Edges Guide to HL2DM

This guide was made for all people who just want to get better at this game. Hopefully it will help newer players and people in the middle of the skill road improve their game play and gain a further understanding of how this game works at its best.

That being said this guide may be difficult to follow 100% if you’re brand new to this game. It should also be known that this is all my own opinion and there will be varying opinions throughout the DM community on how to play this game. This is what works for me.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
   
2. Intended Audience
   
3. Basic Settings
   
4. Basic Skill Set
   
5. How to Improve
   
6. 1v1 Strategy
   
7. Team Strategy
   
8. Playstyles - A Small Perspective
   
9. What you should do while losing

Introduction

Who am I?

My name is Edge in game. I’m a “competitive” player in HL2:DM from the US. I’ve played in a few different leagues all the way back from CAL to our short stint in clans united and warzone.

What’s my background in this game?

I started this game back in late 2005 strictly playing low gravity until a friend of mine named Karnage introduced me into stock play. My earliest memory was intruding on a CAL match between the big cheese and someone else. To which I was promptly asked to leave! Instead I watched the game from sourceTV and decided it was something worth learning.

From there I started learning a lot by watching some of the top players at the time; A_Seagull, LukeGT421, Voxtex, Nutri_Grain, Zman, Confused, Phantom.. etc. That’s when I started to practice replicating what I watched. Trying to learn to bhop was a pain in the ass at first, but after a few months it become second nature almost. Then playing against anyone who would spare a few minutes to play someone terrible at the game. That’s when I got my first shot at a team with wrw2 (War Room Warriors 2). We were a mix of new and older players. While we didn’t do too great in our CAL League it was a blast.

Over the years I started to develop my game play and started working on becoming one of the best players that I could in the US. I owe a lot of my friends in Synergy and in Sanctuary of Warriors.

Intended Audience

This guide was made for all people who just want to get better at this game. Hopefully it will help newer players and people in the middle of the skill road improve their game play and gain a further understanding of how this game works at its best.

This guide is not for the people who can’t see past their own level of game play though. If you’re unwilling to accept that there may be a skill level above your own, then you will be unable to objectively analyze what's missing in your play style. As such you will be unable to improve quickly.

Basic Settings

Controls

Bindings
Key bindings are important things to start using in this game as soon as possible. They will let you access weapons much faster than any other method offered by this game.

The following screenshot is an example of my current key bindings:



Mouse Sensitivity

There is a TON of debate on what mouse sensitivities are the best. My only comment on this is use something that’s comfortable for you, then lower it to the lowest you can while still being able to play comfortably.

For reference I use 2.1 with 400DPI.

Settings

Steam Launch Commands

The only important command I know of is -rate or -refresh for your monitors. If you use a 144hz monitor for instance you would set the -rate launch option as follows:

-rate 144

Console Commands

Rates
Without going into too much detail on what each of these does these are the ranges of normal rates for competitive or stock gameplay.

Cl_cmdrate 67
Cl_updaterate 67
Cl_interp_ratio 0, 1, 2 (Usually set this to 1)
Cl_interp 0.0015 – 0.0100

Useful Commands

Snd_restart – Restart your game's sound stream if the sounds glitch out
Cl_showpos 1 – Use this to show you your current game position as well as velocity. Very useful when working on your bhopping.
Net_graph 1 – Net_graph 1 will show you your client’s FPS, in and out to the server, and a few other stats that can be good to know.

Configurations

All configurations are now stored under C:\Program Files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\Half-Life 2 Deathmatch\hl2mp\cfg
You can use .cfg files to save your configurations to your rate, bindings, and any variables to auto load into DM every time it starts.
You do this by setting up your autoexec.cfg to point to another .cfg file with
your settings. An example of this is below.

Autoexec.cfg
Exec Edge.cfg
Edge.cfg

Crosshairs

Custom Crosshairs are allowed in HL2DM! It’s great! But the format has changed and now you have to put everything under the “custom” folder in the root of hl2mp.

See the picture below:

Basic Skill Set

Movement

Strafe Jumping
Strafe Jumping is the initial strafe sprint / curve -> jump that builds up velocity. There are several ways to perform this. I won’t speak too much on this as there are several guides already on how to do so. I will link the original youtube video from Onti:

Bunny Hopping

Bunny hopping is the ability to continually jump after your initial strafe jump while maintaining your velocity. This can be done manually with the space bar, but 90% of people will tell you to bind mwheeldown to +jump.
Bind mwheeldown “+jump” in console

When Practicing your bhopping skills the key thing to remember is stay as relaxed as possible while hopping. The more relaxed you try to be the better you will build the muscle memory needed to bhop smoothly.

