Also, another thing is that I know some of the hl maps have large spaces out in the open with not much to hide behind. As a medic, you are pretty hopeless, because the only thing you can really do is hide behind your heavy and other nearby classes from snipers and spam. When this happens, it's up to your own sniper, spy, and other classes to shut down the enemy sniper and spam classes when this happens. Otherwise, you will likely get sniped for free and your team won't be able to push or defend.

I would have put this in my former post but I reached the 4000 character limit, l0l.

I don't think I've ever played medic in a highlander, but most of the rules of playing medic in 6v6 should still apply just the same. I would say the only thing that is a bit different is that you constantly need to check your back for spies, and you need to be careful with carelessly walking out in the open since you can get sniped at practically any point. A really important aspect dealing with the last sentence is if you know exactly who plays what class on the other team (especially spy, sniper, and demo), you can start playing with less worry and more freedom until they spawn and get in position again.

For positioning, hiding behind your heavy should be pretty straightforward. He's a giant 450 hp meatshield, and you should be able to hide behind him or around a corner to minimize much of the damage directed at you. Heavies are pretty much unbeatable at close range unless there's tons of focus fire against the heavy, so as long as the heavy as good reaction time and can turn around to protect you if needed, you should be just fine. If your heavy goes down, just run to a soldier or anyone nearby that can do a decent job protecting you until your heavy spawns.

Calling the medic's uber isn't as hard as you think, you just need to remember to do it. If the medic builds the uber as fast as he possibly can, it takes 40 seconds to get 100% ubercharge (you can time this by seeing exactly when he spawns). Compare this to how much uber you have and communicate it. In example, if the medic spawns and you have 60% ubercharge, simply say "their medic just spawned, we have 60% on them." Likewise, if medic just spawned and you died, you can have a rough idea in your head of how much uber they have when you spawn, saying something like "they roughly have 40% on us." You could technically time their uber by the game clock, but if someone caps a point, the game clock resets. As long as you generally know where the uber stands, that's important. Also, don't forget that building kritzkrieg takes 30 seconds instead of ubercharge's 40 seconds.

For calling in general, just communicate where you are a bunch of the time. It's so much better to have a medic that won't shut up about his position and his ubercharge percentage than a medic who is pretty quiet. If your teammates communicate pretty well, then there's not much need to communicate any action going on unless it directly involves your heavy and you, because you don't wanna clog up ventrilo/mumble with too many people talking at once. Plus, it's not always easy to see what's going on around you when you're constantly watching out for spies and hiding from snipers. There's eight other people on your team, so I'm pretty sure most of everyone can do a good enough job communicating the things you don't see. Also, don't forget to say that you died or that you even dropped uber. It doesn't matter how embarrassing or unlucky the situation was, because it's better for your team to know that the uber you once had (which you now dropped) did not and will not happen anymore, or if you simply died without uber. Therefore, your team can readjust their position and gameplan accordingly.

tl;dr
-Check your back for spies quite often
-Don't blindly walk out in the open when a sniper is likely looking for a pick on you
-Hide behind your heavy when pushing because he does a fantastic job protecting you
-Hide behind corners and walls to minimize taking unneeded damage
-Compare your uber to the enemy uber from when you/they spawn
-Communicate your position a bunch so your teammates know where to go for heals
-Communicate when you died or when you drop uber

I'm not familiar with hl maps at all, but review the maps with your team so everyone is on the same page. Also, a big key to improve is not to get angry at yourself or in general. Once you become angry, you start to lose focus on what's going on and you won't improve at all.

I hope this helps. ;0

What's the point of seeding teams in a league so that the best teams play the best teams and the worst teams play the worst teams? Technically, proper seeding would have it so that the worst team plays the best team in week 1, but that's going against what you're saying. Even more technically, shouldn't proper seeding only have the need of having a tournament, because isn't the point of a league is to properly seed the best teams for playoffs? The whole idea of a season transitioning into playoffs is that ideally the top X amount of teams are the best teams, not half of the best teams and half of the decent teams.

I'm not sure with the whole argument of "people play for fun, so when teams start losing badly, they fall apart." I'm pretty sure teams falling apart because they lose happens at any level of practically any game, and the people who stick together and actually care about getting better will get better (ie: eMg). Also, the thought of "I only have fun when I win, so if I'm not winning, then I don't want to play anymore" sounds like someone who is too lazy to improve and wants all the right cards to be dealt for them. If someone has this mindset, then fine. However, having this mindset does not mean you have the right to complain about ESEA not giving you a golden schedule that makes your team go 14-2, when realistically you're on a team that should be going 5-11 and needs improvement.

This looks pretty cool. How is this going to be different from tf2lobby in terms of features, or is this just a personal project just to see what you can do?

I suggest that if / when this happens, European and American flags should be to the left of their respective events / matches, just to clear confusion for what country is playing. I have no idea what the current upcoming event icon is currently being used, lol. Looks like a guy from Gears of War.

I'm hoping this happens sooner than later, because this will increase a lot more interest in TF2 for teams and viewers.

