Recently I've taken to playing TF2 on my Xbox, where the game is simpler and I can play in comfort instead of inside my freezer. My computer is a piece of crap and I can't afford a new one, these things happen. Anyway, Xbox Team Fortress 2 is different than PC Team Fortress 2. That's an obvious and actually kind of dumb statement; PC TF2 is several times larger than Xbox TF2 in terms of pure content and even though every new weapon slightly tweaks the game's balance even the vanilla stuff has been changed, nerfed, buffed, and gold-plated. The maps have changed: Dustbowl is slightly different but Granary massively so, new maps have been added, new gamemodes... Mann Versus Machines practically added a new game to TF2.
There is one feature that appears to be Xbox only. It might be a server tool but in four years of TF2 I've never encountered it on the net. No, wait, once. Maybe; I forget. Anyway! Class limitations. The Xbox's TF2 has built-in adjustable class limits when you're creating a server, meaning people can decide that if they want their game to feature only one medic per side, or that they'd like to see a game of Sniper on Sniper, they can do that. That's actually what lead me to this post.
Playing two rounds, one Engineer Only Dustbowl and one Sniper Only 2fort. Both games were incredibly fun and incredibly frustrating. The engineer one was badly broken, of course, because engineers are dangerously useless on Offense and they are almost infinitely stackable on Defense. Red would cede the first point after the initial "two sentries over spawn doors" trick, then build seven sentries on the point. I think the longest anyone stood on the point without being turned into a chunky Southwest-style salsa mist was two seconds. But at the same time, it was oddly compelling even to be on offense, killing sentries with your pistol, etcetera.
The Sniper one might have been fair. I'm an awful sniper, but I make up for it by being sneaky; with no engineers I strolled onto the 2fort battlements and stabbed three fictional people to imaginary death. Then I realized that these people were almost cartoonishly oblivious, so I climbed back up to the battlements and shot eight of them in the head. I think I might have shot some of them twice. Then the host changed the rules so one team (his, I assume) had an engineer to control the courtyard, and it turns out that if you switch a class limit to 0 while somebody is rolled as that class, they will stay that class until they change classes. So one side had an engineer that controlled walking-class access to the intel. Snipers aren't great for fighting a well-placed sentry and the game stalled, one side feeling helpless and the other steamrolling them.
But I had an idea that I'd like to see executed: two rounds of exclusively one class. One server, two rounds, all Medics. One server, two rounds all Demomen. Still 12v12 like TF2 was meant to be played, but iterated through individual classes. Who wins when Dustbowl is exclusively guarded by Soldiers? Or attacked by scouts? Is 2fort more fun with 24 pyros?
You might be wondering, what's the point of all this is. It's kind of a balance thought experiment, to see how differently the game plays when you make subtle changes like that. For example, with all Engineers a game of Dustbowl favors RED. Of course, with no players Dustbowl favors RED. But what happens in a game of all Scouts? Competitive TF2 is a game played in the margins of an ubercharge--what happens when it's not?
Most of all, there's something vaguely liberating about it: "When everybody is OP, nobody will be".
There is one feature that appears to be Xbox only. It might be a server tool but in four years of TF2 I've never encountered it on the net. No, wait, once. Maybe; I forget. Anyway! Class limitations. The Xbox's TF2 has built-in adjustable class limits when you're creating a server, meaning people can decide that if they want their game to feature only one medic per side, or that they'd like to see a game of Sniper on Sniper, they can do that. That's actually what lead me to this post.
Playing two rounds, one Engineer Only Dustbowl and one Sniper Only 2fort. Both games were incredibly fun and incredibly frustrating. The engineer one was badly broken, of course, because engineers are dangerously useless on Offense and they are almost infinitely stackable on Defense. Red would cede the first point after the initial "two sentries over spawn doors" trick, then build seven sentries on the point. I think the longest anyone stood on the point without being turned into a chunky Southwest-style salsa mist was two seconds. But at the same time, it was oddly compelling even to be on offense, killing sentries with your pistol, etcetera.
The Sniper one might have been fair. I'm an awful sniper, but I make up for it by being sneaky; with no engineers I strolled onto the 2fort battlements and stabbed three fictional people to imaginary death. Then I realized that these people were almost cartoonishly oblivious, so I climbed back up to the battlements and shot eight of them in the head. I think I might have shot some of them twice. Then the host changed the rules so one team (his, I assume) had an engineer to control the courtyard, and it turns out that if you switch a class limit to 0 while somebody is rolled as that class, they will stay that class until they change classes. So one side had an engineer that controlled walking-class access to the intel. Snipers aren't great for fighting a well-placed sentry and the game stalled, one side feeling helpless and the other steamrolling them.
But I had an idea that I'd like to see executed: two rounds of exclusively one class. One server, two rounds, all Medics. One server, two rounds all Demomen. Still 12v12 like TF2 was meant to be played, but iterated through individual classes. Who wins when Dustbowl is exclusively guarded by Soldiers? Or attacked by scouts? Is 2fort more fun with 24 pyros?
You might be wondering, what's the point of all this is. It's kind of a balance thought experiment, to see how differently the game plays when you make subtle changes like that. For example, with all Engineers a game of Dustbowl favors RED. Of course, with no players Dustbowl favors RED. But what happens in a game of all Scouts? Competitive TF2 is a game played in the margins of an ubercharge--what happens when it's not?
Most of all, there's something vaguely liberating about it: "When everybody is OP, nobody will be".
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