If I go down to the gym to play some pickup basketball, I don't expect the guys there to be NBA level and be able to execute complicated plays. But if they all want to take half-court shots and bounce the ball of their head and stand in a corner and twirl around, yeah, I think that's kind of annoying.Originally Posted by roBurky
So in a game where the objective is to push a cart, I don't think expecting people to try to push the cart is "taking it too seriously." I just want people who are making a minimum attempt to play the game. If you have no problem with people running around and doing whatever they want, congratulations, you're part of the problem.
Also, this:
I've tried the gentle approach. "Hey, can someone go medic? We need ubers to break through their guns." "Can someone switch engy and get a teleport running?" That doesn't work. Which leads to this:
"hey, can one of you snipers with 2 points switch to medic or engy?"
"fuck u"
It can get annoying to be on a team that hasn't even worked out that it is being rolled, for sure, but it really sounds like you just take things too seriously to reasonably expect that pug/f2p games will be satisfying for you anymore.
Is there some reason why you aren't joining a clan or switching to scrim/comp matches? It seems to me that this would take a lot less time to get you in a game you enjoy than waiting for valve to completely change the pickup game / point / drop system to your liking.
Personally I think the drop system works fine, tying it to wins/points would produce some pretty shitty incentives. If you think the guys playing sniper to get their huntsman from the first milestone achievements are annoying, wait til half your team is engies farming points by taking each others teleports the whole match.
I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of taking TF2 seriously enough to let a crappy team bother me.
I've played in a server with a player just like that. Well, I guess we all have, but this guy would constantly rage on other people for no reason at all, then warn about videoing others to get them banned all because they weren't playing the game how he wanted them to play it. Only know of one person who got banned though.
Really sluggo, you'd be best going into competitive games if you aren't there to join in and be a part of the sort of antics that pub matches provide. Some of my most easily remembered matches in TF2 include the ones where we would try and win as a single class eg: all medics, all heavies etc. Even better is when we'd win (all heavy is close to unbeatable).
sluggo, have you tried playing on the iO servers? I've noted a higher quality of player there than elsewhere.
These responses baffle me. It's like you guys don't even understand the basic concept of what a game is.
Let's go back to my basketball analogy. Say you're playing a casual 3v3 game at the playground, but there's one guy who just wants to run around like crazy and see how long he can dribble the ball without shooting or passing or have it stolen. He's not playing basketball, he's doing something else altogether and fucking up the game.
According to you guys, that behavior is just fine, and I'm the crazy guy for being annoyed with the guy for being a douchebag. Apparently I should go join a formal league.
You guys are nuts.
TF2 doesn't allow a single non-competitive player to lock up the game like your basketball example does. Also, instead of yelling at the guy on the court, you could go play another game of basketball at any one of the thousands of other courts currently in use. Or, yes, you could join a league which would guarantee you the degree of competitiveness you want.
Also, unlike basketball, you can just switch servers, or start your own.
But here's the problem that's sailing way over everyone's heads: In TF2, when you join a public server with 24 people, HALF those people are being douchebags.
Every. Single. Server.
And you guys are cool with that.
What a joke.
I've tried looking for these a few times, as people have mentioned them before, but I've had no luck. At the moment, I only see two servers, which are both empty and I have 200+ pings to.
If you were talking about any other game, you might have some sympathy, sluggo. But TF2 is the most casual-friendly multiplayer FPS I've ever known. It's practically impossible to have a negative effect on your team.
Your basketball analogy would only work if it was some kind of game where everyone got their own basketball. In which case, one guy spending the time practicing his dribbling isn't a problem at all. Particularly if an equal portion of the other team is doing the same thing.
I used to get frustrated with people just playing team deathmatch on 2Fort, and not trying to achieve the objective. But I realised that's just a problem with 2Fort and Capture The Flag. It takes a considerable amount of teamwork and focus on the objective to meaningfully contribute to capturing the intelligence. I think that's why there was only 1 CTF map when the game came out, and why Valve never made any more.
But something like Payload allows everyone who just wants to wander around and click Mouse1 to accidentally contribute to the objectives. Fighting people in the middle of the map is a necessary step to winning, which is a thing it's very hard not to take part in. The spawn positions, respawn times and map layout typically funnel both teams in to the same area as the cart. It makes the objective something big and visible and physical on your screen, and makes pushing it into the same action as restocking on health and ammo.
I really can't imagine getting as frustrated as you at the amount of cart-pushing going on in any TF2 match I've seen.
