yuko

By Sirlin Introducing...the Scrub The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things. One definition is someone (especially a game player) who is not good at something (especially a game). By this definition, we all start out as scrubs, and there is certainly no shame in that. I mean the term differently, though. A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about. A scrub does not play to win. Now, everyone begins as a poor player—it takes time to learn a game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win. The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. Let’s take a fighting game off of which I’ve made my gaming career: Street Fighter. In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start. You will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you—that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you block for fifty seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap. Street Fighter was just one example; I could have picked any competitive game at all. Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definition of playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing. A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Who knows what objective the scrub has, but we know his objective is not truly to win. Yours is. Your objective is good and right and true, and let no one tell you otherwise. You have the power to dispatch those who would tell you otherwise, anyway. Simply beat them. Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite subtle and difficult to discover. Knowing the counter tactic prevents the other player from using his tactic, but he can then use a counter to your counter. You are now afraid to use your counter and the opponent can go back to sneaking in the original overpowering tactic. This concept will be covered in much more detail later. The good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak. Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They don’t know the first thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Superficially, their argument does at least look valid, since often their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of this “fun” on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter his every move, even his every counter. Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is a sequence of moves that is unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.” I once played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him five times in a row asking, “Is that all you know how to do? Throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either ignore his losses and continue living in his mental prison or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play. I’ve never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves. I’ve also never seen a prize for a player who played “in an innovative way.” (Though chess tournaments do sometimes have prizes for “brilliancies,” moves that are strokes of genius.) Many scrubs have strong ties to “innovation.” They say, “That guy didn’t do anything new, so he is no good.” Or “person X invented that technique and person Y just stole it.” Well, person Y might be one hundred times better than person X, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the scrub. When person Y wins the tournament and person X is a forgotten footnote, what will the scrub say? That person Y has “no skill” of course. You can gain some standing in a gaming community by playing in an innovative way, but that should not be the ultimate goal. Innovation is merely one of many tools that may or may not help you reach victory. The goal is to play as excellently as possible. The goal is to win.

just add them to your favourites list and you can see when people are in the server also 500 ping is pretty much unplayable.

connect [server ip]; password [password] add 'password' infront of the password... hope i didn't confuse you just an example: connect 213.13213.412313:213123; password iamgod

PiZZAwOWOwOWWOoW?

you're welcome!

I loled at this. +1 HahAhA +1

I Am Too Lazy To Retype ㅇㅅㅇ junjihyun?: http://asiafortress.com/thread-1789-post-18381.html#pid18381 ㅇㅅㅇ junjihyun?: lol nmy!: haha nmy!: if i were a hacker nmy!: i'd try to not hack for a game, play like the shitter i would be, and record a demo, and upload it for all 'the fucking assholes' I cApitAlizE rAndOm LeTTeRs. o/

its called highlander. no shit

idealistic people

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-287ehU1U4&feature=player_embedded

There's no such thing as getting worse. Never play the blame game. You probably gained experience and know what not to do by playing in AFA. That should be the way you're thinking

There was a chance for AFA participants to play merely players of similar skill level. That chance blew when certain comp morons decided to alias and get their first win ever in AFA pugs. All these "play much better teams, get rolled, learn better' thing is getting on my nerves. You don't get better by playing stronger teams in which you get rolled in 8 minutes. You only learn when you think back and see what, why and HOW your team was lacking and how the opponents played. AFA participants do not have the capability to get rolled, then slowly reflect on how they can improve or the rationale behind certain plays of the opponents. Sorry if I might be offending anyone but consistently getting rolled and not knowing how to improve will be disastrous in the long run. The worst thing that might happen is for these remnants of AFA puggers start EMULATING plays without knowing the rationale behind it. Then it would start another cycle of pure retarded strats/no strat at all as most of our teams are famous for. If certain players had not been dicks and purposely screwed AFA pugs up, it would have worked. It barely got to a week since launch and it's been transformed into something just ridiculous. Who's here to decide which players are in div1 or 2? What criterions are we using? Previously when AFA was still AFA, I had the motivation and drive to actually hop in the servers and sincerely help the players who truly wanted to learn. They had fun, they learnt. Now whenever I wanna start jumping into the server and mentor for abit I see some familiar competitive players' names I just lost all drive because after speccing for 10 mins or so, it becomes apparent that they merely outright carry, frag and that's it. No mentoring involved amidst countless whining and unhappiness among the AFA players (sorry I had to give an example, p_assword) No offense div, when you demoed in the server which stated FFA yet disallowed division 1 players, did you take time and effort off to honestly mentor the guys or were you playing to up your game, to frag maybe? I remember you outscoring the medic. The peeps weren't too happy with you were they? Would the community classify u as div 1 since you're from m. ? I honestly don't know and this is where the line is blurred. Tl;dr: good luck AFA peeps. Soz if I stopped showing up to mentor, I couldnt find the motivation to mentor amongst a bunch of DM dicks. I'll still be around if u need separate mentoring. To the rest of the comp players, grow a pair and play teams your own standard. Lastly, post isn't directed to anyone. Isn't meant to offensive either. Merely thoughts of mine. Sorry in advance.

