Best Way To Move Up In Rank?

[Data 2]

Hey Lotus TF2'ers

I have been struggling with raising my overall Lotus rank. I used to be in the thousands but after a few server resets a while back, I've fallen to 3,000 something. I have been playing as often as I can to try and raise my rank but it's proven to be difficult.

Anybody have pointers on how I can raise my rank faster?

Data

[Tyler Durden 2]

Kill people, capture points.

[DrkEagle 15]

You have to actually play, Data

[Lemon Jelly 26]

get a pocket crit medic and play demo with stickys on defense cp_dustbowl. aka The phantom strategy.

[phantom 29]

durrrr

rank doesnt mean jack shit, just play

and just dont be terrible in general

[Krash 1,040]

Its based on points, so you need to play for a looonnggg time to work your way up. I'm ~1500 and i like to think thats good considering i play ~5 hours a week at most.

[Genny Justice 1]

The trick is really just to play more than anyone else. If you can keep your K:D positive you'll almost always gain points.

[Data 2]

Since I have a day job, I can only play ~10/week. I suppose that's not enough time in comparison to everybody else is it?

[Gotcha 6,307]

I haven't been playing more than that and am still in the 300's. K/D is nothing, mine is terrible with about 1000 in plus, because I do Medic a lot. You don't lose points from dying, but you should try to at least stay on 1:1 to keep a score flow.

You can gain points from about everything, from assist kills, teleporters (you can sum a lot of those on PL maps as BLU), building, revenge and domination, mid-air rockets, pushing, capturing or defending the objective, or even airblasting.

There's some that give more point bonus than others, check out your stats profile under "actions" and sort them by most achieved. A kill assist as medic is worth 4x as much points, unlike a normal assist which is only x2. Teleporters only have a mutliplier of x1, sentry built x3 and so on, you can get a very neat overview there.

The best way is to have a mix of being active and making a lot score each round, try to achieve MVP or at least be in the Top 5.

[Genny Justice 1]

You don't lose points from dying, but you should try to at least stay on 1:1 to keep a score flow.

You do, actually. You also get more points from killing someone higher ranked. For example, right now I'm ranked 25 or 26. If I were to kill someone ranked 300,000 twice and he killed me twice, I would have a net loss. Certain weapons also give a bonus.

Ultimately it's pretty meaningless. To get a higher rank the quickest play sniper like a pussy or have a pocket and always play on the winning team.

[Data 2]

Ok, so it sounds like the only real way to move up in rank is to play either sniper or medic to rack up points and play hours on end. Ugh..

[Krash 1,040]

Welcome to Team Fortress 2, after nine years in development, hopefully it has been worth the weight.

[phantom 29]

actually the easiest way would be to go heavy and stand on the cart on a 24/7 payload server

[Bombz 31]

Or you can find a buddy to kritz you 24/7 on 3rd stage dustbowl defense.

Alternatively you can join stacks 2 and play on the rape train team.

[Phillby 0]

Play with friends a lot, or try and get a pocket healer. I get tons of points when I get a pocket the whole game.

[SatansDankWeed 2]

phantom has been playing tf2 almost EVERYDAY since like 2007 at LEAST 3 hours a day, somedays less but most days prob like 6-8 hours im estimating. so unless your a comuter nerd and have no social life prob no job and def no girlfriend your rank is going to be in the thousands untill you do as suggested above

get good at demo spamming and get a crit medic on dustbowl

get good at heavy and stand on the car spraying

soldier rape banner with crit medic

or be a BOSS like guywhitey and play medic your whole life and get mad pussy all day.

orrr a big bag of sweaty dicks like mojo and just be black and gay

[Skaruts 14]

I've once been in 1st position in a ctf server in hl2dm for a few weeks. And to be honest, I didn't expect it until someone told me to see my rank.

I was happy about it, of course, it's satisfying, but when I tried maintaining it, I couldn't. I fell down the top 10 a few places, since the guys around me were pretty much skilled as hell. Then again, most other players were noobs or not very skilled, or at least not skilled enough to deal with me and the other top 30-ish players.

What I can tell you about this from experience is that the more you worry about stats the worse they will become. Just play, have fun, and pay attention to your mistakes. If you die, it's your fault, not your enemy being a lucky noob or being an annoying bastard. This is the mistake from many people, they have this attitude tunnel-visioning their learning process.

Try to survive but still do considerable damage, capture points/intels/etc, don't engage in pointless sniper wars, don't care about revenges/dominations, etc. Just focus on playing well, and learnng from your mistakes. Whenever you check your stats you may or may not see better numbers, though, but you shouldn't worry about it still.

However, I'll point out one thing here that most ppl tend to not be aware of, or tend to forget about. Stats and ranks are not a result from skills and shouldn't be taken even a bit seriously. I was never really fond of stats when I played hl2dm, but when I started seeing myself in higher places I started snooping around the stats systems. And I found two great examples of how stats can severely deceive you.

- I knew quite a few players from division 1 in leagues (part of my bad stats was from playing against them), and their stats were NOT much better than mine. They were a bit, but really not much. Their KpD was between 1.2-2.5 (occasionaly 3.0-3.5, mine was around 1.6), accuracy wasn't that high (tho much higher than mine), their global placement was around 50-500. Not very impressing, you might say. No, not really. But when you spectated them playing, or even when you played against them, you'd be surprised at their level of precision, and pwnage, if you will. Again, these were division 1 in leagues. The hardest you could get.