I don't think anyone said it's fine, just that it is avoidable with some easy steps you can perform in your own home. There are thousands of people who devote their lives to removing every bit of silliness from the game! And I am sure you would get along famously with those guys.
Here is a thing : if you think you are on a team with a bunch of ten year olds, it is entirely possible you are actually on a team with a bunch of ten year olds. A lot of people who play this game aren't actually very good at it, but there's nothing wrong with that. I get annoyed these days if I don't top the scores as demo/medic/scout/pyro, but I suck horribly at most of the other classes and I am sure I annoy the piss out of my own team with my failspy routine.and I'm the crazy guy for being annoyed with the guy for being a douchebag. Apparently I should go join a formal league.
It's just a game. One that is - entirely on purpose! - totally silly and with a bunch of designed in mechanics to try and balance out the skill delta between people who suck and who don't. There are going to be a lot of people who suck at playing the game, playing the game. Don't get too mad if .. people suck somehow.
I don't know mate, I would normally assume that someone would do something about this situation at some point during their first 30-40 spleening posts on the subject. But perhaps everyone else is crazy for just not catching on to how remarkably effective this thing you are doing actually is.You guys are nuts.
Last edited by djotefsoup; 08-06-2011 at 07:55 PM.
It's not sailing over there heads because:
A: That's not really true, just find a better server, I prefer the Gamers With Jobs and Older than Dos severs which tend to have good moderation, skilled players, and few douchebags.
B: You have shown yourself to be a huge douchebag in this thread, so your mere presence is probably throwing off the douche to cool ratio irrevocably. In other words, you're polluting the sample with your own superhuman douchiness. Seriously you have like the douchebag powers of five hipsters. You should get a giant douche costume and fight crime, because no mere mortal could withstand the supreme concentrated power of your douchebaggery without seriously reconsidering their life choices.
I mean, really, normally only obscure strategy games drive me out of lurk mode, but you've managed to piss me off enough with your sheer douchiness that I just had to call you out.
At the end of the day, all I want is to be able to jump on public servers and occasionally not feel like half my teammates are drooling morons with their heads up their ass.
Is that really such a high bar to shoot for?
Well, what would that something be? I don't have an awesome connection so I don't have a wealth of servers that I can get a decent ping to (a lot of friends of mine play on servers that I have massive lag issues with), and I don't want to join a formal league. I feel like I'm just stuck with public servers, which obviously I find less than optimal.
Nope, it's not a high bar at all. In fact, I play on vanilla servers with solid teamwork, good moderation, and a community I like. Those are the only servers I play on. I accomplished this feat by playing on lots of different servers, and then I used the handy-dandy favorites feature to save the ones I liked. These days I can even blacklist the ones I hate. After the first few weeks, I had a list of vibrant servers and I didn't even have to use the server search any more.
I assume most people who still play TF2 have used a similar technique to improve their gaming experience. Then again, most people aren't burdened with epic levels in the douchebag prestige class.
I have a favorites list and many servers blacklisted as well. It hasn't really helped me, because ultimately those servers are still public where anyone can join them.
But keep up the insults. They really support your douchebag argument.
I am sure this whole thing would have gone in a totally different direction very early on if it was phrased as "my connection sucks too bad to play tf2" rather than "everyone who plays tf2 is a dickbutt".
The something I suggested would be to find some people who play seriously! But this is not something you seem to want to do. I am sure if you go post about connection problems in the hardware and technical stuff forum there will be people who haven't seen this performance who will be willing to help out. It's quite possible this will help, I had a fair amount of problems in this place getting below 100-130ms, even to quite close servers, until I looked up how to properly set and exclude useless DSL modes on this thing and found 15-35ms to most places was well within reach.
Technically, it's not that "my connection sucks." It's just that -- as I've mentioned a number of times in this thread as people have suggested particular servers -- I have a modest DSL connection where I don't get sub-100 pings to many servers. So I usually have a few dozen servers I can choose from at any given time, but that pool obviously isn't as big as others.
Sluggo - text chat will fail. New players aren't processing it. I use a mic and make it light hearted - we only have 5 snipers - why aren't the rest of you going sniper? Play 2 fort - first question - does everyone know what the intel is? Why its important?
I'll jump in and play D with a soldier or demo until we can control our own base. Pretty simple to do that effectively even on a team of idiots. Then start asking who can go get the flag? You gotta remember in 2fort if the base is overrun no way any newb is going to be able to understand what to do. Each map has that - remove the confusion first.
I try and encourage engineers upstairs but only do that if i can protect them while they setup or they get frustrated. etc. etc. etc.
