sneak's Guide to ET

[sneak]

Chapter 3 - Training and Mindset



Section 1 - Comfort and Attitude
Personal comfort is important to me, if it's too hot or too cold I'll not perform as well in ET. I can't be in an agitated or anxious mood, or I'll perform poorly in-game. The best kind of attitude to have when playing is a calm and neutral attitude. If you're constantly accusing everyone of cheating you probably will end up pretty upset and doing even worse than you started off as and then ragequitting. Ever notice how people usually ragequit after accusing players of cheats? That's why. Being fast to accuse players is bad, it makes you look bad and inexperienced or like a hater. The best thing to do is privately spectate and record a demo just in-case. Without proof, accusations are useless. Not to say I haven't been guilty of that in the past, but typically when I'm saying someone is cheating it's because I'm sure. Some people may not agree or realize it yet but my accuracy rate has proven high. Keep in mind too that this game is very old and some players have been playing since the start and have seen much more than you have and experienced much more than you have. We've been playing the same maps and encountering the same situations over and over for countless hours, days, weeks and months. We see players think they're clever trying to do things over and over throughout the years but in reality it's nothing new to a seasoned player. Alot of players have played against much better players than you, making you not much of a challenge to them. Just because they're better than what you've ever seen doesn't mean they cheat (this is mostly going out to you pubbers who accuse every single skilled player who comes to your server and ban them for "cheats"). After a while, it becomes habit to counter the behavior of players because people get so used to it. Imagine waking up every morning to someone punching you in the face. Eventually you're going to catch on that as soon as you wake up, you're going to be fighting back instead of calling them a cheater because they hit you when you were sleeping.


Section 2 - Preparation
Alot of good aim comes from in-game practice of course which is mostly developed by building muscle memory and learning to track player movement and teach yourself a pattern of common movements players make. Another thing you could do that I used to do with friends several years ago is *a 1 vs 4 on a map called ctf_well in an etpro server. These are the rules:

• You go on one team as field ops and you can use any weapons you want.
• Four friends go on the other team as field ops and can only use pistols.

The purpose of this exercise is to teach you how to prioritize targets and hide your body from damage. You want to "slice" your targets off in a way so that you can only shoot one at a time when several are coming at you from the same direction. Sometimes you need to chase people around a building when there are people coming from the other side and will end up behind you soon. You need to use headphones to accurately hear where people are and able to process several calculations in your head while you shoot. If it's too difficult to do all this, maybe try taking it one by one then improving each skill once you're comfortable with others. For example, improve your snapping and tracking to targets then move on to target prioritizing and audio cues to move to certain places to avoid damage. Often the difference between a single kill and then dying and 4 kills then dying is how you position your OWN body while shooting. The enemy team that has 4 players is going to learn how to improve their pistol shots at the same time. At the end of the round the player with the most damage gets a turn unless you're only planning on training one guy in 1 vs 5 over and over. In the global configs the round doesn't end so maybe you should set a timer. There is an objective on ctf_well which is kinda interesting but when you're practicing 1 vs 4 you don't want to do objective. Keep your mind focused on the objective of fragging.

Another thing you can do if you're a loner with no friends is go on an etpro server with aop_practice_b3. It's a map with floating ET heads without a body that I've spent hours on just like ctf_well 1 vs 4. They shoot back at you and hit you pretty well. It's difficult to hit them because there's no body under them and heads are small. My advice is to imagine with peripheral vision if you can, a body under the head. For some reason this psychological trick tends to help me hit the heads.

I think to really build skill you need to get into a routine you're comfortable with during gameplay and get used to doing the same things over and over that have proven effective. Build muscle memory with your keyboard just like your mouse. You should be playing and making decisions like habits, not trying to over-think everything and make it a chore or task to play. Things should feel natural, like you didn't even have to think to successfully pull something off in-game.


Chapter 4 - Things that can hold you back


Section 1 - Player Perceptions
This section is being included because it contains beliefs that can prevent you from accepting the reality of ET, and progressing in skill level.

There are people out there who constantly complain about things like spawnkilling, spawncamping, corner camping, selfkilling, and a number of other things. The complaints are invalid and only holding those people back from reaching their potential in ET. If you don't play using those tactics and skills then you can't be the best player possible.

