Thread: L4D2 TPG Style?

Originally Posted by iLLusioN

My story didn't change. The attitude is why I haven't tried it since. I could make the time to finish a match, just like I do for CS when I want to. I made my original comment because I know I'm far from the only TPG reg that received the same welcome when coming in fresh. I've seen others post in similar threads and a couple of people expressed similar experiences via steam when asked. I.E...be hard asses if you want to, but there's a good chance you are driving potential "customers" away. I will re-iterate...there's being an asshole, and then there's being asshole teacher. All the OG's that Blonde mentioned before were and are most definitely assholes...but they also TAUGHT, and that is the difference I was trying to point out. I don't mind being called names and made fun of as long as people bother to correct me...I was banned before I was an admin, and I was ridden pretty hard by Yung, Duddy, Fly, Smoken, and many others for quite a while until I figured out playing TPG.

And I'm telling you now, that is not how things are. I honestly don't know who you played with this first time, because I'll admit that I have been one of those assholes in the past, but I have always been a teacher at the same time. Many will disagree with whether I was a good teacher or bad one, but just as with anything it takes time and effort to get good at something, teaching is no different.

Honestly, I thank you for your post to my questions and respect your opinion on the matter. If you want to continue to disregard my attempts to tell you things have changed, then that's your problem. Many wouldn't even take the time to try to talk to people and get them to come back. I'm sitting here telling you people have made mistakes in the past, I have made mistakes in the past. The assholes have been put in their place and the community is better then ever. Is that not a legitimate reason to play again?

But as Shen stated, if the other half of the reason why you don't play is because you don't have time, then we can't do anything for you. You are more then welcome to come back and join any lobby. I assure you, and I'm sure the L4D2 admins will agree, that any assholes will be dealt with. We are probably even more lenient then GO, but the players playing will not put up with any player deliberately belittling anyone. The offer is there, now it is up to you whether you want to give us another chance or hold a grudge forever because of one game.

Alright, as the ranking FNG, I have to point out a few things. Yes, L4D2 is a hella competitive game. That's why it's fun. It's all about the flawless execution of the complex and elegant maneuvers needed to get a three cap, and horde the fourth. That's part of the fun. This game is like baseball for the SI. You are supposed to fail more often than not. You are supposed to miss that hunt every once in a while, get popped as the boomer, miss the charge. If you were successful then the SV would never make it to the end.

That's the game.

Now lets talk about how TPG enforces it. Yes, Blonde has a point. There are calls given, just like any CS game, and those should be followed to the best of the players ability. But L4D2 has some limitations. To begin, if a player is kicked, slayed or banned from CS, another tool will join the server in about 5 seconds. Not so with L4D2. You could wait for hours for another player to join. Then you have to worry about team balance, because even the slightest change in player skill can have a profound impact on how the game plays.

No other game sees the kinds of swings in player skill that L4D2 does. You represent 25% of your teams capability. Yet, if you are gone, your team doesn't function at 75%, they lose capability by orders of magnitude. How many times has a team lost someone in the beginning to a nasty spit charge, or death charge, and the other three make to the end? Hardly ever. At least not when I've been playing. A single guy matters that much. At least that's my observation so far.

This server is full of semi professionals. Amateurs do something until they get it right. Professionals do it until they can't get it wrong. When the amateurs join the lobby of the semi-pros who know all the various permutations of every hit location, and every combo of SI you can possibly get, then its behooves the amateurs to put their ego in check and listen. At the same time, no one's getting paid here. As admins you have to know the difference. As a former high admin here, I can tell you the most important thing is maintaining the integrity of the TPG 'teamplay' way. Its our motto, our mission statement and our creed. That's never been an issue in the games I've played, and that speaks to the powerful culture created by everyone here.

So keep up the good work, guys. When I get my internet back to a reliable place, we'll go a few rounds. I look forward to it.

And for those who don't know, Ranger just started playing L4D2 a couple months ago right Ranger? Either that or you just came back from a very long break. He can vouch that assholes are put in their place.

I've only had one issue with a guy who thought he was too good, and he rage quit inside of two rounds. I've been playing L4D2 for about 6 months. I played L4D1 when it came out, but I was more of a BF2 guy. I played CS like 5 times in my life. I suck rock-hard monkey balls at that game.

Originally Posted by Mr_Blonde_OPS

But my question is what if I wanted to go into the CS:GO servers and just play the game for the sake of playing it? Or any strategic TPG game? When I didn't want to play Counter-Strike the TPG-way I would go into GunGame or Deathmatch servers, but when I was on TPG servers it was follow the call and do what I was told to do, whether or not I thought it was correct or not. If I wanted to call a map and make the decisions for the team, I would step up at the beginning of the round and make the calls.

