CommunityFortress

Good day to you, my name is Trogdor The Burninator, but most people call me Trogdor. I wanted to join the Community Fortress writing staff to help realize its ultimate goal, which is to build the bridge between the lower skill leveled players and the higher ones. While it seems that a certain someone by the name of Alar Ensis has already beaten me to the punch, I decided to put my post up anyway. Please keep in mind that this first article is meant to help those that are COMPLETELY clueless to the competitive scene, I will be progressing on much more specific subjects as time goes on.

THE TF2 COMPETITIVE COMMUNITY SURVIVAL GUIDE

Part 1: FORUMS

Forums, they’re a basic necessity for any competitive gaming community. They’re used for a number of things: communication, recruiting, archiving information, and trolling. Part one of my expose on the team fortress competitive community will be focusing on looking posts, learning tips and tricks, and how to spot the trolls.

Looking posts, and you!

Looking posts are a wondrous thing, they’re almost like a resume, in how they give a short and rough composition of your experience in the competitive scene. The basic outline of any looking post is actually quite simple…
•    Username: Pretty self explanatory…
•    Age: While it’s not usually a problem, age can often factor into how well you’ll fit into a team, which could affect your team chemistry.
•    Skill Level: This area is VERY important, and it’s critical that you identify what level you are at so that teams find a suitable member. If you’re not quite sure what level you’re at, here’s a great write-up that can help you out.
•    Experience: This area can vary a lot since Team Fortress 2 has such a spectator-friendly persona. Many competitive players come from other competitive communities to give TF2 a run or two. So make sure that you mention any competitive gaming experience you’ve had before; such experience could include leagues like Team Warfare League and CyberEVOlution, or specific teams that you’ve played with in the past. Even if you’ve had experience in other competitive games, you can put that up too, because it could give teams an insight towards your mentality and thought process.
•    Main Class: The main competitive classes consist of medics, soldiers, scouts, and demomen. Other specifications can fall under soldiers as “pockets” and “roamers”.
•    Other Classes: If you can play your main class well, that’s great, but a team that’s looking for a new member might not need a Medic or a Demo, or maybe they just need a backup for one of their Soldiers or Scouts. Sure you may not be the best in the world, but you’ll be there just in case someone is absent, and your team won’t have to give up a match.

NOTE- ALL classes besides Medic, Soldier, Scout, and Demo (A.K.A. Utilities) are used on a VERY RARE BASIS. I would usually only suggest putting one of these up if you…
A. Have a main class of Soldier or Scout
AND
B. Are VERY proficient in the utility that you’ve specified (I.E. – Sniper headshot sKillz).

•    Other Notes: This is pretty much a wild card, it could basically be anything a team needs to know about you. For example: when you’re available, your nickname in IRC’s, or other contact information.
•    Steam ID page: Used mainly to contact you, so that others can add or message you just in case. You may also wish to keep your profile public whilst looking for a team.
And voila! Your new looking post is ready for the forums! Since the forums are usually visited on a very regular basis, your looking post does your work for you, and stays up until the day you die (or until you delete it, your choice).

THE SEARCH BUTTON IS YOUR FRIEND.

The forums aren’t just for looking posts though, I like to think of forums as an archive of information, kind of like a library with worse grammar and punctuation. So really, forums can store myriads of useful information; such as tips and tricks, preferable settings for game play, and how to improve your overall skill. And this is where my good friend the search button comes in. The search button is kind of like a Librarian to a Library; you’ll ask for a certain publication in a certain section, and it will give you the results of your search. Let’s look at a real world example!

Let’s say you’ve suddenly started seeing some strange glitches in your graphics while running Team Fortress, your computer seems to be overheating and you’re not quite sure what to do! So, instead of wasting everyone’s time with a new thread, you can use the search button! Eventually, you will probably find someone with the exact same problem that you’re having, and also that those “glitches” you’re seeing are called “artifacts”. You’ll probably also find out that you should stop over clocking your system, and aim for lower graphics quality for a better frame rate instead of working your PC (or MAC?) to death.

But be forewarned! There are those amongst us who are destined to give mis-information, manipulate your weak points, and just plain make fun of you. These people are frequently labeled as “Trolls”. You must know them and be aware!

BEWARE THE TROLL!!!

Usually, a person that is misinformed cannot see a troll on the spot, but hey that’s how you learn new things right? In any case, trolls are pretty common in the Team Fortress community for some reason, and that fact is increasingly baffling to myself. Nevertheless, there are a few tricks to spotting trolls…

1. CHECK YOUR SOURCES – If you’re asking for a suggestion and come upon an answer that just plain doesn’t make sense, or seems as though it would never work, 9/10 times you’re getting trolled. So make sure you do your research before implementing a plan from a random person.
2. CHECK NORMAL VOCABULARY – let’s say that someone is being a complete jerk and an obvious troll at first, and eventually they’ll apologize. Don’t be so quick to accept their apology! Sometimes they’re using other methods of trolling people, such as this (allegedly professional) ninja troll on the SNiGS forums.  If you can find the troll within post #30, then you don’t need to read any more of this.
3. UNBELEIVEABLE!!! – If you see a thread with some unbelievable news, and even a video link, make sure you read the comments before clicking it. Usually some people are nice enough to give away that it’s just a troll post. However, if it does happen to be a troll post and you fall for it, prepare to see a video that will either fill you with disappoint, disgust, confusion, or all of the above.

So that’s a pretty rough outline of how to spot troll posts, but stay on your toes, people are still coming up with new and crafty ways to keep trolling forums. And don’t forget, everyone falls for a troll post every now and then, so you might as well just get over it and learn from it instead of crying about it! Overall, we have to remember that forums are used for communication and documentation, so we would be wise to use them as intended.