I, as a new player, would love to see something like this for each class and on some of the harder maps to play for each class, one example could be a demo strategy for let's say, granary middle. I think a lot of demo's (myself included) struggle to figure out how to play granary middle effectively.

because theorycrafting is fucking dumb, there's literally an infinite number of possibilities to some shit strategy.

"yo what if we ran our medic as a DR spy disguised as our medic and then they killed our 'medic' but not really then he stabs them holy shit good shit guys lets touch dicks then play dota"

Go read that "Pyro" thread for more fun examples of theorycrafting.

HA nvm he said high level players.

http://i.imgur.com/dVBOY.jpg

me when I theorycraft

I don't mean theorycraft like "If you airblast their soldier and he shoots a rocket at you AFTER you already airblasted, back off. You gave yourself extra distance by airblasting him so you have a chance to escape and get healed up."

I'm talking about strategy, not how to 1v1 a scout as a demo.

gullywash last pyro strat can work

you don't see them because teams aren't going to give up their strats they've worked to develop.

yea but same goes for sc2...they aren't quick to reveal their personal strats but they at least outline basic ones for the newbies.

there are so many situations that occur in this game, the article/guide would be long as hell. i'm down for this idea either way

Thps push-around on granary still best strat ever.
The thing about strategies in tf2 is that they are only effective for a round or two in a game before the other team comes up with a counter to it. coming up with strategies on the fly based on how your opponent is playing is normally more effective than making up a bunch before you play.

how about you spend your time thinking about theory in real life, like, IRL theorycrafting?????

Daydreaming about frag videos is much better.

But aside from a generic mid guide teams should have their strats private. It's all about forcing a new meta.

10 depot
12 rax
15 cc
15 oc
16 depot

tf2 equivalent - go2mid dontmiss

oc before second cc is better

u stole that strat from acidrenix u dirty noob

It's kind of hard to theorycraft tf2 due to the DM element. Theoretically one guy could ace a whole team if he was good enough.

The kinds of things where theorycrafting works best are in games where there is an underlying mechanic that can be uncovered, mathematically reasoned/modeled, and exploited. Games that come to mind are WoW, DotA, SC2, etc., since these all have a strong numerical aspect (stats, resource allocation). TF2 is more of a timing, spatial positioning, coordination and deathmatching game, so you can't really quantify builds that "work better" since every strategy works with varying success against different teams with different strengths (or even against the same team, with the difference of one guy hitting his shots or making one good play).

"K guys, we're going to distract the other team as ruwin kills everyone."

Are you guys saying those Sigma articles aren't super helpful to newer teams? They are technically theorycraft, but the things he writes about are still very applicable during actual gameplay. Anything that would promote/facilitate the writing of those types of articles is great.

And there's still nothing wrong with having a section where people can just throw out niche strategies and maybe some ideas as to where and when they might be useful. Coming up with completely new tactics on the spot is very hard; it's much easier for players to a build a repetoire of random strats and then try and apply one to their current situation. Sure you'll get some (or maybe a lot of) dumb ones like having your medic go spy, but you might also get some good ones too, which is worth it imo.

To be fair, though, this isn't a bad idea. You can say that discussing strategy is pointless because the difference between one person hitting their shots or not can make a good strategy fail or a bad strategy succeed, and compared to rts games, the degree to which this happens is much greater. Still, you can pick good builds all you want in sc2, but if you fail your micro horrendously, you'll lose (equivalent of whiffing your shots in tf2). Coming up with things on the fly has a lot of value and is probably the best way to play (particularly since it means they'll have to come up with a counter on the fly), and if you understand the game well, you can make coordinated pushes just with a call of "go left" or "go around them".

Still, many people don't understand the game that well and don't ever do anything other than "uber through choke -> scouts watch flank". If for nothing but a paradigm shift, a discussion of some of the "weirder" plays that get run might be helpful -- overloading flank, ball pushing, showing the combo and suiciding, 2-4 man suicides, routes to push and re-push, wraparounds, going mid through house/valley/choke, forward holds, playing gpit .... I think at the very least, guides detailing some of these might be helpful, but I would be wary of the value of a debate on it, since that might just boil down to "well if this scout goes here and hits his shots while you miss, you're screwed" which is univerally true.

Build orders are completely different from something like rollouts. Very often once your team gets to mid, the decision on what you're going to do on said rollout changes due to a myriad of possibilities.

"Set build orders" rarely change. I do understand that you said the example you provided is simple, and that players are required to adapt etc, but it still won't be as effective as something like a build order (imo). I guess it could work in the way that build orders typically have a transition into the mid-late game, where doing x on a rollout can allow you to do y on rollout, but that's me just speculating.

Obviously if people want to do it they shouldn't feel discouraged. Previous posts probably say this better but that's my 2c.

sigma, that's true but does it warrant an entirely new section of the forums?

Perhaps it doesn't. I don't imagine there would be many threads there, and any good ones would more-than-likely be better off as guides in the eventual "how to play tf2" tab. The benefit would be that if there was a valuable discussion to be had, then it being in its own section would prevent it from being buried in the mass of topics from general discussion.

As I was writing this, I had the brilliant idea of reviving the "ask a mentor" section from the commft forums over here, since it did have some decent threads and newbies asking questions mixes well with people writing guides or wanting to discuss a play. Then I went to the forum index and realized we already have "TF2 Help". Just put these threads in there!

RIP commft, it had some great guides

i perfected it 8)

there is more than one way to play (i mean play good)
my team has good gamesense but we have some more aggressive players than others so we lost people/pushes sometimes for that
the best thing u can have is a team with the same gameplay style
and fuck strats