Great game to play with friends. Still awesome on your own.

Tips:

- The use of an in-game microphone makes communication easier and can make you a 'phantom'-leader of your team.

- Stay humble towards your skills, that takes the opportunity away from people to make fun of you. Respect can also be a significant factor when playing on certain servers.

- Understand class diversity. Unless your team is deliberately trying to do something stupid, like everyone huntsman sniper, usually you would want to spread the classes out, so you always have a counter-attack option for something. In case you're not sure exactly what to do, you can always ask your team, but also a general tip would be that a team shouldn't have any more than two snipers and/or spies each. This is because they are very specific classes, and generally only take out one player at a time.

The last thing I want to do is to encourage you, Team Fortress 2 is a fantastic game with a very large community displaying a variety of skill sets and experience. So don't fret if you're not playing to the standard of others in your team, you'll get better with practice! Speaking from experience, I only started understanding the mechanics of the game after I had already played 600 hours. There's a lot of depth, and I'm still learning :)

So buckle in and have fun!