Ladies and gents, trigger-happy Cow Manglers and hype-building Soda Poppers, welcome back to Screaming Eagles.
Late, you say. This edition of Screaming Eagles is late!
Well, yes, but it's not my fault. You see, someone in the server was running Sandman and I happened to take a baseball upside the head. I lost time. When I came to my fists were full of cream cheese. Tethered to my leg, a young billy goat. The goat was a-chewing. A-chewing and staring. I slowly came to realize that he was now my goat, and had been for some unknown span of time. Him and the cream cheese and the very great shame.
That accursed Sandman! But it's not just that ridiculous bat and it's infuriating stun ball. You see, on my long slog home with the goat and the cheese, I've had time to consider the effrontery of certain TF2 weaponry and why it's bad for the game and the community. I've pondered and I've meditated. I shucked fistfuls of soggy cheese across vast stretches of pavement. The time for thought is over--let us speak now of the arsenal of shame!
In last week’s edition of Splash Damage, I discussed the Free to Play announcement and I proposed that the competitive TF2 community has “found it challenging to actually confront new players with the merits of playing competitively”. I argued that all of our methods to attract fresh blood to the competitive community are indirect and that they seem to have only a limited impact on the average TF2 player. I concluded by hypothesizing that perhaps we need to devise more direct ways to approach new players with the idea of competitive play.
The comments of readers on the previous edition revealed the diversity of opinions among community members about what it really is that deters new players from joining the competitive world of TF2. Some said that new folks find competitive play too challenging while some said that new players are afraid of leaving their comfort zone. Others argued that the classes used in competitive play (chiefly Scout, Soldier, Demoman, and Medic) are not numerous enough and surmised that many non-competitive players wish the other five classes featured more prominently. All of these comments are worthy of discussion and each has roots in the truth.
That's right folks, I just received the prizes from Zalman for the CommFT-Zalman 6v6 tournament (remember that registration for the event closes on August 20th). Their marketing guys are phenomenal and promptly shipped us the prizes prior to the start of the event as I requested. Shoutout to Mr. Yang at Zalman for being great to work with. And, without further ado, a photo of the prizes...
Ladies and gents, there's Highlander afoot! Week 5 of UGC's Season 4 slug-fest was decisive: the wheat was separated from the chaff, the good from the bad, the hrrrm from the meh. Included were the very weird and the disturbingly normal, and on a good day, you can't tell them apart.
But this is Highlander! There's 18 friggin' dudes in a server trying to blow each other up. Anything goes. And now, as we bum-rush the final three weeks of matches, every point, every cap, and every piece of intelligence returned is crucial!
Let's get into the Week 5 re-cap before we soldier on to the Week 6 predictions. After you, good reader.
Outlined against the bright blue Yukon skies, the Four Horsemen ride again. In lore of old, they are known as Pestilence, Famine, Destruction and Death. These are merely aliases. Their real names are PYYYOUR, dummy, justin and carnage. Together, and with their team mates TLR and ww-, they form the wave of wins that threatens to take out every team that stands between them and a season 9 championship. Only one team obstructs this path of glory: eMazing Gaming.
Last time they clashed, eMg won. But now, with both teams 12 and 1, their upcoming match on the all too painfully familiar Yukon will secure themselves as Season 9 champions and the all important first seed in heading into LAN playoffs.
Yukon is a hard map, a map that can go back and forth for twenty minutes and then suddenly burst forth with aggression, ending rounds in seconds instead of what can seem like hours. It is also a dangerous and difficult map for medics, with harsh sight-lines littering the map and immense difficulty in dodging away if caught out of position. It is a map that will test each team’s combo to the breaking point and beyond.
Snipers, mostly due to the aforementioned enraging lines of sight, are fearsome on the wide open vistas we will see this weekend. This fact will not go unnoticed by viewers as The Experiment has arguably the two best snipers in Invite, justin and carnage. This will be a fierce, and close match with each team vying for that slight positional advantage, yearning for that juicy medic pick, crying as their best laid plans fail to lay waste to their brothers in arms.
All things considered, the results of this match are unimportant. Both teams have an assured spot at this September’s LAN. What everyone will really be looking for is that psychological edge. If The Experiment manages to take this game from top seed eMg, it will mean that their chances to win it all shoot up that much higher.
The Experiment has a lot to prove on Sunday night. eXtelevision will be casting this match, Sunday night at 11pm EST. Peter Mansbridge will be manning the camera as duder and eXtine serenade us with their luscious voices.
Hello and welcome to the first-ever edition of Splash Damage. This edition is the first of many weekly articles that I am planning to write and release every Wednesday. In each post, I will outline a particular topic related to competitive Team Fortress 2 and I will offer my perspective on it.