- Then I looked at the person standing in 1st place of global stats, his KpD was around 16.0 (wow). The 2nd position was a similar one but with around half the KpD, the 3rd one was a normal player that somehow managed to get in 3rd (still wasn't a league player, though I didn't investigate him). I was a little puzzled, I thought "only aimbots get this high in KpD". Well, turns out he wasn't aimbotting. I saw that by looking at his Kills per Minute average number, which said he killed 1 player every 42 minutes on average. He only played in one single sniper map. Ok, in short, he only camped in a corner, in a secret area of the map, all the time, and he only sniped at his enemies, without ever dying. This guy would be completely "raped" if he would start playing against the players in division 1.

So in conclusion, if you spend your life pwning noobs you'll get good stats. If you spend your life fighting players of you skill level you get bad stats, and so do they. The difference is, you'll get better at it, and the one pwning noobs won't. The same will happen with server ranks. Even though you gain little points from killing noobs, they can easily add up to high ammounts and deceive you.

[Bombz 31]

KPD on stats isn't all that important as there are numerous ways to preserve that. Some people just like to virtually grow their penises with the stats system. Just do what it takes to win for your team. One good indicator though, is kills per minute. Good players take down others at a faster rate. While you could have an AWESOME KPD just by spamming some area, or hiding a bunch, kills per minute usually means you're out on the prowl looking for people to kill. This isn't a great indicator, but it's much better than KPD.

I guess a good example I could give you would be this:

There is 1 minute left, you're playing offense. There are 2 sentry guns guarding the capture point for the defense. One directly overlooks the point, the 2nd is off to the side covering the pot shot areas so that you cannot easily take down the 1st sentry.

A stat whore waits back and doesn't do shit to help win, because he doesn't want to needlessly die. Someone who wants his team to win rocket jump or sticky jumps towards the SG to dive bomb it and take it out, not caring about whether he'll die or not. One will reflect better in stats, which one is it?

[IronJawbone 30]

Never stop playing. As in, make people who live on MMOs look like they have a robust social life.

[Oprah 5]

Overall you could have the best K:D ratio and capture shitloads of points but all in all, playtime prolly goes the furthest on how fast you rank up. If you're half way decent and play 8 hours a day 7 a week, you will rank up faster than the guy who goes 100-2 for a couple games a week.

[+Cactus 4,948]

Earlier in the thread, Lemon Jelly mentioned that getting a pocket Krit Medic is a great way to level up - to be fair, the way the stats work, being a pocket Krit Medic on a decent Soldier/Heavy is a better way to get points. You get 4 points for every kill assist you get as a Medic, but only like 1.2 (if I'm reading things correctly) for each Rocket Launcher kill. You also get 5 points for every Uber/Kritz, so playing Medic can really add up if you can get over the idea of not fragging everyone you meet.

[Nano 7,892]

KPD on stats isn't all that important as there are numerous ways to preserve that. Some people just like to virtually grow their penises with the stats system. Just do what it takes to win for your team. One good indicator though, is kills per minute. Good players take down others at a faster rate. While you could have an AWESOME KPD just by spamming some area, or hiding a bunch, kills per minute usually means you're out on the prowl looking for people to kill. This isn't a great indicator, but it's much better than KPD.

I guess a good example I could give you would be this:

There is 1 minute left, you're playing offense. There are 2 sentry guns guarding the capture point for the defense. One directly overlooks the point, the 2nd is off to the side covering the pot shot areas so that you cannot easily take down the 1st sentry.

A stat whore waits back and doesn't do shit to help win, because he doesn't want to needlessly die. Someone who wants his team to win rocket jump or sticky jumps towards the SG to dive bomb it and take it out, not caring about whether he'll die or not. One will reflect better in stats, which one is it?

I never really got why some people cared about the KpD ratio in tf2. It always seems to me that statistic should only matter if you lost points for dying. By definition some classes are going to die more often (scout/pryo) becuase they have to get right next to the enemy whereas a sniper usually gets to stay back. If you only get points for kills, who cares about dying!

[Harlequin 2,975]

What I can tell you about this from experience is that the more you worry about stats the worse they will become. Just play, have fun, and pay attention to your mistakes. If you die, it's your fault, not your enemy being a lucky noob or being an annoying bastard. This is the mistake from many people, they have this attitude tunnel-visioning their learning process.

this. btw, as all the others here already pointed out: Stats don't say something about your skill - or even more important: being credit to team.

A Win for my team (no matter what position in the score I am) feels much more better then being 1st on the loosers team.

[R4mbo 5]

this. btw, as all the others here already pointed out: Stats don't say something about your skill - or even more important: being credit to team.

A Win for my team (no matter what position in the score I am) feels much more better then being 1st on the loosers team.

100% Agree with that. Sometimes I look at my score and see I got more deaths than kills. However, I feel satisfied if my kills assists is being higher or equal to the number of deaths. Assists are the real proof of team usefulness, and I don't talk about medics.

Also, back stabbing counts as 2 points; 1 for killing and 1 for back stabbing. On defensive payload teams (my favourite is badwater red side) with your eternal reward you can easily manage to empty waves of blue guys off that cart. Plus, you get the defence point. Usually, the last guy standing looks back and tells me : "Hey where the f*ck is everyone else?" and me to answer : "I never really was on your side..."

-lawl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcQfV4Sy-o8&feature=related

[Nano 7,892]

I want that song now.