liking the style I can understand, even if the vast majority will never agree with you. However saying that the game doesn't encourage skill because all classes doesn't have the same ammount of HP is about as fucking retarded as whining about that the uber damage dealer in your average MMO doesn't have as much HP/armor as the tank. All the classes in TF2 have their place.

lol Schild.  Bet you wish you had a grenade sometimes.

Also, turrets aren't that bad really, you can shoot them around corners without them seeing you.

Just watch out for Bhodi ><

Take a really good look at the Penny Arcade comic a couple of posts back, and tell me that a heavy+medic combo is one that wins because of skill.

In the original TF and TF:Classic characters had armor and not differences in health, and their armor was NOT healable by medics, so essentially, this adds a huge advantage just based on the differences in the HP of each class. The armor also was a basis for why one class was slower moving than another, where now this is done by character's size.


Personal Pref and all that? WTF?

My opinion is that the cartoony look makes it into a Pixar FPS kiddy game. If you don't think it reduces it into a kiddy game, or what I said is a "shit strawman argument", then you missed where it says "I honestly can't fathom" clearly deliniating this as my opinion. I own the BF games (excepting 2142) but at least ET:QW has a combination of things I did like from that series, upgraded and enhanced, where TF2 doesn't appear any less twitchy or confusing, yet has almost nothing making it an upgrade to the TF I used to play. Strawman indeed.


Please see my response above. All the classes in TF or TFC had their place too, just some of them had more armor when they respawned. Giving classes more or less health than others, where medics are constantly replenishing health, makes some classes near invincible.


I did make a mistake in that statement, but me adding "not a true FPS in comparison, to me." wouldn't have kept people from attacking me any less. I think you sound like a fucking dickhead too, think you have a ton of nerve to tell me to not be a dickhead while being one yourself and obviously need to point out "ALL GAMES MUST LOOK TEH SAME" was NOT my argument here.

Wrong.

Did you even play TF? The only way to get more health than anyone else was if you got a Medic heal you. Medics could heal past the full health (100%) max to 150%, but it gradually went back down to 100% over time.

Still wrong but it was a nice try to make it sound like you know what you are talking about.

Never do. If I want a grenade I'll be a demo. That's how the game works.


You can stalemate 2fort too easily with them.

Some things never change.

It all comes down to 3 things, 2 in conjunction with eachother.

1. Hallways are too narrow.
2. Spies can't clip through the turrets and engineers. It's instant spy detection.

Finally,

You can build a turret on the goddamn desk. if a spy tries to sap it, they'll grab the briefcase first and decloak/despy way too fast.

I suppose also, people hate being medic and heavy too much, particularly at the same time, to really be effective. A heavy/medic combo, or even better, heavy + 2 medics would absolutely rape face.

So yes, some things don't change, they just fuck it up in new ways.

Lord Neckbeard the Angry: Squeezing MMO one true way style hate into FPSeseses, one game at a time.

Ah, shit. Forgot to download this over the weekend. I blame the NFL. I have the urge to bounce grenades on you folks.

Guess I should also figure out a headset config, I don't want to drop a bundle on it. Maybe I'll just get an extension cable or something and use my shitty $16 headset so you all think I talk through a cancer throatbox.

As HealBitch© I must point out that it does take skill to dominate with the heavy+medic combo. As a medic I can't stand behind the heavy and automatically win. I need to use geometry to my advantage to stay out of the line of fire while the heavy brings the pain. I need to keep moving in order to stay out of sight for enemy snipers. I need to keep a look out for anyone who may be a spy. I need to know when to pop the uber and make sure the heavy is on the same page so we both can run in and not waste it. To take a comic as god's truth as to what a game is about is moronic. Moronic, however, is par for you. We understand you don't like the game, that's fine. Play what you enjoy, but leave us to our enjoyment as well.

Go troll elsewhere.

That's one of the things that irk me as a medic.  Some heavy's seem to think that my services are a right, and they'll completely ignore the fact that they have certain responsibilities in the relationship like keeping my ass alive.  Running head long into a wide open area where I have no cover, and ignoring the swarms of scouts bum rushing my ass are both good examples.

A heavy-medic combo is all about teamwork, and a lot of heavy's seem to really take us for granted.

ok, I'll tell you outright that your opinion is wrong. Graphic style doesn't affect the underlying mechanics of the gameplay, and having played TF2 I can tell you it's no more a "kiddy game" than, say, World of Warcraft, which also has a stylised "cartoony" aesthetic style. By your logic, the deep strategy of QW:ET would all magically disappear and it would suddenly become a "kiddy game" if it had a GFX-swap with TF2?
Yes. Strawman. Indeed.



RE: Trippy. Oh, also, I manage to kill medics, and kill heavies. Just like I manage to kill tanks and walkers in BF series games. Even when they have engies following them. Of course, I've actually played all of those games.



You're being a twat. Now you're telling me I have a lot of nerve for pointing out that someone on the internets is sounding like a dickhead? What's next? You're going to threaten to come over to my house and beat me up after school? If "ALL GAMES MUST LOOK TEH SAME" is not your argument, then I cordially invite you to rescind your "OH NOES PIXAR KIDDIEZ" argument and replace it with something of substance.

Seriously, you're not making a lot of sense. Your arguments as to why TF2 isn't a "real FPS" seems to be based on 3 things:

1) Some toons have more HP instead of more armour.
2) OMG PIXAR KIDDIEZ - You don't like the design aesthetic they have chosen.
3) You haven't actually played it.

 
Not exactly an argument-winning combination.

I enjoy Day of Defeat: Source a great deal and have always been a fan of FPS games. Is TF2 worth the preorder? If im looking for more of a tactical based laid back FPS? I dont want to have to worry about my kit beyond choosing a preset on a splash screen.

Anybody who hates TF2 is with the terrorists.

Still sore over trying to take Turtletown?  I agree with you, though.  I'd also point out that we were not watching the tunnels (I wasn't at least), so you should have tried swimming over from time to time.

As for heavy+medic, the PA cartoon also points out how to defeat the combo easily.  Ubercharge only lasts five (?) seconds.  Just don't be a dumbass: shoot/backstab the medic first.

Pennilenko, TF2 isn't what I would call laid-back, but there's no kit to worry about other than picking a class.  If you want a sniper rifle, spawn as a sniper; if you want grenades, spawn as a demoman.  TF2 is worth the full $50 for The Orange Box.

It is rather easy to turn the intelligence room into turret death.  No one player can break it.  I've yet to see a spy that can do it reliably.  A demo man can try finessing some grenades in, but then you can just run up and shotgun him in the face.   Needs to be a demo man + medic or another combination that can take a little of a beating.

Was my mic working last night? I wasn't getting any feedback (only plugged in the mic, not rest of headset). 

How to beat Heavy + Medic? A single spy.

Interestingly, I broke the intel room as a heavy with a medic on my back.  It helped that the engineer was in the wrong place, meaning his dispenser was not next to the desk and he was not behind the turret.

I'm going to try this with a demoman one day, but I will likely still need help if the eng decides to unload his shotgun into my eyesocket.

yeah, an ubercharged heavy can obliterate the room's static defenses in short order. medics are key!

What is orange box?

I hope my lazyness to look this up isnt offending anyone.

HL2 + Ep. 1/2 + Portal + TF2, steam preorder lets you into TF2 "beta" before release date.

The Orange Box is either a box or a virutal box that contains Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and a demo of Peggle with a picture of the Rape Beaver being set on fire by a TF2 pyro.  I preordered it for $45, pretty sure it retails for $50.  Even if those other applications are only a .png of Gabe Newell kicking your dad in the ballsack, it's worth the $50 just for TF2.

Thanks i was trying to determine all that. I have HL2, Ep1. Already though.

If you guys say TF2 is worth it ill preorder tonight. /Cheers to me getting killed over and over again......its going to be great.

If you guys come across a guy that keeps dying over and over again in funny yet non-tiring ways. Thats me.

The medic's ubercharge is also incredibly effective when used on nearly any offensive class that moves about the same speed as the medic. Soldiers are even better than heavies for decimating awful turret clogs in dustbowl/2fort with an ubercharge since it's quicker to get there and pop the charge (Critical rockets also wtfpwn level 3 turrets instantly). Ubercharging a pyro is fun for cap-point clusterfucks.

I wish there were more maps, and more versions of the current maps. Well would be 100 times more fun as a CTF map instead of the push variant it is now.

I'm sure the final version will let you fuck with modes and maps, or others will add it within the month.

I can not wait. I want the 3rd part of DustBowl to be it's own map and you just play it over and over and over.

I haven't played a competitive FPS title regularly since Quake 2 Rocket Arena.  I am really enjoying TF2 even with some really bad FPS chops.

I did get a new mouse though and I'm loving it.  A wireless Dell two button mouse (although 2 buttons does cut it for this game) has now been replaced by a Razer DeathAdder (oohh scary).  Such an improvement with aiming and feel. Plus, it has nifty blue lighting!

Damnit, someone tell me if my mic was working!   :-D

So many chokepoints :(

I have a choke point......hangin.



My god, I am sorry for that one. I cant take it back though. I just couldn't stop myself. Its like sticking your tongue to a single leg of 480 3 phase, You know its gonna kill you but you just cant stop.

Which is as it should be IMO.  If you have three engies or whatever focused on defending an area, and one guy trying to break in, then it should be nigh impossible for the one guy to get past them.

As I discovered in that same game, trying to demo my way past Ookii's turret defenses.  I failed horribly.

Voice seemed pretty choppy to me, some people it would come through, with their little name in the corner, some would be a name with no voice. Could be because I'm using a non-Creative soundcard, with crappy ass beta drivers. And I was too busy getting blown up by bhodi.

Lover Razer for their mice, hate them for their sound.

So, like, can the banners of the f13 main page be updated with Team Fortress 2? That, Mass Effect, Halo 3, etc.

Banners seem to be about 6 months behind now.

Try 2 years behind, sucka.

Is there an option to buy JUST TF2 right now? I already have most of the crap from the Orange Box, so I don't want to buy it all again.

Maybe you weren't listening.

HL2 and Ep 1 have no value anymore. You aren't buying them. TF2 is worth the $50. hell, to me it's worth $150+ since we bought a ded.

I guess the dedicated server might make it worth it. Can I have uber admin powers of life and death over everything that walks, swims or flies?

Hey, believe it or not I never played Half Life 2 ... when it originally came out I was playing on my older PC and I knew I'd have to play with gimped graphic settings (and besides I thought the first game was horribly overrated), so I passed on it.  Now I'm glad I did, because the game plays great at its highest resolution on my new PC - and the game itself is fantastic.

So I pretty much feel I got the best deal ever with the Orange Box.

I know I saw the itemized price in the list when it was calculating how much you "saved" when buying the Orange Box, but I don't think it's offered a la carte just yet. FWIW, the itemized price was $30, I think. The additional $20 for Portal makes it worth it, and the additional crap they throw in is just icing.

Yes, you can be a sniper.

Just rest assured the entertainment value of TF2 is worth the price of the whole box, at which point getting a free expansion to HL2 will make you smile.

You guys are making it very difficult for me to resist the urge to get TF2.

Stop it, damnit.

The Math Hedgehog disagrees with you. 

(http://slog.thestranger.com/files/2007/01/hedgehog.JPG)

You have at most 2 out of 5 of the items in the Orange Box.   2/5 is not "most".

Don't forget the entertainment value of yelling at people over Teamspeak as you run around batting other people in the head.





.... I'm Batman.

This thread sold me. I just need to be patient enough to make it home. I can sneak in a debit card preorder before she gets home and wants to know which game imbuying this time.

OK, ok- I'm sold! I don't want to anger the math hedgehog again. How big is the file? Will I have a prayer of playing tonight?

FIFY

Uhh.. where's the edit? :headscratch:

Edit: NM, the Ron Jeremy picture isn't loading for me.

It took about 4 hours at 300Kbytes/sec when a friend of mine loaded it on a fresh machine (no Steam/Source-engine games ever installed before).

