joshuawn
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Signed Up February 7, 2014
Last Posted April 5, 2025 at 2:22 AM
Posts 598 (0.1 per day)
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#14 To all MGE lords in TF2 General Discussion

before anything else, i think it's important to lay out the general framework for optimal MGE matches. arena-specific advice can only follow by knowing the matchup & the type of fight in play.

each fight of an MGE set should be strategically categorized in one of three ways:
1) the first fight -- determine the nash equilibrium (which is usually, but not always, the center of the arena based on your spawn relative to your opponent's) and then immediately begin the fight from said position, readjusting view angle & character placement based on your (im)precision & your opponent's (im)precision (i.e. damage dealt/received and, more importantly, expected damage to deal/receive). this ideology is the most straight-forward for scout vs scout, but it holds true for nearly every single matchup save for possibly demo vs any class, as demo usually performs better the farther back he can hold. it can be tricky to determine the nash equilibrium for scout vs soldier as either role, but the best advice i can give is to not underestimate having low ground as a soldier if you have prior knowledge that the scout is clumsy or tends to play imbalanced (usually in the forms of playing extremely widely or double-jumping very naively). on the flip-side, it's important for scouts to constantly attempt to get a view-angle advantage over their opponents unless they have a reactionary &/or predictive advantage over their opponent (the element of surprise).

the other two categories are very match-up & arena -oriented, but the most important mentality to have across both is to think about influencing your opponent in the long-term so you can better predict what he's going to do in future matches. going onward as generally as possible...

2) won the last fight -- establish and maintain momentum by identifying view-angle discrepancies between spawns (e.g. you're playing scout and the soldier spawns perpendicular to you looking at the center of the arena whereas you're looking right at him). utilize your first-shot speed advantage (but be wary of having less ammo than your opponent on respawn if you used a hitscan weapon to kill your opponent in the last match) and plan to close distance.

3) lost the last fight -- utilize your greater ammo count if you have a hitscan weapon &/or re-angle your opponent as uncomfortably as possible to break momentum. this is the most physical of all the fights, but prediction is still a major factor. for instance, if you're playing scout & your opponent tends to have a passive-range of movement, approach it like a spy & jump/double-jump behind him to flip the view-angle discrepancy in your favor. at the same time, if your opponent overly predicts hyper-angular play, punish with a tight-aggressive playstyle by moving slightly diagonally into said opponent. always play around with depth-perception: move backwards to amplify angular discrepancies and then follow-up by squeezing in between shots to maximize damage dealt & minimize (but not necessarily negate) damage received. mobility is extremely important to factor when reestablishing momentum; sloppy movement can exhaust you & waste your efforts in otherwise close fights. most importantly, realize that it's completely normal to lose multiple fights in a row in MGE. momentum can be very hard to overcome, with ammomod arguably being the hardest arena when said momentum is against you.

playing into view-angle discrepancies & deceiving your opponent, you don't necessarily have to stare at your opponent while you fight him. the whole romanticism of "tracking" your opponent is naive at best: most weapons don't fire a continuous stream of bullets or projectiles, nor are the ones that do necessarily accurate past the first shot. as long as you know where your opponent is, you can minimize the effects of interpolation wrt splash damage by looking in a seemingly passive (or, if your opponent overly predicts you as a passive player, a hyper-aggressive) direction & committing to running towards it, turning & shooting only when you know your opponent believes you're doing something different from what you're intending. as such, it's very important to constantly practice predicting your opponent given a limited set of visual information. an exercise i regularly do is to plant my crosshair in one position (either on the map or constantly relative to my opponent) & attempt to make my opponent go where i want.

taking this a step further to a possibly unpopular opinion, i believe most higher level players in any game don't actually physically "track" their opponents regardless of what they articulate. as long as your modeling strategy is accurate, the closeness of your crosshair placement directly correlates with the precision of the resultant predictions. it's simply not physically possible to truly track your opponent in the long-term; physical tracking is essentially equivalent to tunnel-visioning, and you need to do it as absolutely minimally as possible.