I have nor have heard anyone ever tell someone they couldn't call for the team on L4D2. Now if you were calling and your calls weren't working, then of course it is time to make a change. That doesn't exactly mean that your calls were bad, but it just wasn't working. This is a two-way street you are explaining. You think we are being stubborn for wanting to play "our" way, but that means you are also being stubborn for only wanting to play "your" way.

Does that kind of shit fly in any other TPG game? No. The call is made and the call is followed. The good callers are made present because their strategies work and the callers who suck, stop calling because they lose. There is nothing wrong with losing btw, but most people would like to win rather then lose. This is exactly how L4D2 is. If you want to play "drunk" late night games you are more then welcome to, but everyone needs to be aware that it is a drunk game where the sole purpose is to have fun and mistakes will be plenty. We have those games all the time.

If you were to post this same exact post in the CS:S forums back in the day, you probably would have been banned. Stuff like "game has to be played a certain way" or "SI had to hit in a certain place". There is a certain way to play the game and be effective. There are certain places to hit as an SI to be effective. Just like there are certain calls and strategies that are effective in CS:S and CS:GO. (I keep using these games as examples because they are the best examples that I have experience playing)

If we had players like you complaining and coming to the forums saying that they are always having to play with assholes who play the game "their way", we'd have chaos. I never tell a player where to hit or where to be in L4D2. I give suggestions that have worked for me and I have seen work in the past. There ARE hits and strategies that don't work in L4D2 and I see people continue to use them for some reason. Your telling me people have a right to continue to think their ineffective hits will work? Does sitting back and awping work? Is that how TPG works? No.

You're assuming again. Every player in L4D2 hits at different times, and at different areas with the same effectiveness. Each person would call a map differently, just like in CS. The only difference is that in CS you know the calls, and you know what to do. Why? Cause they are called, and they are detailed enough for anyone to know. The caller calls a lower B tuns to short, and if you don't do that then you're in the wrong and you should be. But in 2/3s of L4D2 games you're are assumed know when to hit and where, and if you don't then you're not doing your job, even when the hit isn't called. Which isn't a good way of doing things cause different types of attacked work the same way.

As SV I play the game slower than most, but still get put on a team where the "lead" pushes. That's fine if you're leading the push, but if you aren't calling the push(which happened in a majority of L4D games), or if you are going into Room A without calling it, then you should expect others to as well because if its ok for you then its ok for everyone else. It's stuff like this that you guys don't do, ever, that's the most irritating.

Originally Posted by Shenanigans

I understand what you're saying Dre. I'd like to clarify though, that I don't think that "fucking around' is necessarily bad, IF everyone on both teams is on the same page. Some of the most fun games I've played where totally shitfests where everyone was friends, no one was really calling and it was just lots of chaotic action. However, the problem is when not everyone is in that mode. If someone is actually trying to coordinate hits or doesn't think its funny when they lose half hp to a smoker while a teammate was 10ft away, then this really becomes an issue. It's also not a way that anyone is going to learn or improve much beyond the basic skills that they could pick up in a pub. And frankly, its almost as frustrating to play against a team that's in "fuck around" its a hollow victory when you feel like you're in a one-sided fight.

The other thing that's changed since you an some of the other players were around more is that the average level of skill has gone up. The amount of skill that would once guarantee you as 1st pick in a draft is now just average to below average. This means that unless everyone on your team is organize and trying, things just are NOT going to go well: you will never see the SR, and your hits will just look embarrassing.

Again, fucking around and just playing are totally different things. I can't tell you the number of games where others bitched about "you guys just fucking around" where the game was only a 200 point difference and the other team was pissed. Why? I have no clue, cause if the game was tough enough for the winning team to only be 200 points ahead, then I don't see how the losing team was fucking around, and I've been in plenty of games like that where I was called out for fucking around.

And as I stated in the other post, actual coordination, rarely occurred in game. I understand that calls get messed up by people, but if there was real coordination going on, then messed up hits wouldn't have happened as much.

I don't know what any of you are talking about - 'cept Ranger.

Anyone is welcome in a game I start, as it has always been. I also continue to hold out hope for a lot of the OG players and continue to pepper them with invites (everyone in this thread has received an invite from me in the last few days). Problem is I'm a west coaster now - all you fucks go to bed too early.

Oh - and Fuck DOTA2.

Originally Posted by iravedic

I don't know what any of you are talking about - 'cept Ranger.

