This week, I had one of my proudest moments in Team Fortress 2: I was accused of hacking. As a Pyro. Normally we reserve that for the Snipers, who can one-shot people at extreme range, rather than someone using area-effect attacks up close.
Granted, this was from a Spy, and a relative newcomer to a server where I usually play. He was outraged and found something suspicious in the way that I would run up to a niche or corner, where he was standing invisibly, and set him on fire. We regulars know that Spies are constantly hiding in those spots, and he could not watch me Spy-checking continuously for several minutes once the other team got up to 4 Spies. And we know there is a Spy nearby once he backstabs a Sniper. And not all of them were perfect on the issues of being fully cloaked before moving or changing disguises in plain sight.
Let’s see what this weekend brings. Fear my w+m1 skills!
: Zubon
Old-school Quake matches were entirely about anticipating where someone might be. In large matches, you’d commonly spin and toss rockets into every place you’d expect players would group up.
In one-on-one matches, it was really common to never actually ~see~ the other player, but count up frags by fire-and-forget methods like this. Always keeping on the move, it was almost Zen-like.
Even with Quake’s high speed movement, it was actually less twitch-reflex, since it was more anticipatory than reactionary.
This sort of pathfinder playstyle depended heavily on intrinsically knowing the map. Once new maps become commonplace it faded out (plus Sniping kinda took its place), but it’s returned with TF2 (albiet at a much slower pace).
I love going to a regular server of mine and hearing people whine about regulars hacking when in actual fact, they practiced what they did many many times (and also failed many many times) before they got to where they were ^_^
In TF2 at least, this really is the ultimate achievement. Hearty congratulations!