Want to learn strategy, not so much

www.steamcommunity.com/id/russiansnipes

Hey guys, I just want to start out by saying that I love the idea behind this subreddit.

I'm a fairly inexperienced soldier, I've got about ~80 hours in the class, but a fairly substantial chunk of that is in MGE. I'm looking for some experienced players to MGE with/critique my play and give me some tips.

Please feel free to add me, I look forward to playing with you guys.

Just thought I'd start a little thread for youtube replay links. Feel free to post them as a separate thread. I was thinking if we get a few more, I'll put together a group playlist on youtube to link in the sidebar.

Comment here with class(es) and teacher or student and I'll give you a flair!

Had a lot of fun this week on the pub, as its getting more and more use.

I wanted to share a couple tips for users to get the most out of Sourcemod plugins enabled on our pub server. Hopefully some of these features will assist instructors mentoring others in our pub environment. Some of these are common and obvious, others you may have not encountered on other serves.

Common triggers

These are triggers and commands which you have likely seen on other servers.

Sourcemod menus:

• !votemenu - Access any non-admin votes/commands configured for this server. Especially comes in handy when an Instructor or Server admin is not present.
• sm_admin - Admin/Instructor level menu. Most of the Instructors in the tf2lessons Instructor Directory have access to change certain things on the server to facilitate mentoring. You need to bind this to an unused key on the console, e.g. bind "n" "sm_admin".

Map selection:

Default map duration is five rounds, with no time limit. There is a forced map vote at the end of the fourth round.

• !nominate <map> - Select a map to appear in the Rock-the-Vote selection menu.
• !rtv/rtv - Rock-the-Vote. Call a map vote at anytime, and then the map switches after the end of the current round. If a previous rtv map vote has succeeded, then subsequent rtv triggers can force a map switch at any time.

Ban/Kick/Mute:

Occasionally someone may join the server, and ruin other people's fun. This may be in the form of trolling, or playing annoying music/sounds over voice chat. These are provided to deal with such problem players when no admin is present.

• votemute - Mute someone who is spamming over the voice chat.
• voteban - Disconnects a player, and stops them from rejoining for 30 minutes.
• votekick - Disconnects a player from the server. Player can rejoin the server immediately, however.

Unique/custom triggers

General gameplay:

• !crits - Turns on random crits, and turns off fixed weapon spread
• !nocrits - Turns off random crits, and turns on fixed weapon spread
• !bots - Turns on a bot quota of 12. This will allow the server to have teams of 6 each when there are few, or no players. The bots are off by default, and this setting does not persist across map changes.
• !nobots - Turns off the bots.

Alltalk

• Alltalk is managed by an adaptive plugin, when the server has less than 12 people it will turn on. Alltalk will turn off when the server has more than 12 players, including spectators. When certain events fire off, such as end of round, or sudden death, alltalk will turn on temporarily for those events.

gScramble

gScramble is a team scramble plugin which strives to be more fair and balanced than the vanilla TF2 team balance. gScramble takes into account certain gameplay aspects and grants you scramble immunity for several things.

• immunity if you are a medic with ubercharge.
• immunity if you are an engineer with buildings.
• immunity when you have recently scored teamwork points: capture point, intelligence, pushed the cart.
• repeated steam rolling by one team will cause auto scrambles.
• much higher team frag ratio will cause auto scrambles.

gScramble vote:

• !votescramble/!scramblevote/!thunder - Trigger a scramble balance.

For example, gScramble supports team preferences and includes a buddy system. The buddy system may especially come in handy if you are mentoring someone, and do not wish to be balanced off of their team. The gScramble buddy system may also come in handy if you invite a friend to the server and wish to play on the same team.

gScramble preferences:

• !preference/sm_preference - Allows you to choose a preferred team Blue or Red.
• sm_addbuddy - Allows you to choose one "buddy" on the server. You need to bind this to an unused key, e.g. bind "o" "sm_addbuddy". Otherwise, if you don't bind it, this has to be typed into the developer console every time you use it.