What most people struggle with here is keeping their mouse movements smooth and not jerky. I will upload a video with this guide explaining what I mean here.

Air Control
Air Control is the ability to control where you are in the air. This is accomplished by using the strafe keys and your mouse. You can control your movement while in the middle of a bhop to move left or right or even straight. With air control you can actually gain velocity mid bhop.

One of the easiest ways to practice this is to start from a crouch and bhop while trying to gain momentum using the right and left strafe.

Video of this: To be uploaded.

Weapon Skills

Grenade / Orb / Prop Juggling

Prop juggling is the action of using the gravity gun to hold an object, shooting it with mouse1, pressing q (lastinv) twice, then catching the object with mouse2. It is useful in particular with two objects the AR2 Combine Orb and the Grenade. Successfully juggling either will reset their timers.

Video:

Fast Orbing
Fast Orbing effectively speeds up your AR2 Combine Orbs dramatically. This is done by shooting the orb out of your AR2 then switching to your gravity gun quickly and shooting the orb. This can be done with a grenade as well.

Video:

Grenade Timing
You can catch your grenades after using mouse2 (right click) to lob the grenade, switching to the gravity gun, and then catching the grenade. This resets the timer and gives your 4 ticks of the grenade to toss it before it explodes. You can effectively throw your grenades with a timer using this.

Video:

Silent Weapons
You can silence almost any weapon in the game by firing and then immediately switching to the gravity gun with last inventory.

Video:

How to Improve

Mindset

There are a few different mindsets’ most people in this community will have. There are a LOT of negative ones that conflict with growing and learning. This is where I will go into as much detail as I can on how you should look at winning, losing, and raging until you break a keyboard.

The Negative Mindset

The negative mindset is something I’m going to address first. People with a negative mindset tend to grow the slowest at this game. They complain and get upset at every little bug, at ever loss, and they focus on this. It becomes common place and turns into a bad habit to easily become upset. This mindset will HINDER your ability to learn the game proper. It will drive other players away from you as well.


The “Community” mindset

The community mindset is a positive mindset. This is a player that when losing will accept their losses and move on. They tend to not care too much about the game itself and rather are here for a community and to have fun. While these types of people will get better at the game faster than a negative mindset they typically will not have the determination to improve their gameplay. In short, this mindset is not competitive enough to allow quick growth.

The Competitive Mindset

A competitive mindset is one where the player accepts losses, but takes them seriously. What I mean by seriously is that the player has the ability to accept that they lost a game but will take the time to try to understand why they lost and try to improve. This person typically will not rage out of games and will always try until the end of the match. This is a GREAT mindset to have because it focuses on ways to constantly improve.

Demo Watching

Identifying your mistakes in game is often difficult to do. That’s why while you learn the game it is important to record matches you play using the record command in the console. An example of this command is “record 1v1_la_2-x-x”. This will record your demo to the file 1v1_la_2-x-x.dem. You can play this back by opening the console and typing play 1v1_la_2-x-x. From here you can re-watch your gameplay objectively and try to determine the areas of the game you need to work on.

One thing that is always great to do is find someone else who is willing to watch the demo with you as they will usually give a more objective opinion on where you played poorly.

What demos to watch
Now if you’re playing the game a lot and recording a lot of demos you clearly do not want to go back through and watch them all. The ones you need to watch however are games where you’ve struggled and lost. These will reveal your mistakes that you’ve made most often and that your opponent capitalized on.

You should not always watch demos where you steamroll someone in though. You will not benefit from these as much as you will not notice your mistakes as often.

Practicing

After watching your demos, you can start breaking down some of your issues. The things to watch out for include the following:

Aim

If you are constantly missing shots be sure to work on improving your aim. This can be done by slowing down your game play, taking your time to aim which should force you to become more consistent with your mouse control.

Movement

If you notice you often run out of sprint, struggle with specific map jumps like the ones on Lockdown, or in general are moving much slower than the people you’re playing then you know you should be working on movement. There are a few ways to go about this but the biggest thing is trying to relax first and then go into a server and bhop for a 30 minute sessions. Relaxing first will help your muscle memory build faster.

Positioning / Strategy / Awareness

If you notice that you’re constantly being caught off guard then you need to work on these areas. You need to start understanding how the maps flow, how to choke an area off, and how to out think the people you’re playing against. The easiest way to do this is to watch the demo and make notes of every time you go caught off guard. Look at the situations that lead up to it and ask yourself what you could have done to avoid it.

