I'm inclined to think it is the point, actually. But thank god men sublimate to the extent that they make space stations instead of just buying stripey shirts.

Too bad astronauts aren't as pretty as David Bowie. I bet that guy got back to Earth and had a hard time getting any from his wife within three weeks.

Mr. Slin took the time to help me get set up and gave me his overlay file the first time I used Mumble. Thanks, Mr Slin, and happy birthday.

I wish I still had some of the old Polish demos from when rail killed spawning players instantly. I remember one round on cpm1 between Krogoth and Venom that I had to slow down to even follow. I guess cpm1a is a bit cramped for the best players, but it's a lot of fun otherwise. I always thought of it as "The Bad Place" of Q3.

What happened to cpm1a?

I played some CPMA way back in its heyday, and actually got to know a lot of the better NA players- I was pretty terrible at it though. I eventually realized that with the hardware I had at the time it was going to be hard to get all that much better (I was getting 10-20 fps a lot of the time.)

But the other thing is that the player-base was uniformly really skilled. Even with my 10-20 fps I could stomp most VQ3 DM servers, but I remember just getting destroyed by people like Apheleon, over and over. Every once in a while new players I could play against would show up, but they would leave really quickly, because they were getting destroyed too.

I didn't know people were still playing CPMA, and I'd be psyched to play, now that I have hardware that can handle it, even if I just got destroyed over and over. But I am a glutton for punishment. I will play against much better players until they get bored with beating me 35 to -2 at duel, because I figure that has to eventually make me better. Most of my friends would just drop the game after a beating or two though. And unlike TF2, CPMA has very little in it that lets weaker players have some chance against stronger ones.

I'd love to see CPMA have a renaissance, but it seems like a tough game to get into if the only people you have to play against are people who have been playing it since 2002.

EDIT: But yeah, I am going to see if I can dig up my old Q3 CD and I'd love to play if you don't mind that I haven't played in a long time, suck, and probably can't remember how to bunny. I played some QL a couple of years ago, and even had a pro account for a while, that I never used because no one I knew wanted to play. Now that they have made QL so unfriendly to F2Ps I think it would be great if there were a resurgence of real servers.

Yeah, the ping is not so bad from Eastern NA. I was pinging around 85-100, though it felt a little laggier than that. Had to switch off Demo to Scout, but then it was very playable. Nice server. I'll pop back in from time to time. Thanks!

EDIT: And I should add that I realized afterward that I had a download going in the background.

"Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?"

That was really a lot of fun, if kind of humbling. Boy do I have a lot to learn. Thanks to everyone involved, and especially Brad and Eldritch for the coaching.

Ah, that's cool. I do kind of feel like I need to work on one or two maps at a time, just to cement things.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to make it to a mix soon, hopefully this Friday. I would have played last time, but I was way too ill. I'm not in touch with frkn, but he gave he a link to some STV demos of last LAN upthread, which was greatly appreciated. I was really sick over the weekend, but I spent a little while watching mixup's rollouts on Badlands at 50% speed, along with other parts of the match.

I'm at a tricky stage in my tf2 development. I have about 100 hours of play-time, basically 75% Solly, 25% Scout. When I play on average pubs I often stomp pretty hard, but when I play on good pubs I sometimes do OK, and sometimes get stomped myself. And when I stomp, and then watch demos of me stomping, I realize that I am terribad, but the other team is terribadder. I'm not really good enough to play 6s at this point, but...

I like tf2, and it's the game my friends/co-workers play. But I've played enough now that I think I'd enjoy a more coordinated, skill-based format, even if I get stomped a lot. I got on a pub that's usually pretty reasonable the other day, on Granary. In our yard (we were defending last) were two wrangled 3s. We had 5 engies on our team, plus some spies and snipers. The other team looked like it was about the same, and there was an epic wrangler vs sniper battle going on. I didn't stay long enough to find out how it turned out.

So, since I know that in pugs, and even in newbie mixes, there are going to be a lot of people who are a lot better than me at dm and movement the quickest way for me to get as viable as possible is to know where to be and what to do. I really need to work on the movement too, as I think that's going to improve much more quickly with practice than the dm.

