Valve has released another round of stats, this one concerning all that Team Fortress 2 playing we've been doing. They have things broken out along a couple of different metrics, including lifespan, kills, assists, captures, and even just damage dealt. As Rock, Paper, Shotgun's commentary notes, the stats confirm every suspicion you've had about your fellow players. "Yes, there are more rushy-bastard Scouts than any other class. Yes, campy-bastard Snipers earn the most points. Yes, hitpointy-bastard Heavies get the most kills. Yes, hidey-bastard Engineers live longest. And so on. What's slightly odder is the breakdown of which side wins most frequently on each map. BLU has the edge in every killing field except Dustbowl and Gravelpit. Why? How? I thought we were all the same! Damn you for not being neater, demographics." We previously discussed Valve's stats release on Half-Life 2: Episode 2.
It doesn't surprise me that Blue wins more consistently than red. Red stands out more on most maps, thus giving the blue opponents a slight edge in spotting the enemy. You definitely see this same thing at play in Halo, and I would suspect it may be even more prevalent there due to the brightness of the colors.
I've seen this in other games as well. In dark maps, blue is harder to see. I wish what they would do is let each player set the actual color of each team individually. i.e. a player, regardless of what team they were on, would see teammates as blue and opponents as red or whatever colors they choose.
Yes, it's strange that they don't do that. They've made some maps symmetrical - why not also take the easier step of always making the enemies the same colour! It would also reduce the mistakes made by drunk players: "what team am I on again?"
I think America's Army did something like this. No matter what team you join, you're always an American fighting against the terrorists. (That way, America never loses, even when the insurgents win.)
This was an option in Perfect Dark: Zero and IIRC Gears of War (long time since I played that). You could set "all enemies red/all teammates blue" / "team always blue/enemies normal" / "normal" Whenever we'd play a game that used the new color schemes it threw people off and they complained like mad. Perhaps these innovative changes get pulled out of more popular titles because the majority of users aren't interested in change...
Though I know I would love to see it appear in Halo. (Red/Green colorblindness i
To the GP, yes that's true, but with TF2's abundance of orangish-red desert textures, the same could be said about Red.
To the parent, while that'd be nice to always have the opponent be the same color, they'd have to drop the whole Builders League United and Reliable Excavation Demolition branding thing that they have the maps branded with (something I think gives the game a nice bit of personality) - unless they could find a way to dynamically load the textures, which I don't think they can do with Source
Certainly in Halo 3 I chose white for my Master Chief colour and I found that I was doing well in Snowbound but not quite as well on other maps. So as an experiment I changed my Master Chief to brown and my overall stats have raised a little. It doesn't make a huge amount of difference, but it's enough to get that split second edge.
Especially on shady maps. Red stands out making it far easier to see them trying to snipe. High ground and Valhalla are two that immediately come to mind. Even better, change the brightness/contrast on your tv and never miss red again. Just how it is I suppose.
This is why I like games like Rainbow Six or (maybe obscure personal favorite) Navy Seals for Q3, where the two sides are, say, "urban camouflage" and "slightly different urban camouflage". Not only then does neither team enjoy an advantage in spotting the enemy, they also have no advantage in separating friend from foe!
The Blue Door is in the middle; the Red door is on the right side of the screen. When teams are unbalanced, one door is locked. When teams are balanced, the player chooses between the door in the middle of the screen, or the one to the right. The result? A significant number of players pick the middle door more often, leading to a Blue power play.
How to test this hypothesis? Randomize the color of the two doors each time, and see if the advantage evens out.
I play female characters (even though I'm a guy) in dark shades for a different reason: the other guys get really pissed off at seeing a female character with a hot sniper rifle.;)
Something to remember about the 2fort death map...
The big red hot spot has 3 levels of height in play: there's the area right outside the spawn, the area below it just before the ramp room, and the area with health in the sewer pathway. All three occupy the same x,y coordinates on the map. I think this contributes to the heat of that particular spot. Would be interesting to see a vertical cross-section of that one area.
I think you mis-read that map. The most deaths (the red spots) are just inside the entrance to each team's base, just before you head out the doors or wander into the courtyard. This is the largest choke-point both when a team is laying siege to your fort, and when you are doing the same to the enemy team. There is a slightly higher density outside the spawns. This is probably because a *lot* of scouts run over the bridge cover and meet sentry guns covering the courtyard right there. The same is true for sol
I blame snipers for the red spots. Whenever I've died there, it was a sniper that killed me. A good reason why the other two corners aren't red would be that one of the two spawn points is closer to the battlements... with the other spawn point I'm more likely to go fall through the hole in the floor and end up in the middle of my base instead.
in regards to the bit about scouts, snipers, heavies, engies, etc...it's almost as if each class has certain strengths and weaknesses put in there intentionally! I know it sounds crazy, but maybe, just *maybe*, there's more of a difference to each class than the character model! WOW!