What to do when you are losing

Keep calm... first and foremost... keep ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ calm. If you start to get mad, it’s downhill from there and your gameplay will suffer. If you keep calm, you can try to turn a game around. You can refocus your efforts and analyze what you are doing wrong during the match. This is the most important thing about playing in this game in my opinion.

Playstyles - A small perspective

Please note that this section is all my opinion on the different playstyles in the game.

Defensive "Turtle" Playstyle

The defensive playstyle is a player who tends to prefer safer gameplay. They will try to minimize the risk in their game play over all else. One common way you can tell when you are playing against a defensive play style is by paying attention to what they do when they're in the lead. Typically speaking, a defensive player once in the lead, will not push to get a LARGER lead. They will instead work to minimize their chances of dying and giving up a lead that they're comfortable with.

Remember, when playing to win any playstyle is appropriate. if this means you find sitting and camping a specific area of the map works well for you when in the lead, and you feel comfortable with only a 3 frag lead, then by all means do what you think will win you the game.

This is one thing you will see from these players is "boring" gameplay. This means it won't be as fast paced, it won't be the shock and awe game play that you might be used to with DM.. but it is very effective.

The one example of a player previously in the US that was extremely defensive would have to be an early 2v2 partner of mine, Divinity. While there was a lot of controversy over Divinity being a team baiter, in which he would let me die constantly, what he did do was play super defensively. He would give up as few deaths as possible while and instead of pushing the enemy when we had a lead, he would hold back, minimize the deaths, and let me work to rack up kills.

In a 1v1 setting, if Divinity had a few kills over his opponent he would hold back and let them come to him. At the point of being in the lead, there is no point in risking losing the lead.

Aggressive "Rambo" Playstyle

An Aggressive playstyle can be characterized by the following:

• Get a shotgun
  
• Get a little armor
  
• Rush Rush Rush!!!! GO GO GO

All jokes aside a typical aggressive playstyle tends to push for as many encounters as possible. They rely heavily on catching opponents off guard and then crushing them with overwhelming pressure.

Normally an aggressive playstyle will heavily favor fast game play and trying to increase the score gap as large as possible. In contrast to the defensive play these players want to win by having a large gap, this gives them the ability to have more mistakes allowed because they have a larger lead to give up.

One of my earliest encounters with this play style was a player who went by Vap0rizer. He had played both on my team as well as against me in several occasions. Vap0r would rely heavily on his aim to throw his completion off guard. People would often be caught off guard by how quickly he would push engagements at any chance he could. He was often criticized for being overly aggressive and rushing with a shotgun. While sometimes it would put Vapor in a bad situation in game to rush constantly, with his aim he managed to make most games positive by forcing his opponents to fight in combat that they were not ready for.

One of the flaws with this play style though was that it could be easily shut down when expected. Typically, most of the players I met with this playstyle are highly emotion players. If they start off good, they play good for the whole game, but if you can OUT rush them to the first few frags, they typically start playing worse.

One strategy I love using on players who play like this is to reset the flow of the game. I slow my own game play WAY down, play a bit more defensive, and play in a game of cat and mouse. I try to draw out battles for as long as possible, fighting for a few seconds, then escaping to recover my health. This tends to frustrate aggressive playstyles which forces their aim to deteriorate enough to make my own aim good enough to win engagements.




~ There will be more to come on playstyles as I can find time to write up my thoughts.

Final Thoughts

As of 1/31/16 this guide is on version 1.0. I will be updating it with more information including an indepth look at 1v1's including my analysis of different playstyles. I will also be updating the sections missing video guides with my own guides I will be making over the next few weeks.

If you have someone you want to see in this guide please leave a comment and I will add it to the list of things to add into it.

Thanks for your time and I hope the guide helps!

[Pluto]

where is the demo folder?

[Penix]

THIS GAME IS LIVE
AND THIS IS AWESOME :)

[Netanel CHEZI]

Thank You!

[lasthippie]

Thx buddy, i am looking forward for your next tutorial videos

[hex0ne]

hey, that's pretty good

[{λ²} Older Than Fire]

thank you.

[sorry]

Thanks, man.

[SpD|Chop]

thank very good insight

[uNsLide]

vote + for slovak power's post

[Washed | McPickle Pounder]

Thanks Everyone, more videos may be up this weekend as well as a rough draft of 1v1 play. I'll try to do a video break down of a few different styles if I can find demos of other players that I would classify in those styles.