I have Steam + HL2 and CS:S loaded (recently)- I am hoping it takes less time. Might be able to sneak in a few rounds before I get to bed. I will paint a giant 'n00bler' target on myself.

No need, grenades are nondiscriminatory.

Yeah, I just left mine on overnight once the preload was available one day, so I have no idea how much time it takes to get just TF2 on a Source-loaded computer. The TF2 gcf files in my SteamApps dir are about 2.4GB combined, although I think Steam claims it's only using up about 1.4GB of space.

Anything +medic can do it on ubercharge, but anyway, defending the intelligence room itself is entirely the thing to do yesterday.

Today, the cool kids are holding the open air room at the top of the big staircase down to the intelligence area.

You can hold that reliably with one turret and passers by. Spies can get past you, but only on the way in. Muhahahaha!

Gotta have someone covering the ramp room too in that case, since they can go out up the steep staircase instead of the spiral.

I think it may be possible to place one turret up top so that it partially covers both ways up, but I haven't gotten a chance to experiment with that yet.  It'd have to be right at the corner between the ramp room and that other upstairs room.

Played on a server with someone who did just that. You can waste it as a scout from under the stairs shooting between the steps.... :)

Booo.  My turrets will stay in the intel room where it takes more than one punk with a pistol to kill them.   :-P

I had HL2 & CS:S on steam and on Saturday morning it took about 1:30-2 hours to get TF2, and that's with intermittent downloading of HL:2 EP1 going on. That's at ~ 600 Kbps

So, the voice chat works great for me, but I hate the crappy headset I have.  I'd like some kind of headset mic thing without speakers -- I have perfectly good speakers on the PC already and I'm only using the headset for the microphone, but it has a dumb speaker that wants to sit over my ear.  Suggestions?

- Q

Mic + speakers = feedback loop = bad.

As expected I suck ass at this game, but damn it's a lot of fun. I'm generally turned off of action FPS multiplayer (BF2, RB6 i do play) but the style and balance of TF2 combined with great map design is ++fun.

I still haven't found "my" class: the soldiers rockets fire to slow for me and heavy's minigun had me screaming at my screen. So far I like the spy (BACKSTAB!) and the sniper are most entertaining but I still suck at them. I do wish a class had a assault rifle type primary weapon but that's a small issue. Damn good game.

Oh and I appreciate that it's not uber-shiny as it means I can run it on my laptop at 1440x900 with most options on and get good framerate.

Tried medic yet?  His primary weapon (syringe gun) probably isn't as powerful as what you're looking for, but it is fully automatic.

Medic gun is fucking vicious once you get the arc down.

A bit late, but a sniper can easily defeat the medic+heavy combo. Fuck, I don't care how many medics the heavy has; it could be a heavy + 10 medics, I'm still killing that heavy in a single crit shot to the face.

But yeah, the comic is right: shoot the medic first. Then, watch the heavy run around like he just got his head cut off...well, only for moment, until you charge up another shot to Actually take the heavy's head off.

Or better yet, just cap the heavy, and watch the medic look confused as you then shoot him too.

Man, I don't kill a medic'd heavy with a crit shot to the face.  Usually takes 3 if he has a medic on him.  With more than 1 medic, impossible.

Maybe I just don't charge up enough though.

I like stabbing the medic, then stabbing the heavy, then re-disguising as my prefered method.

If you're all the way charged up, you can indeed kill a heavy with a medic in one shot. On the third leg of dustbowl, it's critical to kill the heavy first - the medic actually becomes a problem for the other team when he's running around scared to death - also, an easy target. On any other stage, I'd go for the medic first.

As a spy, there's no question, go for the medic first. Especially on Dustbowl. Everyone else is already aiming at the heavy.

Can you tell I like dustbowl?

I play Heavy and love it. Thanks to Grub for some healing love last night. I was on a tear last night....fuck I even was racking up Pyro kills!

Right now, order of kit favorites are:

Heavy
Scout
Soldier
Medic
Sniper
Pyro
Demo


I never play engi or spy, will eventually I guess



And BTW, get the fuck on Teamspeak guys....and the f13 server runs great for me. Thanks schild.

I kinda wasted some hours this weekend beating HL2, but I guess its about time huh? :)

How does teamspeak interact with the builtin voice comms?  I've always found teamspeak to be incredibly cranky on my win32 machine and running it on the linux laptop sorta sucks too.  The TF2 voice comms stuff works great for me...

- Q

Well using in game voice i cant talk shit to my opponents on it :)

Ah, that was a fun time. I'm pretty rusty on the fps skills, but sticking to my trusty grenade launcher I didn't fare too badly. First round was hilarious as I just wandered around getting killed learning the map and weapons (on 2fort). Grenades to the head are crit kill fun. Sticky grenades are great defense, but I need to learn the mechanics on them because they disappear on me. I know they blow up after you hit the limit, but I planted some on the control point and switched to the grenade launcher, then when I switched back to detonate them they were gone. Ah, well. Still a great class, wish it had a gun though. Need to remember to pull out the bottle when people get up close, I'm very prone to terrorist attacks (blowing myself and my enemy up with a point-blank grenade), always have been.

Grub was killillating me pretty good as a heavy. Like the death sequence, nice touch. Definitely a solid game, wish I had better pings though.

Voice comms are still a no-go with me, for the same reasons I've iterated. I should probably bend a bit of mind-power to the situation, I admit.

I may need to pick this up it seems.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking even though I suck ass supremely at FPS games.  This just looks too fun to miss.

The wife has layed down the law on game purchases since buying Bioshock, MoH: Airborne, TW '08 (which sucks, btw - buggy piece of shit), and preordering CoD: MW.

Man up, I wanna hose you down with my chaingun big boy

Sounds kinky.

No need to switch back to the stickygun, just rightclick.  I stuck three or four on the inside corner of the 2fort tunnel then lobbed some bouncies into the pond at a swimmer and possibly a turret, and when the swimmer followed me I just detonated his ass.  I like demoman, and I also need to remember to get out the bottle when in melee.

My voice wasn't working for whatever reason, although it is related to the sound card I installed yesterday, I'm sure.  TS works fine, I recorded a .wav file just fine, so I will fiddle with the TF2 settings since NONE OF YOU WERE ON TS.

EDIT: I proved my idea on de-turreting the intel desk, so huzzah.

OK- I got it installed and played a bit last night. I have no earthly idea wtf I am doing, however, having never played TF before. Can someone give me a breakdown of the different classes and their roles?


Also- my load times between maps is EXTREMELY LONG (like 15 minutes). I am guessing this ain't normal. Any suggestions?

That's weird. Does the screen go black?

I would love to know surefire Anti-Spy techniques.

I was playing yesterday defensively on dustbowl, the enemy team had like 4 spies which would destroy all of our sentries within 30 seconds of any given map started.

My team finally wised up to it, so on the second round of dustbowl at the last CP, we had two heavys next to two dispensers and 3 pyros guarding out sentries, and we still got raped by spies in the end.

That FreshFruity or FruityFresh (I forget his name) is the goddamn antichrist.

No- the load progress indicator jumps to about 75% completion and then just sits there. I have had to reboot to get out of it. One time I was able to load into the game. It seems like I can join a map in progress but can't switch maps with everyone else, but sample size is too small to make that definitive.

Edit-  I was answering schild, btw.

The classes are pretty archetypical in my opinion, although the medic and sniper have better autofire weapons than I would have guessed.  Scouts capture twice as fast.  Demoman doesn't have a shotgun like most everyone else.

The only surefire antispy technique I know of is fire, applied liberally and indiscriminately.  Or shoot anyone with your name.  Or shoot the predator-flicker when they bump into something, like a turret or teammate.

Spies are also my bane. Heavies may slightly edge them out for my total deaths, but spies are definitely the other main reason. The only other class I remember getting me alot was Pyro...when I lagged. Doubt it was video lag, since my ping was pretty high, but it could've been. Not much I can do about spies as a demo, but I have learned to use cover much better to avoid my massive heavy deaths...and some of that was practicing headshots on Grub ;)

I wish demoman had the bundles of dynamite, though. The odd glowy spiky balls just don't have a visceral feel to them. I also couldn't seem to stick them on people. Really, really need to be able to stick them on people. Load up a heavy's arse with 8 boomballs and wait until he is surrounded by some buddies...

I did see one guy with my name, didn't realize spies did that. Bounced a grenade off his head.

Actually, my policy is when in doubt, start bouncing grenades off things. I like demoman.

My policy is to unload all my clips before I die.  I favor "over a building" and "into a window", but I'm pretty indiscriminate.

(http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/9351/2fortturretplacementoj5.png)

This is what I've learned about 2Fort to deal with scouts. Or rather, to deal with useful scouts, like me and jigglypuff.

That inside corner one is good. I spent lots of time playing combat engineer in Planetside (before they got all the new toys). Some of the best placements were behind cover from approaching fire, could hit all the chokepoint approaches, and would ideally nail enemies in the back, getting in some free shots before they even knew it was there.

The open staircase area is tough because of the layout, easy to sit in the room and take out the turrets, but I'm considering it from my demoman mindset... The one in the front battlement is kinda nice for protecting snipers/defenders backs, because that's how I generally died up there...but being immobile they wouldn't last long at all since it's an easy position to hit from across or below.

When I'm engineer on 2fort I place a turret on that middle green spot at the top of the stairs, I further put a useless transport at the battlements as an indicator of a greedy scout or rocket jumper: they always kill the teleporter, then I know they're coming.

As for spies, just shoot everyone.  Dispensers mean you never have to worry about ammo.

WAP, here is my quick breakdown.

Do you like lobbing grenades? Grab a demo.

Do you like headshotting fucks? Grab a sniper.

Do you like suiciding groups of people? Grab a Pyro.

Do you like being a huge meatshield with unmatched close range firepower? Grab a heavy and call a medic.

Do you like racking up points healing huge meatshields? Grab a medic

Do you like speed, and abusing people with Louisville sluggers? Grab a scout.

Do you like obliterating people while taking a shit? Grab an engineer and upgrade the fuck out of your turret.

Do you like one-shotting and stealth? Grab a spy.

Do you like rocket spamming and bunny hopping? Grab a soldier.

The best place for a turret in 2fort is on the desk right on top of the plans, with the scanning arc covering both hallways. Put a dispenser next to the desk against the wall in that little nook. Then just stand there and shoot anyone who comes in the room and hit stuff with a wrench to repair it. Never in a million years will anyone get in the room without ubercharge, and then there's no way they're getting back out of your base.

I love this game and it reminds me how much fun the first one was before everyone on the planet had rocket/conc jumping scripts that made capping flags trivial.

ANd FruityFlesh is indeed the devil. Also, the server is way too popular as it took me 30 minutes to get on the server last night.

I'm pretty sure you can air-detonate them though, which is pretty satisfying (though they may have just attached to a far wall, I don't play Demo often). I remember bagging schild with them when he was sniping on offense on Dustbowl a few times. They're great to plant wherever Snipers like to pace across (not so much on 2Fort though, except on the bottom doors) because they don't automatically cause them to scatter like with the grenades.

Dispensers also mean you wish your mic worked so you could tell the engs to BUILD SOME DISPENSERS.

Also I agree with angry.bob, did that successfully myself once.  I had my back in the corner, between the dispenser and the wall, which annoys spies.  My readouts told me I destroyed your desk-encampment, angry.bob, not sure what you saw but I saw "Yegolev -> Dispenser/Turret/angry.bob".  I like how you ran out into the hallway for a tasty grenade, though.  I coat mine with chocolate.

Bah, and how many tries did it take you? I think you died to your own nade right after me though, so I count that as a victory. I'm not sure, but I think you'd killed the dispenser without killing the turret. You might have killed the turret another time, but I'm pretty sure you never managed to get all three at the same run. Not that it mattered really, there were two other Sentry guns in the room in the corners.

If you ever want to hop on the server while it's busy just ping us in steam and we'll kick someone so you can get in.  Of course if we're actually playing you can only contact schild, since I have killed the steam overlay for sake of my FPS.

