Matchmaking and Gamesense: in-depth guide

New to competitive matchmaking? Don't understand what you do wrong? Or maybe you can't seem to accomplish the next step forward in ranks? If so, check out this guide, and improve your gameplay!

What this guide is about

Hi guys!

Like most of the community, I have been playing some matchmaking beta lately, and I even got gifted myself a beta pass the day right after Valve gave them out. I noticed that most of the people having a pub only background have troubles with their decision making, and, to an extent, with their gamesense.

For this reason, I decided to give you an insight read of the competitive mindset, and help you to start building your gamesense. I will be listing all the things that every player should know when they play a competitive match, in any format.

I wrote this with matchmaking in mind, but it can be applied to league players as well. I assume you reader already know the basic mechanics of the game. I am also not going to give you straight-up answers: neither the best class composition, the best item loadout or the best way to put up a mid fight.

IMPORTANT: This guide is meant to help players who only have a public server background. Anyone who has spent some time learning any competitive format will most likely know all of this.

That being said, enjoy!

Index

To make it easier to read, I decided to split this guide in different sections, each one divided in two or more paragraphs.
The first paragraph of each section covers the most important things of that subject, while the others analyze it more in depth.

You can read the sections in any order, still, they are ordinated based on their importance, and they are easier to understand when read in the proposed order, so I recommend following it.

The arguments I will cover are, in order:

• Advantages
  
• Team cohesion and overextension
  
• Vocal communication
  
• Class composition
  
• Mid Fights and backcaps

IMPORTANT: This guide is a very long wall of text. User discrection is adviced.

First of all

Forget everything you learned on pubs, and I mean everything.

Decision making in pubs and in competitive is very different. A decision that on pubs will bring you on a godlike killing spree will likely get you killed in organized games, and decisions that might seem wrong in a pub may well give your team the upper hand.

Of course, you should not forget your mechanical abilities (movement, aim, etc.), just forget everything you know about decision making. I know it sounds difficult at first, but trust me, it will come in handy later.

Another thing you will need in order to be able to apply most of the things I will talk about is a working microphone. Vocal communication in a team is one of the biggest deals in competitive, and team chat is just too slow and unreliable. You don't need expensive gears: even a cheap, 10 euro headset will do the job, as long as the mic works well.

Rule number 1: stop +forwarding your way on the map

"What? Should I really unbind my W key?"
Well, no, not quite.

This is the most recurrent error that pubbers do when they try out competitive, and the first thing you need to do in order to start building your gamesense.

In pubs, people just keep going forward, until they meet 1+ enemies, fight, and then keep going forward. Until eventually one team spawncamps the other. It happens everytime, players just keep doing it regardless of their team's condition. Chances are, that this also sums up quite accurately your experience of pubs too (if not, congratulation! you are the 1%).

This works against unorganised teams, and heavily relies on your ability to out-aim, out-move, out-smart, out-anything your opponents. It will likely not work in competitive, where teams are coordinated together and likely on the same skill level.

You always have to be asking yourself: "Should I go ahead, wait here or go back?". These three "stages" (pushing, holding and falling back) are the main situations you are going to be in during the match (excluding weird situations like backcaps or huge flanks, but even then, those require team coordination to do)

This simple question is the very basic of gamesense, but, now that we asked it ourselves, how do we answer it?

Advantages

"Advantages" are the whole center of competitive TF2, and to an extent, of competitive gaming as a whole. They are also the concept new players struggle the most with, but in the truth they are rather simple: an advantage is all it seems to be; an advantage you have over the enemy.

To put it in simple words, let's make some examples:
Let's take a typical 6v6 team battle. 12 equally skilled players fighting each other.
Which team will win?
Who knows. It gets down to chance. No one has an advantage over the other

Now imagine 1 player is down. It is now 5v6
Which team will win?
The team with most players, of course. They have an advantage over the other.

Now imagine if the players rejoins the fight and his team happens to have an uber.
Which team will win?
The team with uber (if they can use it). They can make a player invincible for 8 seconds, they are much more likely to win the fight.

You get the idea of how advantages work.

Now, let's put ourselves into a competitive game: your main goal is to win, or else, why are you playing competitive?
To win, you never want an even fight: assumed equal skill level, it would come down to chance, and relying on chances is not a very solid strategy.
You can't assume that you will win by sheer aim either, because underrating the enemy is the key to lose. You always want to respect your enemy, and never consider yourself better than them.

