[Kaylee]

The best people don't play tf2 anymore or in one case have gotten rusty cause he RARELY plays tf2 anymore

care to elaborate

Xcstacy when he played soldier and sniper all the time, Clem, Anomaly, Balls when he played demo all the time, etc

Oh yeah I forgot yay. He's the best still playing.

[Adder]

Yeah I just remember there was like, o-m-a-i or something like that.

for cs 1.6 at least, it was o-int-m-p-i

i have no idea what happened to CAL but last time I checked it doesn't even exist anymore

Tanked, what CS-S cal-i team were you on?

I think in CS:S they changed int to a and took out p or something.

[yay]

The skill disparity between the best pub stars and middle competition players, much less high level, in a 6v6 environment is ridiculous.

Even the best pubstars have horrible habits that take a long time to be broken which allows them to be annihilated. It's difficult to explain without using known pub players as examples and come off as though I were insulting them. I can say that CAL-I, CEVO-P, ESEA-I level CS 1.6, CSS, CoD, etc teams have tried to make the transition to TF2 with the expectation of being top tier and failed miserably. It's a whole different skillset beyond individual fragging talent.

There's just no way to describe the skill level gap, other than many of these teams that try to play against middle-high teams without hours upon hours of scrim practice and in-depth class dynamics are lucky if they can score a few frags much less take a round. The number of scrims and matches I've played against guys like those, where 3 or more people finish with 0 points is surprisingly high.

[Agua]

We could always host our own 6vHighlander setup some time...

As someone who is breaking into 6v6 and debated heavily on this topic in the other thread, all I can say is that people should try their hand at comp style play.

The simplest you can break it down is that there are different strategies for dealing with 16v16 and 6v6. They are different skill sets. The main difference that I have seen is that comp players dedicate more time to focused practice and they reap the benefits from that.

Personally, I enjoy the challenge of 6v6 since most of the "challenge" in regular pub games is convincing people not to play like asshats and avoiding crits when possible.

[getthere1tme]

Tarquin,

There are a number of things that make racking up pub kills a lot easier. Inferiority in your opponents is a big one. Being a demo, soldier, or heavy with a medic, preferable a kritz medic is the easiest. There are more people to shoot at when kritzed thus more kills. It's impossible to push a conservative combo while they're building kritz or uber because they have 14 people and more than likely numerous sentries to retreat to. Being a great pub player is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your name is known, you get pocketed more you get more ubers and kritzes and are topping the scoreboard because of it. Likewise, you can have a lot of extremely talented non-heavy class players who simply dont frag or play well due to conditions.

I'm not saying that the better pubbers don't have any skill. Of course, good aim, awareness and movement will all help but in pubs that's only a tiny piece of the pie. Only bare minimum of these skills is required for pubs. When you're playing competitively, when one or two people down is often the loss of a point and possibly a match and your opponents are just as talented as you are, if not more, then it's a much bigger deal and it requires a greater skillset.

Great pubbers are still good players, but that's all; simply good. They can definitely make the transition too. My team is mostly SourceOPians. LpG are from SOP Gold Rush as well as Evil. But you can't transition from being a great pubber to a great comp player right away. As soon as you step into competition you realize how great of a skill gap there really is and how far you need to go. Pubstars are just big fish in a little pond. Put them in a bigger pond with bigger fish and they're the ones getting chomped on.

tl;dr A comp player will always have more raw skill than a straight up pubber because he's better conditioned and held to a higher standard.

[Drbumpy]

How many threads like this do we have on here, just out of curiosity? There always seems to be another one springing up just as the last dies.

I'll make this simple with some dashed points:

-People who play competitive TF2 will practice (rather than just play) so that when they play another team they don't have their assholes intruded upon.

-16/16 and 6/6 are wayyy different, and 16/16 with a bunch of randoms and 6/6 with actual TEAMS is even wayyyer different.

-Killing idiots doesn't make you good, but it does make you better than idiots.

-You don't need to make a thread like this because I'm the best and everyone knows it.

-It's ok to be any size of fish in any pond, but some ponds are smaller with dumber fish.

-Community weapons are overpowered.

-Nerf crit stickies.

Should just about cover it, I think.

[Tarquin]

Everyone please note that I wasn't making an argument that comp skill =/= pub skill or that pubbers are just as skilled as competitive players, or even that if the 95% of best pubbers were to jump right into competitive action they would be anything above average.

What I'm saying is that the "Pubstar" argument, which everyone on multiplayer FPS games has been shouting for as long as I can remember --ity goes something like, "It doesn't matter how good you are because you only play pubs" -- doesn't make sense. If you are good at the game, you are good at the game, and you can probably teach yourself to be good at the competitive level too. Now obviously the people who anyone cares to watch on Source TV, who are at the top of the foodchain, are a tiny fraction of the entire population of TF2 players.

[getthere1tme]

I like turtles

[Agua]

turtles are nice.

[unknown]

std is good too