Maybe it was because you weren’t on the team you thought you were on. :smack:
What exactly is backtracking? I’ve seen others complain about this in passing and I’ve never quite gathered what the phrase means in a TFC context.
Yeticus Rex: I don’t know if no one but me is seeing your Happiness, or if they’re just ignoring it, but I have to say - I have the sudden, burning desire to go spray paint that (in eye-searing red, in horizontal-scroll-bar-inducingly big letters) all over my neighbors’ houses.
And let me third the confusion on the OP’s definition of LAN parties. All of the ones I’ve ever been to involved being in the same room, at least, which made communication pretty easy. If you’re in a tournament setting, maybe there are too many people to hear clearly, or something…? I don’t get it.
Well in some sort of free-for-all scenario you wouldn’t need mics. You’re just in yelling distance from one another. But when you’re playing some sort of team based game you need to keep your strategy a little more on the down low. The yelling back and forth is reserved exclusively for trash talking. But yeah a LAN is just a group of people all logged into the same local server. This party had about 60 people total, so it was a big room. And your team isn’t necessarily the ppl directly next to you.
I hear ya. I am considering leaving the Alliance and never playing it again, ever, because of complete idiocy about it. I’ve never seen them win Arathi, which is bloody sad. It’s every man for himself, though I’ve done decently there following the other guys who weaken the enemy. But thewy never go after the bloody priests, and they hardly pay attention to the battle.
That was my guess too. If that’s what he was doing–grabbing a flag from his own base and taking it to the enemy’s base–you’d expect that first, his own team would start yelling at him. After he’d done it a few times, you’d expect the enemy team to start making fun of him, too.
I have no idea if that was even possible in TF, though. Just last Thursday I started playing Team Fortress 2, and although I’m not especially good at it (most points I’ve gotten is 16, as an engineer), I’m finding it ridiculously fun.
Daniel
IIRC, it’s not possible to pick up the wrong flag.
That’s what I thought you’d say.
Imagine 2fort. Suppose two opposing soldiers are running across the bridge to the respective opposition’s base. If you’re the red soldier, according to backtracking, it’s wrong to turn around and chase the blue soldier, killing him, once you’ve past him.
Yes, it’s stupid.
That’s a shame. The only reason I was doing Arathi in the first place is because I needed the marks for some gear. I won’t be doing it again any time soon. That, OR Warsong. Alterac is the only one I like and we seem to win that about 50% of the time.
Don’t leave Alliance. We need all the reasonable people we can get. Play a few horde characters in the meantime, but don’t abandon your Alliance peeps. That’s what I do for some sanity every now and again. 
I’ve been a total BG slut (Allies) these past couple of months. I’d say we win AV about 70-80% of the time, EoS about 65%, AB about 60% and WSG about 20%. It really seems to matter what time you play. Good Alliance play early in the day and early in evening, really sucky Alliance play late at night.
AFKers are what steams me. It should be easy for Blizz to write a routine to flush AFKers from games, or ban them from BG for days at a time. I’ve noticed now some Horde that seem to have written a macro to keep them in the same spot during a game when they are AFK, so they show damage and don’t get Reported.
As for the OP, methinks you’re over-reacting; after all, it’s called Team Fortress 2 not My-Personal-Soldiers-To-Boss-Around Fortress 2. But seriously, you’re calling them a bunch of uncoordinated, egocentric assholes, but yet you signed up for a tournament with a bunch of people you haven’t played with before, or had played with before and knew they played poorly. This sort of reminds me of 50 DKP Minus (Video; NSFW).
I’ve never played that game, but I’ve run into similar situations in WoW. Before they made the changes in patch 2.0 late last year, people would run battlegrounds not to do the objectives, but to build up honorable kills. Thus, in the capture the flag BG, it was quite possible that people would ignore the flags and just have a big PVP fest in the middle of the battle field for an hour or so.
Fortunately, at least, Blizzard wised up, changed the honor structure, added diminishing returns on kills, and added arena for people who just want to pvp.
That use to be true in my battlegroup, but I’ve noticed that unless we go up against a full Horde pre-made, we win a large majority. Hell, we had a five-cap on the briefly last night in AB, and a four-cap in EotS.
The key to BGs in WoW isn’t just competency, it’s communication. If you’re PUGing BGs, where you don’t know how good the players are, and don’t have an effective way of communicating, you’re going to lose a lot of games. It use to be true that Horde won a lot because they use to have a severe edge in competent players simply because none of the younger players wanted to Horde, but that doesn’t so much seem to be the case now, could just be an anamoly though.
