Montana Fragfest

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.

Another surefire way to tell if someone ISN’T a spy is by looking at the weapon they are wielding. When you are a disguised spy you walk around as your selected class wielding the default weapon. So if you see a medic with their medigun out, don’t worry they aren’t a spy. Also if the teammate is actually firing their weapon they aren’t a spy, because a spy can’t fire weapons when cloaked.

Another built-in measure to find spies is by their name. When a spy selects a class, they inherit a name of a teammate that is using that class, and if they are a class in which your team has no members they will be given a random name from your team. This means if you see someone running around with your name attached they need to be dealt with.

Another way to tell if someone isn’t a spy is through voice communication. If alltalk is off on a server, when that spy uses voice communication they won’t have the little exclamation bubble over their head denoting they are using voice communication. If the server has alltalk off, when the spy uses voice communication then they WILL have the exclamation over their head, but you will notice on the right side that it is a member of the opposite team talking and you should kill them immediately. Often I will use voice communication as a way to let team members know I’m not a spy simply by clicking the voice comm button once or twice so they can see the exclamation over my head and know I am on their team.

There you go, ways to sniff out spies with zero thought required! Get out there, grab a pyro suit, and get flaming those sneaky spies!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Team Fortress 2, Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.