My perspective, as many of you know, is not one of disinterest given my active involvement in the community. My name is Graham Clay and my screen name is jinn_. I founded this site in March 2009. I have been playing competitive TF2 since beta and I was a TF2 league administrator under Pipher, Ahn, and Aschow at CEVO from beta until mid-2009 at which point I assumed the position of Head of Game for CEVO TF2. By the time I retired after CEVO Season 7, I had run a dozen TF2 events and I had helped shape many of the current competitive TF2 standards (6s, the big three maps, timelimits and winlimits, tournament formats, etc). In terms of my personal life, I am from North Carolina and play a lot of soccer.
In the dozen days since we announced our donation drive for The Experiment's LAN fund, we have seen an amazing groundswell of support for the team's efforts to make it to Dallas. So far, as of this posting, we have received $792.19 from a total of 21 community members. That's an average of $37.72 per donor and we are immensely grateful for the generosity of the community. The team has already purchased a few plane tickets with the donations and they are pumped to see their fellow players support their ESEA S9 LAN endeavor.
As promised, I have devised a method for donors and the community to interact with the team. There is now a section of the forums devoted to everything related to the LAN fund. The section has three stickied threads (one with a copypasta of the original announcement, one with information for donors, and one for anyone to pose questions to the team) and non-stickied threads for each donor who donated more than $20. If you are a donor, check out this section of the forums ASAP.
As we receive more donations, we will continue to add to the list of donors on the forums and hopefully we can get all of the donors in touch with the team. We still need more donations, though, and I thank all of those who have donated or are planning on donating.
Doom! Terror! Madness and Popsicles! Popsicles made of doom!
Highlander is upon us over in the UGC Season 4 HL Summer league, and blood is in the water. Week 4's matches were make or break for many teams, but fret not. Free is here and he has the medicine of coverage. It soothes. It calms. It puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the crit rocket.
Let's recap the week before we get down into the all-important Week 5!
Ordinarily, I'd post some hooplah about CEVO in this post. But, come on! This is CEVO we're talking about here! You shouldn't be reading hooplah! You should get registering your team and getting ready to whip some behind!
Power creep is something that's been happening to many classes throughout TF2's lifespan. While the majority of unique weapons simply provide an opportunity for an alternate playstyle, some weapons are nearly always (and in a few cases, literally always) better than their stock counterparts. I see this as a poor design choice, and the unfortunate side effect of having 120+ weapons in the game.
Sure, this number includes a few weapons that are shared amongst classes, and the promotional reskins that aren't technically different, but the point remains valid. TF2 is thick with content.
For these articles, I'm going to break down one individual class slot at a time and show you what's happening to our beloved classes, and why I believe power creep is something that's preventable if we step in soon.
This first article will focus on the Soldier's melee slot. We'll start with one obvious statement:
The Equalizer is better than the Shovel in 99% of all situations. This is damn near fact. If you're getting Ubered and have exhausted your ammunition, you could pull out your shovel. If you have exhausted your ammunition, have an enemy in melee range, and are above 121 health, then you could pull out your shovel. In every other situation, Equalize your way through enemies or out of trouble and into a healthpack. The biggest downside that isn't explicit is something Deathanchor sums up well: "The second you see a soldier whip out his equalizer, you know he's lit." If you saw a random Soldier on the battlefield, wielding his rockets menacingly, you'd be terrified and start looking for a way around him. If you see him floating around with an Equalizer, quick, shoot him!
Is the Equalizer fair, especially in competitive matches? It's another case of an interesting weapon that promotes risky clutch plays, like the Ubersaw. Sam P. calls it "a lot of fun", and that's something to seriously consider. Sure, it's better than the Shovel. Is it worth nerfing, just to promote good old reliable, bursting-into-flames shovel gameplay?
Area 51 vs Check Six Gaming is the match for tonight, cp_gravelpit the map.
It's been an eXciting week of stopwatch this week, with eXtv covering 3 nights of Gpit (after Warmfront on Sunday) so far. This match could prove to be the most important covered however, with Area 51 having a 6-5 record and Check Six gaming trying to battle into the 4th place spot with their 5-6 record.
This is the last time Check Six plays Area 51 this season, making this a crucial victory if they are to make it to LAN. There are just 4 games left after this, with Check Six playing eMg twice while Area 51 faces Classic Mix^ twice.
Tonight, eXtelevision members eXtine and Duder (running production) will be joined by the ever fantastic Schetter from keekerdc.com and the legendary TF2 scout oPlaid for commentary.
Discuss the match below, before and after the match.
