#Team Fortress 2 multiplayer

[terengineer]

https://youtu.be/biDGWmaG3lE New chick the link video!

@terengineer

[zarla-s]

TF2 Casual is still a bot wasteland (the petition's at 285k+ signatures currently and valve has said nothing) but every now and then you run into another real person which I consider a personal victory, haha. Under these conditions what else can you do, there isn't any other way to win! Shout out to you, CRINGE-ineer gaming, wherever you are.

Remember to go to save.tf and sign the petition if you haven't already! And if you still can lol. The bot hosters are big mad about the #fixtf2 tag right now from what I've been seeing in casual.

[patreon]

[randomtheidiot]

Name a more iconic group.

[ideaticaphelion]

puyo puyo tetris is a pvp game, i think everybody would agree, in which two players compete at independent tasks wherein success at ones task hinders the others ability to succeed

team fortress 2 payload race pits two teams against one another with both having the same end goal; they desire more or less the same result and are only "competing" to have done the best at that by the end. like they have a "canon" reason to fight but thats not important. this is also pvp i think we can all agree again - and if you disagree with my reasoning, we can instead turn to operation (1965), in which the end goal is unquestionably "to collectively remove all of the ailments from cavity sam" while still being unarguably pvp

in many competitions (i.e. archery, curling, etc) the end of the game is not determined by when a player gets a certain number of points, but by time or a certain number of attempts by each player or whatnot

as such, an experience where players are performing individual, separate tasks, which can make the game more difficult for the other players when performed successfully, and where all players have the same end goal, which is judged at the end of a certain length of time, is pvp, yes?

most asymmetrical multiplayer games offer up the idea that one party can hinder the other, while the other cannot respond in kind, while still being considered pvp; see "among us", among any number of other examples

now, consider The Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off; a competitor in this competition (or "pvp match") has no real agency in their own victory (on account of being a pumpkin), while still being a competitor (or "player") in the game.

if we agree that the above is true, then we must agree that a contest consisting of two players performing completely different tasks, in which one party may obstruct the other through their own success, both players having a shared victory condition of "most success within a set time period" (rather than "defeating" the other), even if there are competitors that don't necessarily have any agency in how well they perform, is a pvp game

therefore, if we were to start scoring pregnancy,

[www-bestiemme]

Recently read all the tf2 comics and wanted to practice drawing them. Still trying to figure em out not 100% satisfied yet

[yankaze]

scout Yan

[orangesoda63]

(SFM) Level MP Logic

[tf2]

Payload! Getting a thing to a place by standing near it! What do you think about it?

Please reblog if you feel so inclined!

[lunion]

A lot of people talk about online toxicity in online games like TF2. I don't see as many people talking about things such as this match I played today, where a player was racist in the chat, 10 seconds later he was votekicked out of the server by unanimity as everyone just said "good riddance".

A lot of people may be quiet and not stand up (and they probably should), but honestly, I still see a lot of good elsewhere as well.

[cluelessatthispoint]

There were like three spies...3!!! Way too many.

[burningexeter]

I guess you could say this is probably the only good thing to come out of whatever the hell Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was but it got me thinking since it wasted such a fun as hell concept —

I now want to see something like this, a big ass and full-on crossover movie where Los Angeles, California or Manhattan, New York (either one of those two) is under attack by alien forces and our U.S. Government has no choice or as a last resort to round up and force against their wills all of these numerous different heroes and villains to go in and clean this shit up or else.

Have it not only be what Battle: Los Angeles tried and wanted to be but pretty much failed miserably at but also be that type of grand scale, epic in size and scope fun that movies such as The Mummy (1999), Pacific Rim, Guardians Of The Galaxy, The Rock and even Armageddon all had.

[terengineer]

https://youtu.be/HeLHd2JS3_g New chick the link video! @terengineer

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Top 47K - Team Fortress 2

Join the HG101 gang as they discuss and rank the wildly popular sequel to a 90s Quake mod.