Anyone is welcome in a game I start, as it has always been. I also continue to hold out hope for a lot of the OG players and continue to pepper them with invites (everyone in this thread has received an invite from me in the last few days). Problem is I'm a west coaster now - all you fucks go to bed too early.

Oh - and Fuck DOTA2.

Hey Dota2 is a beautiful mistress! ...Which makes people look like crack addicts...haha

Well, I guess I'm likely one of the people you're talking to here Blonde. Since I played hundreds of hours of both l4d and l4d2 until I felt that the culture in TPG was changing. This was evidenced by appearances of such things as Tier lists of TPG players and the Mother of All Etiquette Threads. The latter of which I posted heavily on, as people on both sides of the issue recognized that the culture of L4D had a problem, just that there were very different viewpoints to the problem.

Now, I haven't played with the TPG group regularly since then, though I have stuck my toe in occasionally to test the waters and found very similar issues as what was going on. But for those that don't want to go digging through two years of posts in order to find them, I'll summarize my thoughts.

First of all is comparison of L4D to CSS, and there was indeed an influx of highly competitive CSS players into the L4D2 community. Which is fine, however many of the players already there came from TF2 or BF2 oriented gameplay. And although both are or were played TPG style with high emphasis on teamwork and cooperation, there is significantly more individual initiative in both games because of an understanding of goals. CSS, with a static map and a fresh start every 2 minutes, it all boils down to the initial call of pretty much A, B, Slowplay, or Follow the Leader, and because everyone only gets a single life per round, that is the main direction and must be followed through. Using TF2 for example, there is really no set "caller", we have a goal of "Push the Bomb" and people decide how best to do that, and as a team you may need to tell people to get off sniper, you don't specifically get told that you need to be X and get berated because you didn't succeed in your task, you respawn and try again. Or in BF2, you'll be told to spawn a certain class or hold spawn or push a point, but generally your path and choices evolve as your own as the battle continues, as opposed to being told exactly where to stand and where to shoot.

In L4D there is only one goal per team, Get to the end, or prevent them from getting to the end. And I think there was a large misunderstanding on viewpoints. Especially with a bunch of people accustomed to be leaders coming onto the servers and trying to make very strict calls when the changing situation called for looser ones. I'm not saying that it should have been "everyone do your own thing" or anything like that, and that is what a lot of the stricter ones interpreted those who said that as saying. If someone is not working towards the team goal, it's pretty obvious, but there are plenty of ways to do so, and I think it was especially evident when playing infected. The caller in CSS will generally have a 'god's eye view' of the map at every round start, the CTs and Ts will always spawn in the same places, and it will always take X seconds for someone to get to Y. However in L4D the battlefield is pretty constantly changing, and at any one time, any one individual will only know about 1/8th of the story, thus why there was often a lot of input from the whole team. People calling out that they're lagging behind or that they've got a good boom at a good time, or the like, I compared it to the situation in TF2 when suddenly the medic/heavy or medic/soldier combo would become the leader of the team when they had uber ready, and then the 'leadership' role could just as easily switch to the engineer saying that they were setting up at a certain point. It was fluid and dynamic, and worked well in the L4D community for a long time.

I mentioned years ago that I felt the best callers for L4D would say things such as "Lets set up for X" or "Keep the pressure up" or "Hold on and we'll hit together" on SI, or on SV "Lets push for Y" or "Lets try to pick one before we go." But at the time there were a bunch of people that felt that the best way to motivate the team was belittle them and berate them, or acting like the person they were ordering about had only just got the game. Essentially the issue devolved into a series of arguments about best practices and exceptions that established only that "yes there are exceptions to the hypothetical best practice, and yes you are the one who could judge best if they would help your goal, but if you do so then you're only going to get reamed out unless you've been loud enough to establish yourself as the caller."


Another issue I had was that I felt that people were playing much more to win than to have a good game. And yes, the goal is to win, but I felt that certain tactics being used were gamey and becoming more common. The two main examples I recall were that people were told to cycle their SI spawns by suicide and to intentionally stand still and die so that their team could get SI first on the next round. Personally I felt those were very cheap tactics and toeing the line of being cheating. Now, that may have changed in the past two years, so if so then disregard this last paragraph.

Anyways, that is pretty much why I stopped playing L4D2 regularly with the main TPG crowd, and I think why there have been post after post in the L4D forum about where people have gone. TPG L4D culture had a problem, and instead of solving it, split apart with a lot of former regulars deciding not to play due to the change in culture and attitudes.

Also, for historical reference, here is a link to the etiquette thread. http://www.teamplayergaming.com/left...e-threads.html