[mxlm]

That was pretty lame, guys. You had twice the number of players as the opposing team, and none of you were willing to switch.

[Mongoose]

That was only for the one round; things evened out after that.  Besides, the server auto-balance should really take care of that sort of thing way before it gets that bad.

Anyway, that was pretty fun, albeit a bit short-lived.  We need to get enough people together to populate most of a server ourselves, though.  Someone else around here has to own the game.

[mxlm]

That was only for the one round; things evened out after that. 

You weren't willing to be on the outnumbered team for only the one round, so I'm not sure why you'd expect me to be.

[Mongoose]

Woah, take it easy.  The truth is that I never even really think about team balance when I'm playing TF2, because the server usually does a good enough job of keeping things auto-balanced that you don't have to think about it.  This is the only time I'd ever seen a server stay that lopsided for that long; I kept waiting for it to boot some of us over to the other team.  I wasn't deliberately not changing to keep the team stacked (hell, I wasn't even getting many kills there myself), and I doubt anyone else was either.

[mxlm]

Woah, take it easy.

...

[Mongoose]

You came across as sounding a bit hostile there.  I apologize if I read you wrong.

[mxlm]

Thank you.

[Mongoose]

So as a fun follow-up story, I was playing in a random server later in the day, and I finally got the chance to experience the Hoodoo Self-Propelled Bomb Cart bug.  It's hard to defend against a cart when it has a mind of its own and makes it all the way to the last point before setup time ends. I think our team was far more amused by it than annoyed that we "lost," though.

[General Battuta]

I played on a server where the cart was a horse. What up with that?

[Mongoose]

I guess they didn't put the cart before the horse.

[sigtau]

I guess they didn't put the cart before the horse.

http://www.instantrimshot.com/

[Scourge of Ages]

http://www.instantrimshot.com/

Surely you mean http://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=rimshot&play=true

[Mongoose]

Okay, so I think I'm starting to love CTF on Turbine.  I've had two of my best experiences in the game over the past few days there.  The first was by far my best round as a Scout, in which I managed to pull off the Triple Steal achievement by capturing the intelligence all three times.  The amazing thing was, only one of them involved me picking up the intelligence after someone else had died, and on the last one, I snagged No-Hitter by not even having to fire a shot. It's fantastic having a Heavy-Medic pair on your team who manages to camp in the enemy's vents and keeps announcing right when they're ready to go Uber and drop in.

In the second, which just happened a few hours ago, my team was playing back on its heels for most of the match and was down 1-0 with under a minute left.  Finally, someone managed to push in and grab the enemy intel just before time expired, triggering Overtime.  What followed was a non-stop madhouse of grabbing and dropping for the next few minutes, at the end of which our team somehow managed to win 3-2.  I even managed to grab the last capture somehow.

[MP-Ryan]

Battuta kind of got his ass handed to him on my favourite server yesterday

Anyway, if anyone's ever looking for me, I can be found here:  64.34.184.221:27015

[General Battuta]

Yeah I ran into MP-Ryan in the middle of an awful TF2 night and ragequitted shortly after.

Was not fun. Thinking I may need to drop this game as spy just makes me rage too much.

[Hades]

Yeah I ran into MP-Ryan in the middle of an awful TF2 night and ragequitted shortly after.

Was not fun. Thinking I may need to drop this game as spy just makes me rage too much.

Then... play a different class?

[General Battuta]

Yeah I ran into MP-Ryan in the middle of an awful TF2 night and ragequitted shortly after.

Was not fun. Thinking I may need to drop this game as spy just makes me rage too much.

Then... play a different class?

NO

[MP-Ryan]

NO

As an alternative, you could try not running straight into the Pyro with the sombrero and a wicked penchant for using his axetinguisher.  You're survivability would probably increase dramatically   I was totally going to taunt after my third kill on you, but then I saw your score and felt sorry for you  

In fairness, you hit the server when it was full of regulars who are all certified Payload fanatics and regularly spy-check for some of the most irritating ****ers with knives I've ever seen in the game.  If you're coming from a regular pub, you don't have much of a chance.

[General Battuta]

I'd been playing for hours at that point and was well into a miserable self-punishing rut of cyclic failure and self-blame leading to even worse performance. I'm not really up for critiques of my playstyle right now.

[Mongoose]

I've had plenty of playing sessions when I can't seem to accomplish **** and keep getting sniped/backstabbed/demospammed every time I set foot out of spawn.  Sometimes it doesn't matter which class I switch to; I just continuously get wrecked.  The only thing you can really do when that happens is to grit your teeth, keep grinding it out, and learn from your deaths to see what does and doesn't work.  What makes the game worth playing are those moments like the ones I described above, when everything seems to magically come together and I'm having a ridiculous amount of fun.  It can be a round when I'm dominating as whatever class I'm playing, or just one where the people using voice chat are tossing some hilarious banter back and forth...either way, that's the reason why the game has hooked me like this.