a lot of this may become more intuitive when you optimize your physical setup to reduce aberrations and discomforts in edge-case arm/wrist positions. monitor refresh rate & mouse/keyboard actuation force aside, this requires a serious look at your posture & your setup's ergonomics. determine how much of your mousepad you actually use, and then further determine if those bounds are caused by physical/mechanical problems or from habit. determine if expanding your usable space would allow you to hit wider, previously uncomfortable shots. in total, make these analyses from your opponent's perspective: determine possible physical positions that you could take (wrt mouse placement and in-game camera angle) that would most likely be extremely uncomfortable for your opponent, and then make said positions as comfortable as possible for you.

more advice than that would honestly require me to watch you fight, but i think as long as you shift away from pattern & rule-based thought processes into a probabilistic mindset, you'll eventually consistently outplay your opponents. don't fall into intrusive thought feedback loops about "thinking too much" or "overthinking the situation": try to explicitly articulate what you believe your opponent is intending on doing wrt the type of fight & your relative spawn position, and make clear statements about what you're going to do when fighting your opponent. always approach your 1v1's with self-awareness. with enough cognitive practice, you'll be able to increase your mental & physical stamina. it helps to approach MGE with the end-goal of lessening your physical burden in more extreme applications (e.g. handing multiple opponents at once in 6's).

the best class-nonspecific ammomod-specific advice i can recommend is to play very aggressively since keeping momentum is much easier than acquiring it. nosplash is also a great precursor map to ammomod (although in ammomod it can be optimal to not direct your opponent's feet since splashing down at the ground is easier than directing your opponent in the air). if you're a soldier, swapping between your rocket & shotgun can stifle your opponent greatly (although i don't think it's necessarily good practice unless you have no confidence in your hitscan). you should also practice juggling your opponent with singular rockets: knock them up in the air, predict where they're going to land, shoot once they touch the ground, rinse & repeat.

posted about 7 years ago
#3 TF2 Hours vanishing from profiles in TF2 General Discussion

mine just disappeared too wtf lol
in fact, all the stats of the games i've played since summer of 2017 have disappeared

posted about 7 years ago
#5 lft in Recruitment (looking for team)

always accessible & saved our asses as a sub. and from playing with her in prior seasons when she dedicated significant time to competitive tf2, her soldier dm is incredible even when she has high ping. i'm sure her demo play can be, if not is, just as good as her roamer.

good luck with the team search, and thanks again for subbing so often.

posted about 7 years ago
#5 LFT Medic Mid IM / Pocket Mid-High Open in Recruitment (looking for team)

great attitude, remains objective during tough situations & clearly has a lot of potential. i do believe that one more solid, rigorous regular season will step him up to a top level IM medic.

posted about 7 years ago
#5 the seventh man in TF2 General Discussion

i asked reddit something similar with regards to a perma-spy as a 7th class
https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/481ldk/so_guys_i_have_a_thought_why_not_have_a_new/

"So you guys must know Extine he makes really cool new competitive modes because people need new competitive so I have an idea why not use 7 people on each team? So its like 6 but 1m ore so its kind of like 9v9 which is HL but 7v7 so 7lander??

ok so in 7 lander what u do is u have 6's like 6's class then u have perma spy and the perma spy uses BACKSTAB technique to stop push and to make push happen i think its GENUIS and makes spy a very good class

how do u all plead??

EDIT: Guys im refreshing this page alot becasue im afraid u all dont understand and i want to help u explain because im a competiteve teacher so let me teach u what i mean :-)

EDIT 2: wow I now know why my Teacher Gets so Frustrate siometime now that i can See how little u guys GET IT>>??? but Im gona be more patent like my teacher and Make sure u all know Why 7v7 with Spy Permamain will work.. And You will all make sure Steam knows it and it will be great !! I cant wait this is gonna be really exciting guys"

got a lot of great responses, especially from thesteam

posted about 7 years ago
#166 AS MGE feedback in TF2 General Discussion
SubinkaHis ping isn’t the thing in question. The point is that the clip is an example of questionable play on his part.
Also, while looking at As MGE server stats I noticed that he has the highest point total of anyone on that server by ~11,000 points. The main part of this that looks sketchy to me is that the person in second place is yaima (who I’m pretty sure is the same person as blackymonster, who was hacking), despite having 3 less hours on the server than yaima, and spending a decent amount of time doing nothing in badlands middle because nobody wants to play against his crutch loadout. I also visited his gametracker page and I doubt that he got good at TF2 by frequenting Hightower and 2Fort.
Basically, the deeper I dig, the more suspicious he gets.