What you have to do is to assume that any engagement you take while you have any advantage will result in a win, and the opposite, that any engament taken at a disadvantage will result in a loss.
It is obviously not always going to be this way, but by doing this you are already putting yourself in a good mental condition.

Now we can aswer that question "Should I push, hold or fall back?":
You have to decide to push, hold and retreat according to the current advantages and disadvantages you have. When, based on the current situation, there is a good chance of a push going well, you decide to push. When there are low chances for the push to work out, you decide whether to hold or fall back, with the same thought process.

Here goes a list of all the important advantages, from the most important to the least:

• Man advantage: who has more players alive?
  
• Uber advantage: who has more uber percentage?
  
• Health advantage: who has more health at the moment?
  
• Skill advantage: who is more skilled, in terms of raw aim and movement?

You can understand why killing a medic is so important: it gives you all of the 3 main advantages (The enemies just lost a player, all of their uber and their primary healing ability).

As you can see, the skill level of a player has the smallest impact on the result of a play.This is because, even if you have godly aim, you aren't likely to win if you are engaging an enemy with a huge disadvantage: even the best player in the world would lose to a newbie, if the best player starts out with 1 hp only. If you happen to face a player who seems to be better than you, you should try to use the other variables to your advantage, and avoid engaging in face-to-face combat.

The key concept is that:
You can outsmart your opponents when you can't outaim them. Since the "who is more skilled" aspect ONLY comes into play when you are engaging on equal field, you still have a chance of winning even when fighting better opponents.

Of course, it is not like skills now are meaningless, that's the exact opposite. To put it in perspective, if having one player more alive is worth 10 euro, being slighty better than someone is worth 50 cents.
As someone becomes better and better, he will get to a point where his individual skill will even be able to overcome a man or uber disadvantage: for example, a very good scout can possibly win a 1vs2 against two worse soldiers.
At this point, thought, that player should move to the next division (or, in matchmaking, to the next rank), to start playing with better opponents, who are on the same skill level as him: this apparent "advantage" gets reset.

There's much more than that. A lot of different advantages, more subtle come into play during a match, but those are the main four, and the ones that influence the outcome the most.

Learning how to recognize advantages

If you got past the section above, congratulations! you already got the most difficult part down. But it won't serve you anything if you don't actually know how to recognize the advantages.

In general, recognizing advantages comes, as always, with experience, and is a very important part of your gamesense.

To put it simple, to understand the advantage situation you need to cater as many information as possible on the enemy team, and elaborate these in order to get an idea of their general condition.

The informations you can cater can be anything, from how many players are alive, what classes are alive, which player is on low hp and how much is the uber, to the positioning of the enemy team and how many ammo the demoman has loaded.

As I said, recognizing advantages comes with time, and I can't really make you perfect at it. But I can give you some basic tips, that will help you do better.

The biggest one is to have a talk-active team: if you are planning on solo queueing, there is little to nothing you can do to encourage your team to talk, but if you are going to be playing with friends, make sure to share as much infos as possible with them, and have them to do the same. It will greatly improve your comprehension of your opponent's status.

The second most important thing you can do is checking the scoreboard often. Why? Because the scoreboard gives you a massive amount of infos for no real cost at all.
It tells you how many players are alive, on both team, giving you a general idea of the man advantage.
It tells you which classes are alive and dead on your team, that will immediatly tell you if any of your core classes is dead. You can also check your score, of course!
Just make sure you are not spending too much time with the scoreboard open. When I started, sometimes I didn't notice scouts right in my face while I was checking if my medic was alive!

In matchmaking specifically, thought, checking the scoreboard became obsolete, since Valve added an hud on the top of the screen, that will tell you how many players are alive, which classes are dead on both teams and the health condition of your team. This is in my opinion a nice add to coordinate teams of randoms, but if you happen to start playing in leagues or even lobbies, keep the scoreboard in mind.

The third and last tip is directed to people that are willing to play medic, and it's to learn how to count the enemy uber. It is a very hard subject and you can easily find many tutorials on the web, if you mind checking. In short, to get a basic ida of how it works, you need use your uber meter and assume the enemy medic is building at your same speed. If you have 25% and the enemy 0%, you have a 25% uber advantage, and, likely, when you will have 100% the enemy will have 75%. When a medic dies or pops uber reset his uber meter.

You should account for dead times, such as when you are not building at the max speed, when you are not healing and when you are dead. Keep in mind that a stock uber builds in 40 seconds (25% every 10 seconds) and kritzkrieg and quickfix build in 32 (25% every 8 seconds), when you and the enemy medic are on different mediguns: with these values and some basic math skills you should be able to calculate how much uber advantage you lost/gained in these dead times.

