I was skimming through Teatime’s editorial, and decided to give some footnotes for you all. Some of it is for the sake of understanding the history of this game, and some is just to learn more about the game itself. For anyone that hasn’t played the original TF for Quake, I highly recommend finding a copy of Quake (I recently picked up a boxed full-version Quake CD at my local nation-wide software chain for $6 to replace a broken CD), and just giving it a run, to get a hang of what it took to get into a game of TF in the first place, and also to get a look at what over 700 people were doing at a time when the last big hit online game had had 300 players. It’s akin to comparing the number of people that play CS to the number of people that play Quake 2 Red Rover (fun mod btw ;p )
Also, some of this information is still pertinent to HL and TFC. In fact, reading through one of these files, I found the script that eventually became the ’detscript’ which revealed a bug in the demoman’s pipe detonation delay in TFC. The files are as follows: TF2.8 Readme.txt file (yeah, 2.8 was the last client version of TF before TFC came along), TF Versions change history, and the Quake Tech Info help file. The first two files came in the TF2.8 client download, the 3rd came in one of the patches for Quake.
Anyway, just thought I’d share, since I had this stuff sitting on my hard drive anyway. I was one of those 700 people playing QWTF for a while, and then, as much as now, I often took time away to do something else from time to time, but TF’s a hard one to shake off. There’s something to be said about smaller communities in online gaming, you’re more accountable for your actions because everyone knows everyone else. I really started paying a lot more attention to the way I play when I started recognizing the people I was playing the game with, and even moreso when they started recognizing me. On top of that, if someone asks a question, and you know the answer, it takes a lot less time to answer the question and go on with the game than to chide the person for not knowing something that you probably had to ask about as well. It’s not the new players destroying the game, so much as the somewhat older players not helping the new players. The gap in skill that a script can make up for is so minute that it’s laughable that people would go to such great lengths to protect it. The things that matter: how you move, the weapons you choose to use, the timing of your approach on an enemy, the way you work with your teammates, the way you communicate, can not be made up for with a script, and if you can’t stand out above the newbie on the basis of those points alone, then who are you to chastise and chide the newbie for asking?
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