gg trukaraptor, sorry for the sentry. Our scout said he'd switch back when he died, but then he didn't :(

This is the cutest HUD I've ever seen and I seriously need it in my life.

I'm pretty excited to play my first season in Open.

It looks like we're getting the official "welcome to open, fuckers" greeting bright and early with our first match against some pretty good gamers. What's the record for the fastest match loss? :D

Honestly scrims were pretty awful today (one of the things I came to enjoy about 6s was how non-cluttered it was, and with every soldier running the cowmang with its awful-looking lazor beems and off-classes it certainly felt a lot more cluttered and, well... a lot like HL, which I left, partially because it was so cluttered). But I imagine that after a while the lazor weapon meme is going to pass and people might start settling down.

I mean. I guess I don't want to act like it's the end of the world because there are pretty valid reasons for wanting to try this, but it just kind of blows that it's happening during my first real season of 6s when I was just beginning to feel comfortable on my new class. =/

Also lower-level 6s are going to be a total shit-show.

I have a terrible absolutely-not-for-long-time-computer-use fancy designer chair so I always bring my leg up to rest my mouse hand on my knee like an arm rest. No that's not good for me.

I legit have "gamer socks" that I don't wear for any other purpose because I'm afraid I'll wear them out and then that comfort would be gone D:

I played with bleh for two seasons of HL and one of 6s when he lead and kinda mentored our team of friends. I actually initially ended up picking him up on my old HL team because, after he added me for a tryout, we ended up accidentally running into each other in a pug and he was super chill and positive even though the teams were really unbalanced. So I knew that this was someone I absolutely needed on my team - you get a lot of tryouts who fake a nice personality in their tryout and then bring out their real negative attitude later on. But he's genuinely a really nice person - and on top of that he's a really smart gamer even though he loves to pretend that he's not. And he's a fragger on basically every class. Give him a tryout, he deserves a good team.

Thank you to everyone involved in this! This honestly felt like an incredibly unique experience, between the chemistry with the analysts and casters, as well as their knowledge of both the game and the players. The little ribs and jokes just kinda made it a really cool and personalized production.

And yes of course there were technical issues, there always are, but this was just... great. Really great.

I... am honestly not ok with that. I say this as someone who has extremely weak DM skills (for various reasons, which include RSI in both hands from work that prevents me from being able to play this game for more than two hours at a time without taking painkillers) and most of the reasons for why better teams played with me in the past was because of my calls and game sense, so I actually would fall into the category of someone who "doesn't excel in technical skill but is very good (well.... relatively) tactically".

I'm really really not ok with the implication that there's now an opportunity to get to the top by either being really good at DM or really good at calling, not both, as it currently is. I think the current limitation on what it takes to be at the top (being both smart and mechanically proficient) is good. I'm not saying that coaches are going to be like the brain of the whole team of braindead DM lords or whatever, I know it's not possible to think THAT hard for someone else, but it will still reduce the individual intelligence and decision-making required to play on a top team, and it will also devalue the intelligence aspect while elevating the importance of DM (which I think is the exact opposite of what you're hoping to achieve).

Coaches who can sit with their team and spectate the match through your plugin/listen to comms silently and provide input during pauses/half-times/whatever are totally fine though, and if someone wants to do that then all the power to them. Being involved in comms and real-time decision-making (as kaidus said he did) is I think where most of the community draws the line.

Disclaimer, I absolutely am not trying to make any statement about Crowns' victory, they just took advantage of an opportunity that was given to them and IMO being salty about how they won and saying shit like they "didn't deserve it" after it already happened is kinda dumb. Congrats to them on their hard-fought victory.

But I don't want to see this sort of coaching again in competitive TF2.

Woof

[*] I went in not really caring who to cheer for at i58 but they were so, so entertaining to watch that I got transformed into a believer, hoping they could bring it all the way to a win.

It was the reason why dreamhack didn't have time to go into a 5th map, was an argument about allowing coaches or something like that. They made the announcement that coaches were going to be allowed at i58.

Kaidus is trying to compensate for his physical inability to play the game. I mean on the one hand I feel for the guy, I have RSI too from work and I'm starting to consider how I'm going to feel where I can't play anymore. But on the other hand it's kind of a huge advantage to have a 7th player who's over-seeing your whole team, who can stabilize the team around that perspective rather than having to piece together 6 players' perspectives. I don't know if this is a necessary addition to TF2.

From one low-level medic to another: feel free to inform your team that they are all very low health and need to consider backing the hell out. Your teammates are a lot less likely to be aware that they're all piss-poor health than you, so they might just be thinking, oh, I'm the only one hurt we can keep fighting. No. Tell them "we have bad heals/positioning (it's usually both when you're starting out because the second your teammates start taking damage they start shrinking back to their medic and suddenly you're all on low ground with poor health), we need to leave". You can call that you're tanking either a demo or a soldier to lay covering fire and the rest of you need to GTFO without taking damage.

You can also kind of start to see if you can recognize a pattern where healing one player is more important than another. Like say you're all low health near a choke - you probably want to have your spammy classes as healthy as possible so that they can spam out that choke and hold off the other team, giving you some breathing room, time to grab some health packs and whatever. Maybe you're backing out completely, so it's better for you, the medic, to heal the scouts so you can back up faster and also have them healthy enough to deny anyone who attempts to jump you or your teammates. Etc. I can't really give advice on this because I'm bad myself so you'd probably be better off asking a more experienced mentor.

If your teammates are making you pressured by bitching at you, seriously, either tell them to shut up or no joke go find a new team that's more mature. Med is already stressful, nobody has any right to make it any worse by trying to sway your decision for the sake of their own stats when they're probably fucking up just as much as you (by taking damage they shouldn't be). They need to learn that they are playing as a TEAM and sometimes it means giving up your own health to tank someone more useful. Like one of the things me (the demo) and my pocket are working on now is rotating aggression and heals so that we're not taking the same spam damage and that lets our medic have a clear understanding of whom he needs to tank at any given time. Ideally everyone on the team is constantly thinking about how many heals they're taking up and how to spread it out so that your team is always functioning at the best intersection between good aggression and good health.

I play TF2 because I'm too afraid to pursue my dream.

I mean, ok, taking that back, I started playing TF2 when I was in a really bad place in my life with severe undiagnosed depression and working two jobs and finishing my degree, which was like, slowly sapping my will to live. So TF2 took care of that. Now I got help, graduated, finally got a job that I really enjoy and that has decent career prospects.

But I can't bring myself to pick up the thing I love. I drew and told stories since I was very very young, my mother still has collections of shit I made up and stories she taped me telling when I was a toddler and could barely talk. But every time I pull out my binders of notes again all I can see is how everything is below my expectations, how there are so many mistakes in my designs, how my stories could be fancier, more fascinating and interesting and I worry about the fact that someone is going to look at it and go "oh, so this is just like this other story I read somewhere, only worse". So I just go and do the job that's safe (ironically, one that has me working with people who DID take the step and actually produced something) and then come home to play TF2 and read and forget that I have all these binders of ideas that I'm too afraid to actually commit to.

Bump! Had some tryouts with nice people, but I would like some more!

I guess I'm also willing to try out medic for a good team. I am a much better med than demo though so, my standards for teams are a bit higher. I've played med seriously only in HL but I also have a lot of pug experience. My game sense on medic is pretty good, so once I adjust to playing it in 6s I believe I would do really well. Still mostly interested in demo but, I guess I'll keep my options open.

I forgot to mention but, I'm an adult with a job, so I can pay for myself as well as pay for a scrim server and mumble and all that. I might be able to pay for someone else too but, my job isn't that good :3