As for vaccinator, since the build rate is so variable and the ubers are so much different from the standard ones, there isn't really a way to predict it, but it should be safe to assume that in most situation a vaccinator medic will have at least one or two short ubers.

Predictions will not always be accurate, but with this method you should be able to tell with some approximation how much uber the enemy has. Of course, when you will get to higher levels, you will need to be much more precise than that, but if you do happen to play on those levels, why are you even reading this guide?

Team cohesion

This the most important thing in competitive TF2, needless to say it is also the hardest to apply in a team of randoms.

It makes sense for your team to stay togheter, so that, if a teammate engages a fight, the others can help him out. A lone player is an easy pick, since he is likely to die if he engages more than one enemy at a time.

Staying togheter, though, doesn't mean staying all in the same place: if you do so, a demoman can just spam at you and inflict massive splash damage, with little risk, and at the same time, staying all in the same place means having little to no map control, and thus not knowing the enemy position at all. We don't want that.

The best way to position your team, is to split it in two halves:

• The combo, that will be the core of the team
  
• The flank, that will cover secondary areas

The combo is made by powerhouse, tank classes: medic, demo, the pocket and sometimes a passive player, depending on team and map. The flank is made by mobile and reliable classes, such as scout, soldier, pyro, combat engineer or even a second demoman.
If you are wondering the reason of this classes, you can skip to the next sections in which I analyze each class in detail.

The combo is the point of referement of the team: they are the ones to lead push, to watch the main chokes and entries, and generally the combo's position indicate how much map control a team has. Its role is to be the point of referement for the flank, and to engage in head-on fights.

The flank is made by the players who watch the secondary entries, make sure no one passes, and go for offensive plays coordinated with the combo. Their main role is to prevent the combo from getting surprised and damaged by flanking opponents.
The flank players should always rotate to the combo when they are low on hp, and when they are running the risk of dying, as well as asking their medic for an overheal when they can. If you feel like you can't win an engagement on the flank, fall back and ask a teammate to help you do so: don't bring your ego in the question, better safe than sorry.

Combo and flank are equally important: a flank without the combo can't do much, but at the same time having the combo alive but the flank dead means you could get overwhelmed from different directions at the same time. If you don't have enough players to cover both areas, there is nothing wrong with falling back to a more defendeable position, or at least waiting for your teammates to respawn.

Overextension

Overextending is the main mistake that will get you killed in competitive, especially if you are playing on the flank.

Overextending means going too deep into the enemy territory, without your team's backup.
Against competent teams, overextending usually means suicide, because the enemy can just engange you in a 6vs1 fight and your team is too far to actually do something about it.

You can be led to overextending for any reason: you need informations, you are greedy for kills, or you just didn't realize enemy were so close. Think to it about crossing an invisible line: one step back, and you can still retreat and stay alive; one step forward, and you are committed, with no chance of going back.

The reason why this mistake is so much common is that players always feel they need to do something, that they need to make a play, that each second spent doing nothing is wasted.
In the truth, things are a bit different: sometimes teams need to hold a point, and wait to be ready before pushing. In these moments, dying is the last thing you want to do: you want to stay alive and ready to push out with your team, and going for yolo plays will hurt you more than the enemy.

Sometimes, all what you should do is wait.

Once you understand that, the only thing you need to know is where the "invisible line" is.
The best thing you can do about it is knowing where your teammates are positioned, so that you don't get too far from them, but after that, the only way to learn is experience: paying attention to your errors, you will be able to tell by experience where you should and shouldn't be. It is a trial and error method, and it is the only way you can learn: don't be discouraged by your deaths, but take them as a chance to learn something.

That being said, don't confuse overextending with playing aggressive on the flanks: once you understand where the "line" is, you can play around it, and keep pressuring the enemy flanks while still granting yourself a way out. Playing aggressive on the flanks is sure more risky, but also way more rewarding when successfull, and the experience to do will come down, as always, with time.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can, sometimes, try to "make a play", and willingfully decide to overextend, relying solely on your individual skills to get a pick, or force an uber. Usually it is not a good idea, but, sometimes, it can work.
I don't recommend doing it often, or even doing it at all. Just keep it as a possibility, and if you really want to, just make sure you aren't running into 6 players stacked togheter: it won't work.

Example of successfull overextending in order to get picks:
https://youtu.be/aFf4yepLAtk
CAUTION: you may not be able to replicate it at home.