As far as the RvB thing goes, it's obvious. BLU is best. Also, maybe the red jackets of those Red Bread losers wear makes them stand out more? Just a thought, but I bet a bright red jacket against a concrete wall is an easier target to lock in on than a blue jacket against the same wall.
in regards to the bit about scouts, snipers, heavies, engies, etc...it's almost as if each class has certain strengths and weaknesses put in there intentionally! I know it sounds crazy, but maybe, just *maybe*, there's more of a difference to each class than the character model! WOW!
I think it was more a commentary on the relative popularity of the classes than their strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you look at the full stats from Valve, you'll see that scouts are the most popular class, but a
What you quoted above was really just poking fun at the attitude of the summary...claiming every class is using bastard tactics, when they ought to be playing fair and such. I mean, seriously, what class does the author play as? Paladin?:P
You don't go Scout to kill people, but for point capping and intelligence runs - which ought to score more points. Also I'd say that the Spy is by far the hardest class to play, not the Scout.
The sniper get more points an hour then the Heavy which gets more kills per hour... As snipers are less likely to defend or capture I am curious as to why that is the case. Perhaps it is killing turrets...
Poor medics die fast... Not in my games!!!! NO ONE SHOOTS THEM THE NOOBS!!!!!!
Rocket launcher does the most damage but the not allot of kills for the soldier... Perhaps this is both the soldier and the turret for the engineer? As I do not see turret stats for weapon damage.
heavies get more assists (only 1 point) since they do fast damage but still damage over a period of time and heavies do best when working with other classes, snipers sit by themselves and take down enemies with headshots and other solo kills
The fact that heavies have the most kills could be misleading. How many of those kills were while the heavy was being healed simultaneously by a medic? A heavy does have real killing power, but because he is so slow he is easily killed by pretty much anyone outside of his rain o'bullets. Also, I usually see a good spy or soldier consistently at the top of the leader boards when I play. This could just be an artifact of the server that I frequent though.
Yeah, but those are the outliers. I've seen a spy at the top, and then two sitting on the bottom. For every guy who can awesome spy, there are three that purely suck, and won't stop playing one.
Slashdot headlines are getting worse and worse, if not for the sake of sensationalism. So, Team Fortress 2 confirms:
- Elvis is alive - Area 51 experiments - JFK's *real* assassins - The existence of the Illuminati - Pharmaceutical conspiracies - Chupacabras - ECHELON-style monitoring
Sorry, Team Fortress Developers, Deus Ex beat you to the punch 5 years ago!
I'm surprised the demoman isn't in there for most points, or kills. When I finally got around to trying this class (after 2-3 weeks playing scouts and soldiers primarily) I racked up more points/kills in 30 minutes than I did with any other class in the previous weeks. All I did was sticky-bomb high-traffic areas and blow people up when they walked by... came to point where someone bothered to note how little skill I had (and I didn't argue, it felt cheap and I got bored with it after an hour or so).
I bet your circumstances helped out there. More likely than not, you were either A) playing against a poorly-functioning team, B) playing with a very well-functioning team, or C) both A and B. If you were playing against a well-functioning team, they would have forcibly removed you from those high-traffic areas, and not allowed you to regain entry. If you were playing with a poorly-functioning team, you would not have been able to fool about camping hallways and such.
Any tactic that works for "an hour or so" just screams that one of the above situations it the case. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the truth is, there is more or less a response class for every class you can play. If you keep sticky-bombing a hallway, I sneak around as a spy and end your reign. If you keep sneaking around as a spy and ending people's reigns, I burn your face off as a pyro. If you keep burning my face off as a pyro, I mow you down as a heavy. If you keep mowing me down as a heavy, I drop a couple rockets near your feet. The list goes on. More or less, every class has at least one or two classes that can effectively respond to it. Since you apparently did not encounter the demo response classes for so long, there was something seriously wrong with your opposition.:)
Still, sticky-camping can be amusing for a little while.:)
According to the stats, Red successfully defends Dustbowl some 71% of the time. While I expect the defenders to win slightly more than the attackers, this percentage indicates that's something wrong with the map balance. Dustbowl is also ranked fourth based on time played (ahead of Well and Granary). This might not have anything to do with Red's skewed win/loss ratio, but it's worth pointing out.