You guys are definitely very chill and friendly. Even though I haven't done one yet, thanks for running the newbie mixes. I sometimes feel like tf2 is a good game hidden inside a bad game (the bad game is the one with five engies per team) and I'd like to play the good one, but it's hard to break into. I'm never going to be an invite-level player, but I think it would be cool if there were pugs and even very casual leagues for less-skilled players to play the good game in.

I just wrote a couple of my friends about the mixes, and hopefully they will make it to some in the near-future too.

I might start asking some questions about what I am seeing in the demos I am watching (wish they had comms) in the help forum. There's a lot I don't understand. But I do kind of feel like STV demos are a lot more useful than vids, since they let you see things at variable speed from lots of perspectives.

This much, at least, I have figured out. But it leaves a lot of questions I shouldn't ask here, and can't because I am at the character limit. Sorry if I rambled... antihistamines ftw.

Thanks again.

I've not even played in a mix yet, let alone have the experience running them that you guys have, but I have a couple of ideas about helping people be better prepared for them, from the perspective of someone trying to figure out what he most needs to know. I don't mean to be presumptuous. And since I don't have that experience some of what I am thinking might be wrong or stupid, but I'll put it out there.

One thing I think might help is if you announced well ahead of time a map to be played on a given night. That way people could concentrate on being ready for that map in particular. This would particularly help if you're going to play the custom maps. You just about never see snakewater or process played in pubs, so I have very little experience with them.

Another thing that I think might help is to record demos of the rollouts you plan on using, as a full team, and make them available. I've been looking at some of the Badlands rollouts in the demos that frkn gave me a link to (thank you very much for that) and it's really different watching the full team roll-out (at 50% speed,) and how they co-ordinate it than watching a Youtube video that just shows some soldier jumps. On top of that the rollouts they are using are very different from what I've seen demonstrated on Youtube for Soldier rollouts, which never really mention equalizing. And then there's trying to figure out why they are rolling out a certain way, and positioning themselves in a certain way at mid... some kind of guidance like "ideally this Scout winds up here to protect the demoman, so he can concentrate on spamming these spots," etc., would also help.

And watching those demos has raised a lot of questions for me- there's a lot in them I don't understand. This is the wrong thread to ask those questions in, but maybe it would make sense to have a forum somewhere for people planning to play in newbie mixes to ask questions in, since it's a lot easier to answer things before the mix than during it. I don't really want to jump into the main forums here and start asking a whole bunch of things that are probably obvious to anyone who has played 6s much, though.

I've been starting to do pretty well in a lot of pubs lately, but I know that once I start playing even newbie mixes it's going to be a humbling, if not a bit humiliating thing for a while. I'd like to prepare as well as I can, and reduce the "unknown unknowns" as much as I can, but it's a bit bewildering. It seems to me that having some resources outside the mixes to help people prepare for them, and give them a better idea of what they ought to know coming in would help. Sorry this got so long.

Well, I hope you can keep finding people to coach, as I'd really like to come to a newbie mix. I was going to last night, but I've been sick lately, and I was feeling really bad last night.

I play with a group of people that I work with- we play Lan in the office one night a week every week, and play a fair bit on other nights. The range of skill in the office is pretty wide. I'm the best player (mainly because I played some qw, and q3 and CPMA at one point,) but there are a couple of other people who are getting better. We're a little tired of pub nonsense at this point, and we're getting interested in playing something more organized.

I do think that our skill level is probably pretty low compared to the average pug, and we're limited in the classes we play. I've played mainly soldier, and my movement could be a lot better. And the other two mainly play Scout. I've been playing a bit of Scout lately too. None of us are good at demoman. So we're definitely not at a point where we could jump into #tf2mix, though I do plan on speccing some pugs there.

So I'd definitely like to play in a newbie mix, to start getting a feel for how the 6v6 game is played.

One thing I am a bit confused over is demos. I'd really like to find some demos of the best invite teams that let you switch to any POV on the team, so I can watch things like roll-outs and mid-fights from each perspective to try to get a feel for everything happening. Back when I played Quake they used to post demos of pretty much every match. But I haven't been able to find an archive of demos for the recent ESEA seasons, for instance.