Team Fortress 2

[SimpleComplexity]

No, u.

 

[vrok]

Maybe if most of the weapons actually required skill to hit with the game would be fun. As it is now, I just find it really boring since after about two weeks you know all the maps inside out and the appropriate tactics for each class so there's nothing left to master. It doesn't even have hand grenades...

The only reason I can think of for having the all round extremely low skill ceiling is that they wanted TF2 to be the ultimate casual noob-shooter. In that case congratulations is in order, because they have indeed succeeded.

BF1942 for life.

 

[The_Pope]

The reason I liked it briefly was it's very low skill ceiling (slow movement, low damage, inaccurate and/or spammy weapons, massive hitboxes). Once you've figured out the basics of every class, there's nothing left to learn and you're just doing the same thing over and over again on a very small number of maps.

I guess the depth might show up if you get two organized teams, but I don't feel like joining a clan for a game I don't like.

 

[silver crowaxe]

I play TF2 from time to time for its mindless fun. However, playing it for any extensive length is impossible because of its shallowness.

 

[kingcomrade]

Slow movement? TF2 has slow movement? lol
I prefer games like TF2 over shit like DoD and Counter Strike, which are mostly about who sees who first. I don't know what you guys are talking about, mostly. If DoD and CS are what you guys mean by deep shooters, well, I think something else is your issue. If you think inaccurate weapons and low damage means the game doesn't require skill, I think you've got things backwards. Accurate weapons which do high damage make combat a point and click deal, I prefer the dogfighting of TF2 and RTCW style games to the move-stop-shoot-move-stop-shoot of CS.

I've changed my mind on the balance. The Soldier isn't as bad as I thought it was, and the Demo is more powerful than I thought it was. I prefer playing Soldier on defense and Heavy/Demo on Offense. Except for turret blockades on some maps, which -require- an ubercharge to break, there's not really any glaring balance issues, either. Yeah, demo charges do a bit too much damage, yeah the rockets move a bit too slow, yeah the scout just plain sucks. But they're all minor problems.

All in all it's a pretty fun game, more fun than I've had with an online shooter in a very long time. I think I like the game as much as I liked RTCW.

edit- I see you listed "no grenades" as a complaint, yet you call the game spammy. I played the original TF, and I quit it because of the lameness of the grenades.

 

[Destroid]

UT is about a million times better than TF2, for a fast paced game.

 

[The_Pope]

The 'spammy' and 'no grenades' thing are from separate posts by separate people. This isn't KC vs Anon, the guy with a billion posts who likes to argue with himself.

My gripe with it is that the damage is too low for the ambush style gameplay of pseudorealistic tactical shooters, and the movement is too slow for the dogfighting in competitive arcade shooters. So you're left with holding the crosshair on a massive target moving at glacial speeds. Difficult stuff. Still, I did enjoy it a lot for the first few weeks.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

I used to play it a lot for a few months after release then kind of stopped because vavle wasn't releasing any new maps. I came back when they released some new maps and now I play intermittently. Now they slowly releasing upgrades for the classes but its a bit too slow to keep me interested. I also don't want to have to hunt down achievements to get them.

 

[MINIGUNWIELDER]

Ehh, you need to play with a good server.

I suggest PA or SA, which, in addition to being easily trollable, also have awesome forum games due to the sheer amount of meatsacks and the monkey theory.

Really, the SA forums have about three shadowrun third/deadlands games going on at any one time, and Mafia/Phalla are awesome.

Also, Psychadelic Eyeball is an awesome person.

Oh, and there's a .hack LP and additionally a Liberal Crime Squad one.

We should totally get our own Liberal Crime Squad LP guys.

 

[sabishii]

I've only played like two days because I've run out of games but...

I figured out that ubercharged duos think they're invincible. The typical person doesn't consider its duration. So I follow them around 10 paces behind for a few seconds. Wait until the uber-aura flickers (or I just count to five) and bam, let loose rockets at feet. Or if I can't do that, I slip out of the room, count to five, and pop back in with rockets spamming.

Crits are also fun. Two of my guys rushed into a bunch of enemies in the room in front of me and got themselves slaughtered. I waited a few seconds so that they thought nobody else was coming, and then blam crit rockets = three dead.

It's also fun to take out your secondary weapon now and then. People expect 2 second-traveling rockets when they get 4 shotgun blasts to the head.

I also find the low damage annoying, as I'm used to playing the Battlefield games where a successful ambush means a one-shot/burst-kill, not 50% and hope that his twitch skills are worse than yours. Still, I imagine it makes for more strategic serious clan gameplay, just like Guild Wars is compared to, say... WoW. Not so much fun for the lone-wolf casual, I guess. Though I also agree that the skill ceiling is a little low (I was doing pretty damn good for only two days of experience) and in the maps as well.