(I've been playing Dustbowl since 2000 and it's the only reason I give a damn about TF, in case you're wondering.)
A mediocre Red team still has a decent chance of winning; a mediocre Blu team doesn't. Furthermore, a good player can still have fun on Red even if his teammates are idiots. Not so on Blu, where the entire team must work together to gain ground. Try advancing through the "death corridor" on stage 3 as your four offense engies refuse to switch to a more useful class or move their gear up. (As a side note, I've noticed that as more Blu players switch to engineer, the odds of Blu losing increase exponentially.)
To be sure, I've played some fantastic rounds on team Blu, but I often find myself server hopping to avoid wasting my time as an attacker doomed to defeat (hey, I don't have much gaming time these days and I'm not going to squander it getting raped.)
This trend is the reverse of what I saw in TFC: Blue would win the majority of matches thanks to skilled players pipe/nade jumping the flag into the cap, bypassing the entire defending team. In TF2, one player can't jump across half the map and save the day. In other words, there's a greater emphasis on teamwork.
One of my suggestions: redesign the first capture point on stage 3. Maybe narrow the bunker to give Blu a wider area to navigate and reduce the potency of Red demos. Any other Dbowl players think the map needs tweaking to even the odds, or is this simply due to offense requiring more coordinated teamwork, something in scarce supply on pub servers?
I play almost exclusively on 24/7 dustbowl servers, and I actually think the map is properly balanced. The problem comes from yes, you need more teamwork on offense and on public servers this is generally in short supply. However, I will say that "more teamwork" can come down to just 2 people, a medic and a demoman. You complain about those two parts in dustbowl pt3 being impossible to break. No matter how great the defense, it's pretty easy to just pick it apart completely with an uber demo. I've popped 4 sentries in a single uber in the first cap point in part 3, and then my whole team just rushes past and destroys the remaining defense. It just takes slightly better planning and communication.
I think the other problem is stupid instant-respawn servers. These totally unbalance the map in favor of red. I no longer play on any server like that, regardless of map, but it pretty severely impacts the two pure attack/defend maps, gravelpit and dustbowl, and I think this is reflected in the stats since those are the only two maps skewed in Red's favor.
Yes, I know it sucks to sit there for 15 seconds waiting to respawn when you're defending. But guess what? The other team has to travel the whole map to get to the cap point, whereas you spawn there. Instaspawn breaks the map.
I think the other problem is stupid instant-respawn servers.
Yeah... you want to see something insane? Get on a server playing cp_lazytown with instant respawn. Preferably a 32 player server.
TF2 is not your typical FPS, but that fact hasn't quite sunk in to the minds of custom map designers and server admins yet. Playing on a custom map, or to some extent, any server with custom settings, is usually a recipe for game breakage.
I find the opposite--Blu wins more than Red on Dustbowl/Gravel Pit. This is particularly noticeable on Gravel Pit, where the offence wins, teams switch sides, and the other team's offence wins. (Repeat five times for the tournament match I watched in Gravel Pit).
The going theory I've heard is the instant respawn servers that I do my best to avoid. The attacking team by design is supposed to have a faster respawn timer, which instant respawn servers negate, and at any rate the defending team always spa
i dont know if it needs re-working. it's supposed to be a challenge for the attacking team. the first cap on stage 3 is practically impossible to hold for too long. and if you capture it quick enough you can give your team nearly 20 minutes to take the 2nd point. you're correct that red need only be mediocre. but, i mean, it's called *TEAM* Fortress for a reason. two relatively coordinated teams will have GREAT skirmishes throughout.
if there's anything at all that needs nerfing it is the first trench in sta
It's not that Blue has the edge on most maps. Their edge is minimal, and probably not significant. It's the seemingly HUGE discrepancy in favor of Red on Dustbowl. Red wins over 70% of the rounds?!?
Disclaimer: I'm relying on "big numbers" to make these "statistics" relatively accurate. I've done no actual analysis beyond looking at the numbers.
You can get some insight into the numbers behind the very non-numerical TF2 by inferring from these statistics.
If you look at the "average distance" stats, you notice immediately that the fireaxe appears to have a longer range than other melee weapons--and it appears to be a fairly significant extension, making the axe's averagekilling range nearly as long
In the same graph, we can see that either syringe gun tracking is bugged, or that medics have a _very_ hard time aiming with their syringe gun
My vote is bugged. I get plenty of kills with the syringe gun, and usually at more than the maximum range of, say, the flamethrower. My guess is that the Fireaxe and the Syringe Gun got their tracking mixed up, or something to that effect.