RIP AFA

thank the lord it ain't you

there's some srs problem there.... mentors..killing? what?

by year you mean month i hope

i doubt it would have been so heated if you hadn't suggested taking this concept of AFA and, i quote from someone, "throwing it into the lion's den". maybe for a change, we get to see players who actually know how to play in a team, as a team a month or two from now. these players might just very well be players who actually turn out being good at the game and dominating the scene, because they learnt the basics from the very beginning. from the way you look at things, these AFA participants ain't progressing. from the way i look at things, these AFA participants might just very well be progressing at a much more rapid rate than some of the normal puggers. i personally wouldn't address these players as "retards" as you have. if i had to bestow the title "retards" onto some people, i would, on certain normal puggers who lurk around the PUG servers, DMing their lives away and not improving at all from the very beginning. this can be attributed to the lack of basic-foundation building. "frags = win" <- /vomit as with you, i'm glad new blood's coming in as well. we're not allowing them to stick in their own bubble forever. when the time comes and they have grown out of the AFA standards, they will be asked to move on to the normal pug servers. till then, let them improve and develop in the AFA servers. it isn't exactly babying them through, when they're playing with players around their standards, is it? at least they get some sort of competition, to put it bluntly. putting them thru AFA isn't gonna make it worse, it isn't gonna be unproductive, this will pay off ultimately. still, no offense

New clause: Competitive players are welcome to mentor the AFA participants, but are strictly forbidden from participating in the game itself. This includes medicing for any team. What a mentor should do is to join up the relevant mumble channel and coach accordingly. (i.e. via voice chat).

i think that's a very horrid thing to say it hasn't even been a week since the launch of the AFA, if one mentoring session and 5 AFA pugs are enough to get any previously-public players into higher-levelled competitive tf2, then it defeats the whole purpose of getting an AFA server, or starting this at all. the idea of AFA was not just to bring people into comp tf2, it was to nurture and mentor newbies in the ways of comp tf2 and providing them with the opportunities to practice. true there are plenty of shitters playing in the normal-levelled pugs but throw these AFA participants into a pug with 8-10 other people who have countless more experience; sorry to say, but its the hard truth: they'll probably get torn apart by the puggers, and knowing our community, they will get flamed alot. AFA was a success, you're right, it brought a whole new wave of new, interested, fresh, enthusiastic puggers who even bother getting into mumble just for a better and more productive pug session as compared to the normal puggers (us) who take forever to pick, forever to roll, forever to choose classes, and the standard is still subpar. there is absolutely no sort of commuication between the normal puggers and it's mainly just DM, DM, DM, whereas the newbs are actually talking to one another. i don't know if this is somethin to be ashamed of. this ain't merely just some (i quote) "low-level pug shit". i've seen and personally taught some of these guys during the past week and i've to say, some of their learning attitudes reign far superior to those in the normal pug scene. true, their DM might not be up to scratch, their game sense might not be there, but at least they're getting the basics right from the very beginning. you mentioned that most of the people here started by putting themselves into shit, going thru the ring of fire. look how that turned out. we have people who don't know how 6v6 actually works, and how to play an actual team game instead of an all-out MGE-sausagefest in scrims. it's painful to watch. if only the AFA participants were willing to form teams within themselves and start picking up scrimming, i'm willin to bet, with the same level of dedication, enthusiasm and determination they're showin in these "low-level pug shit", within a month they'll be able to beat some of the teams now convincingly. no offense

The Agentcy | Sigma | PUGs and Scrims Server kindly provided by Agent K Please contact nmy if you have any queries. Steam Profile This server is meant to host pick-up games for players who are not eligible to participate in the Asiafortress Academy (AFA) PUGs. However, those who are eligible to join the AFA PUGs can still participate in PUGs in this server. This server is also available for teams who wish to scrim. Scrims take precedence over PUGs, but teams will have to wait for the current PUG taking place to end (if there is one) before commencing the scrim. There are two different configs in this server. The default one will be the PUG config, where teams will play to a round difference of 5, or to the end of 30 minutes. Teams can request for an admin to change the config to the SCRIM config should there be a scrim, where teams will play to the full 30 minutes, regardless of the score, so teams can practise the map for the full 30 minutes. There are a couple of changes to the unlocks allowed, a few notable changes include the allowing of the use of: > Gunboats > Equalizer > Bonk! Atomic Punch > Sandvich These unlockables are allowed because they provide opportunities for teams to implement more strategies into their gameplay. Rules and Regulations: Players are expected to be courteous and keep trolling and flaming to a minimum. For PUGs 1) Players will join up the teams, and once there is a combined total of twelve (12) players joined up, players will roll to spec immediately. The last two to spec will join the teams as medics and will have a melee-fight in the middle capture point. The winner of the duel will commence picking. 2) While the duel is going on, players in specs should take the initiative to consolidate a list of players who haven't played the previous map, and provide this list to the medic captains. Medic captains have to pick from the list first, until the list is exhausted, then proceed on to pick other players. 3) Offclassing is allowed, but only for legitimate purposes. For example, a pyro defending last is considered acceptable. However, if anyone is found to have offclassed merely to be a nuisance to his or the other team, he will be severely dealt with. 4) Teams will play to a win difference of five (5), for example, 5-0 or 1-6, then the PUG will end. 5) Players can then use the votemap command to vote for the next map. For SCRIMs 1) Teams can request for server admins to join in the server and execute the scrim config. 2) Even though SCRIMs take precedence over PUGs, teams must wait for the PUG going on to end before requesting for the puggers to leave the server/spec. Even though scrims do take precedence over PUGs, teams are expected to be polite and courteous to the puggers when requesting for the usage of the server. Final notes: This server is kindly provided by Agent K of The Agentcy. Cheers to him. Should there be any persistent discontent, disputes or queries regarding the use of this server, please contact nmy at Steam Profile The Agentcy | Sigma | PUGs and Scrims Do note that this server is not under any form of Asiafortress administration. connect 103.1.152.28:27015; password sigmapug

mmhmm.

http://asiafortress.com/thread-1763.html

Hahaha cobalt

good stay where you belong

the only thing dead is you every game you play note: thing