I think I may be sucking ever so slightly less at this than when I started, but am skeptical about ever being much of an fps'er.  On the other hand, it is certainly a lot of fun, though I do wish for a little more variety in maps or mission types.

- Q

Here's the problem with putting one at the top of the stairs like Hat suggested. The spy shotgun shoots straight through the stairs. On 2 of those 3 spots, I can mow down a turret in 4-5 shots assuming I get 1 crit. it takes roughly 2.5 seconds. I probably should have made those spots blue.

Wrong.

actually schild is right; demoman seems to be the name of the game when destroying turrets is concerned.

Everything you say is true, including the part where I blew up both of us.  I could have handled that better, so yes it was a victory for the defense.  I didn't expect you to rush me, most of the engs I fight seem to be pussies.  The other two turrets, I couldn't have touched those... I think; will try during another session.  As for number of tries, I actually lobbed something like 24 grenades behind the desk during that push, seems like I reloaded at least twice, so while I'm pretty proud of it on a personal level, it's not like I was all "i'm in ur base killin ur breefcase".  Probably the turret went poof after you came at me, I sent a lot of grenades in there.  A lot.  I enjoyed the hell out of that.

Im horrible about screenshots. I had like a quadruple baseball bat run, shoulda SSed it.

Also, pyro on certain maps is money.

Funny thing about pyros, I keep getting killed by them but I can't seem to kill anyone with them.  I'm sure I'm doing it wrong.

Demoman is the name of the game full stop.

Picking other classes is just something you do when you feel insufficiently cool and good looking to be worthy of the spendour that is demoman.



On turrets in 2fort, I favour a spot about mid way between the middle two green spots on schild's map. You don't want it right in the corner or it can't see all the way to the bottom of the diagram, and the mid point is a little harder for demomen to hit than the outside-area/upstairs room entrance.

One there, and one on the bottom left green spot and you seem to be spy and scout proof, anyone coming in is going to need multiple coordinated players.

Wrong again.


And again! They can get by from the balcony make a very hard left quickly. You can't hope to lock it all down with just 2 engineers. It's not enough. Ironically, more than that leaves you with mostly not enough offense. Most teams have 3-4 engineers. Which is mostly crazy. My opinion? It's best to lock shit down in the basement.

This is true.  I've done the demojump onto the balcony, and go to basement, destroy 2 turrets and 1 engineer, nab the box and make my way out.  It's rather easy.  You can also demo/rocket jump up the chain floor in the middle.  People flip out when you do.

As a scout you can crouch jump onto someones head, and then jump on the balcony or up the chain floor. That's money when it's someone attacking you.

You definitely can, but it seems like it is about a second till you can blow them up. It's sweet for taking out uppity scouts who think they are going to kill you at range.

Double props if you kill them on the way up w/ yer shottie.

At the end of the round, sticky grenades are fireworks.

Downloading now.  How big is the file?

When you're in-game looking at your stats don't reset them. It doesn't just reset them for that gaming session. It deletes all your stats! Bummer... :roll:

Video or it didn't happen.

Just TF2 was about 4GB IIRC. Took me about 2 hours.

We live in an amazing age.
/me remembers spending the entire day downloading the 8MB Quake 1 demo.

Hellgate London is 3.2GB.

It took me 32 minutes.

I'll keep FRAPS running from now on.

Rgr.  Getting between 500-600 kb/s.  At about 63 percent done right now.  Should be done about the time I'll be able to play (once my baby boy goes to sleep).


Splendid.  What size internet connection?

A good one.  HGL took me about 2 hours.

Damnit.

Full server.

had great fun on your server just now :)
we should play more often and just mix the teams up more too.

Okay, Scout is pretty damn fun.  And wow, do the other classes seem slooooow after you've been bouncing around as scout a bit. 

Is there some way to turn around more quickly?  I seem to have a helluva time tracking people up close if I want to go whack 'em on the head with the bat or whatnot.  Am I just lousy or is there some trick to it?

- Q

Adjust your mouse settings.

Good, good fun.  I suck...bad...but still had fun.

 

Yeah, thanks for some fantastic gaming fun.  I actually feel somewhat useful every now and again too, which is a nice bonus. 

Fiddling with the mouse settings definitely did help the turning business.  The rest is probably just practice, practice.

- Q

I'm not sure why the demoman is black, but has a scottish accent and a drunken demeanor.

Bottle kills ftw last night. A couple really good ones. I did learn some limitations. Even with a medic, don't bumrush a heavy with only a bottle. Check. But getting a better feel for the flexibility of the loadout. Still feels a little lacking without a traditional gun of any kind, hopefully I can get my aim back to where it was when I was playing battlefield, because my only hope for midrange combat is a perfectly placed grenade between the eyes.

You can cheat a bit and use the alternate weapon and right click to blow the grenade up in mid-air.

Nope, can't do that. There's a timer on the grenade before you can blow it up with the latest patch.

I have fun when I get to play, but holy fuck does this thing hang/crash a lot. Patches plskthx.

Yeah, toward the end last night I was working with the sticky gun a bit more. I practiced it for a while the first night and then was much more effective with the main launcher and stuck with that. Last night I was practicing bounce angles and switching out to the bottle for melee kills (it's pretty effective). And it's funny when someone says "Bottled!"

ARRR AH'M DRUUNK.

I think one of the main problems with demoman is slow reload. I pretty much have four shots and then I switch to the bottle. And waiting for eight reloads on the stick gun is awful. I think the delay was why I stopped using it in firefights, it was throwing my timing off. I'll have to practice (probably A LOT).

Going up against the rabid scout clan dropped me down to about 1:1. Good practice, but they need to stop with the macro shit and not brag about doing decently against a non-competetive server. We're basically pubbers, for crissakes.

I did much better at demoman when I read one of the loading screen 'tips' that stickies fly farther when you hold the button down longer. Made getting out of the damn gated tunnels easier. Stupid turrets.

It makes me wonder how many other blatantly obvious things I'm missing.

Ah, shit.  Stickies go back to defensive tactics.  Which they excel at, but still.  Demoman has enough limitations.

About the demo speech, I think you might be confusing "scottish accent" with "drunken slur", but I'm uncertain.

It's drunken and scottish. Not complaining, it just doesn't seem to fit the character model, I pictured more of some kind of 70s B-movie black hero. Or they should have gone for Fidel from Jagged Alliance, one of my favorite characters ever. I remember once he got pissed at the wimpy medic guy and started chasing him around trying to blow him up. Err...anyway. Good tip to hold the button down longer, didn't know that, I was just arcing stuff higher.

Now you're just being racist.

Oh, wait.  It's the Racist server.

This is weird.  I have the crashiest pc ever when it comes to Source engine games, and I've only had one crash since I've updated my video drivers (and only had one before on loading).  That wasn't even an in game crash either.  I was loading maps and then Steam decided that it'd take TF2 off my games list for some reason and crashed me out.

It only crashed once for me while playing, and I that was server side.

But, I can tell you it does not like being alt tab'd out.  That caused my comp to freeze up more than a couple times last night

Yep.  Alt tab doesn't like the game.  You know what's worse, laughing at some guy getting hit by the train in that one map and then accidentally hitting the Windows key.  I really need to disable that fucking thing.

That was probably me.  It got me freakin' TWICE last night.  I got hit, laughed.  So what does my dumbass do?  Goes zooming by the same spot AGAIN as a scout.

Windows key.  Heh. Yeah.  G15 keyboard ftw.  It lasted all of one miskey last night.

I don't get mid-game crashes too often (had the looping sound bug once), but I get stuck at the loading screen ALOT when we switch maps. Judging from the forums, I am not the only one, so I am just waiting for some patching love. Poker tonight, so they get a free night to work on it without me bitching  :-D

I only got the one boot when the server reset or whatever last night, no crashes. However, schild sent me a steam pm and that dropped me out of TF2 entirely and then the pc was lagged as hell and I just shut it off because it was taking minutes between responses. Bastid ;)

Windows key...I remove them from my keyboards. Caps lock, too. Don't use, don't need 'em, away they go.

Only problems I have had are in-game messages and alt-tabs.

Most crashes I've had are between rounds, and when trying to run teamspeak and tf2 at the same time. Both crash then.
I'm running the latest nvidia drivers, but flaky sound ones.

The patch removed the ability to create friendly fire servers so I guess no one will be able to call me a carebear newb for not playing on one.

Thank God.  I wandered into one of those accidentally a few days ago.  It was horrible.  Spies become completely unbalanced when you can't just hose your teammates down with bullets to check for them.

Is it wrong that when I get this game, the only class that looks interesting to me is the Spy?  It seems like the sort of class that may draw all the OMG CLOAKING OMG newbs. 

Spy is one of the more interesting classes to play.  Playing a spy in TF is basically the experience that The Ship tried (and failed) to distill -- it's something that very few, if any, other games have gotten right. 

The cloaking is sufficiently limited that you still have to be able to pull off a convincing disguise in order to be an effective spy in TF2.

I just wish they had a shimmer effect when they moved while cloaked. As is, total invis, which I think is a tad broken.

They DO have a shimmer effect, yes? I mean I keep seeing the predator effect spies wandering around and shooting at them. Do they only have that after they've been shot or something?

The only thing cloaking is really useful for is quickly dashing through heavily guarded areas.  And sometimes to make a quick escape from a firefight.  Having it not work while moving (adding any sort of visible shimmer would bascially amount to it not working) would make the whole thing almost useless.

Now, if you could stay cloaked as long as you wanted while you were holding still... that'd have possibilities.

(edit) I think the existing shimmer effect only happens if they bump into someone.  Or if they're in the process of decloaking.

Yeah, it only occurs when you bump something, or right after you cloak.

I don't even need much of a graphic effect, but give me Some chance to see an invisible spy coming at me.

Oooooh I suck so bad.

I just played a four-hour 2fort game and I feel dirty. it was so friggin' fun! pyro is definitely my favourite class, despite the high amount of self-death involved.

It also occurs if they get shot. If I see a spy cloak, I immediately open fire and try to hose down the area he's in to figure out where he is. If he gets hit a couple times, then he'll often decloak and try to go after me with the knife or pistol.

I usually find spies by bumping into them in a tight corridor. I also hate fucking spies. But I guess they do shake up the gameplay quite a bit, but playing as demoman, we're in it tough with no shotgun. Either I bust out the bottle on him or try to get lucky with a nade carpet.

Tried being an engineer for a little bit, not sure it's my style. Had fun with a couple f13'ers guarding the intelligence room, though, as a demo. They were both engy and I laid some stickies on the entry halls and played roving sentry, didn't lose a point after we got set up.

Then I forgot we were in sudden death until I heard the 30second countdown...only one engy left on the other team and two or three of us. Woops!

Was cool seeing more f13ers on last night.

Any thoughts at actually scheduling a date/time and basically fill the bitch up with f13 names?

Seeing there are 3 groups of peeps that I roll with, I am now know as [MnMYTHf13] Slayerik ...ya i know it looks stupid but at least it covers all the bases.

M-n-M: Morituri Nolumus Mori (Those about to die don't want to) , guildies over the last 5+ years.
f13: Forum buddies/enemies over the past 5+ years
MYTH: www.mythlogic.com    - work buddies running a PC business

Not that anyone cared, but there is the breakdown.




And also, noone ever seems to be on TS so I end up going to one of the other two's vent server. Come on guys, its not that hard to log in :)

I tend to play between 2230 and 0200 Eastern, on alternate nights so I don't suffer from sleep deprivation.  I also think I have the voice issue cleared up, but playing TF2 with headphones instead of positional speakers makes Baby Jesus cry.

Heh.  Me and you both.

I'd probably do a bit better if I'd pick a class and stuck with it.  Next time I can get in, I'm probably going to stick to medic and sniper, depending on the map.  I have a blast as both, and it's pretty rewarding running around healing teammates.  Edit:  Would be nice if medics had some sort of rez ability.

