Some clarifications

Sigh, some people tried their best to misunderstand my latest editorial. But what can you expect from a community which discusses respawn camping as if they had never seen a lame demo hanging around the enemy resupply exclusively for kills ...

Of course most of the issues I described in my editorial are by no means new.
It’s quite logical that many people who started playing this game with TFC have few insight into the history of TF. But the gap in understanding the history and development of TF/C is growing larger. The newer players not only have no idea what the original TF had been through, but they also know little about the roots of TFC. Many people discussing the HWG today know little about how pale in comparison this class was before TF1.5 (which in fact made him so strong Valve toned him down a bit later). Can those people really evaluate the sniper without knowing how ineffective he was pre-TF1.5 (unless in the hands of really good snipers), but that the sniper was a feared class in QWTF in a way which is hard to imagine even today?

The overstressing of skill or a winning-at-all-cost attitude have of course been present in the times before the TF 1-5 patch and will have plagued the old TF as well. Don’t think I’m trying to fool you into believing the old TFC or TF community would have been an intact world with everybody being role models. The change I spot is not the upcoming of this attitude but I feel it’s growing and spreading through the community (and I’m sure it’s in no way restricted to TFC but becoming a general problem in all kind of games).
By no means I intend to apply to each ’new’ player that attitude. There are a lot of good people amongst them, without any doubt. Oh, while we’re at that point: With ’new’ I don’t mean newbies (you should know me better by now)! I expect little from someone who has just entered the game and the community and who has still so much to learn about the game and the way to play it. Somebody moving to TFC from a deathmatch-game will likely need some time to adjust and to realize that TFC requires a different approach and attitude. But as soon as somebody’s past the initial phase of getting to know TFC he should in fact adjust to the game, and then I (or anybody else for that matter) feel entitled to question and criticize the attitude he’s showing.
So ’new’ is merely an expression to separate - quite crudely - the post-TF1.5 generation from the one pre-TF1.5. But let me stress this again: This distinction is not intended to lump together all ’new’ players as the bad folks and glorifying the ’old’ players as the good guys. Take it as you would take a statistic saying there would be an increase of small criminality amongst the 15-20 years old.