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This week has been kind of scrappy because of all the new uni students arriving and work picking up, often eating into my prime evening/early morning gaming time. However the time I have had I’ve invested in playing more matches rather than the super deathmatch sessions I’m notorious for.

I’ve always known that relentless aggression is not the way to win games when playing scout, however you so often see scouts doing it. And I am one of the worst, the kind of scout who seems to always be trying to infiltrate the enemy space for a medic pick so i can scream ‘MEDIC DOWN!’ and recieve my big adrenaline rush. However having eventually managed to find a team I need to change that behaviour because it occured to me that while I normally judge my perfomance on my kill count, a scout with 10 kills can have a much more positive impact on his team than a scout with 30 kills if the high fragging scout is doing so at the cost of his teams defence. Now my 3 weeks experience have taught me (especially playing scout) that the game is -incredibly- situational and fast decisions often have to be made based on topography and game dynamics. However it occured to me that whilst this is true, your guaranteed to find yourself more than likley in many situations where the only real variable in play is players individual skill. Namedly rolling out to fight at mid. I began to think about what is best in this situation, because it is the one i most often see scouts (myself included) get carried away with something or play an all offensive rather than defensive roll. So I thought about it statistically.

I’ve made these stats up obviously, they are bullshit, they may be close or very far away, however the margin of error on my educated guess probably isn’t big enough for my theory not to have legs. Furthermore this is not -actually- representative of true TF2 obviously, so please do interprut i think this to be literal. It’s basically a TF2 based super simplified model of some things that could happen. However I hope that it illustrates the point i’m trying to make about this subtle complexity in the way I think i’m beginning to see the scout class work. I’ll put a summary of what I think below it if you can’t be bother to try and get your ahead around my disjointed maths/the maths is so weak it enrages you, but i hope you take the time to try and understand what i mean by it because for me I can see more and more situations it seems to explain or something similar could apply.

Team A is a clone of Team B
Team A plays aggressive scouts
Team B plays aggressive scouts
Odds either team loses a medic or demo over the course of the fight from a succesful scout play: 45%
Odds either team loses a scout/both scouts: 50%/25%
Over x games the teams should both be equal.

Team A is a clone of Team B
Team A plays aggressive scouts
Team B plays defensive scouts
Odds Team B loses a medic or demo over the course of the fight from a succesful scout play: 15%
Odds either Team A loses a scout/both scouts: 80%/40%
Over x games the Team B should be ahead.

Say that scouts have a value of 1, and med/demo has a value of 2. Assuming the odds of losing both scouts are lower than that of killing a med/demo (by my stats 20 percentage points lower) then the outcome is positive. But obviously when both teams are running scout aggression the value of their other classes is decreased enough to neutralise the advantage. So the scouts look like they are performing, but actually they are actually trading value from other players to increase their own.

When you run defense against aggression however you have a much lower chance of killing anything than you do of losing both scouts. Using the 1/2 player values, its quite unlikely that the aggressive scouts have a positive effect, almost always one for nothing, occasionally two for nothing, with outcomes involving a beneficial kill lowest. So in this scenario the additional defense of the scouts actually boosts the value of the rest of the team by increasing their survivability. The scout value probably increases as well because they themselves benefit from close medic proximity and added protection.

So the tl;dr of above:
I think that scouts can appear to be more useful than they really are because when they fail to defend a team mate they actually increase their odds of performing a positive action while the enemy focuses on exploitiing their error.
In a balanced situation scouts should statistically be playing defensively to provide both themselves and their team mates with an advantage whilst negating any advantage an enemy that could come from their over aggression.
I initially percieved scouts to be flittery classes that did most of their work on their own or within their partnership. However I am now beginning to think that maybe they are more like little catalysts than can boost their value and the value of other classes when they execute things in conjunction.

I guess that this is why when I downloaded a few demos from recent event finals the scouts seemed to watch flanks rather than hold them and often float about the combo or do a lot of their work from far back so they could provide quick assistance. As opposed to rushing flanks or lesser defended areas as I see most of the scouts doing at mid clashes in games at my level.

I have no doubt loads of people will disagree with that but hopefully a few will agree with me and that is just my opinion. And again just to cover my back I think there are loads of situations where aggression is the right thing to do, i just think its a lot less than I initially percieved it to be.

Yesterday the TV licensing man came with a search warrant (apparantly) and while I toured him around my sleeping housemates rooms my shiny new samsung 120hz monitor arrived. Its fucking the sweetest thing, feels so much different, sounds really weird but i think people with them might understand, its actually like the game is smoother than real life. Finally getting widescreen, an extra 5″ screen and not 8ms response is great as well. When work slacks up I’m going to have a few massive DM sessions to get used to the new resolution but i see it making the game much more pleasant to play and less embarassing dragging my 2003 dell screen to lans. If anyone is considering whether they are worth it, they definately are.

Another thing I’ve been trying last few days is no viewmodels, or at least none on my scattergun. I think it helps me concentrate a lot more on my crosshair however i think before i also used the model to help aim and it took me a while to get used to. Still dunno if I’m gonna keep it like that but I’ll play with it a bit more see how I feel.

After a epicly flamed recruitment thread one of the flamers was talked by a friend into giving me a trial which went pretty well. Hopefully once work slacks up on Thursday will be able to get a marathon of games in to work on building a solid scout partnership, something which at the moment I dont fully understand the mechanics of.

Cheers for reading!

Flame on!

walloftext

Scout doesn’t equal Rambo?

I find it amazing how in 3 weeks, you’ve gained a greater understanding of the game than many players have in nearly 3 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYvY9fYUZSE

You are completely over-analysing the game, it was an interesting read but this isn’t poker. The stats you’re using have no research behind them and are basically numbers you’ve picked out the sky. You havn’t took into consideration that teams will have a scout aggresive and defensive or that they could run a sniper instead. There are too many class variations to be considered for this type of analysis to be productive. As you said TF2 is a VERY situational game, so I’d recommend using the time you invest in playing to practice different variations rather than wasting your time and energy on these useless equations.

When a team is the aggresor they are ALWAYS in the driving seat. You’re putting your opponents on the back foot by being aggresive, they’ll nearlly always be in a worse position and will be forced to make those quick decisions you talked about.

I noticed you talked about using no viewmodels, the main benefits for this would be that you see more on the screen, you can also manipulate the use of corners more.

Who gives a fuck

Quoted from N/A

You are completely over-analysing the game, it was an interesting read but this isn’t poker. The stats you’re using have no research behind them and are basically numbers you’ve picked out the sky. You havn’t took into consideration that teams will have a scout aggresive and defensive or that they could run a sniper instead. There are too many class variations to be considered for this type of analysis to be productive. As you said TF2 is a VERY situational game, so I’d recommend using the time you invest in playing to practice different variations rather than wasting your time and energy on these useless equations.

When a team is the aggresor they are ALWAYS in the driving seat. You’re putting your opponents on the back foot by being aggresive, they’ll nearlly always be in a worse position and will be forced to make those quick decisions you talked about.

I noticed you talked about using no viewmodels, the main benefits for this would be that you see more on the screen, you can also manipulate the use of corners more.

josh tells it like it is