Team Fortress 2 beta: A sniper experience

October 2nd saw the release of a fix. Information in the patch said something about fixing the position prediction algorithm. Curious in nature, I decided to see if I was right. And I was. Immediately, I started dominating the playing field.

“So I am not as rusty as I thought.”

Some of the feelings are coming back now. I just let my hands move by itself. Each shot strengthening the connection between past and present. I say, I have a 25% hit ratio at the moment should be able to get back up 50% once I am more familiar with the new setup. For an improved sniping experience, I have long switched to my own way of holding the mouse. Instead of moving my whole wrist or elbow, I decided to plant the wrist on the mouse pad and rely purely on my fingers to move the mouse. I hold the full weight of my mouse between my thumb so that it slightly float above whatever surface it is on. I figured that my fingers have more precision than my wrist. The gain in precision is thus obtained by decreasing the range of motion. I managed to offset the handicap slightly by increasing the mouse sensitivity to 75% while playing games.

So I kicked people’s ass for two nights straight, the improvement is staggering. I am usually the one with the second most points on the leader board, with the first being a scout of course. So, with that record, I think I can safely say that I am more entitled to judge this sniper class. Here are some interesting tid bits that I discovered.

• When coming out from a wall, enemy snipers who’s already in position can now see your arm first before you can see them. Giving a camping sniper first strike opportunity.
• Fully charge head shot will kill anyone
• Head shot without charge or a fully charged body shot will kill the light armored classes: Sniper, Engineer and scout.
• You can shoot through the cracks between any object. Giving you some very interesting cover.

I also noticed a big difference when playing COD with my co-workers. I seem to have an easier time sniping them off than before. Everything is like slow motion to me, feels like my brain is in a sort of over clocking mode because TF2 is a much faster game and people jumps around more. Maybe my theory was right, if we are forced to take information at a higher rate, we’d think faster. Further reinforcing my belief that, we need to constantly put ourself on the edge in order to improve.