About L4D, for a change

It sure is a good thing Valve fixed dedicated server searching in L4D. Tried playing a few nights ago, and since I had four friends along, we of course made a lobby to make things a bit easier. I (or Slaver) usually host locally, because our connection's upload rate is pretty okay, and at least my friends hardly ever get any lag, but since the dedicated business was supposed to be fixed (and sometimes Steam decides to kick me while hosting locally, naturally making the server shut down), we tried that.
Did we find a server?
Yes. Once, out of five tries. And we had 170 ping. So matchmaking indeed! Server searching was fucking better before this so-called fix.

And why do people try to invite me to play L4D when I'm in-game? I never really understood what's the point in that. If you see me already playing on a server, what in the world makes you think I'll just jump servers and join your game? I get a lot of invites suddenly, from several different people on my friends list, and for some reason those always get under my skin.
So take note, people: when I play L4D, I usually play with a rather large group of friends (who are people I know irl). So if you want to play with me, drop me a line instead of just throwing a random invite, and I'll see what I can do.

And if there are a bunch of people with "Esa" after their name playing with me, yeah, those are my friends. We decided to start wearing a tag to confuse people (and scare them away in lobby when they join: there are four people in already, all going Infected, and all wearing the same tag after their name. Hehehe) and make it obvious that we know each other and any insults we may fling at each other are not to be taken seriously.
And if you ask, Esa stands for European Space Agency, and yes, we all work there.
(In reality it's just a silly in-joke which really doesn't make any sense in any other language but Finnish. Or, well, imagine replacing a part of any compound word - or in severe cases, any noun - with a very common male name, eg. John. There you go).
And don't mistake us for a clan of any kind.

And while we're on the topic of L4D, I wanna write about another thing. If you, for any reason at all, go AFK during game, even for a moment, TAKE A FUCKING BREAK FROM THE MENU. The goddamn idle mode is there for a reason. Because what happens if, during a versus match, you go to a toilet, or where the fuck ever, and just leave your character standing there? Yeah, we get slaughtered, that's what. Because we have to
a) Wait and protect you in one place, making all of us easy prey for the enemy team, and Director of course thinks that we're bored, and marches out a few hordes to make us feel alive again,
or
b) Run for it and leave you, which gets all of us killed. Because a smart enemy team knows that you, being AFK, are not a threat, and thus goes after US instead of YOU. Because we're one man short, you can't help us, and after we've been overwhelmed and incapped, you're the easy target.
Next time you go AFK without going idle, we're going to votekick your sorry ass that fucking instant.

And why don't people stay together in versus? I hate it when our game falls apart just because one man stays behind for some reason, and then gets assaulted by a Smoker or a Hunter, and we have to go back for them, and then we lose. I'd love to leave them to die because it was their own mistake to stay behind, especially when we make it very clear at the start of the match that we're going to stay together and keep moving, but you know how it goes, it's a team game.
If you're going to heal, SAY SO, so we know to hang back. Don't go after Smokers or Hunters you saw behind us in the distance, just inform the team of the threat and KEEP MOVING. The infected have to keep moving too in order to catch us, so a Smoker hanging back won't be doing much if we ignore him. If YOU go after him, by yourself, you're a fucking idiot, because the Smoker sees you, you probably won't see him or his tongue, and then you're in trouble, and fucking things up for the rest of us. And if you need to do anything that requires you to be away from the keyboard for more than five fucking seconds, go idle. For the love of god, it's not that hard.

And here, have a GTA-style Francis (who's incidentally my favourite Survivor):



I've also been getting back to TF2 and I would appear to be a kickass Pyro (my brand new most kills record is 20) while I've nearly completely lost my touch with both Soldier and Demo (although it is debatable if I ever really HAD any touch with either, oh well).

HA!

FINALLY.
After eight months of playing together and getting my butt handed to me every freaking time I ended up face to face with him, I finally dominated Slaverstrike.



Okay, yeah, he was playing as Spy and I immediately went Pyro (and told Sonny - a fellow Pyro - to torch everyone because Slaver's going Spy), but by the time I got the domination he had already changed back to Demo. And that was the only assist I got against him, the rest were kills.
The best part? He never got the revenge. HA HA HA HA.
And he's still whining to me about it, haha, but COME ON he dominates me every damn time we are not in the same team, and this is the first time I've actually managed to dominate him. And probably the last time too.
(The best part about the screenshot? The only way is down, so after gloating over the GREAT SUCCESS! and laughing my ass off, I had to suicide. Ehh.)

So apart from some domestic domination disputes my misadventures in TF2 can be summarised a bit like this:



We kick ass.
And those scores are fucking ridiculous (also I was so torn apart because I wanted to be Sonny's Medic too D:), but what can I say. We make one hell of a team because we can actually communicate with each other.
Except we still need to learn to decipher what the hell is it that one of us is trying to say sometimes: I often go "OH FUCK ME DEAD" or "EIIII PERKELE" which usually means that there's a Spy or a Pyro behind us, but hell if he knows what my sudden screaming's all about. Haha.
And I'm having trouble of being a one-man Medic, since I'm so used to healing everyone. So sometimes I just go all "wait a mo, I go heal these other people here" and fuck off somewhere to heal others. And it hurts me when I need to be dedicated and we have a Mission to Accomplish and someone's yelling Medic somewhere and I can't go to them without Slaver buying the farm. So torn!
And our teamwork doesn't work quite as well the other way around since I'm such an atrocious Heavy, but if I'm the Medic and Slaver's the Heavy, we pretty much dominate. As you can see (the scores at the end of the same match):



So, um, beware? I guess.
And of course someone whined about it at some point ("why are these awesome players teamstacking on a newbie server?"), so apparently Chrome + Slaverstrike = Automatic Teamstack.

Nothing else, really. I've been playing a lot as Demo (and gotten some Medics to finally love me, which is just wtf: one Medic loved me on Badwater and kept giving me his übers near the last point, basically just hitting it the moment he got it and I was going all JESUS CHRIST THESE AMATEUR MEDICS DRIVE ME INSANE, running there glowing and just chucking grenades at people without really accomplishing anything. I was hoping he would go away and leave me to do my sticky camping in peace but noooo, he was sticking to me like glue. Another "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!" moment was when a Medic übered me on Gold Rush about two seconds before the gates even opened. OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO LOSE), and disturbingly much as a Sniper, and find myself sucking quite hard at it (and still refusing to change classes because "WHY DO I ALWAYS HAVE TO BE THE MEDIC?"), but I'm wanting to learn. And that's how it goes: you can't expect to get good at playing some class if you never play as that class.
Also the stupidest Sniper kill ever: I round a corner on top of the roof overlooking the second checkpoint on Badwater, only to see a sneaky BLU Engineer whacking away at a first level sentry, so I hit the Engineer in the face with the kukri, kill him off, and drop down from the roof with the sentry shooting at my ass. Escaped with 2 HP. Just what the fucking hell, Chrome.