The high damage of "realistic" shooters doesn't just necessitate twitch skill, KC. Maybe in CS with insanely small maps, but in larger open maps it rewards observant and strategic gameplay. I actually enjoy it because it covers up my crappy reflexes, as I can sneak up on someone so I have a huge tactical advantage instead of having to "dogfight" as you said.

 

[kingcomrade]

I got a 19 kill spree with the demo man. I am the most jewish son of abraham that ever lived.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

I got a 19 kill spree with the demo man. I am the most jewish son of abraham that ever lived.

good update, would read again.

 

[racofer]

The problem with TF2 is it's over simplicity and the fact it doesn't reward individual player skill. You got a sucky team? Or only 3~4 bad players on it?Well, you are screwed.

My favorite online shooter is still QWTF (that's Quakeworld's Team Fortress for the illiterate ones), because even if you end up with stupid people, having high skills can turn the tide. Say you have a full average team vs. a full bad team with 1 or 2 really good players. This can change the match significantly.

Now, it's good to have a game that relies on team work to get things done, no doubt about that. The problem is that this mentality works great on design sheets and clan gaming but fails miserably on public servers, which represent the majority of TF2's gaming. Removing grenades served only to please casual gamers so they wouldn't get pwned every 10 seconds because of their incapability on mastering a few necessary skills to become competitive at online gaming, and consequentially forcing team work or constant class swapping to overcome a sentry for example. With grenades you had a whole different array of possibilities to inflict damage. Now we are stuck with "dice rolls" for critical damage that are completely skilless, all for the noobs's sake of course.

On the technical side of things. The source engine has one fatal flaw for online gaming, the hitboxes. Why you might ask? It's simple. The way lag compensation works at source games is atrocious for internet gaming where people have varying latency to servers. Let's exemplify: if someone is playing as a sniper with a latency of say, 100ms, against someone with a latency of 20~30ms, some weird things can happen like being shot after behind walls, and I bet anyone who plays TF2 has already noticed this. That's because valve decided to be nice with laggers and every action on the game is balanced to the highest latency. What this means is that if a lagger sees someone and shoots at it, the server will register that shot and apply to the poor bastard that happens to have a decent connection. It's common to see people being headshoted a few seconds after hiding because of this stupid behavior, or being hit with melee attacks from 10 feet away. For lan matches this problem doesn't exist however, since everyone is on equal grounds with latency. Another extremely frustrating thing about TF2 is the awful hit detection. Even now, near a year after release, we still have spies "backstabbing" your face.

All these technical flaws added to a weaker, dumbed down gameplay mechanics that rewards casual gamers and this simplicity that makes fuckwads brag about their killz make TF2 a chore instead of a joy. Now with achievements and those arena maps (which make this game Solo Fortress 2) we have a lot of people grinding for that shit and making TF2 the new WoW.

KC might find the game fun because it's recent to him or maybe because he didn't play something better before, but I bet he will grow tired of the repetition and blandness of it eventually.

 

[Shoelip]

Yesterday I was playing and met someone named "pwny the clown". He lived up to the end of his name very well in that all he did for most of the game was talk about how much modern games suck, especially TF2. At first I though he was skyway or something, but I guess not even skyway would join a server for a game just to tell people playing how much he thinks it sucks. There's my update. :D

I'm thinking maybe he was just posing to try to make us real angry gamers look worse.

 

[DefJam101]

It's better than a lot of multiplayer shooters out there, it's just that it is a team game. Meaning, if your team sucks, you suck.

The game does not have nearly enough depth to support this type of gameplay, which is what drags it down.

 

[Shoelip]

You really gotta take the character's personality into account to. It's one of the only multiplayer games with actual characters rather than just classes and player models, and I think that adds allot to it.

 

[Darth Roxor]

The problem with TF2 is it's over simplicity and the fact it doesn't reward individual player skill.

You never played a spy.

Now with achievements and those arena maps (which make this game Solo Fortress 2) we have a lot of people grinding for that shit and making TF2 the new WoW.

I have no problem with achievements, because most of them are easy to get with normal playing, but yes, I have to agree that introducing team deathmatch (aka arenas) was a stupid thing to do, but fortunately, it's possible to just completely avoid them.

 

[Destroid]

You say that but shitty gamemodes are an easy way to dilute your player population and kill a decent game. If you make the real gamemode the only gamemode it really helps, especially in a location with a smaller gaming population like au/nz.

 

[Shoelip]

He's got a point. When combat mode for Natural Selection came out it quickly became more popular than the regular mode thanks to it's mainstreamyness and it became difficult to find a server running the real game with decent ping.

 

[racofer]

You never played a spy.