My problem is aiming, so I'm going to fiddle with the mouse settings... lowering the sensitivity, in fact.  I have my Razer set to "10" sensitivity all the time, and thinking on my terrible performance last night I can see that I was overshooting a lot.  Scout vs scout, the other guy would shoot me in the eyes and I would shoot him in the elbow at best.

I play 11-midnight most nights, a bit later on the weekends. A few nights a week I'm on earlier for an hour or two and sometimes it's 10-midnight. Basically if there's anything else going on, I'm not on the computer :) Last night I ditched early and played guitar for a while. Eastern times.

I should probably fiddle with mouse settings, zoomy scouts give me problems, too.

5-9ish pm is reserved for family/baby boy/wife time.  Most of my gaming time is 9ish-11ish pm CST.  Weekends are more flexible, though, that is of course when the boss (wife) doesn't have a mile long list of honey-do's for me.

I cannot fucking wait to eviscerate you bastards who so mercilessly humiliated me last night.



Seriously, take it easy man - I'm a medic...

I usually get on ts when I get in but i don't think my mic is working and that's just one more thing I don't want to mess with.  Plus I really hate my headphones and usually just go with my speakers. 

I seem to do best with Soldier but that aint saying much, plus sentry's hardly slow me down with the rocketman.  I still spend most of me time as an engineer so if you find a turrent placed in a crappy spot, it's probably mine :p 

Mine won't launch! I get past the valve screen to the "Loading" screen w/ the medic, spy and heavy weapons guy on it...then it just minimizes, disappears, and I am back on my desktop....

It did that too more me at first.  I reinstalled my video card drivers and it made it so I didn't even get to the loading screen  :D

After reinstalls of directx, video card driver (a few times, different ones), and sound and motherboard drivers I was eventually able to play and perform at the mediocre level i have now grown accustomed to.

Dear Valve:

(http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/5601/100pctbitchesvn0.png) (http://imageshack.us)

MORE ACHIEVEMENTS PLZ KTHX

I'm enjoying this.

I'm very, very bad at the game -- I have never once felt like I was effectively assisting my team -- but just as soon as I think I can't bear the humiliation any longer, everything crashes and I have to hard reboot. It's all so profoundly cathartic. Thank you, Valve.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10984.0

Donation information.

I'm getting too old, as well had a too long hiatus from multiplayer FPS. Result: Reflexes fucked. Sometimes I don't even know what the fuck in the action.

The pyro got a tremendous buff in the last patch.   :-o  Meeting one at flamethrower range is pretty much guaranteed death now.  And flamethrower range is about double what it was.

These daily adjustment/balance patches are fun:

"I'll pick pyro for balance to offset our 3:2 advantage."
"Auuugh. It burns!  It burns!"

- Q

This may seem obvious, but water is your friend versus pyros.

New item in the next patch: a bucket of water.

Wow this game is fun and boy do i suck. After a several year hiatus from playing any sort of FPS of this sort online other than more tactical shooters, my reflexes are terrible. But soo much fun. The worst part of the game is trying to decide which class to play on any given map/team. So many fun toys to choose from. Loving the scout, sniper and spy best so far, although demo is good fun too. Can't seem to get the hang of the soldier though, anything I can do with them I can usually do better with a different class. Have yet to try pyro's or medics, but they're on the list for tonight.

pyro's a bit like sucking on rust-coated candy. delicious!

I do think they should give the medic either a bucket of water or a fire extinguisher. Some maps are rather lacking in the water department.

Anybody is able to accomplish anything with the scout?  I like speed and dogfight, so I've been practicing allot with the scout.  I can't manage anything else than scavenging the weak.  I can rack much more point with other class.  Hell, everytime I see a scout opponent I'm thinking free frag.

Scouts are about winning levels quickly.

and being quick...quickly. I usually can't keep up when scouts really use their mobility rather than simply being fast. double-jumping on some guy's head and shooting him in the brain with the scattergun is not healthy. it's also good for tagging medics with heavies and generally pissing people off when they're busy with big scary problems like turrets or soldiers/demomen.

Scouts are also pretty good at sneaking up on snipers with a baseball bat.

Its all about the bat.

You probably just haven't been drinking enough coffee.


That, and I gather you really have to use the mobility to surprise people. When scouts coming running directly at me from range, they usually lose no matter how much stupid ass jinking about and double jumping they do. But good scout players have an annoying habit of spotting opportunities to get close before I see them.

Though I agree that scouts just dont have the staying/destruction power to rack up a ton of points. I play them a lot and my best is like 5 points.

Sums it up for me.  I do sneak up from behind, patrol from health pack to health pack and hunt spies.  The problem is that I can never rack allot of points.

After tooling around with the spy a bit, I can safely say that kiddie forum flames virtually ensure they get nerfed.  Its either going to be a shimmer, or special goggles for engineers or scouts that see through disguises and cloaks. 

I love the scout - I have almost twice the playtime on it than my next-most-used class and I think my stats record is 12 points. There's a bunch of different strategies you can use to be effective. They boil down to "avoid enemy, flank enemy, hit with bat, take points/secret crap".

Never attack someone head-on if you can avoid it. Any other class can outgun you, even a SMG-using sniper. You have to flank or get behind people to effectively attack them. Watch where the main flow of battle is. Most people will only look at the big cluster of enemies in front of them, and in many levels you can swing wide and come in behind them. The "best" thing to do is charge in to point-blank and issue a shotgun blast or two to the back. Me, I prefer to bonk people with the bat while screaming "I'M BATMAN" into the mic.

Don't run into the big fight. Seriously, just don't. Focus on getting past the front lines, scoping out the defenses, and capping points behind enemy lines. This is particularly effective on Granary - slip past the front-lines when your team holds the middle and cap the next two points. If the enemy has serious defenses, this is less viable, but it works surprisingly often. This is also good on Well - if your team is about to assault the 2nd-to-last point, try to get to the final point and hide there. If your team manages to cap the second-to-last, you can dart in and cap the final point in a matter of seconds.

And never. Never ever. Never ever ever stop moving. Even if you're alone at a cap point, you never know when someone's drawing a bead on your ass.

I got the game and like the medic on the full maps.  I usually follow and ubercharge a heavy, demo, soldier, or pyro if I can, especially if I can keep you at long range.

I miss the vehicles...nothing is more satisfying than running over someone  :-D

Even though I can't play on my computer, I've played on a friends...and I have to say I love the strategic depth of the Spy.  Its all about picking both the correct disguise and, somewhat counter-intuitively, PASSING UP KILLS.  You have to know when passing up the one backstab will lead you to four or five backstabs, and cannot be nervous about moving in a whole crowd of enemies for awhile or waiting 30 seconds for all of them to be in the perfect configuration.

Even though this isn't a BF1942 type game, it reminds me of that game.  What I lack in omgwtf cocainetwitchbunny skills I make up for in tactical thinking.   

I have to agree with the BF2 Deja Vu. A 32 player server is battle of Kirkland all over again. But with bunny hopping and dolphin diving not working. Was pubbing today so changed my handle as I did not want the world to know [f13] was the land of uber mad skills...well...or something. And ended up back on the F13 server so if you see Applebutterforbrains give him a wave or a bullet to the brain as you see fit.

Bunny hopping doesn't work?

I gave him a rocket!

I don't think I'm playing again until they fix the pyro and demo. Shit is ALL fucked up right now.

Huh?

Let me guess on this one- there are places, where if the demo/pyro has a dispenser, that they can shoot a continuous gout of flame/rockets and completely lock down a chokepoint. 

Uh. No. They overbuffed them and now everyones a pyro.

It's the flavor of the week. And it's not particularly fun to play against. Pyros can nearly completely lock down Dust Bowl on their own now. Don't even get started on the stairwells in 2Fort.

No it's not. The Pyro is finally useful and can still be easily owned, except that it can actually make more than occasional kills and a lot of assists.

Jigglypuff and I played a game against a bunch of scrubs we should have outright owned.

Except they had 4-5 Pyros at all times. Pyros are a spy-detecting hallway clearing tool, not the frontline monster they're being used as right now.They're more effective than scouts and rocketmen now. That's a problem.

Don't they fall over pretty easily still?  I definitely felt more effective as a pyro post-patch, but certainly not unstoppable by any means.  I'm pretty lousy at this stuff though, so maybe in the hands of somebody more skilled they're more troublesome?

- Q

Capping classes goes a long way towards making people think about how they use each class. Jus' sayin' is all.

Yes, but you die taking them down, they're basically suicide machines (and most of the time in the process they've lit your entire team on fire, this takes place within 3 seconds).

Got TF2 because of this thread and I'm looking forward to getting my face stomped in by the rest of you.

How is the stability on the new patch? Any crash fixes yet? I am sick and fucking tired of rebooting my machine or killing TF2 with Task Manager and having to wait 5 minutes for it to die.

Methinks the pyro is about as overpowered now as it was underpowered before.  If they split the difference it should be perfect.

Until then I'm having fun setting squads on fire, thank you very much.  It's actually kind of nice to have such a direct counter to the giant close-knit multi-medic doom attack formation.  I had a shitload of fun on the 3rd section of Dustbowl finding good hiding spots along that long march to the final point and then jumping out spewing flame in every direction.  The way people scattered in terror reminded me of a cat jumping into a flock of pigeons.

To say nothing of the unbridled joy of actually breaking into the spawn point early on and setting their snipers on fire.

If you have an nVidia card there are new drivers out today that are supposed to help with TF2. It could help with the stability issues.

Thanks for the heads up

Pyro is definitely overpowered right now.  I should not be able to take down a medic, soldier, heavy combo even with the surprise attack from behind.  But dammit Pyro is actually fun to use right now and I really tried using it before patch. 

I mostly play has medic and engineer and I think Pyros are really easy to take down.  Run backward and shoot them in the head, then heal everybody a little bit before they burn to death.  Can't do much against a turret either.  They totally rape scouts and spies tough.  It must depend on the class you'r playing.

Sometimes, people make it way too easy for ya on 2fort. :evil:

Yah, I just had a dustbowl match where I proved that.  I was holding down a hallway with ease.  If Nix hadn't put up that fucking sentry I would have had a much more fun time.  You're still pretty pointless at range.


Damn snipers.  One thing I'm not used to with not playing competitive FPS games for a long time is dealing with snipers.  I stand still for a second and there's the eye-bullet graphic with my name next to it.

Pyros got the buff they needed but the lack of class capping hurts. The way they were before was shit, because I had to shove the flamethrower up someone's ass in order to mildly burn them.

I think they're gonna have to make it so you can't damage yourself before matches start so you can't have a half-medic half-attacker team instantly cap the first point in a gigantic invulnerable rush. It's kinda bullshit. Again, class capping would help that too.

I think the Pyro class needs another weapon or skill myself...like a fuel spray button that lets you set up puddles of fire, or molotov cocktails. The Heavy is about the only class who is just fine with a single unique weapon.

I really hope they get the classes balanced well enough that there isn't ever a need for class-capping server mods.  Capping a class is essentially saying that class is the bestest class ever and only the people who are really quick to whack the button get to be lucky enough to play it.

I expect that's part of the reason they're keeping all these stats on hours spent playing different classes and highest scores with each class.  It's all getting dumped into some giant balance spreadsheet of doom so they can look at a big graph and say "hmm, everyone's playing pyro now and getting higher scores than with anything else.... DEPLOY NERF BAT!"

Well, classes were capped across the board in TFC. You couldn't have too many % of any one class. This prevents a lot of shit, because an army of engineers could make 2fort, yard, and well utterly unassailable.

Pyros may possibly be even MORE broken now. Two of them flaming a hallway is absolutely lethal.

I suck way to bad with any class to even worry about whats going to get nerfed or not.

I imagine that they're going to up the power of the scout bat as it is now less powerful than the surgical saw, broken bottle, or wrench.

Also, part of me thinks Engineers should get an EMP grenade to deal with other engineers shit in their territory. Not one that can destroy, but say a 5 second knockout. Would make 2Fort faster... heh.

I don't want class capping but they really, really need to do something about this.

Didn't know they nerfed it. That would explain why I couldn't take down a sniper with 4 swings. Fucking hell.