I’ve never heard of this sort of rule before, but this sounds BEYOND stupid. I can understand certain non-mechanics rules because they would qualify as “griefing”. Winning isn’t just about completing your objective, it’s just as much about preventing your opponent from completing his. I’d really like to hear from someone who can explain the reasoning behind this rule. It actually sounds like it would just decrease the fun.
Agreed here. AFKers really suck the life out of the BG, especially if there’s more than one. If they’re alliance, we get rolled and it’s no fun. If they’re horde, it’s not a challenge and it’s no fun. Fortunately, they tend to be hordies, so at least we get a better chance of winning and get bonus honor. But still, I’m interested in fun, not honor.
Isn’t that the spy’s bread and butter maneuver? I mean, if the spy can do this to get his points, why can’t the soldier (or anyone else for that matter) do it? Or do they also bitch about spies as well? Of course, I’m being rhetorical here.
Sure I was over-reacting! I was just getting my flame on while it was still fresh in my mind. I’m not that mad about it now. It was a 40-man tournament and I was not allowed to pick my team. It was luck of the draw (or lack there of) that I got my team members. (Plus one dude didn’t show up, so we were a man down) I was just dissapointed that I paid $15 to go and my team only played for the first 15 minutes of a 3-hour TF2 tournament.
Hey blue: don’t want a red soldier running past you? Shoot him while he’s in front of you. If he’s not shooting at you, it should be easy. If you shoot him enough, he’ll stop trying to run past you.
If the game doesn’t enforce it, it ain’t a rule.
Okay, having never played in that sort of tournament, I had made the incorrect assumption that you had gotten to pick your team. When I think of the term “LAN Party”, I think of a bunch of friends bringing their PCs to someone’s house and gaming.
On that note, when you’re all paying to participate and your teams are random, how do you establish who is the leader and so forth? To relate back to WoW terms again, if you’re at all familiar with it, it’s like you paid money to PUG a battleground. At that point, it’s not so much about your own skill, but about the luck of the draw of whom you get on your team. IOW, it really sounds like it’s just a bad tournament format.
This is my view as well. For instance, my character is a holy priest, and it’s frustrating because I’m almost always one of the first targetted in a PVP situation and I’d die quickly. I don’t try to implement a rule like backtracking or, like the Brittish army, consider it uncivilized to target certain people; instead, we formulate strategies that utilize that tendency to our advantage.
Even further, especially with the backtracking example, there are definite times when it’s strategically advantageous to do so and by NOT doing it, you’re severely hindered. If you don’t backtrack, a disadvantaged player can just try to run past you rather than engage you where, without the rule, you could just leverage your advantage. Even worse, they zerg, such that you can’t kill a large number of them, and as soon as they pass you, you’re screwed. The only mentality I can conceive of for this sort of rule is a number of people who hate to get ganked (and who doesn’t?); but that’s part of the game, and it’s just as much your own fault for either failing to pay enough attention.
Yeah, it ruins the game. The only recourse, when a server is flooded with clan members who try to enforce backtracking, is to leave.
Hah! Not on my server! I’m Horde (yes, I’ve gone to the dark side), and we consistently win AV and AB. You’re probably right about EoS, though. I used to play Alliance, but it just got lame, so when BC came out my husband I created BE toons. They’re 70s now and we’re just now working on getting our marks for gear. What a slog. :rolleyes:
AFKers piss me off too. But, mostly I hate people who bitch each other out during the battle. Just fight the damn battle and save it for later, PUH-LEASE.
Oh yeah. The AFK’ers are a plague. I’ve started becoming vigilant about reporting them, though. That’s the only recourse we have at the moment. Blizz may figure something out in the future…or not. Who the hell knows what those guys have in mind half the time?
As for the bitchfesting between players, that’s as annoying as it could be. Why would anyone spend the time and effort to play a game and then ignore the game in favor of asserting who can be the most hardcore shit talker? Hell, even spending the time WITHIN the battleground to constantly place blame on others is just beyond me. Get it together and we can get our extra marks and more honor. Isn’t that what we went there for? Sometimes I guess not.
This is why I’m taking a break from the bg’s for a few days. I’d like the honor, but really, it’s just getting under my skin a little too much.