Vocal communication

Being able to talk to your team is not enough: you need to be able to talk well. Your team doesn't have all the time in the world to listen to you, so you need to be quick and concise in your calls.

The first thing to do is learning how to talk while shooting and moving, even in critical moments, without losing focus on the game. It will be difficult at first: most people are totally unable to talk and play well at the same time, but if you want to improve, this ability is crucial. Making an early call can really turn the tide of a match, and you need to be able to make that call in time.
In other words, you want to split your brain in two halves: the first one plays, the second one talks.

What I did to adjust myself to this was having normal conversations with friends while playing mge and deathmatch: it was brutal at first, but it paid off.

I noticed that, death after death, dodging rockets and aiming the scattergun was becoming second nature, and that I wasn't really paying much attention to it anymore. Instead, I could focus on many other different things, that I would have never noticed before, and improve my decision making as a whole.

It also improved my cold blood: I used to be that guy who panics all the times he gets into bad situations. As I got used to split my attention between fighting and talking, I also started to keep my cool better, and I sometimes even managed clutch my way out of the bad situation I was in. If you happen to have this problem too, you may want to try this out.

Anyway, if being able to talk at any given moment and time is important, you also want to make sure you are also listening at any given moments and time. Getting killed as medic because your teammate wasn't listening to your calls is one of the most obnoxinous things in the game.
It happens: sometimes your brain just goes full-automatic, and you don't fully listen to callouts, or even pay attention to the game. Make sure that it happens the least as possible: you always want to be 100% focused at all times.

The last thing you need to be able to do is, obviously, the actual talking. This part is mostly for Europeans, because language is an actual barrier here in the Old Country.
If english isn't your first language, as it isn't for me, and your teammates aren't from your own nation, make sure you take some time learning how to speak proper english.

Beside the fact that speaking english nowadays is a necessity even in real life, and that you should be able to do it regardless of a videogame, it is important not to lose time in game because you don't know how to say something. It takes some real dedication to learn a new language, but it will pay off, and will improve your english marks at school!
But why am I saying this if the guide itself is written in english? Damn, you gotta think about things before writing them, Gius.

Callouts

The best way to communicate with your team in-game is thought various callouts. Those are very short messages with the purpose of, well, calling things out. Callouts are the best way to inform your teammates about the current status of the game, making them aware of things they may not have noticed.
For example, after killing the medic, many people will usually say: "Medic down!", to let their team know that useful information. Or maybe just to show off, who knows.

A lot of people, thought, are unable to make good callouts, and only make it worse for their team. Here come some general rules you need to follow, in order to make good callouts:

• Be fast, clear and understandable
  
• Include only and all the useful informations
  
• Don't confuse your interpretation for facts
  
• Be polite, and have a good behaviour

Let's analyze them one by one:

The first is the most important by far: since your teammates will need to make callouts too, it is important not to flood the voice chat. For this reason, short and clear sentences are better than long and slow ones.
For example, the sentence "You should watch out for that lime spy disguised as scout in sewers, even if he has only a few hp" can be shortened into "Spy scout in sewer, low hp". As you can see, the first sentence was too long and slow to call: your team may have been already backstabbed by the time you finish it. The second one, instead, is fast, clear and easy to understand.

To make fast callouts, you need to remove all of the useless informations from them. Here, is when the second rule comes into play: you need to "filter" all of the informations you have, and only share the ones that actually matters.
The important things to call out are usually enemy positions, who is dead and who is alive, if the opponents run some dangerous class such as sniper, what medigun the medic is on, damage dealt, uber percentages and, well, many other things too long to list.
After some time, you develop a sense for what is revelant and what isn't, but in the meanwhile, if you don't know if something is revelant, call it in doubt. Better safe than sorry, right?

The third rule has to do with trust: your teammates generally should be 100% sure you are calling out only true things, and that you are not trying to fool them.
Sometimes, thought, you will make some mistakes into reading your opponents moves.
For example, if you are getting killed by a soldier on the flank, and all the evidences lead to believe he is going for a quick bomb on the medic, you might want to call out "Soldier bombing from the flank!", but that is, in fact a bad call. You are not 100% sure about that, and the soldier may actually fall back instead.
In the meanwhile, your team is still waiting for him to bomb, and might waste some precious time. What you should do, instead, is calling out something like: "Soldier killed me on the flank, he might bomb you": this way, your team is still ready for an eventual bomb, but will not expect it as a fact.

