ubercharged.net

An epic struggle

Wow. Me and my team felt dumb after this one.

It was one of those satisfying, hard fought dustbowl battles. An epic struggle where you’re hanging on by the skin of your teeth, constantly pushing back and forth, where the teams are evenly matched and everyone is putting in everything they’ve got. In short, a pretty damn good game.

It was the last stage. We fought hard to hold the first control point, and we managed to for a couple of minutes before inevitably losing it (as you do on dustbowl, because it’s designed that way). So we fell back to defending around the next corner after that.

I was playing medic, and it was one of those great random public server teams where it all just gels. We had a good mix. There were the couple of obligatory soldiers, a demoman, a pyro, a bunch of heavies, and a couple of engineers keeping sentries up behind the front lines to handle the odd enemy push that drove us back a bit far. Our guys took the defense back on the offense and were doing a great job driving the attackers back. They knew just how much to push back to slow the enemy’s advance. They’d judge it just right when to fall back to get healed up, and with all the intense fighting (and healing), the ubercharges were coming thick and fast.

It was smart play. A couple of times one bright soldier even ducked out repeatedly to get hit by an enemy sentry round the corner while I was healing so I could build uber quicker.

This was going great. We were pushed back from the first point with about 8 minutes on the clock - not too shabby. We then managed to push back and hold their advance steady. We were still holding it nicely till about 2 minutes to go and were feeling confident. We were co-ordinating over voice comms, and spirits were high. We were gonna do this.

Yeah we rock, BUT…

In all the excitement, we all kinda forgot about doing any defense of the actual point. Seeing as we were forward of the door to the alternative underground passage to the last cap point, we figured no one could get through - not even a spy. Hah.

Somehow though, this one god damn Houdini ninja spy did manage to slip past the constant rocket spam, pyro checking, and even the 3 lard ass heavies that were physically blocking the entire width of the path! I’m not sure exactly how, but I’m picking some kind of advanced portal use. Possibly involving flinging…

And he plonked himself directly on the cap point catching us with our pants down so to speak. Meanwhile we were all defending the bottleneck half way across the map blissfully ignorant of any problems until Ellen McLain sneered that our control point was in trouble. So we all did a 180 and bolted for the control point to try to somehow get there in time and salvage the game. We managed to get to the last corner with less than second to spare…

I know you’re all expecting a happy ending where madlep saves the day (again), but it was not to be so. A couple of rockets were fired, but the point was capped before they hit. The last thing we saw was the spy taunting us before the cap timer finished. Then he charged our mob and killed us all with the butterfly knife as humiliation time kicked in.

Did we feel stupid? Yup. Very.

On the upside though, I’ve managed to sneak this one in a couple of times since then. Its great if you can pull your own Houdini and quietly slip past the current point being contested to wait patiently near the next cap point. I even spent 3 minutes deep undercover patiently standing next to an enemy demoman pretending to be a sniper. I backstabbed him at the last second and did my own sneaky cap to win the game. Was crapping myself. I was sure him or someone else would try spy checking me at some point - but random displays of incompetance are a hallmark of public servers (don’t expect to get away with that in any form of organised game).

I love it when that happens now.