Is there somewhere that I can read all these changes/tweaks? Stuff seems to be in flux and I can never tell what's what.

The patch updater has a button to view the changes (and those for the last 3-4 patches).  I'm not sure if that stuff is just generall posted somewhere.  It'd be useful!

- Q

I've not once seen a message about tweaks to classes in the notes. Just fixes, additions and bugs.

The patch notes are listed if you right-click the TF2 entry in your games list and pick "Update News".  The most recent update on that list is:

Noobish question but.. can you place sappers while cloaked? I can't seem to be able to.  I've played like a whole 10 minutes worth of spy.  It's difficult to learn one currently with the proliferation of pyros.

No.

Another noobish question:

Can anyone find a set of rules for points scoring, or for how your respawn clock is determined?

The points feel something like...

+1 per kill
+2 per destruction
+2 per capture
+1 per defence
+1 per some number of assists?
+1 per some number of healing/teleports/other stuff?
-1 per some number of deaths?

Nice! I hope this unfucks my setup. I really wanna get some killin' in. I have taken to sniping the balls off of n00bs in Bf2 as a substitute while I waited for a patch.

Your respawn time is determined by the number of control points your team has. When you are losing it takes longer to spawn. It looks like they do wave spawning though, so if you die 9 seconds before the next spawn wave they throw you in that wave.

As far as points go, the only thing I'm pretty sure of is you can't lose points. I've killed myself and my score hasn't gone down.

Just invade their motherfucking.

In the last day or two I learned the joy of the bottle kill.  Still wish the demoman had a pistol or something, but shanking a medic coming out of uber is a fantastic feeling. 

I miss the old demoman grenade exploding.

I haven't even been able to play since the patch and I already miss exploding on contact after the first bounce.  That's bullshit.

Agreed. I'm still not done weeping. And bottle kills rock. That was my remedy for the old pyros. Now I'll just run away.

Its so damn satisfying to break your bottle on a scout who is using his mobility to his advantage.

Schild was sayign something about the bottle doing more damage when it's cracked, is this true?

Completely not answering your question, but I always break it on random shit on my way to the action out of habit. I'm honestly not superstitious at all, but it looks a lot more badass.

Most of my assumption for difference comes from a tiny bit of actual killing with it, and the fact that the avatar in the upper right hand corner changes when you kill with it. Thus leading me to believe it's treated as a different weapon entirely.

Some guy created a new map, I might stick it on tonight:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=605142

EDIT: Hell I added it, for right now I put a 2 hour timelimit on it since there is nobody on the server, I'll fix it once people connect.

Go try out the new map!

Is it big enough for 32 people?

Edit: Holy fuck, that map is almost facing worlds. Knock the damn server back down to 24 and let's do this shit up, yo!

Save me a spot! Or alternatively, PM me and tell me how to bring the console up for admin goodies  :evil:

Dude, you already have access to that information. Look further down. In another forum.

I know the commands, I just don't know how to get the console to appear. I R NEWB.

Turn on "developer console" under Advanced, in the in game options.

Then press tilde (`).

Ah! I was pretty sure it was the tilde, but I didn't enable it. Gracias.

Man, I miss Facing Worlds...

Is there a download link in that post? I know what I'm doing when I get home tonight...

Server will automagically give it to you.

It didn't here, just said "map not found, disconnecting." That said, I just downloaded it from FileFront and got in fine.

Holy fuck, it's a sniper's wet dream....

Here's the map, zing.

Hey, as far as achievements and stats go, can someone explain which are per-life, per-round, and per-map change?

Make sure you've got cl_allowdownloads 1 (or whatever it is) enabled in console.

I made a spray for Yoru:

(http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/8908/batsignalfx4.png) (http://imageshack.us)

This is awesome. You are awesome.

Also, I think we should reconsider naming the server "Bat Country".

I don't care if it's Bat Country or not, but the racist servername seems to be attracting a bunch of fucking morons who don't realise it's irony.

This. Both our servers, when I played on them this evening, were filled to the brim with drooling morons. I've never seen such bad snipers/spies/engineers before.

One sniper was getting repeatedly sniped from a well-entrenched pair of snipers on the other team. What does he do? For the entire round, he respawns, runs out to the exact same spot, begins to take aim and gets popped. Again. And Again. And Again.

Another spy kept trying to stab people in the face as opposed to the back, only to get shot to death before doing anything to anyone who wasn't at 1% life.

And the engineers... jesus, setting sentry guns up in little-used parts of the base that can be easily destroyed by a simple around-the-corner grenade bounce, then setting up their dispenser elsewhere... and then rushing off to join the assault, so spies could make quick work of everything!

Argh.

What's funny is I've played with some fantastic people as well that thought the server name was hilarious. Freshfruit for example, you all know Freshfruit.

One gem in a pile of manure.  Tonight's crowd was.. bad.

I think the subtle irony of our server name might be overlooked by the internet hordes. Can we change the name to something less prone to draw people even less mature than ourselves? :)

Oh did you gents run into another "I love to hear myself talk" crowd?

Hell I say fight the power, rename the server "The South Shall Rise Again." That'll bring out all the internet's finest.

They did another patch today, and added something called "Minimal HUD" which moves the health and ammo downward so it doesn't cover up so much real estate. I also noticed something all of you will want to crank to the max -- Field of View. At 90 degrees, the max, you can actually see people hiding behind doors as you go through. It's pretty sweet.

Both can be accessed through options->multiplayer.

Don't forget, they added Very High Resolution to the graphics options.

Actually does increase the non-player textures dramatically.

I am happy to report that the combination of the new Nvidia drivers and the patch from 9/28 allowed me to play as long as I wanted with no crashes. It was a hell of a lot of fun last night, even though I ended up on the short bus team getting repeatedly raped by F13ers (angry.bob and Samwise in particular). I was experimenting with different classes last night, so I was likely one of the retards setting up sentries in stupid places- I am still learning the maps, since I haven't been able to play longer than about 10 minutes at a time until last night.

I am all for changing the server name. I am a little uncomfortable with the image it portrays to those who don't grok the irony. I also got to use my admin powers last night to kick a retard who kept playing music through the voice channels. Probably my greatest contribution of the night  :-D

Shoot, I suck so bad im not even using my forum handle in game yet. How can i be reasonably skilled in Every FPS except for this one? I dont understand. Im sure I am missing something.

It definitely doesn't play like a normal FPS. The maps are really cramped and confining, so there is more face to face action, dancing around corners, etc. It takes some getting used to for sure.

If you were babysitting your sentry, or at least staying within a few seconds' run, then you're better than most of the team I was playing with yesterday.

If you weren't, you're part of the problem and will be seeing the business end of my bat sooner or later.  :x

Seconded.

File the current name under 'sounded clever when drunk' imo.

If achievements say 'in one round', it actually means one life or until end of round - whichever comes first. The rest are obvious and state the measurement period.

Average and max stats are also per-period-alive.

Note that if you finish a round 'not out', that seems to count as a death for the purposes of calculating average/maximum points/kills etc. Which sucks just a little bit.

Heh. I was near my sentry probably 85% of the time. I know it picked you off a few times, so it wasn't in a horrible spot   :evil:

I played around with the scout some yesterday and had a blast with it.  Almost got my first capture on 2fort but got killed by a hidden spy like 5 feet from the cap.  I really need to get my jumping down with it and I don't seem to be able to make the same spots that others do.  Plus I think are just too fast for me to properly aim with, don't think I have the reflexes for that class for an extended period of time. 

On granary I did have my best round as a scout when I ran behind the lines that were trying to cap the middle point and batmaned a medic and the 2 heavies he was healing to death, wish I had a screenie of that gem because it'll never happen again.  Seconds after that I went running to my lines for healing and ran into another heavy and shottyed him in the face as well.  It was a round that made me shout my love of the scout.... every round after that I was screaming at how shitty a scout I really am  :(

Something that isn't obvious about the scout is that good ol' fashioned Half-Life crouch jumping can make your second jump just a bit higher. Once you get that down a lot of new paths open up on the maps.

I think I've got the medic down a bit, but still need to get my mic fixed or change some hot keys.  I think I need some hot keys that let them know I'm gonna uber them and get ammo up so we can charge.  I need one to yell to stay in my range, otherwise I can't keep them invulnerable.

Btw, is the doctor supposed to be able to 1 to 2 sawblade(knife) people?  I'm pretty sure I was one shotting pyro's, soldiers, scouts, and spys with it.

I does seem the pyro is a bit over damaging right now, but I am able to keep some people alive if 1 vs 1, I can't heal threw two pyro's on one guy. 

There are all these handy voice command menus bound to Z, X, and C, one command on which is "Ubercharge ready".  There's probably some way to macro individual voice commands to a key the same way "MEDIC!" is bound to E by default... I'll investigate next time I'm in game.

Personally, I don't mind having a few morons in the mix, On The Other Team.

Cheers for artificially inflating my sniper scores.  :evil:

But yeah, seriously, sometimes we get far too many morons on the team. Who don't even respond to voice chat.


I especially hate the people who like to try to snipe "with me" on 2fort. As in, trying to snipe in the same fucking spot as me. Blocking me from cover makes me angry.

Can't you walk through your teammates now, so they can't block you?  I haven't quite worked out the rules for it, but it seems like you aren't blocked by your teammates or by structures built by teammates.  Slightly immersion-damaging, but very nice from a gameplay perspective since it protects you from the sort of jacktardery that you're describing.

I believe they bump you, which fucks with aim at the very least, hinders your ability to dash into cover more likely. I know you can walk through turrets though, not sure if you can waltz through people though.

At they very least, idiots snipers blow up my spot and draw far too much attention. I'd rather they be a distraction on the other side of the sniper deck. :-D

Last night was a hoot! What was up with that spy guy, Krammer, or some such? He was just out of control! I need to learn some tactics to identify spies faster, because he was litterally there and gone before I hit the floor. Someone even said something about how his ping was too high for us to hit, which sounded a bit off, but then again, this player was slaughtering my team.

Just shoot everyone.  Someone cried SPY and I sprayed lead on my whole team (when I wasn't a demo), even during my stint as a sniper.  If you see someone with your name, shoot him a lot.  If you see two people with the same name, shoot both of them.  If you see someone run up to a turret and stand there, shoot him.

Last night was indeed a hoot.  I didn't find the pyros to be unmanageable, even with the demoman's gimping.  They sure as hell were annoying, though, where before I could mostly ignore them.

The high ping spy seemed to be stuttering as he moved, like the predictive code was failing. Still, he caught fire nicely a few times. The new maps were nice, even if I sucked at them until I got the layout down.

The new map was nice, however that fucking game kept going and going and going.  Did anyone ever win?

I said his ping was too low for me to react fast enough before he took down my entire team. Unforuntaely, I've got about 100ms latency to the server, he was running somewhere ~25ms. It's hard to outmaneuver a good guy with low ping like that; he can shift around you and knife you in the back (even attacking from the front) before you can spin around to follow. Same with scouts, you're at somewhat of a disadvantage.

The most annoying thing last night was running through my team, shooting at a guy with MY NAME and not one person turning to help. This happened multiple times. I need to learn the keyboard shortcuts for spy. I'd use that a hell of a lot more than I use 'medic!'

Ooki kept changing the map manually -- that map has no time limit. As fun as that map is, it's quite easy to stalemate unless you get some honest-to-god teamwork -- double uberheal chains with a spy taking down the sentry at the same time. Sentries are pretty godly in situations like that.

It's definitely a stalemate sort of map.  We would get organized for a bit and push forward, then we'd have some key people drop out or get backstabbed and we'd slide back to center.  It was a real meatgrinder, but lots of fun.

I was on for about 30-40 minutes and only the one cap point was seriously contested. We couldn't really push up those two ramps without an alternate route. However, it was a great deal of fun fighting over the one point that was contested, very back and forth, the two routes made it a bit interesting. And a nice choke hallway to load up with stickies for maxkill. Also, concrete to hide behind and lob nades over. Good demoman and engineer map...and of course a good spy map. I'm really starting to dislike spies, they're like wandering damage tables in AD&D.