It may seem like a little, subtle difference, but avoiding possible confusions is a very important thing to improve your team cohesion. A series of wrong calls can snowball togheter, and in the end the worst thing that can happen is your team not believing you anyway, no matter the call.

The last one is pretty obvious: no one enjoys getting matched with a toxic players, that rages and whines about everything any team does. When playing with other, try to be as polite as possible, even if your teammate makes stupid mistakes. And, trust me, it will happen. Not only you will not be raged at, but your team has also a better chance of winning, because everyone is willing to work togheter, and is having a good time.
This, of course, doesn't mean you shouldn't highlight your teammate's mistakes: it only means that, if your medic is dying over and over due to bad positioning, you shouldn't rage at him, but rather keep your cool and using some constructive criticism. It will be hard, I know for experience, but trust me, it is way more rewarding in the long run.

Effective class compositions

Before starting, I have to say something. I am not going to give you the best class composition. And not for any particular reason, but for the straight-up fact that likely there isn't. There are so many possible combinations, that even if there was an actual best class composition, some people may still do better with a "worse" one, for nothing else but natural inclination.

I also have to clarify something many people don't seem to understand: The standard 6s competitive lineup (1 medic, 1 demo, 2 scouts and 2 soldier) is NOT the best way to go. Sure, it is still a pretty solid class composition in any given scenario, but it becomes the only one viable only when you apply certain rules to the game(in the form of class limits and item bans). Without the formers, a lot of different combinations that were not possible before become viable, and you are not forced into that specific team composition. So please, don't try to turn matchmaking in MvM, thanks.

So, what defines an "effective class composition"? Or better, what makes a class composition "effective"?

Well, before answering we have to take a look at the gamemode we are playing, and see what a team needs to achieve in order to win. Currently, competitive matchmaking supports only 5cp and koth maps.

What do teams need to achieve on 5cp maps? Usually, those things are, in no particular order:

• Have a good offensive power
  
• Have a good defensive power
  
• Be able to hold ground
  
• Move quickly around the map
  
• Be able to adapt to the current situation (advantages, remember?)

On koth, your objectives keep being quite the same, but mobility becomes slighty less important because the maps are quite small, while having a good offensive power becomes even more important, since you want to start attacking as soon as possible due to the timer.

Offensive and defensive powers are quite self-explainatory: you need both to attack and to defend points in order to win, so you are gonna need those.

Holding ground may seem the same as having good defensive power, but it is a bit different: having defensive power means being good at killing people who are pushing the point you are defending, while holding ground means being able to stop people from rushing or getting to a certain area.
For example: sniper and demoman have both an excellent defensive power, and can really help defending a point. However, they need the support of their team in order to prevent enemies from rushing them: alone, both classes are dead to any scout or soldier, and have to fall back from direct enagagements, or risk to die to it.
This makes them great to defend a point with the support of a teammate who can hold the ground for them, but weak when they have to hold ground for themselves

The latter two are pretty easy to understand: moving faster means covering more ground in less time, and thus get into position before the enemy, cover more ground and cap more points before them, chase them better and be able to fall back before they can even get into shooting range.

Being able to adapt to the current situation pretty much sums up all of the above, and means being able to react better to the advantages and disadvantages situation, and in the end having a better chance of all your plays being successful.

Knowing these parameters, you can choose your class composition based on your team's preference. The classes to run, are opt to your judgement: someone may find running two heavies effective, someone may not.

The importance of a dynamic team composition

I already know that this section alone is going to bring me so much hate. But I have to cover this argument too, for the greater good.

IMPORTANT: Before reading this, please make sure you have an open mind about this argument, and before flaming me for saying your main is not viable full time, please take some time to read my argumentations, and if you can find some counter-argument, I would be happy to read them. If you decide not to care about my suggestions and keep running your favourite class full time, go ahead, I will not stop you.
Also, keep in mind that I am talking about high level matchups. Of course, everything can work in low level play, simply because of how teams are disorganized and the big skill gap between people. If you can be effective playing your main full time in your rank, just go ahead and do it.



While playing a match, it is important to remember that you are not forced to play the class you start with all the time. It may sound obvious, but it is important to remember that you are able to switch between different classes mid game, doing what in 6s is called "offclassing".
If you are forced to defend last, you may as well switch a scout to heavy or engineer, because in that situation they are far better, and switch back to scout once you are done defending. If you need a pick so badly, going sniper or spy may be a good choice.
In the end, you are not glued to your main, and often having a dynamic team composition is the best way to go.