[kellanved-ammanas]

I have just over 80 hours on Pyro and I'm just now finally starting to get a feel for reflecting projectiles. And like the radius on it is so much bigger than I ever would've thought. Like, rockets that are going to go right past me, I can reflect apparently because I've done it multiple times now on accident. Its range is longer than I thought too because what I always felt was a little too early to right click, is actually apparently the time to do it. I guess, in hindsight it makes sense that its rang and size are fairly large because having it be that big makes it much more useful.

But like for so long I assumed it only worked immediately in front of Pyro. So that's the only time I tried to do it, resulting in me getting hit most of the time. That not being the case is cool though and fuels my new mission in TF2 to get better at it because it's actually a bit easier than I'd thought for so long. Is there hope for me to ever be properly good at it? ... Probably not. But that's okay. My main goal in the playing the game is to have fun, even if getting better is part of said fun, it's not everything.

[txttletale]

How is it possible that, in a multiplayer game, a character can be useless in pro gameplay but good in casual gameplay?

sometimes, it's because there are specific aspects of organized team play that are not technically 'inside the game' but render the character useless. for example, bastion from overwatch (pre-his ow2 rework) was a character whose gimmick was being able to do huge amounts of damage at the cost of being unable to move. the spy in team fortress 2 can kill people and then pretend to be them. these are both pretty strong in casual games when nobody is on voice comms, but in pro (or even high-level casual) games where everyone is in a voice chat together and communicating constantly, it's really easy to say "bastion is top right, flank him" or "the spy just got me".

a lot of strategies like this, that rely on surprise or deception (or, in games like league, poor map vision and awareness) get drastically worse the higher level play is, and so the same is true for character who are built around them.

another factor is skill expression -- basically, how many ways you have as a good player to leverage your skill for more impact. characters with extremely high mechanical variance, like widowmaker in overwatch, are going to vary wildly between a good player and a bad player, because the character requires you to consistently get headshots to get any value whatsoever. characters with higher skill expression are inevitably going to get better and better as you climb the ranks, eventually overtaking characters with low skill expression.

so, for example, characters in mobas or shooters who can get guaranteed value without having to aim or land a skillshot or position well have a guaranteed floor of value they're always going to bring to the team, no matter how bad the player playing them is. take junkrat from overwatch, whose primary form of landing damage is spamming bouncing grenades down chokepoints. a bad player is capable of doing this and getting, while not the most possible value from him (there is always going to be some level of skill expression where there is interactivity), a reasonable amount of value from him, whcih makes him disproportionately good in a lobby where everyone is bad but playing a character with a lower skill floor.

and this is good for the game! it is good for brand new players (or casual players who don't care about being good at the game) to have characters they can pick and reliably give their team value no matter how bad they are. it is good to introduce characters who can do insane things if you're really good at the game and give your higher tiers of play more complexity.

[artbyblastweave]

Recently a post has been doing the rounds about military propaganda in the latest COD, yea yeah, sky’s blue, fork in kitchen, et al et al. This got me thinking about the shooters I actually play, and one thing that strikes me about the multiplayer shooters I play is that a lot of them dodge that same major discourse bullet by expressly grounding themselves in amorality and Kafka-esque dysfunction- a structural fingerwag towards their own content, acting as a paradoxical green-light to enjoy the game with no sense of moral injury. And there’s a big example of one that didn’t do this that kinda winds up with egg on its face as a result. 

To start with, I’m thinking about Team Fortress 2. The original Team Fortress, inasmuch as it’s possible for a game where you shoot each other with real firearms to be apolitical, was fairly apolitical. The soldiers had no markers of identity beyond their arbitrary team affiliation; the fighting was over no discernable real-life resource or point of political tension; the environments were decontextualized labs and facilities. It was platonic violence. 

