Sep 29

TF2 Pickup Rule Guideline

TF2 SA Pickup Rule Guideline

Have TF2 experience

You must have played TF2 for a while. If you’re a beginner with TF2 don’t bother joining a pickup. The others will notice it straight away and start moaning about you.

You don’t have to be particularly good at TF2 though. As long as you have a good amount of experience with it (ie. know maps, know where the health/ammo is on maps, know all classes, know all weapons including unlockables, having most of the general achievements).

A rule of thumb is to have at least 40 played hours, and at least 20 hours in two of three of these classes: Scout, Soldier, Demo.

Know pickups

If you have never seen a TF2 clan match or pickup, then you should not join one. That would be like playing a game of chess without knowing the rules – a complete mess. When a pickup starts you can try to join the tf2 server and spectate it. See how it plays out and learn from it. Do it a couple of times and then maybe try to add to a pickup yourself. This is a very important point. If you choose to ignore it you will be banned.

Be prepared

We encourage you to enable highlighting in your IRC client. ‘Highlighting’ means that whenever someone writes your nickname you will hear a beep. This makes it less likely for you to miss a pickup. To enable highlighting in mIRC see this guide.

On IRC and in-game you should have similar names – otherwise people don’t know who is who (which is especially a problem when someone is missing). If you use different names and you get banned for something you didn’t do, then you probably won’t be unbanned.

Make sure you have the map cp_freight and cp follower (extract the files into Steam\SteamApps\your@account\team fortress 2\tf\maps)

Also make sure to join one of the TF2 servers to check if your ping is alright. The IPs for the TF2 servers can be found using the !servers command in #tf2. It can be a good idea to put them in your favourites (on Steam) because you are required to join  the TF2 server within 10 minutes after the pickup starts.

Never leave a pickup

If you’re in a pickup you have to stay in it until it ends. Leaving before the end ruins it for the 11 other players. If you absolutely have to leave, then make sure to tell your team why and find someone on #tf2 to replace you. It is always your own responsibility to find a replacement.

Know pickups

It’s not a mistake to have this headline twice because it is so essential.
Here are some of the most important points regarding this subject:

– A team should almost always consists of 1 medic, 1 soldier, 1 soldier/heavy, 1 demoman, 2 scouts
– If you want to play any other class then make sure your team agrees to it
– There may only be 2 of each class
– However there may only be 1 demoman, 1 pyro and 1 medic
– The medic should be healing his team mates 99% of the match
– The sooner you join the server, the better chance you have to play the class you want. If your class   is taken when you join, you’ll simply have to play another class.
– On granary and badlands the pickup is finished when 30 minutes have passed or one team has 5 points

To get a better idea of how the 6v6 gamestyle is played, check out some demos.

Should you need further assistance, don’t hesitate to contact any of the following people:

Xt3rminator, Goldfox, Joint, Bobalas, Surge, Razerfox, Reg, Chaotic, Kinganimal, Toast, Turbz, Raliator, Fr00glez0r, Skillpig

TF2 Pickup Rules

(These are only guidelines, admins can alter at their own discretion)

Breaking a rule will result in a ban:

  • Players are expected to connect to the server for the entire duration of the pickup, if you will be late, please notify an admin, letting him know how long.
  • Players ARE allowed to request a replacement should they need to leave, but they MUST wait in the server until the replacement has joined the team. Once the replacement is in and playing, the player is able to leave the Pickup. Do NOT expect to be able to leave the Pickup and have a replacement found for you, doing so will result in a ban.
  • Admin powers are to be used properly, and not to disrupt the pickup in progress. Kicking/Banning players for the server with no reason will not be tolerated.
  • Players being disruptive during the pickup(eg. being rude to other players, not adhering to class restrictions) will be warned and then if said player ignores the warning and continues to be disruptive, he or she will be banned.
  • Players who sign up for the PICKUP in the IRC channel and do not join the server within 10 minutes unless if he/she found a sub and notified the admin/captains involved.
  • Spamming of any sort, not only limited to !add, will result in automatic ban of 1 (one) hour. Players who continue to spam after returning from their 1 (one) hour ban will be dealt a lengthier ban.
  • Any generic player using the /notice command in IRC will be banned for 1 (one) hour. The /notice command is ONLY for admins and should never be spammed! Admins spamming the /notice command will be reprimanded and given a warning, followed by a removal of their admin privileges if it happens again.
  • Being abusive (which includes, but is not limited to, racism/sexism/rude or other distasteful comments) or disruptive, ruining the game for other players or being a downright idiot will result in a ban.
  • Players may join the Pickup server if they’re not in the Pickup. However, please add (spec) to your name the Pickup. If a player who added to the Pickup does not show up, please contact the games admin to let them know that you will sub. DO NOT simply join a Pickup team in the absence of a player unless specifically told too by an admin.
  • The scout unlock, Sandman, is banned in competitive play.
  • The sixth person to join each team has the responsibility of going medic, unless of course someone else already has selected that class.