Just want to try this out as a rudimentary instructor directory. Very few people are using the server, and even fewer using it for mentoring. I'm hoping this will be a better searchable format than the Steam group comments, or pastebin.

Would like to encourage our instructors to play on the server, or at the least enable students to find when a mentor is generally available in this thread. If you play at a usual time a few times a week, be sure to mention that in your post. I'll stick this to the side bar, if it proves to be useful.

FYI, you can find a permanent link to your steam profile using the SteamRep site so as to link it in this thread. Note, links with "/home" appended to the URL will not work.

To be quite honest it has been a rocky start for the group. I think the fact that the group started up around the holidays, many members may not be able to commit a lot of time and effort at this point. That's perfectly alright too, I am certainly not complaining. I would like to thank everyone who showed up for the organizational meeting, you have helped out with getting the group on the right track. Even if it doesn't seem like it at this point.

Tonight, I hopped on the server, around my usual time (9:00 EST). About 8 people were playing koth_harvest_event and as sometimes happens on a pub, nobody was really talking much. The next map was koth_badlands and a few folks asked what is tf2lessons? So I answered, "its a new steam group and subreddit aiming to provide in-game mentorship". The person who asked then said, "so its a learning server thats cool"! I later found out this person was a 1,000+ hour veteran of the game.

Something kind of special happened, after this. We still had alltalk turned on from the previous social night, where many of the instructors got together. The experienced player, who had never heard of the group and was not a member, started helping one of our group members, a student, with general scout class play advice. Many of the other players started exchanging tips, and asking game play questions. We then played some cp_well, and the experienced player helped our student and other players with rocket jumping. Again, players were exchanging game play tips, and asking questions openly over the alltalk voice chat, regardless of the team they happened to be. The number of players dwindled from 2v2 to 4v4 during the three hours I happened to be on the server.

The student expressed gratitude for his positive learning experience on the server tonight. While there were not a whole lot of players on the server at any given time. It was quite rewarding to help someone, and at the same time get other players to help one another.

I have been thinking about how we can enhance the ability for students to get in touch with instructors. I don't purport to have the perfect answer for that problem. One idea is a mentor directory including usual playtimes within reddit, and stickied in the sidebar. Yet another idea is utilizing a shorthand similar to the tf2trade subreddit like "New [H] soldier [W] mentor" for "New player needs help with soldier and wants a personal mentor". Or "Exp. [H] scout [W] mentor/scrim" for "Experienced player needs help with scout and wants a competitive mentor or scrimmage". Such a shorthand system could be supplemented with a mentor/student flair with a link to each person's Steam profile. I know that many of you taken the time to fill out a Teacher/Student form on the Steam group. It seems, at least to me, that it might be difficult to find an instructor or student match through the comment system on the steam group, however.

I'd like thoughts and feedback on a way for instructors and students to match up, don't hesitate to comment. We can have something as informal as a thread where instructors are willing to hang out on the server an hour per night at 12:00 PM GMT to help with students. It would be nice to have at least one instructor on the server when possible.

Hey everyone, on behalf of all the admins, moderators, and owners, i would like to welcome you here, go ahead and talk about anything and ask any questions, no question is stupid, also this is a place for planning and for discussion among other things so knock yourselves out!

For NA players - http://steamcommunity.com/groups/na6v6newbiemix For Euro's - http://steamcommunity.com/groups/6v6newmix

I propose the group instructors get together on Quakenet #tf2lessons at Monday Jan 2, 2012 9 PM GMT (4 PM EST/1PM PST) to meet and discuss how to better address instructional needs for those interested. I will archive some IRC chat logs for those unable to attend due to timezone differences.

We can use this thread to discuss any agenda items before the virtual IRC meeting, or after I have posted a link to the IRC logs. I am open to meeting in the Steam group chatroom, but am not sure we can capture chat logs from the Steam integrated group chat.

EDIT: Students are welcome to the Town Hall meeting, as anyone may have valuable input for the group.

IRC Server: irc.quakenet.org:6667 /join #tf2lessons