Yes it was fun last night, I kept seeing the spy disguised as me and my damn team shooting me as I'm shooting him.   He seemed to run at me disguisied as me for some reason, maybe he thought it would throw my teammates off (which it did).

I can't wait for them to enable sprays. I made mine yesterday, to be used while spying:

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/bhodiinsidesmall1191516893.jpg)

Maybe I'll make another, with f13 inside.

I think near doors it is universal pass through and in open field depending on your difference in speed.

That goddamn spy was annoying as hell.

I agree completely here, line-of-sight was at a premium.  I tried but wasn't able to make much headway as a soldier, and even with an uber I was suiciding to take out turrets and whatnot.  There was a pretty good open spot from the top of the ramp into the "garage" area, and that's where I racked up all those sniper kills, but most of the map had things to hide behind.  The back-and-forth was lots of fun.

I was working on this...

(http://homepage.mac.com/surlyboi/f13.gif)

I'll see if I can find my MrHatBullseye file when I get home.

Or someone can come up w/ one of those annoying CT sprays from counterstrike.

Those would both look really awesome with transparency.  Do you still have to do freaky shit with bitmap palettes to make that work?  I note that the spray importer still doesn't accept image formats that support real transparency.

Meet the Demoman! (http://www.gamestop.com/product.asp?cookie%5Ftest=1&product_id=200198)

THAT demoman still gets grenades that explode on contact after bouncing.

Hurrumpf.

Meh.  These are funny, but they've hit all my four least favorite classes. 

How do you make custom Tags?

Sounds like something I could do to kill time at work.

Damn, that was the first thing I noticed, too.

All you need is a bitmap that's 128x128 (or 64x64, etc).  Then in the multiplayer options there's an option to "import spray".  Unfortunately it seems to be broken at the moment.

Can anyone figure out what he says right before the bleeping? I think it is something about them having eyes, but I'm not sure.

From his gesturing he seems to be lamenting the loss of his eye.  "They got th' make ya ile?"

My usual approach of imagining Private MacAuslan saying it isn't working.  We might need an actual Scot to unravel this one.

Not sure but he primed that grenade before knocking it off the table lol

One day I'll learn not to play online games ever again.  Wow, am I embarrassingly bad!

It just takes a little practice. Try the heavy to start; the damn chain gun has a huge spray cone. While it means it is really hard to hit things when you want sometimes, it is also pretty forgiving. Medic is also a pretty reasonable starter class. It's a good way to learn the maps.

Playing on stupid custom maps with 3-man teams isn't the best intro to TF2.   :-P  If you get in a 10v10 game on a good map the learning curve is much kinder.

Until Valve fix it, you can make it work by importing into CS:S, then copying the files &(folder) across to the relevant TF2 folder.

And the demoman is complaining about his manky eye, I think.

DId y'all notice the disclaimer in "Meet the demo man"

(http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/5192/captureqj9.png)

Yea.....

I hope the pyro one says the same thing.

Yeah, that custom map sucked balls with 3v3. It just wasnt fun. Also, it was so fast paced it seemed to get one sided very quickly.

No new maps? Fuck! Seriously -- who would pay $30 for an online-only game with 4 maps?

Bhodi, Ookii and I paid a lot more than that.

Say hello to the server that's left.

Yeah, I know... but just because others spent more doesn't allay my annoyance! I expected those maps to be beta maps with a full map dump on release.

This is me, being let down. I enjoy TF2 but it's not going to be for much longer if I have to play the same ol' maps. It's a copout for them to expect community modders to pick up the slack.

There aren't many times where dev expectations and "being right" line up.

This is one of those times.

I'll just be happy when we can get the map rotation we want.

Also, it needs to stop swapping off of DB in the middle of the series. If the attackers win the first two maps and time "expires," it should still go to the third map before swapping.

Woo, I iced some fools tonight!  Go me!

I got it for the 360, played it most of tonight.  I had a lot of fun being a Pyro.  This game will definitely eat a lot of my time.

This is me being too MMO-myopic: they made TF2 for the 360? Any word on if it'd ever allow players from 360 to play against get owned by PC players?

I finally got in last night. Steam seemed to weather the storm of people buying it pretty well, though I have no idea how many other people were just interested in TF2. I was very pleasantly surprised by the first thing I noticed right off the bat. From the screens I'd seen (hadn't watched any videos), I was expecting WoW-esque low-poly worlds and low-textures. Instead I got a cartoony HL2 (to my eye anyway). This game looks fantastic at max settings.

Better still it's just fun as heck. I was very surprised by that as well. I plunked the $30 site unseen (no beta since I didn't pre-order Orange Box), like any schmo stumbling into their first game. I was expecting to get omgwtfn00bsteamrolled all night and yelled at by my team for being stupid, particularly since there's no way to learn some of the nuances outside of battles. What I got instead was a very intuitive experience, fast action, people doing the same thing I was, no team kills. The only thing that took me a second to realize is that invincibility mode thing. Man that's cool. Even Engineering was easy: have metal/get metal, build one of four things, upgrade Turrets, repair them. My only downer was I couldn't build more than one turret. I still have fond memories of my Planetside Engineer-spec :)

What I don't know is how much of that had to do with the random server I picked from the low-latency/secure/22of24 I picked from the list. I forgot to favorite it.

This is also really the first time I'm using Steam to any fair degree. I love the seamless integration, particularly in how you can not only contact your Friends, the system will tell you what TF2 server thye're on. I had only previously checked out some of the casual stuff through the digital delivery thing, but most of that seemed no different from RealArcade, MSN GameZone or XBLA. I do love Venice though.

Anyway, say hi to the guy off the street who did no research, was looking forward to it, and lovin' it

Oh, and dumb tech question:

Does TF2 require Steam to run? Like, if my group had a private server, could we just launch TF2 and connect to that without having to run Steam at all, even knowing the Community features won't work? I'm not looking to get around any authentication or DRM thingy. We all own the game already. I'm thinking more from a security angle. I've got some pretty paranoid friends :)

Use steam. You don't really have a choice.

Ok, thanks.

Also, anyone have any insights to offer on the mod tools? I don't know anything about "Source". Is it a bunch of texture and code files or do they actually provide an UnrealEd-like map editor? I poked around with UnrealEd a few years back, and it wasn't that hard for someone with copious CAD experience (I'm not uber, but have been around the block with them). I'd love to actually get crackin' on a TF2 map or two once I have the game down.

You can set the server to not use steam, russians use it to create servers they can connect to with their pirated copies.

That said, you're not russian.

I took a quick look at the toolset and it looks like they use a modified version of Softimage:XSI as the modeling platform (HL2 engine from what I can tell). Given that I use Softimage all day it might be fun to make some maps. The real trick is to use their textures, meshes, and other assets so your custom maps don't take a week to download.

Time to start reading up on the mod sites.

someone at f13 (not me) should make a tutorial for making TF2 maps so we can all get in on it.

numbered steps
in laymen terms

that'd be AWESOME

Thanks Bhodikhan. I've never used Softimage specifically, but it is pretty straightforward. And I completely agree on the libraries to use. I'm not anywhere near good enough to go all Extreme+ with maps enough that people want to come to my site and grab them.

Definitely tonight's thing to dig into. So much for the WoW dailies ;)

@schild: yes. Maybe a few of us can start a wiki or somesuch. I'll wait in the thread to see who is a) as interested or more; and, b) has a lot more experience doing mods/maps than my few hours with UnrealEd :)

Hm. Wiki. I have a Jotspot account That hasn't been used for anything. That's an interesting idea. A straight guide would probably be best though.

I used to work with UnrealEd, made some stuff for NWN and Morrowind, started back making Quake levels (I forget the editor, though). Well, actually, started waaay before that, making ASCII games and text adventures on the C64...One hallmark of my Quake levels was trying to set up areas so monsters would fight each other if you played conservatively. Especially those grenade-launching guys, making it so a few of their grenades would bounce into a room with something nasty was a lot of fun.

But really, I don't have enough time to /play/ games as much as I'd like, so I'm probably not real interested in level-making unless it's fairly fast.

So, which of you are going to be putting the portal gun into TF2?

Isn't the Portal gun essentially the same thing as the Engineer's entrance & exit?

Well, with two-way travel, the ability to shoot it, cool 'through the looking glass' effect..



Yeah, somebody put it in.

Part of me really wants to take the scout, give him a portal gun, the bat and a handgun and make Team Portal 2. Lots of labyrinth style maps and such.

Jesus I swoon.

He won't need the handgun.  Not at all.  Think about it.

I feel like I did when I was twelve and I was pretending Mum-Ra and Skeletor teamed up against He-Man and Optimus Prime.

Portal gun would be insane! I'll be concentrating on the world stuff though personally.

I loved doing that in NWN. Patrols that if you timed it right, you could let them clear themselves out. I gleefully ripped off my days doing that with opposing-faction mobs in EQ1 though :) Good puzzler element.

I used to be jealous of my friends' ability to manipulate sprites on the C64. I had to hard-code the graphics in Applesoft. Best I could do myself was an Ultima III world that didn't have the animated NPCs and water. Ah, those were the days. Finally ended up programming my own Font creator... not that you could do much in 8x8. And I had mouse control. Mouse control!. I shoulda sold out to Aldus ;)

UnrealEd? Holy crap! I do 3D for a living. Mostly box modeling and texturing and I could never figure out what the hell Epic was trying to do. It always seemed to be a game of "Carve a map from a solid block". What a mess. Working with the Valve toolset is much better.

Unless Epic changes it's methodology I foresee many TF2 maps and no UT2007 maps in my future. You couldn't PAY me to make UT maps. Pain and more Pain.

Oh, yea, UnrealEd was crazy. I didn't even "figure it out" per se. I had to do a lot of reading. But after awhile it made a twisted sort of sense. Back in the day I was doing solids modelling in things like Pro/Engineer and Solidworks, programs Industrial Designers and Engineers use to talk directly to tooling machines with their data (the other side, surface modelling was for character models, CGI, etc). UnrealEd felt more like a bit liek that, where you start with an object and then work the interior of it, sorta the inverse of how CADD modelling works, but not a huge departure. But intuitive it was not.

I'm looking forward to something of a lighter faire :)

Portal deathmatch could really suck if the maps weren't well designed for it.  You'd have to make sure that it wasn't possible to use a portal gun as either an instakill weapon (e.g. put a portal over a lava pit and then just shoot the other end at people's feet over and over so they fall in) or a way to avoid combat indefinitely (e.g. run around spamming portals ahead of you so nobody can get a bearing on you or follow you through your own portals).  Also, you might need a way to differentiate between the portals of different players to allow people to figure out where any given portal goes as easily as they can in the single-player game.

Multiplayer coop puzzles might be cool, though.

I think that adding a charge-up time and 'ammo' count to the Portal gun could solve most problems.

I agree with you completely, and I really want to participate in the total carnage and assfuckery that this sort of simple implementation would bring.  It would make so many heads explode.


These are all really bad suggestions.  You want to encourage this sort of behavior.  You want an additional class, a scout with only a bat and a portal gun.  No modification to the portal gun whatsoever.  If this doesn't produce enough epileptic fits, you have to add some boxes and barrels to the maps.  It will turn your brain to mush.

I suspect it won't be very easy, though.  The likelyhood that turrets or players have full physics is small, so you probably won't be able to drop a heavy player on a sniper and kill him.  I can dream, though.

The engineer portals are from what I saw last night not like what you see in portal. Its more like a more normal teleporter. You jump on the blue pad to teleport you to the reciever. You could not from what I can see shoot through it its just a nice way to bring reinforcements up to the front faster.

We had a good engy make a good protected port in place when we were doing that capture the three points map when we were staging for the last point helped get reinforcements back up to the front really fast.

GIven you have to hit feet, and portals are slow and highly visible, I'd have no issue with the insta kill thing.

Using the momemtum transfer trick to fling people into opposing bases would likely break everything mind you.