We expect players to follow these game play rules, and to behave properly during the Pickup.

BANS are as follows:

  • Being later than 10 min in a pickup will result in a 8 Hour BAN
  • Spamming over voice or chat will result in  a 4 Hour BAN
  • Swearing and abuse to other players will result in a 24 Hour BAN

Sep 24

Angry Vikings

Clan tag: av°

Members:

Medic – LikaLota (Leader)

Scout – Evil Clown

Scout – Dan

Soldier – Elapid

Soldier – NoobStick

Demo  –  Alien

Reserve – Bugs

Description

Legendary Norse warriors whose frenzy in battle granted immunity to sword and flame. Such warriors were an elite, associated particularly with the raging war god Odin.

Sep 21

Segment Gaming TF2 team Disbands

After a promising start to the TF2 BOTCv2 Trinity’s performance began dropping and many of the key players either left or could no longer play on a regular basis. After such a long time with no sign of improvement and increasing frustration and tension within the team SeG TF2 Leader said the following: ” I (Goldfox) as leader have decided it’s time we call it quits. Citing personal reasons and the team’s inability to perform the players have decided to go their separate ways and find other teams or move onto better things in gaming.”

You can read the full history at Segment Gaming

The TF2CCSA Team wishes all the best and good luck to all the ex-SeG TF2 players.

Sep 13

Aim Guide

This is not a guide to improve your aim but rather a guide to setting up your game, OS and hardware properly in order for you to improve your aim. Many people may know about these tweaks and some may not but either way they will help you to improve your aim by means of more consistent practice.

Getting a decent mouse and surface

This step is probably the most important especially if you are using a low sensitivity. I am not going to go into details on the different types of mice and comparisons etc because the mouse you choose is very dependent on your play-style and budget. I can say that there isn’t much point on spend loads of cash for a seemingly ‘better’ mouse when in practice there usually isn’t any realistic difference. This said, there is a great difference between a regular mouse and a ‘gaming’ mouse and I advise that do a bit of research into what you need/want in terms of a gaming mouse before purchasing one that may be overpriced and/or useless to you. There also seem to be mixed views in terms of installing mouse drivers from the company who developed the mouse or leaving the default windows drivers but ultimately this is up to user preference. It is also important to get a decent mouse pad or surface that you will use for your mouse as this can greatly increase the accuracy of mouse compared to using say a tabletop.

Mouse acceleration

What?

Mouse acceleration basically means that the speed at which your mouse moves in-game is relative to the speed of its movement. So if you move the mouse quickly you will turn faster compared to moving the mouse slowly. Because of this mouse acceleration needs to be turned off if you are playing a FPS game such as TF2.

Why?

With mouse acceleration on you do not have constant control over the amount you will turn in-game. With mouse acceleration on it will be much harder to ‘learn’ how to turn a certain amount quickly in order to land a hit because the speed at which you move your mouse along with the distance you move it will determine where you will end up aiming. With mouse acceleration off the amount you will turn is dependent only on the distance you move your mouse and thus you can ‘learn’ how far to move your mouse to aim a certain distance only relative to your sensitivity and not the speed at which you move the mouse. It’s all about consistency.

How?

These steps should work for all windows OS’s that you can run TF2 on.

