The easiest way to do this would be to making an outrageously loud hitsound (huge gain in audacity or something similar), which would destroy audio quality, and turn down game volume a lot. It's not a good idea to begin with though, positional audio is really important for competitive games. Any better performance when not listening to the game was probably a fluke or a placebo effect, you're better off with sound on.

It looks like more of a problem with the config then your graphics card, as if the models were bugging out. Try setting r_rootlod to 0.

This exactly.

When I had ~1500 hours in the game pubbing, I started playing on the TG MGE server religiously, thinking that it was the "purest" form of DM, etc, and racked up what must be at least 600 hours on spire before starting to play inhouses/mixes. Since then I haven't really played much MGE or DM, but what I can say is this:

Playing any kind of mod or alternate gamemode in a game only really makes you better at that mod or that gamemode. Sure, it might make you better at the really low-level things, like putting your crosshair on someone and clicking at the right time, but that is usually made up for in the amount it changes how you expect people to react to a given action on your part. I.E, if I were to somehow get into the implausible scenario that both I and another soldier had 300hp on either side of spire, and neither of us had people on our team to help, there would still be other factors, the perceived difference in the time it would take for one team to arrive and the other team, who was attacking the point, etc. Even how people jump, in a straight 1v1, when you jump another soldier, if your aren't focusing on making your strafes as unintelligible as possible, you will get airshot because of how the other person is probably paying 100% attention to hitting you.

I'm not trying to say that MGE and DM are useless, not at all, just that if you think grinding 100 hours into it will make you win more DM fights in a 6v6 scenario, you're probably wrong. MGE and DM are great warmups, but I've found that if I play one for more than an hour before a scrim I miss more shots and make more stupid mistakes then I would otherwise.

tl;dr MGE and DM for warmups, don't grind it out hoping it will magically make you better

http://puu.sh/4gJl5.png

It has almost rained every day for the last week.

I'd be less inclined to bandwagon against indust if I had played a pug with him where he didn't leave 2 rounds in within the last 2 months.

You're being -fragged because the ugc forums are a much better place to recruit for ugc. The recruitment subforum is mostly oriented towards ESEA.

http://puu.sh/4fHau.jpg

The cursor and time machine run is well underway.

The problem with the pistol/smg ideal is that it relies on a standard distribution to be the least bit reliable, and given that over a sufficient number of trials it displays this, it's perfectly suitable for a game. The problem is that because it is still random, it won't always have that standard distribution. The smg is generally better then the pistol in that regard because first of all, it has a tighter spread, which is unimportant from a statistical perspective, but also that it fires faster/more. In a perfectly comp-centric world, the pistol could have a mechanic that worked as a sort of cone, shaped similarly to the maximum spread that is has now, and calculate damage based off of how close the center is to the target, taking into account range, whether or not part of the cone is blocked, etc. This would require an entirely new mechanic, which is not something that valve is in any way going to do. The closest alternative would be to increase fire rate/clip size dramatically, and decrease damage to scale, so that the spread is more even/reliable over a given amount of damage (if that makes any sense). None of this is likely to happen, however, without substantial (if simple and easy) modding of the game, or some unforeseen level of Valve catering to competitive.

tl;dr could easily be fixed by making spread more statistically stable.

I've never really liked dance music, but it has a pretty cool bass line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNBIf7WVQyk

I just really like the guitar in this.

Has someone compiled a map pack yet? If not I'll make one.

Also, just gonna point out that people have managed to play at pretty competitive levels on bad hardware, but a mouse is still a must, I can't imagine doing complicated jumps or movement with a trackpad.

cool in mumble and good personality, loves his capslock key

Oh, I entirely missed that menu. Well, thanks for pointing that out, should be helpful.

It looks like it would have some odd sightlines into lobby from forward spawn, would make sniping from there a little too dominant IMO.