CommunityFortress

Ladies and gents, welcome back to Screaming Eagles.

Recently, I experienced a horror.  It hurts just to talk about it.  It lingers, a faint metallic taste of terror, a grimy tar oozing between the teeth.  It weighs on me and in the dark of night it erupts from my mind and pulls me awake screaming and sweating.  And sometimes, when I remain asleep through chemical means, it uses my credit card to order pizza and pornography.  Really boring pornography.  As if.

You see, dear readers, recently I underwent a true TF2 trauma and lived to tell of it.  This, then, is a cautionary tale, a story meant to teach and instill fear in the hopes that you'll never (again) undergo something similar.  This is about fear.  This is about pain.

This is about The Day of Suck.

Hit the jump for the full scoop!

At first, I barely noticed it.  I was warming up and missing shots.  No biggie.  Then I matched up against a teammate that I normally beat.  I won the first match.  I lost the second.  I lost the third and fourth.  Waves of rage and confusion flooded me.  What the hell?  Why were all my rockets missing?  Why was every shotgun flying wide?  In a red haze I went for re-match after re-match.  In the end, I tied up the match sets, but barely. Changing DM maps didn't help--I was performing at a fraction of my former self.

Then I scrimmed.

The humiliation I bore was nearly too much.  I sat, my finger hovering over the power button of my PC.  A lone bead of sweat dangled from the end of my nose.  I could quit, I told myself.  Power down, unplug the tower, raise the window and hurl it onto the street.  I could race down to gloat over the shattered ruins of my machine, cackling and dancing and calling on the dark gods of graphics cards to take the sputtering mess down to whatever nether realm they lorded over and make of it a toaster.  Or some earrings.

But I didn't.  I took a deep breath.  I considered: what could drop my skill so hard and fast in the span of a day?  For that matter, what about a week?  Now that I thought about it, I realized that I hadn't played well all week.  My aim had been off, my movement had felt sluggish, and I was dying left and right.  Everything just felt WRONG.

The next day, I played to similar results and took one ass kicking after the next.  I asked some friends how this could happen.  Their replies ranged from mystified for rational.

"I have no idea."

"It just happens sometime."

"Take a week off."

"Is your CAPS lock on?"

"Behold the Curse of Yog-Soggoth!"

Yes, I mused.  A curse.  It must have been a curse perpetrated by some collective comprised of ex-girlfriends and Conservatives.  But no ex would stoop so low.  Or take the time out of her day to ruin my TF2.  Neo-cons, however....

But no matter what I tried, no matter who I talked to or the advice I was given, I remained firmly in the realm of the not very good.  And when I thought back on it, I realized that I hadn't played very good in a week or so.  In fact, I'd been taking some embarassing losses for nigh on five or six days.  The frustration and misery were building to a head.  I was going to explode.  My guts melted and were replaced with hateful, spiteful gophers.  My eyes jellied.  Fire wreathed my skull.  Soon, the gut gophers had made custard-like dishes of my eyes.  The fire adorned their cavernous dwellings.

Am I still a man? I asked the gophers.

They said nothing, only shook their heads and nibbled their custard.

What was going on?  I checked and re-checked my settings and in the midst of my panicked clicking a teammate's stray comment caught my ear: "My aim has been better since I lowered my sensitivity."

Could it be my sensitivity?  But how could it?  I hadn't changed it.

Or had I?

I checked.

4.39

Sweet mother of shoe-lickers, no wonder I couldn't hit anything!  4 on any class is way too much for me.  I've always been a low-sens proponent, one of the folks who raves on and on about his giant mouse pad (I have TLR to thank for that) and the virtues of high rates.  But in messing with my configs, I had accidentally overwritten my low sensitivity with a newer, barabarous setting.  I changed it back to my familiar 2.9, clicked Apply, clicked OK, and hopped back into DM.

Eureka!

My rockets, they hit!  My shotgun, my flick shots, my beloved airshots!  Oh, how I had missed them!  How I had mourned them as gone forevermore.  Of course, it took me a few days to get back up to par.  In fact, I'm still getting myself back to operating specs, still missing the odd shot here and there that I know, three weeks ago, I wouldn't have missed.  But I slept that night with my skull attached and the flesh firmly in place.  Gone were the fires, the gophers.  Hollow were their caves.

At last The Day of Suck had ended.

Amazing, isn't it?  One little change in one setting and all my skill and training--or 90% of it--went right out the window.  It taught me a valuable lesson: that all the tips and tricks should be guiding you to find what works for you.  And when you find what works, settle in and do the ever-loving crap out of it.

What about you?  What's the story of your Day of Suck?  Hit up the comments, add me on Steam, and double-check that your settings are in order.  You'll be happier that you did.