In order to win, you need to be able to balance out each class strenghts and weaknesses according to the current situation.
In a way, classes are like tools: each serves a different purpose, and sometimes you need to realize that your favourite tool is not the one that you need to win.
To win, you need to put aside the thought of having a main class that you will play all the time, but rather accept that you will often have to switch off your main (with some classes more than with the others, but that's another story).

To start talking about each class in particular, I divided them into two major groups: the core classes, demoman and medic, the situational classes, scout, soldier, pyro, heavy, engineer, sniper, and spy.

Core classes

The core classes, demoman and medic, are just what they sound like: the core of your team. They are the very basics on which your team relies, and on which all of your (and your opponent's) plays should be based on.

In all of the possible situations, your team needs to have at least one player going medic, and one player going demoman, or either you will be put in a serious disadvantage.
If you main one of these, you may as well forget what I said about offclassing, and play your main full time. Still, learning at least another class is useful if someone else on your team is willing to play main, and you are planning on queueing alone.

Before going over the single classes, there is something I would like to underline: a lot of time, I see people going demoman and medic just for sake of having one on their team, despite their lack of experience with the class. Having a demoman who can't land a sticky, or a medic that dies right off the bat, is not going to do anything useful to your team. If you find yourself in one of these situations, you should rather tell your teammates about that.
If you are lucky, someone may fill the last spot, and you could play the class you feel you will have the most impact with. After all, you are all on the same boat! If you do badly, your teammates will do badly too.

That being said, everyone in my opinion should be able to averagely play medic, and every decent soldier should be able to play demo too, at least at a very basic level.

Now, we can go over each core class more in detail:

MEDIC
This should be self-explainatory, still, I am going to spend some words over this. A medic, for obvious reason, is needed on a team. He can grants a potentially infinite amount of heals, buff teammates to 150% their hp, and use the ubercharges to unleash an extraordinary pushing or stalling power. In many's opinions, medic is the class on which the whole game is based on. If you don't have one on your team, you may as well give up the match: 99% of the time, you are going to lose.

A less obvious argument that I want to go over, is a strategy that many people, for some reason, underrate: it is the double medics strat. I am surprised at how many people consider this tactic to be worthless or even harmful: yes, at the very basics, it is just having two medics, but, at the very top, it is having two unkillable medics. I personally dislike it, and consider it stupidly overpowered, but, for the greater science, I am going to explain it to you.

What do having two medics means? After all, to run two medics you are giving up a possible firepower class, and basically putting yourself one man down in every fight.
Compared to that, two medics aren't going to heal much better than one can already do, since there are only 5 other players to heal. And the power of two ubers is not even that great, considered that a good team can just do as well using only one. So, what's the point of two medics?

The point of two medics is that, if played right, it can overcome a single medic's main weakness: not being able to heal himself. The two medics can heal, or even better, overheal each other, reaching the crazy hp level of 225, which is a lot. And even if the enemy does manage to get a med pick, guess what? There is another one ready to do the job!
And I am not finished yet! Assume a soldier bombs in and deals 100+ damage to a medic, then proceeds to call that in voice chat. Now a scout is chasing the medic down, but, again, guess what happens? The medic is full hp, because the other one healed him!

Double medics can be so much powerful, but there is a, quote on quote, "flaw" in the strat: it requires more coordination from the whole team than the standard setup, because everyone has to play more heal-oriented, and two medics in particular need to be very syncronized.
So, it isn't the best idea trying this out if you play with randoms. But, if you plan a 5 or 6 men premade match, there is no reason not to, even if you should fell worse than a thief for doing so.

Now, let's go over the second core class by importance:

DEMOMAN
And when I say demoman, I mean a black scottish guy who shoots explosives grenades, not a black scottish guy who charges with a sword.
That's right, going demoknight is not interchangeable with going demoman. If you are planning on using shield and sword, at least tell your teammates not to rely on you to be the demoman.

So, why is the demoman, that again, uses both an explosive grenade laucher and a sticky bomb laucher, so much important, out of all the other classes? The short answer is: spam. The long answer, is: damage dealing, stickytraps and spam.

A demoman alone can slow down so much a whole team that needs to push though a choke point, and having at least one on the team is necessity in order to win a round. Not as much as a medic is, but he still has a very high priority.

You know, when playing pubs, you want to get to a certain area, cross the door, see rockets and stickies flying in the air, and immediatly go back? Well, the same thing happens in competitive. The demoman's job is to literally spam the hell out of the the enemy team, to force them to either fall back or eat a large amount of damage, possibly forcing the enemy uber if they have it.