My other mini-game inside of that is - you can't die. I've gone as high as 32 kills with zero deaths by playing D and helping the team.
Are there bad players who just run around? Sure, but if a few people are on board you can turn it around.
10 snipers? at that point you're better off just giving pointers on napoleonic tactics.
"ok, march forward, line abreast: volley fire!"
A couple of my favorite servers have the number of snipers capped.
Fine with me I never play sniper.
I play almost exclusively payload, the objective is clear and how to do ahceive it is clear. I never use a mic, pay attention to voice or text or have any issues with teamwork. Its fun to push lettel kart.
what's fun? low population server. payload map. newbie red team, especially newbie engie. play as heavy, with fists of steel, and start pushing the kart. eat a sandwich to boost hp to 350 if you want. do not open fire on the reds.
watch as the reds fire stickies, nades, and rockets but fail to do enough damage to stop you. after you push the kart 3/4 of the way before dying and then your team finally wins it, let them know how to beat fists of steel. bonus fun: hide behind the kart while going past the sentry so it never actually opens fire.
A ping in the 200s isn't that big of a deal. Accept that get to work on your friends list. Chet plays Team Fortress and has low friend standards, so I'd start with him.
Yeah, I used to play with the POE folks at 330-350ms and could still do an acceptable (mvp list) medic :)
TF2 is actually pretty good about making things nice at ~100ms+. The drop to 15ms is nice in some ways - but there are really only a few things it seems to help with. The drop seems to be more about making things less laggy to the server and only really affects my client > server sorts of interactions (detonate stickies, rocketjump, interact with sentries, level geometry/setup sort of stuff) and doesn't really make it that much easier to shoot or avoid being shot by players. And people much laggier than me are much harder to deal with than before, somehow.
On servers where I ping 200+, the game is a slideshow for me. It's not a smooth experience where I'm just a few extra milliseconds behind the action, but the game is fillled with constant mini-lag spikes where players pop in and out of position, which makes basic aiming hard to do. This seems to be a common complaint from other players, and just a quirk of how TF2 handles high pings, and it is a big deal. It's not playable, it's not enjoyable.
Chet's been on my friends list for years. It's been a while since I've seen him playing TF2 (as he mentioned, he plays under different accounts), but I did spend time playing on the POE servers a while back, and my main recollection was that they liked to play custom stuff like Hall of Death, which was a cute novelty but not a real substitute for regular maps, and they had a lot of guys who liked to sit on the mic and jabber expletives the whole time. I have no idea if that's changed, but it wasn't for me.
Also, go fuck yourself.
That's odd about your ping, I don't notice any problems until it hits 300 or above. Have you tried checking your rate settings? At one point mine were overwritten somehow and I couldn't play on 95% of servers without experiencing lag issues.
I've never really considered anything wrong with my connection, just that it's not a fat T1 line or anything. I've had it for years and have played tens of thousands of hours of various shooters and Xbox Live games with very little in the way of disconnects, so I've never felt the need to do any technical troubleshooting on it.
I've flirted with upgrading my connection many times over the years, as this DSL was the only option when I initially moved in, but every time I call AT&T to talk about an upgrade, they only want to sell me some 4-in-1 package with cable TV and other crap. When I tell them I only want to upgrade my internet, it's like they're completely unprepared for this request and wind up transferring me to 8 people until I eventually end up at the same person I started with trying to sell me a U-Verse package, and I end up saying screw this, my current connection is good enough. :)
I know this and you know this, and it's certainly not specific to TF2. I can recall lots of frustrating moments in WoW where someone would fail to move out of fire or whatever, and people would ask later why they didn't listen to chat messages telling them to move, and they'd act incredulous at the idea of reading chat during a fight, like you'd just asked them to juggle two chainsaws and a poodle. For a lot of players, it's just too much to ask. If anything, I find the occasional block of text that says PUSH THE CART PUSH THE CART PUSH THE CART, while obnoxious, actually turns out to be kind of effective, because people notice it.
The irony is, while people claim I take the game too seriously, I refuse to hook up a mic and start giving instructions because, to me, THAT would be crossing a line to taking it too seriously. Do I really care about winning or losing enough to strap on a headset and start giving directions to strangers who may in fact be 10 years old? Of course not. Any recent venting I've done in this thread stems from the frustration of joining server after server where it seems half the people think they're playing team deathmatch, and wishing Valve would make some tweaks to nudge people in the right direction. I don't think that's an outrageous complaint, and if that makes me a douchebag, so be it.
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