Far more amusing then using portals over instakill lava would be to put the entry portal on the ground and the exit portal on the ceiling above it.  You'd have to disconnect from the game to escape...

I downloaded HLDJ so I could annoy people by playing the Gummi Bears theme over voice chat on a few servers I go to that allow that sort of thing, and I can't get the shit to work. :(

Or you could just continue moving forward.


Both games, and HL2, allow you to add momentum while airborne.

I downloaded the SDK and I'm in the process of setting it up to make maps. If anyone can figure out how to make Portal multiplayer, I'd be on board to learn how to do Portal maps. Co-op would be hot.

It looks like TF2 isn't listed yet in the Source SDK stuff.  There's undoubtedly some sort of way to haxor it in there, but I'm going to wait until they have the "PUSH BUTTON HERE TO MAKE TF2 MAP" button.

Getting it hooked up for TF2/Portal takes, oh, about 15 minutes. Though I can understand why you would rather wait.

If portal went multiplayer I think you'd have to move away from deathmatch and do something like 'hunt the cake'.


Spawn a cake in semi-random spots, whoever catches the cake gets a point. You still use portals to kill the other guy or team, but that just knocks them out for a while and leaves you free to pursue the moist and delicious cakey goodness.


There might even be a party for the winner.

I made a box in hammer with a spawn point and light. It was glorious and I feel like a god.

This is hard enough to do in Portal that there is an achievment for sustaining it: fall 30k feet.  I got that one last night.  So people certainly aren't going to be trapped in that situation.

There can only be a party for the winner if you assume the Party Escort Submission Position.

Heh I can't even get the Source thing to run. No TF2 map option in there yet? Yea, I'll wait too unless someone's got Schild's numbered-list of steps on how to make it worksie.

Step by step guide (http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/TF2_SDK_Work-Around)

Hey whoever makes a map, MAKE A PATH ONLY SCOUTS CAN TRAVERSE (aka double jumping).

That would be fun.

It actually isn't that hard. I had two slightly off-center vertical portals yesterday, and what I noticed was that when I fell into a portal towards the edge, it knocked me back towards the center of the portal. It seems to auto-center you as you're falling through portals.

The other, easier way is to stand in one place, look straight up and look straight down. Since you can't over-rotate past the zenith and nadir of your aiming sphere, it's real easy to do.

You mean like every single one of the official maps, and ZERO of the custom maps we've seen so far?  It amazes me that all the custom mappers out there have missed that it's important to give love to the double-jumpers and rocket-jumpers.

Mach2 is friendly to jumpings of all types.  I guess 2fort is friendly for scouts, but dust, and granary aren't at all.  I'll also add well to the friendly list, but I'm talking more about 2fort levels of friendly here.

Granary and dust are both pretty scout friendly. There are a lot of places scouts can get to much easier than anyone else. The center point in granary is a scout love fest.

I don't typically have any problems with playing FPS games on consoles (although I'm not really into FPS games in general anyway).  That said, even I couldn't justify picking up Orange Box on the 360 rather than the PC, especially since the system requirements aren't particularly high.

I'll have to experiment more with mach2, but I was really disappointed at how mach went from incredibly cramped to almost completely open, neither of which is condusive to good jumping.  I believe I commented earlier on my annoyance that it wasn't possible to rocketjump to the second level sniper alcove from outside the base, when it gives every appearance of being made for it.

Every single one of the official maps has at least some routes that only scouts and rocket/grenade jumpers can take.  On granary you've got that center area where scouts can jump from catwalk to catwalk by jumping across the containers, which is handy for evading defenses set up at ground level and/or batting enemy snipers on the opposite catwalk.  Dustbowl has fewer usable scout routes, it's true, but there are a few in there (I'm thinking particularly of jumping the chasm on the third section instead of taking the inevitably pipebombed bridge); scouts in general just don't get much use on dustbowl because sentry guns turn them to hamburger so easily.

Either the recent Vista update or trying to decrypt Portal has completely jacked me up. I can't run Team Fortress as it keeps running it, then minimizing it, then opening it, minimizing, opening, minimizing, opening ... gah.

Something I noticed about Steam, though not sure: if you're downloading something while playing a game, does it throttle back the speed of download so it allows for smooth play? Seemed to be doing that while I'm downloading the other part of the SDK (duh, forgot that part) while playing TF2, but I'm not sure.

Oh and Source SDK Base has finished downloading. I launch that and get some Video Stress Test app. I launch Source SDK by itself and it doesn't go (quits out after the Launch screen). Wtf am I doing wrong?

Try removing both and only installing the SDK. You don't need the base.

I just learned that using Steam to "Delete Local Content..." doesn't actually fully delete said local content. So when I thought I was redownloading/reinstalling, I was in fact just reloading what probably was corrupted data. I manually removed it and NOW it's REALLY downloading :)

Nope. Something's definitely screwed up. Short of wiping my hard drive, I'm very sure I've completely removed the program, completely re-downloaded and re-installed, and it just isn't going. Really very annoying, but at least TF2 works.

Edit: Not that anyone cares, but I'm using this post to track my progress solving this. I repeatedly-clicked the launch button a few times over two seconds and that forced the damnable thing to start doing the copy-files/Hammer thing. Ha!

Having a problem here, I think due to me just buying TF2 instead of all of Orange Box. But I'm hoping you folks can help confirm or correct me.

After much issue, and a few complete uninstalls, I finally got the SDK to launch to the main page. But having two problems now:

1) I should be able to create a new mod from the HL2 Single Player and Multiplayer engines, but those are greyed out. I can only create either of the two "advanced" ones. I do own HL2 from when it launched. Do I need to install that in order to get access to the files? My Steam sub-directories do include a number of HL2 executables and related files.

2) When I go to create one of the two advanced ones, it gets about 90% of the way through copying the files to a new mod folder and then does a crash-to-windows/send-report thing.

My computer is five months old, has enough hardware to run TF2 at everything maxxed (including that 16qAF thing I've never heard of), completely updated XP and has .NET Framework 3.0 installed (because the program that allows one to use the SDK to make TF2 maps required .NET).

I'm waiting on an updated SDK. Looks like a couple of weeks. No point in having to work around all these oddities. I uninstalled the SDK until then. I've got better things to do than mess with a kludged SDK. The final one will be buggy enough for me.

That makes sense. In the meantime I might install my HL2 stuff.

Are you talking about mach or mach2?  In mach2 you can easily get up there as a solider or demo.

Can you mute individual players? In CS you could do it from the scoreboard but I don't see any UI for doing it in TF2.

Hit esc, you'll see a mute players option.

Thanks.

I have a request. Can someone make me a customized spray of the Pedo Bear?   :hello_thar: or  :pedobear:

I am willing to pay cash money up $10 (providing you have a Pokerstars account to which I can transfer!).

I made a "Pedo Bear Seal of Approval" spray to go with the "Awesome Smiley".  I'll post it when I get home.

I can do your sprays if you post them as pics in here. It doesn't take but a minute. If you want it transparent, tell me (or have it be obvious) which part you want to be transparent.

What does transparency do? Also, the only pics I have are the smileys-  :hello_thar: :pedobear:


What size pic do you need?


Awesome. That smiley made me LOL every time I ran past it last night.

If parts of the image aren't set as transparent, they show up as the entire bitmap on the wall in a square -- if you want something, like the pedobear seal of approval or the awesome for real, than you make the outside bits transparent -- otherwise the edges (or background of the image) willl show up as either black, or white, or whatever color they actually are in the image file. Any size pic will do as long as it's big "enough", I can scale it up or down; there's a formula for the max image size, but it's basically a square 256x256 pixels big, but one side can also be extended to something like 512x64.

Was the awesome_for_real spray posted somewhere?

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=11201.0 <- Let's separate the tag stuff.

Gracias, mon ami.

Fucking PoS Steam won't let me play TF2 until it updates Portal.

NM: After like 10 minutes it finally gave me back control over the UI and I'm able to pause the Portal download.

Today's update:

Improved compatibility for direct sound

Deathcam screenshots now move the player id panel to the lower right, and hide other hud elements until the freezecam fades

Improved autobalance calculation code when determining who to switch

Improved networking compatibility for some routers

Fixed a crash during level init related to model loading

Fixed issues on Dustbowl and Hydro that could occur when a server emptied in the middle of a round

Fixed a bug in the clientside player avoidance code, and smoothed it a little more

Further crash fixes related to paged pool memory usage

Fixed scoreboard team scores label getting cut off

Engineer buildings now explode when the Engineer dies during sudden death

Fixed a spy backstab exploit where you could stab a player who was not facing away from you

Fixed flailing at the low end of the cloak meter when the player gets uncloaked automatically

Fixed texture detail level setting "Very high" not being preserved

Improved various error messages, and added links to steampowered support pages

Fixed scoring problem where destroying a buildable added a phantom point, not attributed to any scoring bucket but still included in total score

Fixed honeypot server problems

Fixed a rare crash caused by a medigun losing its owner

Fixed an exploit that allowed disconnected medics to continue ubercharging their target until they timed out

TeamMenu now disables the spectate button if mp_allowspectators is zero

Added a missing "cannot_be_spectator" localization string

Re-added class count numbers above class buttons for non-zero classes, in addition to the class images

Removed prefixes (tc_, ctf_, etc.) from map names in various places where they're printed

Fixed some edge cases where grenades could go through player or buildings

Fixed rocket/grenade explosions being able to impart damage through thin ceilings

The Engineer's "build X" commands will now behave properly when bound directly to keys

TF2 updated when I opened steam, and now all the servers won't let me connect with the message:

The server is running an older protocol.

Very cool.... NOT!

We're already updating.

Is there any interest for some more highly competitive gameplay? I would be interested in Scrimming against F13 once a week on either ours or one of the f13 servers. I would really like to mess around against some real competition...as fun as it is, pug's getting raped can get a little old.

something like a 7 on 7 or 10 on 10 ...

So, who is up for some organized killin?

I'm going to throw out a tenative date/time of Sunday at 8pm EST

Do we *have* 7 active players on at Sunday 8, EST? I can probably make it, that's a good time for me.

I don't like the added performance pressure of scrims.

Shutup Hat. We'll do this and love it. With spies like us, who needs medics? Slayerik, we get Freshfruit.

Ok then, we get mkvenner :)

Well, this is plenty of warning for you to get 7+ players :) You could even add something in steam saying it is a scheduled event and whatnot.

Either way, it will be fun and a nice change.

I'd be in for this, as long as you don't kick people with 300+ ping. I can play a medic or engineer with that much lag just fine.

I will happily play as the handicap to the better team to even things out.

Do you play on our servers?  They autokick above 200ms now, if you give me your SteamID (the number) I can add you to the exception list.

I can play too, but I don't think I qualify as "more highly competitive"

I'd be down for some organized butt kicking, but not this Sunday.

Hell, the MNM crew is just some fuckers who played MMOs starting with Shadowbane through WoW

We are by no means an FPS clan. Some of us can scrap well though.

If I get some redbull (vodka optional) and focus I can play pretty well.  I'd definitely like to do some competitive scrimmaging or whatnot.  Could be fun.

I'm gonna make a new thread about Sunday.

Do "competitive" TF2 games involve all the same fake gaywad scrub rules that "competitive" TFC games do?  Or has that not migrated over yet?

IMO, standard rules...

The only other thing that to me would be cool is....9 vrs 9 , 1 of each class only.

I just kind of read it as a game where, you know, everyone works out what they are doing ahead of time... we're going to likely get rolled, but it'll be fun without the engineers building teleporters to their sentry.

"My sentry and I will be down guarding the flag room, along with the pyro on D" "I'll be medic on the heavy" "I'll be heavy, going offense" "I'll be spying, and I'll follow cloaked right ahead of you guys to disable any sentries, co-ordinating over voicechat"

Heh.  That's me.

I can function just fine as the obligatory meatshield to run into a blind area to die and yell over VOIP "hai guyz they are in here!"

Steam id sent, check your messages.

Received sir.  In the future you might want to upgrade from 56k.

lol, that's not 56k - that's playing from Australia.

Alright.