Team Fortress 2 rolls around. Now that the general novelty of a 3d multiplayer class shooter has eroded, development stalls out on the following aesthetic problem; you can’t have semi-realistic militaristic character models rocket-jumping themselves across the map in the early 2000s. The cartoonishness is too dissonant when you’ve got similar semi-realistic militaristic characters in much more “grounded” games. Eventually they resolve this by taking the other tack, leaning into the cartoonishness, crafting character models so completely bombastic and over the top that no action taken in gameplay, no matter how absurd, will ever feel dissonant. This philosophy extends into the map design; the environments are farcical. Military instillations built mere yards from each other, with paper-thin pretenses of being civilian facilities despite the constant gun battles occurring inside. It’s self parody. And when the game extends to the point of having lore and worldbuilding, the idiocy becomes diegetic. This is a conflict fought on the behalf of idiots, by idiots, over idiot-goals, in spaces designed by idiots. It’s completely amoral, but it’s also contained amorality, since the fighting doesn’t spill out of these Helleresque Designated Pointless Fight Zones- and that leaves the mercs sympathetic enough that you can play them as protagonists in stories that take place “off-the-clock” without a ton of tonal dissonance. I can’t stress enough that the TF2 protagonists are amoral PMCs who work for callous megacorps. In a vacuum, this is not a well-regarded Kind Of Guy around here. There is some implementation of this broad concept that would invite a shitload of discourse that I’ve never seen materialize!

A lot of hero-or-character-based multiplayer games do this, abandoning any pretense of player heroism or productivity in the conceit in a way that shields them from a lot of moral and logical criticisms. Apex Legends and Monday Night Combat are explicitly in-universe bloodsports. Atlas Reactor and Rogue Company are cyberpunk corp-on-corp warfare. Dirty Bomb is about loosely affiliated mercenaries picking over the remains of an evacuated city. I think that Valorant is PMCs in a resource war (Not completely sure on this one.) The never-released Battlecry was expressly tied to actual nation-states, an alternate history where great powers fight wars via singularly-powerful champions instead of via traditional warfare. And in Battleborn the PCs were a hastily-assembled coalition of smaller hastily-assembled coalitions, which means that it makes perfect sense that any combination of these people might be fighting alongside or against each other, at any given time.

Here we see commonalities. Amoral participants. Larger governing bodies delineating clear fight zones centered on specific, if deliberately silly or petty, goals. Most crucially, PCs that are very loosely affiliated with each other, such that you’d see them in different configurations, fight to fight, day to day, as they’re contracted or shuffled around by the powers that be.

You know a game that doesn’t do any of this? Overwatch. 

Overwatch gets 80% of the way to being a superhero universe; it falls short primarily because Blizzard chose not to explicitly market it as such, but it’s got everything short of the purposeful brand designation- powered heroes, super science, codenames, Faceless Hydraesque terrorist groups with shadowy, powered enforcers. There are specific allegiances implied by this; specific policy and interpersonal goals implied by this that aren’t really reflected in six-on-six grudge matches in a smattering of inexplicably depopulated civilian environments. There are roughly half-a-dozen villains associated with Talon, four or five independent villainous mercenaries, and everyone else is a would-be superhero. Why is most of the core roster of the world’s premier superhero team performing some kind of terror attack in London? Why is a woman who murdered a civil rights leader trying to stop them, with the help of two avowed anti-Omnic mercenaries and three Omnics? Why did a cryogenics researcher weaponize her tech and come along for the ride? Why are a dozen envoys from tech conglomerates, grassroots movements, and paramilitary defense forces throwing down over a Gazebo in a charming Greek resort? Fuck if I know. Fuck if the writers know!

So, to round it out, I think that there’s a structural difficulty for multiplayer shooters to stand for something, or advance a philosophy, or whatever. The smart ones embrace this by shielding themselves in ablative nihilism, preemptively deflecting criticism by painting the gameplay as hollow and barbaric, but fun! But Overwatch- Overwatch 2′s tagline is “Get back in the fight.” What Fight? Why? Against Who? Call Of Duty might be a horrific mouthpiece for militarism and imperialism, but when it valorizes the military, it’s at least picking a side! Overwatch is just so strange to me because it’s somehow got the worst of both worlds- it uses these heroic, aspirational language and visuals to hype up a gameplay loop that’s ultimately the exact same kind of cynical, aimless abattoir as the games that are smart enough to explicitly be about amoral paid killers!