I have done nothing but be annoyed with Valve servers for 800 hours edition.
Well I figured I'm bored enough I'll probe out into the wilderness of the RPGuild and see who else plays TF2. Sit down and chat classes, shell out shit for Phlogs and sniper teams, and maybe do other things. I don't care.
But for the people unaware:
TF2 - or Team Fortress 2 - is a team based competitive FPS game developed by Valve. Originally a mod built from the Quake engine, Valve picked up the title and developed it their own way. Turning it into the cartoon-y cell-shaded adventure in legally making thirteen year olds cry that it is today.
The game doesn't follow the build of other top-name shooter titles such as Call of Duty and Battlefield where the player basically starts out as a vanilla "class" with some mild variation based on personal skill or some perks, but lays out an option of nine classes occupying nine respective fields on the battlefield. Each class carried with it the roles they are to fill and their own unique play-styles, sometimes several on the same class based on weapon load outs. The game is built to cater to this format, and successful teams know to and do operate knowing full well the roles they need to play and if they can play it. This is true for the Competitive MGE Highlander tournaments.
A class primer:
Scout - Low health, high speed class utilizing the scattergun as his primary weapon. Uses a bat as his melee. The Scooty Boot Man's secondary weapon being a pistol.
Soldier - Medium health, medium speed, vanilla attack-defensive class. Primary weapons are rocket launcher with a shotgun as a secondary and some sort of digging instrument for shoveling into someone's skull as the melee.
Pyro - Spits fires. Almost always holds down primary fire and move forward. Pros lrn2airblast. Constant debate on gender.
Engineer - primary defensive class. This Texas strongman can lay down and build sentries and other support buildings like dispensers and teleporters to keep team mates healed and re-armed in the middle of the field, or boost them to the front lines faster.
Heavy - Russian. Defensive class. Highest health of the nine but slowest speed. Uses a mini-gun. Eats sandwiches. And apparently holds a PhD in Russian literature.
Demoman - The black Scotsman that is supposed to shoot grenades at people. But disregard that and spam stickies because that's a legit and skilled way to do things. Also sometimes charges people with swords or whiskey bottles. Why not play as him?
Medic - Valve servers need more of these. Their purpose is to be German and hand out heals and over heals and most helpful ubers (invulnerability, critical hits, more and faster over-heal rate, and more damage-type resistance) to their team. There's an endemic lack of these on Valve and Skial servers.
Sniper - self explanatory. There's no need for six.
Spy - Runs around and stabs people in the back, saps engineer buildings, sometimes shoots things with a pistol. Smoke cigarettes and is French.
So, what IS TF2?
Well as said before TF2 is a class-based shooter with a strong team element. Though some people would rather trade weapons and hats, but that's all its own thing and worth investigating on its own time. I just like to grab killstreaks.
But the game has an attitude all its own. It's not trying to be Hollywood action movie. It's just... it's own thing. It's mostly silly. Very silly. And every class as an attitude and character all their own. It prevents the characters on team from being just another SWAT team member with a face mask and goggles. They are characters like in a book, they have their relationship (with the people on the other team) and a history to them. Here, if you're somehow five years behind have one of the old "Meet the [class]" videos:
MvM announcement trailer (2012):
Expiration Date/Love and War update (2014):
As you can also probably get from these videos: the game's still being updated. Where other titles drop support after two years or when the next game in the series comes out Valve keeps on the updates and keeps up server support. And what's better? It's all free. Well, to a point. There is Robin Walker's optional hat fee.
Though you can play the game for free and play the update for free if there's anything you want right now and then you can buy it from the shop, most items ranging something like a dollar. But you can get a lot of these from random in-game drops if you're patient or know what weapons you want to keep (because non-premium players have one page worth of inventory) you can still be F2P and keep fairly competitive, especially when most pros think most of the stock weapons are the better balanced, and some of the must-have gear can be picked up from achievement.
This may sound like a pay-to-win program but the game's weapon system doesn't really make any one weapon superior to another, as I indicated previously. And as mentioned much earlier: many of the play styles for the classes can be altered with what weapons you use. A soldier can enter a whole new niche (given, a very niche niche in a niche) if he uses the rocket jumper and Market Gardener. A heavy may become more like a mobile sentry if he equips the Brass Beast. The only real benefit premium gets (five dollars worth of stuff on the Mann Co store bought) is more inventory, higher drop-chances on some "rare" stuff like hats, and a feeling of self fulfillment in the Gibus not being your only hat.