1) Firstly go to the ‘Mouse Properties’ in the ‘Control Panel’ and get to the ‘Pointer Options’ tab. Un-tick the box ‘Enhance pointer precision’ and make sure that the ‘Select a pointer speed:’ bar is in the middle (6th position from the left) as in this image:

Windows Pointer Options

Windows Pointer Options

2) The second step you need to take is to completely remove all other ‘hidden’ windows acceleration via the registry:

If you have any version of Windows XP download this file: xp mouse_fix or if you are running any version of Windows Vista download this file: vista mouse_fix. I am currently running Windows 7 and couldn’t fine an adequate .reg file on the internet for the OS so I had a look around in the registry and found that the variables that are edited in both the XP and Vista .reg files are in the Windows 7 registry so I simply ran both of the two .reg files for XP and Vista and I have no traces of mouse acceleration in TF2.

Run (double click on) the .reg file and hit ‘Yes’. If you are paranoid about .reg files you can open them to see exactly what they are doing by right-clicking on them and selecting edit. This said, if you don’t know what you are doing don’t go messing around in your registry because you can really mess up your OS.

You sould see something like this, click 'Yes'

If done correctly you sould see something like this, click 'Yes'

You will need to restart your PC for these registry changes to take effect.

3) To make sure that TF2 is not going to use any built in mouse acceleration, three launch options need to be added. This is done as shown in the images below (descriptions in the captions):

Right click on TF2 in steam

Right click on TF2 in steam and select Properties

TF2 - Properties

Click 'Set launch options...'

Add all the launch options in this box with spaces inbetween

Add all the launch options in this box with spaces inbetween

To make copying easier here are the launch options: -noforcemaccel -noforcemparms -noforcemspd

There are quite a few more launch options that can be added to effect different aspects of the game and a list of all of them along with descriptions can be found here: Command_Line_Options

Once all three of the above steps are complete you should have no mouse acceleration in TF2. You can check this by hosting a listen server (‘Create Server’ from the main menu) and setting your crosshair on a specific fixed point, move slowly to another fixed point and finally moving the mouse quickly back to the initial point. If you come back to the same spot on your mousepad you are moving the same distance irrelevant of the speed of your mouse therefore your mouse acceleration is off.

Vertical Sync

Unless you have worked some magic in the form of tipple buffering or some other advanced GPU setting (let me know if you have) vertical sync should always be turned off in TF2 because it causes input lag when it is on. This means that there is a noticeable delay from your actual mouse movement to the mouse moving ingame. Although this delay is very small and can only really be noticed when you know about it and are looking for it, it does effect your aim in that you can not ‘react’ as fast as someone with it off. As much as we all like a visually smooth TF2, vertical sync is not the way to go.

You can check if you have vertical sync on by going to your advanced video options in TF2 and checking that ‘Wait for vertical sync’ is set to ‘Disabled’ as shown in this image:

Also while you are here make sure your 'Field of view' slider is set to the far right (90)

Also while you are here make sure your 'Field of view' slider is set to the far right.

Weapon Models

With weapon models off you can see more of what is happening on-screeen (especially whilst reloading certain weapons) and thus giving you a slight visual advantage over players playing with weapon models on. There are two methods of removing weapon models from your game the first being to turn all weapon models off in the advanced multilayer options as shown here:

Untick 'Draw viewmodels.'

Untick 'Draw viewmodels.'

While you are here also make sure that ‘Automatically reload weapons when you’re not firing.’ is ticked as there is no reason to have this unticked because you can halt the reloading of any clip based weapon by firing. The automatic reload does create an annoying animation ‘glitch’ with weapons such as the medic’s syringe gun but when you have weapon models off you completely avoid this problem.

The second method of removing weapon models is through the use of scripting. The main reason for using scripting over simply removing the weapon model in the options is the fact that you can have full control over which weapon’s models are shown/hidden along with being able to sett custom crosshairs for each individual weapon so you always know from your crosshair which weapon you are currently wielding. You can download my current per class config files from here: cfg. Extract all the .cgf files of this .rar to your tf2 config folder found at this location: C:Program FilesSteamsteamapps(yourusername)team fortress 2tfcfg

All the files go here, back up your existing files if you have made changes in the past

All the .cfg files go here. Back up your existing files if you have made changes in the past