So how do you play a Spy?  How do you cloak?  Is the backstab crit for all classes or has a max dmg only?  Finding it very inconsistent.

how to play a spy:

select 4 to choose a disguise ... pick spy, engineer, pyro, or soldier, sniper, whatever class you want.  Be aware if you pick solider/heavy/demoman you will run slower (that character's speed) while in costume. Note this doesn't work in reverse; you don't get a speed boost as a scout (and observant enemies will notice you are moving too slow to be a real scout). It takes about 2 seconds to switch disguises, and during that time you have grey smoke around you (cloaked or not, so be careful). You can do this while cloaked.

You use right mouse button to cloak. Click to turn on, click to turn off. You can notice your little avatar in the lower left corner if you want to see how visibile you are. It takes about 2 seconds to fully cloak and uncloak. You've got about 10 seconds of cloak time, you can see it by your model wristwatch or the bar on the lower right. It slowly refills.

Cloak to get past the main combat areas and come in from behind. Take an alternate entrance if possible. Be aware that people can see you as a shimmer in the air if they are close enough (about pyro flame range, maybe a tiny bit more) and can also bump into you.

Backstabs are a 180 degree arc behind people and will kill in one hit (you can almost backstab from the side, basically). You cannot backstab while cloaked -- you must uncloak.

You can tell you're lined up for a backstab because you will reverse the knife handle for a downward stroke -- however, this is NOT necessary to get a backstab off -- you can run up to them and, if you time it right, any normal 'slash' from your knife can trigger a backstab as long as it hits them from the rear half.

Your primary job is to kill sentries, teleporter entrances (this one is easy and it really helps your team), snipers, and heavy/medic combos. Snipers and heavies are easy prey -- in the heavy/medic combo, go for the heavy -- the medic often moves around too much and you can easily miss your backstab. You can kill him, re-cloak and run off before the medic can even switch weapons.

Only go for one backstab chance (unless you are killing up a line). When someone turns to face you / you are discovered, switch to your revolver. It does a lot of damage, and your knife does pitiful damage from the front. Learn to use the 'q' key to switch to previous weapon quickly, between the knife and the gun. Once you swing your knife, your disguise is dropped.

Sapping does damage over time to sentries and cannot be done while cloaked. Sapping does not break your disguise. You can continually reapply the sap as long as you are in melee range of the sentry. This will ultimately kill the sentry, as long as you can stay alive (good engineers will try and kill you fast and THEN repair the sentry -- often times you end up trading your life for the sentry going down. That's why, If you're after a sentry, try and run in right before your teammates to sap the sentry. This disables it and often a solider will just lob a rocket or two and it goes down. You can also sap, switch to revolver, and shoot it twice. Tapping can be tough or very easy depending on the engineer and his position. It takes two wrenches to remove a sap (one to stop the DoT, one to remove the sap) and two more to repair it to full health. If you go for the engineer, you'd better be fast, since the sentry will track you after you kill him -- get behind the engineer, sap, switch to knife with q, then backstab the engineer. This can be tricky to pull off.

Use 'b' to re-disguise as your previous character. Do NOT do this unless you are completely unobserved, since you will have a grey cloud appear around you that can be seen by all.

There are tricks, but you can basically act like one of them -- kill a sniper, assume a sniper disguise, wait for someone else to run by, kill them. Beware staying in one place for too long, since the guy you killed will come to find you.

Sometimes being a spy is tough if they are alert/good players/small maps with one entrance. Spy isn't really for beginners, but it is fun to play.

Spy also sucks when they are people who will randomly shoot anyone.

If you start firing immediately after the sap. It takes 3 shots.

The hardest part about being a spy is pretending you're actuall the class you're dressed up as.

Easy:
Pyro - they die a lot and kill a lot. You can be anywhere, just act like you're a complete noob and everyone will assume you are one. And since their chic at the moment, your odds of running into someone with the same name is... low.ube

Sniper - They stand still a lot and on most stages, their near the spawn point or the entrance from there. Getting behind the sniper and uncloaking is key, because their almost always zoomed it.

Start with those.

A "non-twitchy" Pyro on D is a suspicious Pyro. On D, Pyro's are expected to Spy check and if they aren't firing off their weapon at their teammates or even at nothing it's a dead giveaway. If you are trailing behind a group that's attacking your CP/base it's okay if you aren't firing as a Pyro.

Sniper is a good disguise if you can manage to get that far behind enemy lines without some twitchy Engineer (or worse Pyro) shooting at you.

Medic is another class that's usually bad to disguise as since people expect you to be healing them even if they aren't wounded so that you can build up your uber charge. If there are a lot of enemy Medics running around, though, it can work.

If you take a teleporter as a Spy don't cloak or try to disguise as an enemy class until the teleporter trail wears off.

If you are playing 2fort, make sure you are fully cloaked while still behind the cover in the battlements before jumping off. It's fun picking off Spies who haven't fully cloaked as they jump off. I'm sure some of them are thinking "OMIGOD HAXOR" when they die.

Edit: Pyros are a Spy's worst nightmare. If you see an enemy Pyro heading towards you assume he's going to flame you as a Spy check so cloak and get the heck out of there.

Excellent advice and tutorial.  Thank ye. 

Yes, I love sniping spies who think they are slick. Especially the ones who jump off the battlements in 2fort while disguised.

Something that has more situational use than people think is the friendly disguise.  On a place like the 2fort sewers, I often enter as a soldier.  When I peek around the corner and me and another person see each other, I immediately pull back, cloak, and then run by the guy that is on the other side.  If you did this in an enemy uniform, they'd know you were a spy and back way up.  If they think you are a soldier and that the problem is in front of them, much easier to dodge and backstab.

On my crappy cell browser so can't quote but Triforcer's idea/tactic above is smart - I never thought of that but I can see it working awesomely. As a blue soldier any red player is expecting a certain threat profile that a spy can totally exploit. Thanks - gonna try that. And yes I've filed yet another "doh, why didn't I think of that".

How'd you do that ? I thought you could just disguise in enemy colours.

There is no friendly disguise. If there was, shittttttttttttt that would be awesome. Snipers and scouts scatter when a pyro appears.

Press - on the disguise screen. It says it right on the screen though a lot of people miss it. It's easier if you make up keybinds for all that stuff, though. I use the numpad to quickly switch between 6 enemy classes and 3 friendly ones as a Spy.

Huh?

Well crap, seriously? How did I miss that all this time. Yeargh.

schild was thinking you could scare off enemy snipers and scouts by disguising as a friendly pyro.  :oh_i_see:

(http://m4.bestpicever.com/pics/pic_11936009173448.jpg)

f13 Team photo? :)

No, we have a genuine nazi on medic, none of this "girl gamer" mythical bullshit.

We don't have tomboy scouts either.

It was either that or finding a real Meth addict.

I just noticed that those people couldn't find a single black friend.

Ever seen a tough, black scot man Cosplay?

Ironwood? It could be the postman's kid.

Also, the soldier is asian. Har. That spy is pitiful. You can't stab nightly and ever so slightly with a loose fitting suit.

I think the pyro works at Circuit City.

Just to keep piling it on, I don't think that's a real toolbox the Engineer has. Has some sort of pattern to it and no handle... it's a jewelry case :awesome_for_real:!

Since the spy didn't work so hard on the suit, he could've at least gotten some matte paint and painted the orange tip of the revolver.

That heavy isn't nearly fat and/or jolly enough  -- I want to know not only that you're capable and willing to slaughter, but that you're enjoying it

That's not an ammo barrel - it's a bucket! BOOOOO!

And again, tomboy Scout, lawls.

Tomboy scout makes that picture sooo much better.  Now, if they can post up another one, only this time with that bat rammed as far up her ass as it'll go, I'll be in love.

(http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/1394/cimg0051cd1.jpg)
(http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/2968/cimg0036xs1.jpg)
(http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/1537/cimg0027vl2.jpg)
(http://photos-206.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll-sf2p/v149/192/0/12417206/n12417206_39490569_8899.jpg)

Oh there are so many backstab ones, and they're all money.

Without the sodomy it's not nearly as funny.

Those Spartans are weak, the guy on the right doesn't even have a six-pack!

He's a warrior.

Of beer.

Female scouts = all the rage!

(http://lh4.google.com/tristan.sacramento/RyQ2ruIR83I/AAAAAAAACKI/7UJRgxdwxnU/DSC_0168.JPG?imgmax=576)
(http://lh3.google.com/tristan.sacramento/RyQ2teIR84I/AAAAAAAACKM/6P_4oxMPUi4/DSC_0169.JPG?imgmax=912)
(http://lh5.google.com/tristan.sacramento/RyQ2u-IR85I/AAAAAAAACKQ/1NPJlx7wzLc/DSC_0170.JPG?imgmax=912)

She can steal my documents any time.

Hope you can get her spy buddy to break you out of jail.

That poor pyro must be sweating like crazy in that mask.

That's what he gets for picking to be the pyro. And you KNOW he picked that.

Apparently it's the Lucasarts Halloween party.

LucasArts hires 16 year old girls or are you talking about the first larger group picture and not the tiny girl about 4 posts up?

I'm talking about the one a few posts up that I posted.  The good looking one.  The one in the same photo with the Heavy Weapons Guy giving his "gun" a "what the fuck does this do?" look.

This is where I point out that your description is incorrect.

Be sure to let us know what the weather's like on planet Wrong, won't you?

And yes, it's the ILM/LA/LF halloween party as evidenced in this Flickr photo set (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaeta/sets/72157602778079836/).

It's just right with a touch of 'you must like men, because I see no hot chicks.'

(http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d165/mschartman/stuff/9txcxfqb.jpg)

Even if that were true, you needn't worry - you're quite safe.

Oh come the fuck on. The first picture is just from a good angle for her.

Don't even. This is the internet. Standards go up, not down.

(http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/2968/cimg0036xs1.jpg)

Seriously. Seriously.

You're posting that picture to say what?  How do I think that girl is good looking? Or that girl is better looking than the other scout?

DraconianOne, schild is confused.

schild, DraconianOne was talking about the second scout posted on that page, not the first one.  The one you thought was a 16 year old girl.

Oh. She's radically hotter than the first one. The first one needs rhinoplasty. The second one needs to be a few years older.


This is the quote where I had the problem. He's talking about the one higher up. or at least seems to be.

I don't even know where I am anymore.

Neither do I, Schild. Neither do I.

That spy still bothers me. He looks like a crack filled whino in a suit. He didn't even get a switch blade.

The second scout is probably about as old as we are if she's working at LA.  It'd be hard not to look a few years younger in that getup.  I have it on good authority that the in-game scout is a spry 50-year-old.

Looking at the two outfits, I'm really impressed by how the LA version's clothes are just shiny enough to look like they're being rendered with the TF2 shaders.  That is some goddamn attention to detail.

I like this one ...

(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2320/1797934182_62fb632e36.jpg?v=0)

(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2288/1797086371_91313c45e9.jpg?v=0)

People cosplay stuff from Office Space? Seriously? Lulz


I shouldn't be laughing cause I'm prolly doing some Persona 3 stuff at Otakon this summer.

It's not called cosplay if you do it for Halloween or special parties.  It's cosplay if you do it randomly in public or for smelly nerd conventions.  :-P

And thats actually an awesome idea for costume...

Actually, I disagree. Cosplay is just a degree of gay.

You can still cosplay on Halloween.

patch notes (http://storefront.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=news&id=1280&s=0,10,90,469&i=0,7710,400,440,220&cc=US&skin=4&client=1)
Woo Hoo! Not that I've ever... eh... done that...  :grin:

Heh.

SOLDIER NERF!

Did you notice all the soldiers crouching last night, Ookii? I guess it's the new bunny hop. Except they can't move when they do it.

I quit TF2.

That means we win by default :awesome_for_real:

Yes! I rubbed my pennies together and came up with the scratch to finally purchase The Orange Box. I just unloaded 95% of my original XboX games lol. Hell, I haven't played them in over a year anyhow. I'm a couple weeks behind, but damn, I'm excited.