And don't get started on "stickyspam noob", a team needs to do what it takes to win, and no one ever said that you can't spam stickies and be skilled at the same time. Currently stickies are the most effective weapon to deal mid to long range splash damage. Fellow demomen, don't be afraid to use your stickies offensively: don't limit yourself, offensive stickies add a whole new dimension to the class.

If spam is the main offset of the demo, stickytraps are just as important. When you are not spamming the enemy, consider lying down some defensive stickytraps. Maybe even spawncamping the enemy forward spawns, if you have the chance. Sure, many team will check for traps, but it will take time away from them. And who knows, you may get lucky and drop a medic.

The only dowside to demo is that he requires a lot of heals from the medic. He is the class that will sit on the choke most of the time, will get focused the most after the medic (and possibly heavy), and will rely on taking a lot of self damage in order to move faster and fight in close quarters. To all the fellow medics, remember to give a demo all the heals he may need, and to keep him overhealed. A demoman without heals is like a sky without stars.

Situational classes (PT 1)

Classes were not made equal. Some of them are far better than others in different scenario, but can become worse if the situation changes.
Situational classes are exactly that: they shine in certain scenarios, but are out-shined in others.

Despite this, you can still run a situational class full time and can be effective with that, but, in certain situation, another class may have done the job better.

For example, a full time scout can go heavy to defend last point, go scout again when he needs to push out, go sniper to get a med pick and push into their last point, or even go soldier if the enemy is spamming a lot of mini-sentries. In the end, it all comes down to your ability to adapt and take advantage of the current situation.

Here comes a brief analysis of each class, in no particular order:

SCOUT
Without bringing broken unlocks on the table, a scout is a very strong member on the team.
He does good in most situations, both attacking and defending, he is the strongest deathmatch class in the game, being able to take out any class in a fair 1v1. For this reason, scout's job is usually to clean up low hp enemies, since his scattergun can be a very reliable damage dealer from mid range. That's not saying he can't take face to face fight, beware.
A dedicated scout main can play both in the combo or on the flank, and even quickly switch between these roles.

The reason of scout's strenght is in the map pool: 5cp and koth are usually very wide and open, and this allows scouts to out-manouver every other class. Their natural high movement speed allows them to easily chase enemies down and easily fall back in case of danger, and the 2x cap speed may not sound like much, but it really comes in handy during fast paced games.

If you, by chance, are surprised to hear all of this about scout, and never considered it more than an annoyance class, you should think again. In pubs, scout may seem weak, due to the amount of spam and stalemates, but with only a decent amount of players and a limited amount of spam, coupled with a favoreable map pool, his strenght grows esponentially.

If you still don't believe a word about what I said, just watch this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mcto2UsZGA

SOLDIER
The soldier is, by definition, a very versatile class. No matter the role you need to fill, a soldier can do it well enough.
Need to protect a medic? A soldier can fill that role. Need to create havok and confusion? Bomb in and make everyone look at him. Need to chase down that low hp medic? Just speed jump and get in close range with him. Need to spam a chokepoint? Rockets are perfect at it.

There are two main playstyle that you, as a soldier, will likely fall into: you will either be a pocket or a roamer.

In pubs, usually a "pocket medic" is a bad medic who only heals one guy. In competitive, the word has another meaning: the medic's pocket is the player dedicated to protecting the medic, he is the guy who stands in the front line and soaks up damage for his teammates. For this reason, he also gets considerably more heals than his teammates, but this doesn't mean that the medic is glued to him, of course.
Soldiers fill the role of pocket really well: having both a rocket laucher and a shotgun, plus a constant 300 hp overheal, a soldier can face everything that you throw at him.

Roamer are the opposite. They rely a lot on their ability to rocket jump fast around the map to flank and take by surprise enemy key players, literally "bombing" the enemy team. Their job is to either create an opening for their team to push in, making a lot of entry damage, or to be the clean up, bombing low hp targets.
If you want to get high killstreaks and fancy fragmovies, this isn't your role, at all. Roamers usually are the most sacrificable member on a team, don't get much heals, and are heavily countered by scouts, combat engineers and heavies, due to the hitscan knockback they can inflict. Their low clip size (only 4 shots, some of which are used to rocket jump) make them bad at prolonged fight.
Still, if the idea of performing crazy fast jumps, making huge flanks that can save rounds, and generally being a crazy kamikaze attracts you, you are welcome!