Perfect Dark! That was pretty much my favorite n64 game outside of smash bros.

I'll be getting new hardware for streaming in about a week or two, so this is awesome. Thanks a bunch!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbsRrmdRYNA

I mostly called as medic in ESEA season 6, but I really wouldn't suggest it for the reason that you stated: you can't see what everyone on your team sees because you're playing your angles properly so you don't take unneeded damage. It's still a feasible thing to do if you're the best at calling, but you need to make sure everyone comms what they see so you can call the play.

This is actually a really good idea for towel's trouble voicing his comms. Good stuff.

They tried doing that with Quake 4. They went into Quake 4 with the mindset of "Okay, Quake 2 had a great campaign, and Quake 3 had great multiplayer. Let's build ideas from what made those aspects awesome." Quake 4 was okay, but everyone hated the engine and the game just felt kind of sluggish aside from crouch sliding. The game flopped pretty hard only about three or four months after it came out, right after winter CPL.

I'm not sure if there is more of a community for games like QuakeLive other than QuakeLive itself right now -- which is not saying much at all. I'm not sure how alive Warsow is anymore, and I do know that Shootmania is the newest competitive FPS at major events, but I'm not sure how well that community is doing. Plus, Shootmania is strictly like a 1v3 clan arena, so I'm not sure if that's your thing.

To be honest, I'm not sure why QuakeLive gets so much flak for being "bad" when people begged and pleaded to have Quake 3 revived when Quake 4 started to die out. It's a more balanced and polished game than Quake 3 which actually has updates, more maps, more gametypes, and an ELO ranking system. Yeah, it's not as popular as it used to be, but I don't know if you're going to find a more active community than what QuakeLive has right now. A lot of really good duelers still play, and you can always find competitive pickup games on IRC.

Honestly, the only mandatory things you should be communicating as a medic is where you currently are and if you're being attacked. If you cannot do that, then you absolutely cannot play medic to the point where it wouldn't greatly affect your team. Other good things that you should communicate but aren't absolutely mandatory is calling when you just used uber (though you can just have the bind where it says in team chat that you ubered, but this isn't always accurate if you're trying to uber at 95% while you're under attack), what your uber percentage is, and keeping track of who has uber advantage (and by how much). The reason those aren't mandatory is that someone else could communicate all of that just fine without it being a problem. Also, if you see someone hurt who is getting out of a fight, just tell them you're in back of them and don't assume that they remember where you said you were 10 seconds ago. Depending on the situation, I might call a push when I see a great opportunity, saying something like "go in now, they are all bunched up in their yard and they are very weak." However, that's just through my intuition playing TF2 and that's not a necessity for inexperienced or newer medics.

When I think about it, it's hard to talk too much as medic. Start implementing the things above to start out. If you find it hard to remember these things, try to remind yourself or write yourself a note. Eventually, you'll get the hang of it and it'll become normal for you.

I don't wanna sound like a dick, but you didn't really mention too much about why it isn't abused more often. If its most viable use is denying the uber push until it's dead or useless (and that is a great, viable use), why isn't it abused way more often? I'm guessing because it doesn't work that often? In my opinion, when something works some of the time that ends up working really well when it does actually work, I don't really consider it broken. Honestly, I think a 450 heavy is more annoying than a degreaser pyro, and I also think that a 450 heavy has more of an effective success rate than a degreaser pyro (I will say that this is situational, but heavy is more versatile than pyro).

I was mostly comparing the fact that heavy is used for the same scenarios that pyro is used for (and more), but heavy does a better job. On top of that, Natascha heavy was abused in so many situations where heavy wasn't normally used, and it was abused to the point where it was considered a problem and overpowered. For pyro being used in roughly the same scenarios (a bit different for gravelpit C, but gravelpit C nonetheless), no one has abused the pyro degreaser enough for it to be seen as an overpowered, unfair advantage.

For the record, I'm not saying that you're absolutely wrong. The reason why I defend the issue of weapon balance and game balance is that I play fighting games competitively as well, which is dominated by the topic of balance. The reason why Akuma is banned in Super Street Fighter II Turbo in tournament play is because he had tactics that could completely lock you down and make you lose if you knew how to do them (and they weren't very difficult to perform). It got to the point where an average player could beat a professional due to his broken tactics. However, on the topic of things that are generally balanced, newer players usually say "wow, you're so cheap spamming fireballs all day" like it's an unbeatable strategy. The reason why they think it's an unbeatable or at least an unfair strategy is that they don't know how to deal with it and give up instead of learning what to do.

In my experience, dealing with degreaser pyro (or pyro in general), mostly consists of sniping pre-uber. However, ubering in a scout against the pyro and flashing a soldier to make them pop in uber vs uber situations forces it so they must split their ubers a lot -- otherwise, pyros will get focused by hitscan or a ridiculous amount of spam, which pretty much means they will get instagibbed unless flashed. Even when ubers aren't happening, degreaser pyros can be threatening and annoying, but definitely aren't a large problem or unbeatable.

/book

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make this because Winter Brawl 7 is on the same weekend. Maybe next time though, but have fun.