Actually since the achievements came out I've been playing spies more often then before. The problem I see with spies on TF2 is their usefulness other than backstabbing enemies. Spies usually do kamikase runs on enemy bases because it's ridiculously easy to spot them. The fact you can just walk into your team mates and the one that you can't walk through is a spy is incredibly lame and takes away all that sneaking it took for you to get there. Actually I've never seen a FPS game that allows you to walk through your teammates.

I have no problem with achievements, because most of them are easy to get with normal playing, but yes, I have to agree that introducing team deathmatch (aka arenas) was a stupid thing to do, but fortunately, it's possible to just completely avoid them.

He's got a point. When combat mode for Natural Selection came out it quickly became more popular than the regular mode thanks to it's mainstreamyness and it became difficult to find a server running the real game with decent ping.

The problem with this arena mode is not that it makes it difficult to find normal servers, and the fact you can avoid these servers doesn't help. What's so bad about this game mode is that it will become mainstream and valve will do what they've been doing lately, listen to all whiners on their forums, and this time it means balancing the game on this game mode alone. Look at the new heavy achievements and removal of +50hp on backburner with no other benefit added. This is solely to balance the game for arena mode. The sandvich makes the heavy a viable class for arena plays since he could end up solo against other people.

 

[Shoelip]

Hey! Are you insulting my Sandvich?! Yeah, he could end up soloing... so could any other class.

I'm not saying I disagree with you completely, but this one complaint doesn't seem particularly valid.

 

[DefJam101]

The problem with TF2 is it's over simplicity and the fact it doesn't reward individual player skill.

You never played a spy.

A spy's success actually depends more on the skill of the opposing team than the skill of the spy. I know this, I have 60 hours logged as a spy.

Knowledge of the game and the maps gives you advantages, but as to actually getting kills and helping your team, it's just a combination of luck and stupidity by the other team. I've been in rounds with 100+ points, and rounds without a single kill.

 

[Dmitron]

I found TF2 too slow, lacks the kind of twitch gameplay I've come to expect from Quake and UT.

 

[kingcomrade]

The problem with TF2 is it's over simplicity and the fact it doesn't reward individual player skill. You got a sucky team? Or only 3~4 bad players on it?Well, you are screwed.

My favorite online shooter is still QWTF (that's Quakeworld's Team Fortress for the illiterate ones), because even if you end up with stupid people, having high skills can turn the tide. Say you have a full average team vs. a full bad team with 1 or 2 really good players. This can change the match significantly.

Now, it's good to have a game that relies on team work to get things done, no doubt about that. The problem is that this mentality works great on design sheets and clan gaming but fails miserably on public servers, which represent the majority of TF2's gaming. Removing grenades served only to please casual gamers so they wouldn't get pwned every 10 seconds because of their incapability on mastering a few necessary skills to become competitive at online gaming, and consequentially forcing team work or constant class swapping to overcome a sentry for example. With grenades you had a whole different array of possibilities to inflict damage. Now we are stuck with "dice rolls" for critical damage that are completely skilless, all for the noobs's sake of course.

On the technical side of things. The source engine has one fatal flaw for online gaming, the hitboxes. Why you might ask? It's simple. The way lag compensation works at source games is atrocious for internet gaming where people have varying latency to servers. Let's exemplify: if someone is playing as a sniper with a latency of say, 100ms, against someone with a latency of 20~30ms, some weird things can happen like being shot after behind walls, and I bet anyone who plays TF2 has already noticed this. That's because valve decided to be nice with laggers and every action on the game is balanced to the highest latency. What this means is that if a lagger sees someone and shoots at it, the server will register that shot and apply to the poor bastard that happens to have a decent connection. It's common to see people being headshoted a few seconds after hiding because of this stupid behavior, or being hit with melee attacks from 10 feet away. For lan matches this problem doesn't exist however, since everyone is on equal grounds with latency. Another extremely frustrating thing about TF2 is the awful hit detection. Even now, near a year after release, we still have spies "backstabbing" your face.

All these technical flaws added to a weaker, dumbed down gameplay mechanics that rewards casual gamers and this simplicity that makes fuckwads brag about their killz make TF2 a chore instead of a joy. Now with achievements and those arena maps (which make this game Solo Fortress 2) we have a lot of people grinding for that shit and making TF2 the new WoW.

KC might find the game fun because it's recent to him or maybe because he didn't play something better before, but I bet he will grow tired of the repetition and blandness of it eventually.

I also heard you can hotkey multiple buildings at the same time. I like how you say the game isn't skill based, then say that if you have bad people on your team you can't win.

 

[DefJam101]

I've been playing War§ow lately.

I've never been a Quake fan, but that game just fucking rocks.