I had the perception that the RL was consistently getting noticably more criticals than most other weapons, but it appears that'
In other FPS games (I haven't played this yet) I always try to be on blue because I honestly have an easier time spotting Red. I usually play UT2K4 and on the average server, red's just easier for me to shoot at.
Of course the red team die first, it is an established scientific fact [wikipedia.org] that wearing red shirts significantly shortens your life expectancy.
The reason is obvious: the game designers are part of the great liberal conspiracy. Sure, right now it's just "blue always wins," but the next thing you know Hillary's in the White House and we're all paying 95% tax rates for substandard health care and rising up against the proletariat.
Hydro's not at all symmetrical, so that's understandable. Red's final CP is ridiculously easy to cap, while blue can hold out for a long time in their little basement bunker. Granary and 2fort are so close to 50% to be irrelevant, but I'm very interested about the Well statistic. That map is completely symmetrical, except for a lot of the theming and coloring in each sprawling base.. could there be a psychological effect? Also those kill-density maps are nonsense, there's no way that more snipers get killed
The Q rotation servers are usually pretty good. Good crowd, good map rotation, not too much bullshit. A tip for Gravelpit: if you're a defending demo, put some stickies on A. Not on the floor, though. Put them up on the walls, above the doors. Put all eight of them all the way around the edge, Leave and go help defend B. At some point, A will start getting some BLU traffic. Don't set your stickies off yet! Wait for it. Usually, people set them off as soon as they see the point is being captured. Instead, wai
Also TF2 is a huge lag-fest, rockets take longer to fire, players don't move smoothly etc, etc etc. And before you say I have a lousy system just shut it, I have SLI.
Maybe you have a lousy ISP, or you're playing on the wrong servers. I've had no trouble with lag. (On the PC version, that is... the Xbox 360 is another story.)
The problem is that TF2 has very strong art direction that ties team color to environment, which is also divided between blue and red. You can't arbitrarily flip the colours without overturning a bunch of aesthetic and gameplay decisions.
Blue more likely to win (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blue more likely to win (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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I think America's Army did something like this. No matter what team you join, you're always an American fighting against the terrorists. (That way, America never loses, even when the insurgents win.)
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Whenever we'd play a game that used the new color schemes it threw people off and they complained like mad. Perhaps these innovative changes get pulled out of more popular titles because the majority of users aren't interested in change...
Though I know I would love to see it appear in Halo. (Red/Green colorblindness i
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To the parent, while that'd be nice to always have the opponent be the same color, they'd have to drop the whole Builders League United and Reliable Excavation Demolition branding thing that they have the maps branded with (something I think gives the game a nice bit of personality) - unless they could find a way to dynamically load the textures, which I don't think they can do with Source
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Bob
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Accidental team-kills: the great equalizer.
Simpler than that (Score:2)
How to test this hypothesis? Randomize the color of the two doors each time, and see if the advantage evens out.
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Hilarious (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)
The big red hot spot has 3 levels of height in play: there's the area right outside the spawn, the area below it just before the ramp room, and the area with health in the sewer pathway. All three occupy the same x,y coordinates on the map. I think this contributes to the heat of that particular spot. Would be interesting to see a vertical cross-section of that one area.
Parent
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There is a slightly higher density outside the spawns. This is probably because a *lot* of scouts run over the bridge cover and meet sentry guns covering the courtyard right there. The same is true for sol
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OMG! (Score:5, Funny)
As far as the RvB thing goes, it's obvious. BLU is best. Also, maybe the red jackets of those Red Bread losers wear makes them stand out more? Just a thought, but I bet a bright red jacket against a concrete wall is an easier target to lock in on than a blue jacket against the same wall.
-G
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I think it was more a commentary on the relative popularity of the classes than their strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you look at the full stats from Valve, you'll see that scouts are the most popular class, but a
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-G
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Interesting stats (Score:2, Insightful)
Poor medics die fast... Not in my games!!!! NO ONE SHOOTS THEM THE NOOBS!!!!!!
Rocket launcher does the most damage but the not allot of kills for the soldier... Perhaps this is both the soldier and the turret for the engineer? As I do not see turret stats for weapon damage.
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My own observations (Score:2, Interesting)
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Every Suspicion? (Score:5, Funny)
- Elvis is alive
- Area 51 experiments
- JFK's *real* assassins
- The existence of the Illuminati
- Pharmaceutical conspiracies
- Chupacabras
- ECHELON-style monitoring
Sorry, Team Fortress Developers, Deus Ex beat you to the punch 5 years ago!