no, i think he got good by playing thousands of lobbies and frequenting 6's ever since ~2015 (http://logs.tf/profile/76561198092645022).
he doesn't seem suspicious to me at all. the clip you linked is certainly weird, but a lot of networking problems can explain it.
his scout stats, including the one & only team he played on back in S25, are overall low open level (https://play.esea.net/users/1698804?tab=history). his soldier stats are solid because he has specialized heavily in direct hit and shotgun ever since he started playing.
i never once thought he cheated, and people are honestly way too petty and mean-spirited towards him simply because he uses arguably a cheesy, but clearly underestimated, weapon combination. people don't try new shit out on tf2 enough, and it's good that we have players try to push underutilized weapon combinations to their maximum level. i don't necessarily agree that using the direct hit is the best way to hone directs, but he doesn't talk shit & he genuinely enjoys it. it can be outplayed if you play optimally because there's a lot of inherent variance caused between the natural imprecision in human reaction and the precision required by direct hit.

posted about 7 years ago
#4 Snakewater 2nd CP Zone Render Game Crash in Q/A Help

what are your launch options? i remember having this same exact issue when i used an old list of mastercoms' launch options, and getting rid of one of them fixed it.

posted about 7 years ago
#25 rewind 2 shoutouts in TF2 General Discussion

i'm proud of my boys at kings crew; they had a fantastic showing. although i couldn't watch every game they played, i was consistently impressed by their stats; their teamwork was top notch and it's honestly something that i hope we aspire to have during the regular season. yimi and change played very well and i can't thank them enough for representing the team as neither paul nor i could make it.

documentary was somber, yet touching. the production team keeps wowing me every LAN, and rewind was no exception.

hope you guys all have a safe trip home.

posted about 7 years ago
#359 ESEA Season 27 Intermediate Discussion in TF2 General Discussion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip9gprNpx98

posted about 7 years ago
#3 LFP Pocket IM in Recruitment (looking for players)

damn, sad to see you go man. good luck with life stuff.

posted about 7 years ago
#4 TF2 Pro League in Projects

fucking sick!!!

posted about 7 years ago
#9 CPU Servers in Projects

awesome stuff man. thanks for hosting this service.

posted about 7 years ago
#3 Mirc twitch bot help in Off Topic

i replicated the script on my channel and it worked properly. could just be an I/O permission issue relating to your user account & writing to the appdata folder (presuming you're using windows since mIRC is windows-specific & presuming that you didn't point mIRC's scripts folder outside of its default location; didn't see if there were any drop-in cross-platform replacements for mIRC wrt its scripting language).

my hypothesis as to why !show works without the write operation fully succeeding (wrt the file system) is that it operates on a cache that copies the contents of the file if it exists. it doesn't reopen the file on every !show event as that would obviously be extremely costly in large chat rooms. the !request event saves its data in the local cache & makes an attempt to output to the file buffer (at which point the script doesn't care about the end result of the write operation). it's either that or both events just operate directly with an uncloseable file i/o buffer.

the simplest thing you could do is try to write to a folder you know you have complete permissions over: just replace requestsinfo.txt in both the !request and !show event listeners with a direct path (e.g. C:\requestsinfo.txt)

i added you to debug in detail.

edit: using a direct path worked for him.

posted about 7 years ago
#80 GUIDE: Weapon-specific Custom Crosshairs in Customization

just a quick tip when it comes to VMT customization (e.g. swapping VTF's, experimenting with material proxies to create animated crosshairs &/or multi-frame VTF crosshairs): you don't need to restart the game to swap crosshairs. although modifications to the weapon script itself won't take effect until you restart, you can modify the VMT file as long as you're in a server with sv_cheats 1 enabled (ideally local) and then call mat_reloadallmaterials in console. alternately, you can use mat_showtextures, find the line relevant to your crosshair [hereby referred to as CROSSHAIR_PATH], and then type in mat_reloadmaterial CROSSHAIR_PATH

posted about 7 years ago
#76 Would you be in favor of a map rotation revamp? in Map Discussion

i think all map should rotate around in circle when fite for more dinamicacity and hav people go left right all over place and circle point capture would rotate other direction from map so map has a lot of spins

posted about 7 years ago
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