Expat of Sadgewich

So I spent a good portion of yesterday mucking about on the ol' comparoonie.  I checked up on you lovely wonderful-types, and wrote, and then did a lot of fucking about on Team Fortress Classic.  There's this one server I like to hang around on, and when I found out they had stats for the players, I checked them out...only to discover that I had won the Yellow Puddle of Shame award, for the lowest kills-to-deaths ratio.  Meaning that I totally suck.

I got too used to playing massive 32-player Dustbowl games, where you serve up respawns in the first five minutes that would make a donkey choke, as everyone on the Defense team spams the exits with every explosive in the book.  One game I played, it took just over five minutes to break out of the exit tunnel.  So I guess I got used to running around aimlessly and getting killed every three seconds.

Now I mostly play engies, and set up a sentry gun in high-traffic areas, and spend most of my time running back and forth with ammo for it.  Which will of course keep my caps down, but what can you do?  Sentries will up your score, while you hide somewhere and keep your death rate manageable, or go back and forth to resupply to re-up on health and armor.  I've already thought of about five thousand different ways to exploit the stats-meter, but there's no way to compensate in the real world for not being good at playing.  If I play for four hours while everyone is still at work, I can nail the shit out of the kill/death ratio, sniping the bots.  If I wanted to get really crazy with it, I could just log on, kill a few people, and then bail out. 

Considering how long it takes the damn game to load up, though, I'd much rather just fight the bots as a way of practicing TFC skills, and watch how the big kids roll, the sort of nasty tricks they get into, and incorporate those into the way I play.  Like when you blow the grate on the Well map, and then some tricky bastard builds an SG right out in front of the opening of the swim pipe.  I'd pay a dollar to know how it is that the good players can get their grenades to clear the pipe opening, because I sure as fuck can't--in water, they just drop right at my feet and blow me up.  I also probably could do with some practice at constant movement.  You go to shoot the live players, and they're all over the place, up, left, and right, and then they bounce a grenade off your face because you didn't track and kill them fast enough. 

Have to learn how to do that and still shoot worth a crap.

So there you are!  Monday in a nutshell--a gaming recap.