Starting off with the big one, SK: Spawnkilling is when you kill someone inside their spawn right after they spawned or if they haven't left the spawn and they're standing there AFK like idiots causing the teams to be imbalanced. You generally don't have an issue with AFK players and people who complain about SK in etpro so this is going out to you pubbers. People think it's unfair and that you should "give the enemy a chance", well the reality is that it's completely fair and they already have a chance because they're playing the same game with the same weapons and classes. Spawnkilling is actually a core objective of all traditional first person shooters, and ET falls under that category. The reason SK is an objective of ET is the same reason killing the enemy is the objective: because the game is a team-based FPS. In order to actually do the teamwork and move or build tanks or trucks, destroy things, build things, carry objectives and capture flags you need to kill enemies 99% of the time. The game is literally a game about shooting people which is why it holds the genre "First Person Shooter". So right from the start, your main objective in ET is to shoot the enemy. Without guns in ET, the offensive team would always win. The goal of defense is to hold back the offense and the goal of offense is to complete the MAP OBJ. Spawnkilling achieves this for your team by pressuring the enemy team from actually advancing throughout the map. If the enemy team cannot advance, they can't defend their map objective (or push it if they're on the offensive team). If you constantly cry about people spawnkilling this is going to hold you back from becoming a good player because good players spawnkill and whining about what other people do in the game is only going to ruin your mood while trying to play. Not only is all the above true, but the game actually COMES with spawnshields built in. How much more can you really ask for? You already have a chance + the spawnshields so stop asking for "a chance to leave spawn". If you aren't out of spawn by the time 3 seconds is over you aren't helping your team enough and deserve to die. The final point about SK is that entire teams don't tend to do it, it's usually one person or two. If an entire enemy team can't leave spawn with one to two people killing/camping there then the teams must be off. That isn't the fault of SK, but a team imbalance. Even if someone successfully kills a freshly spawned enemy or two, the rest of the team with full health and ammo and invulnerability for 3 seconds is bound to kill the SKer.

Spawn camping is basically the same concept, but it involves a player hanging around the spawn which is actually even better of a move. There's nothing wrong with playing smart in order to prevent the enemy team from winning. Next thing we know we are going to have people making server rules to "not shoot someone in the back" because they need to be "given a chance to turn around and shoot you". It's completely absurd and ridiculous but alot of admins are restricting SK because of players who want this. Clans want populated servers so they often have to do what's necessary, even if that means using rules like those. It's the players who need to change and accept that this is part of all shooter games and shouldn't be restricted. When people move on from this incorrect form of thinking that SK/SC is a bad thing, they will begin to improve. The "waa waa it's no fair because you won't give me an extra chance" mentality is harmful. SK and SC can potentially put an enemy player out full (dead for the entire duration of their spawntime) which is also helping the team defend or push their objective. SK and SC ARE the implied objective since the objective is goal based rather than KDR and damage.

Self-killing is also a huge part of ET because of the spawntimer system it uses. In the most simple terms, it's better to spawn with full health and ammo and assist your team than be dead an entire spawn cycle leaving your team to carry the weight of a missing player. Killing out to avoid kills isn't really a huge deal either but I can kinda understand why people get frustrated about that.

Medics, there's nothing at all wrong with medics. In the case that a server admin changes the health regen of medics to increase it by alot or gives them unlimited ammo or something there could be an issue but by default there's no issue. People have whined about medics for much too long and it needs to come to an end. The reason they got owned isn't because the enemy played medic, it's because they're bad at ET. Medics aren't broken and were meant to be in this game and without them there'd be no objective completion. Medics are the all around objective-doer aside from things that require explosions or pliers. This is because they are great for fragging, great for keeping the team healed and revived, and that includes the engineers who will be building and destroying alot of the objectives. They are very useful in several parts of ET. And not only this, but let's face it -- not everyone is that coordinated or lacking disabilities which prevent them from playing better. Not everyone has great hardware and peripherals. Not everyone can knock down opponents easily. We need people who can play medic in this game or it would be extremely boring. Everywhere you go, imagine never being able to get revived. Imagine not having any extra health when you just got shot by a random lotto rnade and you're nearly dead. Medics help carry the team to victory, whether in defense or offense. Yes, you do need engineers for most maps (especially when walljumping isn't allowed), but without medics this would be an entirely boring game. It's not cheap to play medic, it's not cheap to heal yourself. This is the perk you're granted when playing medic. You have less ammo, less grenades, and can heal yourself and the team. Yes, I understand some people only dislike "rambo medics" but I'm referring to the general dislike of medics and people who think that medics should be entirely removed from the game. I'm sorry but you're plain wrong. Medics have existed since the beginning and worked from the start.

Walljumping is only a trickjump if double jump isn't being used. This is one misconception people have in servers with double jump. That guy who just jumped by kicking the air and went over a wall didn't do anything special. He just used your server settings. Real TJing takes skill, timing, practice and coordination. There's nothing wrong either with doing this, though I see the reason why pub servers have rules against it. Again, most players want to continue playing the maps and not have objectives rushed. The only contradiction here is that sometimes the settings and player count for the map sizes are unfair for the offending team.

