Montana Fragfest

The scout is a fast and nimble little class, who’s goal is to get in, get out, and NEVER stop moving. One of his most difficult enemies? The soldier.

From a Distance

The trick when rushing up on a soldier as a scout is to keep moving (you’ll end up hearing that quite a bit in this article) and think carefully enough to dodge his rockets. From a distance the scout can run circles around a soldiers rockets. In this scenario you are probably best if you whip out your pistol and try and get solid hits against the soldier. While strafing and dodging you can pepper him with your shotgun, but he’d be foolish not to just retreat and find some health (and with as much damage as you are doing from a distance he’ll probably only need a little health bottle). If you want to execute a kill from a distance, your best option is to rush up on that soldier and get good solid hits with your scattergun. Read more »

Tonight I was gleefully playing some Team Fortress 2 on the Montana Fragfest server. The map was goldrush and we were on the first leg of the map, and our bomb cart was right near the end. The defense was putting up quite a fight and we were having trouble keeping the cart moving in the right direction. That is when my friend Bruce LeeRoy spouted out on the mike “we’ll have to Scout bomb it”.

What is it?

The scout bomb is a technique that didn’t necessarily appear with the map goldrush, but previous to gold rush you heard similar tactics such as the “scout rush”. A scout rush typically occurs at the map or round start where an entire team switches to scout in order to “rush” the capture points and get a quick win. How does a scout bomb differ from a scout rush you ask? Read more »

This guy! —>

Today Valve released the Goldrush Update for Team Fortress 2. Along with some gameplay updates and bugfixes (which will be talked about in a later article), a major addition of this update is the Goldrush map. Goldrush introduces a new gameplay type called Payload, with the premise being that Blu team is pushing a large bomb (the payload) to the objective deep in Red territory. As members of the Blu team stand around the payload it moves forward (with greater speed the more teammates are around it) while simultaniously dispensing ammo and health. When the offensive pushing (Blu) team doesn’t push for 30 seconds, the payload starts slowly moving back down the track from whence it came. This is a key point, because on defense you need to remember that the cart CAN move back, but it moves back at a constant rate no matter how many people you have pushing it.

This map (or perhaps the gameplay type, I’m not sure which yet) are excellent and ridiculously fun to play. Even in the one night that Goldrush has been out I’ve noticed the playing community crafting very different strategies and counter-strategies.

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If you are new to Team Fortress 2, the task of telling if someone is a spy or not can be rather daunting. I’m going to help out newbies by skipping all the tactical and mental games you can play with a spy and go straight to the fool-proof detection methods.

The first and best way to tell if a friendly isn’t so friendly is by “bumping” into them. By bumping I mean that when you are running around, you will walk through your teammates, but you don’t walk through enemies (or your enemies dispensers, sentries, etc.). So when you are walking, if you walk near a teammate and notice you can’t walk through them, GET KILLIN’! Often I’ll be attacking in a large group of teammates and just notice the slightest bump and more often than not it is a spy.

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The Montana Fragfest boys recently attended a MSU Hivemind LAN party. During this gaming orgy, I noticed that several people had committed several of the Cardinal sins of LAN partying. So to help you folks not be the LAN jackass I’m going to line out some of the biggest LAN party no-no’s so that your friends won’t think your an uber boob.

• Macs – I know you are proud of your over priced computer (heck, even I own one) and excited to see such a large gathering of people who are somewhat technologically inclined, but your computer is not the same. Your computer is the cheerleader on the sideline while the rest of our computers are busy pummeling each other in the end zone. Please don’t bring a computer that is renown for it’s inability to play video games and then walk around the entire time complaining about not having games to play.

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