Now remember: the meta for Dustbowl is sentries everywhere.
Well I figured I'm bored enough I'll probe out into the wilderness of the RPGuild and see who else plays TF2. Sit down and chat classes, shell out shit for Phlogs and sniper teams, and maybe do other things. I don't care.
But for the people unaware:
TF2 - or Team Fortress 2 - is a team based competitive FPS game developed by Valve. Originally a mod built from the Quake engine, Valve picked up the title and developed it their own way. Turning it into the cartoon-y cell-shaded adventure in legally making thirteen year olds cry that it is today.
The game doesn't follow the build of other top-name shooter titles such as Call of Duty and Battlefield where the player basically starts out as a vanilla "class" with some mild variation based on personal skill or some perks, but lays out an option of nine classes occupying nine respective fields on the battlefield. Each class carried with it the roles they are to fill and their own unique play-styles, sometimes several on the same class based on weapon load outs. The game is built to cater to this format, and successful teams know to and do operate knowing full well the roles they need to play and if they can play it. This is true for the Competitive MGE Highlander tournaments.
A class primer:
Scout - Low health, high speed class utilizing the scattergun as his primary weapon. Uses a bat as his melee. The Scooty Boot Man's secondary weapon being a pistol.
Soldier - Medium health, medium speed, vanilla attack-defensive class. Primary weapons are rocket launcher with a shotgun as a secondary and some sort of digging instrument for shoveling into someone's skull as the melee.
Pyro - Spits fires. Almost always holds down primary fire and move forward. Pros lrn2airblast. Constant debate on gender.
Engineer - primary defensive class. This Texas strongman can lay down and build sentries and other support buildings like dispensers and teleporters to keep team mates healed and re-armed in the middle of the field, or boost them to the front lines faster.
Heavy - Russian. Defensive class. Highest health of the nine but slowest speed. Uses a mini-gun. Eats sandwiches. And apparently holds a PhD in Russian literature.
Demoman - The black Scotsman that is supposed to shoot grenades at people. But disregard that and spam stickies because that's a legit and skilled way to do things. Also sometimes charges people with swords or whiskey bottles. Why not play as him?
Medic - Valve servers need more of these. Their purpose is to be German and hand out heals and over heals and most helpful ubers (invulnerability, critical hits, more and faster over-heal rate, and more damage-type resistance) to their team. There's an endemic lack of these on Valve and Skial servers.
Sniper - self explanatory. There's no need for six.
Spy - Runs around and stabs people in the back, saps engineer buildings, sometimes shoots things with a pistol. Smoke cigarettes and is French.
So, what IS TF2?
Well as said before TF2 is a class-based shooter with a strong team element. Though some people would rather trade weapons and hats, but that's all its own thing and worth investigating on its own time. I just like to grab killstreaks.
But the game has an attitude all its own. It's not trying to be Hollywood action movie. It's just... it's own thing. It's mostly silly. Very silly. And every class as an attitude and character all their own. It prevents the characters on team from being just another SWAT team member with a face mask and goggles. They are characters like in a book, they have their relationship (with the people on the other team) and a history to them. Here, if you're somehow five years behind have one of the old "Meet the [class]" videos:
MvM announcement trailer (2012):
Expiration Date/Love and War update (2014):
As you can also probably get from these videos: the game's still being updated. Where other titles drop support after two years or when the next game in the series comes out Valve keeps on the updates and keeps up server support. And what's better? It's all free. Well, to a point. There is Robin Walker's optional hat fee.
Though you can play the game for free and play the update for free if there's anything you want right now and then you can buy it from the shop, most items ranging something like a dollar. But you can get a lot of these from random in-game drops if you're patient or know what weapons you want to keep (because non-premium players have one page worth of inventory) you can still be F2P and keep fairly competitive, especially when most pros think most of the stock weapons are the better balanced, and some of the must-have gear can be picked up from achievement.
This may sound like a pay-to-win program but the game's weapon system doesn't really make any one weapon superior to another, as I indicated previously. And as mentioned much earlier: many of the play styles for the classes can be altered with what weapons you use. A soldier can enter a whole new niche (given, a very niche niche in a niche) if he uses the rocket jumper and Market Gardener. A heavy may become more like a mobile sentry if he equips the Brass Beast. The only real benefit premium gets (five dollars worth of stuff on the Mann Co store bought) is more inventory, higher drop-chances on some "rare" stuff like hats, and a feeling of self fulfillment in the Gibus not being your only hat.
Now remember: the meta for Dustbowl is sentries everywhere.