Alot of people tell me things like "this isn't etpro" or "we just want to have fun" whenever I try to discuss things like this with them or game balance regarding panzers that fire off every 2 seconds from the same player and shut a nuke size missile at a bullet speed of travel rate. I have no intention of turning pub servers and pub mods into something exactly like etpro. The problem is that SOME things are just extremely unfair in these servers and that's what I have an issue with. How this is relevant to the guide is by playing on servers like this and following their beliefs you're creating bad habits for yourself and it will be hard to accept alot of things in this guide and hard to progress into being a more skilled player. Pub players have odd views on etpro and anyone from it. Just because someone expects balance doesn't mean they want to convert your jaymod server into an etpro one. Calm down guys. Also, there's a reason why etpro is used as the competition mod in ET, it's balanced. It's FAIR. So try not to have this bad attitude whenever someone wants a map that happens to be played in pro alot or wants balance and fairness in the gameplay. If people were more willing to accept things and be open-minded they'd be able to improve and the entire game would be less of an accusation-fest.

Modifying configs is perfectly fair and it's a feature of ET. There's nothing wrong with it, it isn't a cheat, it isn't unfair. If that's what you think then you're 100% wrong. First of all, configs are already included in the pak0.pk3 file. If you understand how ET loads the pk3s you know that the things in the pk3 are loaded relative to the mod folder. If you have a silent server and you put a pk3 in there that has the folder structure "/sound/announces" then files inside with the appropriate names it's replacing the ones inside the silent mod pk3. Well in the etmain folder there are configs in the root directory of pak0.pk3 from developers of the game (to best of my knowledge that's where the configs came from). That's where those tricks come from where you tell people to "/exec horsey". Next, this is actually quite common in FPS games. Even Half-Life based games and COD games have swappable config systems. Finally, nothing in CFGs are being added into the game. All of those settings already exist, they're only being tweaked. You're probably now thinking "well, you can't change (or find) those in the game so it's unfair". You're wrong again! You can change all of those in the console and you can find all of those in the console. Alot of people don't know that you can type things like "/cg" and hit tab and the console will display all the cg cvars. Alot of people ALSO don't know that you can type "/writeconfig filename.cfg" to store your chosen settings to a config file.

Lastly, don't make accusations against players for things such as kills to deaths ratios. "Going 118 and 36" doesn't mean someone cheats. Everyone just laughs at you when they find out you actually thought someone cheats because you said something like "dude you went 53 and 4, you cheat". If you think someone cheats, go to spec and make a demo of them. It's that simple. Review the demo to judge their play. Only very seasoned players with the right experience can spot cheaters by playing against them, and even then if they have no proof it means nothing anyway. Don't contribute to those servers who ban people without proof. Get proof before banning or you will forever be a joke and terrible at ET. Speaking of demos, another pro tip to take with you is to record other players who are skilled so you can watch them and learn how to play.


Wrapping this up


By now you may be feeling extremely exhausted after reading all that and watching those videos. Take a rest and reflect on what you've read then go try some things out. Back when I started this game I was a total noob like most people and I didn't really play FPS games online (only LAN games). ET is more difficult than most games I think and I was no child prodigy when I started. I was playing on a server called MoB and I don't remember what it stands for or if it's the same people who play RTCW but there were some players there who trained me in ET and taught me some things about configs and how to remove the bloodsplatter and bobs. I learned alot from them and I still remember that. The people who really taught me in the beginning were thrifty24, [MoB]*Bunni* and joey. I spent hours in scrims on Sandals scrim server and pubbing on ETBOX Core East and SNL! and many hours playing with eX~ and Eternal#. All of this was very useful in learning ET and by the time I joined jaymod clans like [UPC] (United Pizza Confederation) and *PsL (Party Squad Leiden) I was doing real well. I had always liked scrimming but never was interested in official scrims on STA/ETL/TWL, etc... I was also in Jr high and high school for a large part of my early years and busy doing other things back then.

So I wanted to thank joey, thrifty24, bunni for being my original ET mentors but there are other people I have to mention here. Shout outs to and people I've known for a good amount of time and talk to regularly and discuss ET things with as well as other things. Those people being: Banana, tAukima/ellen, Winnie, vick, PuK, grnwng, rsn, gerb/deceiver and Foreigner. Also to people who help me learn more technical information when I'm stuck such as: magik from tjw, Dragonji from sky-e, Paul from TB and from ETLegacy team we have morsik, Radegast, RaFal, Ensiform and hifi. They help me out and I really appreciate that alot. These guys are trying to better ET by developing ETLegacy so go check that out when you get a chance. Finally, wanted to mention Jemstar because he's the coolest Australian in ET ;>.

So congratulations if you've read through this huge novel and learned atleast one thing about ET. Every little thing adds to the community knowledge about the game. If there are any serious requests for more walls of text from me for a guide on something I may consider doing it so leave it in replies.