My config displays the melee weapons of all the classes whilst hiding the primary weapons of most of the classes. The way the heavies minigun works does not allow for the use of scripting to change weapon because of the ‘cool down’ after you have ‘spun up’ the weapon so all of the heavies weapons are displayed and the class has default binds and default ‘q’ ‘lastinv’ functionality. For all the other classes ‘q’ switches between the two main weapons of the class so for example it will switch between the rocket launcher and shotgun of the soldier. This is only different to regular TF2 in the case of the spy because in competitive play the sapper (usually slot 2 in the spy’s inventory) is very rarely used so it has been bound to ‘3’ (the position of the spy’s knife by default). So by using ‘q’ as a spy you will switch between your revolver and knife with only the revolvers weapon model being hidden. For every class except the heavy the corsshair will change based on the weapon you are currently wielding, a dot for your primary, a + for your secondary and a X for your melee. When switching back from your melee weapon by using ‘q’ you will return to the last weapon that you used. There is one unavoidable bug in this config that occurs either if you run out of ammunition for a particular weapon or if you die wielding a non-primary weapon. What happens is that the key binds will be incorrect if you spawn after dying with a non-primary weapon out, you simply need to tap ‘q’ twice to get everything back to normal or make sure that you have the primary crosshair displaying before you respawn. There is also a rocket jump script bound, only when playing as soldier, to your right mouse button and an addition to your right click as a medic that says a message to your team via the ingame text that you have used your ubercharge. All other aspects of the game have been kept (but not set) to default.

Obviously feel free to edit any aspect of the above script such as (crosshair type and size) to suit your needs.

Frames Per Second

If you are getting major FPS drops when there is lots of action on screen it becomes a lot harder to land hits consistently. Because of this it is advisable to use some form of FPS config to keep your FPS high enough at all times in order keep your aim consistent. Everyones opinion seems to be different about what is an acceptable FPS value to be getting in a 6vs6 situation but if you take rates into account it is a lot better if you are getting over 66 frames at all times in a 6vs6 situation. You can read up as to why this is in my rate guide found here: http://tf2.co.za/news/rates-guide/ .You should set up your rates properly if you are wanting to improve your hit registration and entity lag ingame which in turn will affect the consistency of your aim.

If you have decided to use a FPS config, a good one to use is one of m0res configs found here: http://m0re.nocrits.com/index.php?site=files&cat=1 select either the FPS or highFPS config depending on how much of a boost you want. The highFPS does look quite a bit worse than the FPS one but there are some benefits from it if you have a low end machine. You need to extract the autoexec.cfg from these .rar’s to your tfcfg folder (the exact same location as explained in the ‘Weapon Models’ section). Make sure to edit or remove the network related cvars at the top of the configs to suit your needs.

Aim Training Maps

There is currently a discussion on TF2 training maps in the tf2.co.za forums located here: http://tf2.co.za/forum/tf2-sa-general/training-maps/. The maps mentioned here are worth downloading and practicing on if you want to get better at a certain aspect of the game quickly through repetitive practice but no matter how good your ‘airshots’ are, if you aren’t using them to better your team or to win a round they are effectively useless. Have a mess around with these training maps if you want to but it goes without saying that playing clan/pug/pickup games will improve your overall play a lot more.

Custom HUD’s

Off track slightly from aim here. The default TF2 hud is pretty decent if you set it into minimal mode via the ‘Multiplayer’ options ingame or using the console command cl_hud_minmode “1” but can still not display your health and ammo count in an easily visable location whilst you are playing and because of this quite a few TF2 players have adopted one of many custom HUD’s. A quick google search will get you to quite a few of them but one of the best I have seen and currently use is m0re’s HUD found here: http://m0re.nocrits.com/index.php?site=files&cat=3

You can look at the images on the website to see what it changes but basically it moves your health and ammo count closer to the center of the screen and shows the exact health counts of friendly players when you mouse over them along with showing the numerical health value of a medic healing you. It has many other features as shown in the images and is relatively easy to install as explained in the readme file contained in the download. One thing to note is that TF2 updates in the future could potentially cause this HUD to not work and in this case you simply delete the files that were installed with the HUD and your game will revert back to its default HUD.

———-

I hope somebody gets something useful out of this and as per usual I can be contacted in #tf2 on IRC and on steam if you have any queries, comments or corrections.