Solomon
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Demoman not in there? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Demoman not in there? (Score:4, Interesting)
Any tactic that works for "an hour or so" just screams that one of the above situations it the case. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the truth is, there is more or less a response class for every class you can play. If you keep sticky-bombing a hallway, I sneak around as a spy and end your reign. If you keep sneaking around as a spy and ending people's reigns, I burn your face off as a pyro. If you keep burning my face off as a pyro, I mow you down as a heavy. If you keep mowing me down as a heavy, I drop a couple rockets near your feet. The list goes on. More or less, every class has at least one or two classes that can effectively respond to it. Since you apparently did not encounter the demo response classes for so long, there was something seriously wrong with your opposition.
Still, sticky-camping can be amusing for a little while.
-G
Parent
Rebalance Dustbowl? (Score:4, Insightful)
(I've been playing Dustbowl since 2000 and it's the only reason I give a damn about TF, in case you're wondering.)
A mediocre Red team still has a decent chance of winning; a mediocre Blu team doesn't. Furthermore, a good player can still have fun on Red even if his teammates are idiots. Not so on Blu, where the entire team must work together to gain ground. Try advancing through the "death corridor" on stage 3 as your four offense engies refuse to switch to a more useful class or move their gear up. (As a side note, I've noticed that as more Blu players switch to engineer, the odds of Blu losing increase exponentially.)
To be sure, I've played some fantastic rounds on team Blu, but I often find myself server hopping to avoid wasting my time as an attacker doomed to defeat (hey, I don't have much gaming time these days and I'm not going to squander it getting raped.)
This trend is the reverse of what I saw in TFC: Blue would win the majority of matches thanks to skilled players pipe/nade jumping the flag into the cap, bypassing the entire defending team. In TF2, one player can't jump across half the map and save the day. In other words, there's a greater emphasis on teamwork.
One of my suggestions: redesign the first capture point on stage 3. Maybe narrow the bunker to give Blu a wider area to navigate and reduce the potency of Red demos. Any other Dbowl players think the map needs tweaking to even the odds, or is this simply due to offense requiring more coordinated teamwork, something in scarce supply on pub servers?
Re:Rebalance Dustbowl? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the other problem is stupid instant-respawn servers. These totally unbalance the map in favor of red. I no longer play on any server like that, regardless of map, but it pretty severely impacts the two pure attack/defend maps, gravelpit and dustbowl, and I think this is reflected in the stats since those are the only two maps skewed in Red's favor.
Yes, I know it sucks to sit there for 15 seconds waiting to respawn when you're defending. But guess what? The other team has to travel the whole map to get to the cap point, whereas you spawn there. Instaspawn breaks the map.
Parent
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TF2 is not your typical FPS, but that fact hasn't quite sunk in to the minds of custom map designers and server admins yet. Playing on a custom map, or to some extent, any server with custom settings, is usually a recipe for game breakage.
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The going theory I've heard is the instant respawn servers that I do my best to avoid. The attacking team by design is supposed to have a faster respawn timer, which instant respawn servers negate, and at any rate the defending team always spa
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you're correct that red need only be mediocre. but, i mean, it's called *TEAM* Fortress for a reason. two relatively coordinated teams will have GREAT skirmishes throughout.
if there's anything at all that needs nerfing it is the first trench in sta
Stats (Score:2)
You can glean some other facts, too. (Score:2)
You can get some insight into the numbers behind the very non-numerical TF2 by inferring from these statistics.
If you look at the "average distance" stats, you notice immediately that the fireaxe appears to have a longer range than other melee weapons--and it appears to be a fairly significant extension, making the axe's averagekilling range nearly as long
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My vote is bugged. I get plenty of kills with the syringe gun, and usually at more than the maximum range of, say, the flamethrower. My guess is that the Fireaxe and the Syringe Gun got their tracking mixed up, or something to that effect.
Ahem (Score:2, Funny)
Easier to see? (Score:2)
Red shirts (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Blue, definitely (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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A tip for Gravelpit: if you're a defending demo, put some stickies on A. Not on the floor, though. Put them up on the walls, above the doors. Put all eight of them all the way around the edge, Leave and go help defend B. At some point, A will start getting some BLU traffic. Don't set your stickies off yet! Wait for it. Usually, people set them off as soon as they see the point is being captured. Instead, wai
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Totally agree.
Bonus points for playing MegaTF
MegaTF was a blight upon the awesomeness that was stock Q1TF.
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