PYRO
Pyro is a very good support class. Even if I personally dislike running pyro full time, he can be very effective.

If you are going to play pyro full time, you can play both in the combo and on the flank.
A combo pyro usually airblasts spam, denies bombers, spychecks every now and then, and supports his team with general utility. Pyro's pushing power isn't amazing, due to his short range and his inabilty to chase down enemies, but can be very effective during holds, especially due to airblast. I suggest using the shotgun for this playstyle or you could be a prick and use the reserve shooter.

If you are going to be a flank pyro, keep in mind that alone you will be dead to any decent scout, so you should have a teammate to back you up in that situation. The flare gun can do some great burst damage even from mid range, and is the best option for this kind of playstyle.

The reason for which you want to offclass pyro as any other class is his airblast: especially during last holds, airblasting away an enemy uber, even for a few seconds, can buy for team some great time, and even single-handely ruin an enemy push. Remember that airblasting ubers requires you to be positioned accordingly even before the push begins, so your team needs to give you all of the infos you need about the enemy position.

HEAVY
Heavy's role is being a pocket, much like the soldier. The only difference is that heavy is less mobile overall and is an easier target, while having more firepower and health. He has zero chasing power, not being able to outrun anyone, and this makes him awful during pushes, unless you manage to flank the whole enemy team to close the gap quickly, and goes without saying that this doesn't happen often enough to be considered a solid strategy.

On the other hand, he becomes unvaluable during holds, being a 450 hp wall between the medic and the enemy team. The sandvich is also a lifesaver to the medic he is pocketing, if somehow a bomber manages to bring him on low hp. What to say? A perfect bodyguard!
He is not immortal, thought: he is easily countered by demomen and snipers, and can be killed straightaway by almost any class if he is found with his pants down.

Running an heavy full time is a very strong strategy, and many team get away with that, thought, if you are planning to do it, make sure to equip one of the many speed-boosting melee, or either you will be too slow to keep up with your team.

The moment in which heavy become the most valuable player on the team is during last holds, much like pyro: I will even go ahead and say that to hold last you need an heavy, since he is so good in that situation. Even if you don't like going heavy, and no one on your team seems to be willing to do it, you should definately do it anyway if you are pushed back to last.

Situational classes (PT2)

ENGINEER
Engineer has two main playstyle: you can get a level 2 or 3 sentry up and support your team that way, or you can be a combat engineer, deploying minis for short-term area denial and using your shotgun to do the job.

Goes without saying, hoping to get a sentry nest up in time to keep up with your team is highly unluckly: you would spend most of the time trying to get that sentry as close as possible to the frontlines, while your team is effectively down a man. Your impact on the game would be really low, and overall you may be the cause for your team's loss.
On the other hand, building a sentry nest while holding last point is a very solid strategy, if you have the time to do so. A sentry (especially with wrangler + rescue ranger) can be a quite effective and safe way of making the enemy team lose a good portion of their ubers, and maybe get some frags too. If you have the time, you should definately offclass engi to defend last.

If the more traditional engineer is worth running only when defending last, it is rather helpful and perfectly viable to go combat engineer full time.
The way I like thinking to the combat engineer is like to a weaker scout, that instead of speed and deathmatch ability, gets a mini sentry and more health. A combat engineer will play more or less like a combo scout: protecting the medic, denying bombers, chipping away enemy health from mid range.
You lose a lot of potential chasing power, but in return the mini sentry can be really useful to enstabilish ground during pushes and holds, and can basically deny an entire flank alone, since you can use it to hear when enemies are coming. Of course, if you plan on going combat engineer, you can still simply switch loadout and "offclass" traditional engineer to defend a point at any given moment.

SNIPER
Sniper is, in my opinion, the hardest class to play in matchmaking. And I don't mean that "headshots are hard" or "sniper takes more skill", far from that.
What I do mean is that as a sniper, you are weak when you are alone. Not even Flippy can land all of his quickscopes on close enemies, so it is reasonable to assume that defending yourself in close quarters will result in getting yourself killed 9/10 times, especially when you consider you are playing with people as skilled as you.

It becomes a necessity to have your team close to you and ready to back you up, and we all know how hard it is to get team coordination with randoms. This will make it harder for you if you are planning on sniping full time, not to mention that your teammates will likely blame you for the eventual loss, for all of your deaths and missed shots. Even if a scout just held W and killed you without your teammates doing anything about it.

So, if you are planning to go sniper at any time, remember to stay close to your combo. The moment to offclass sniper is pretty much every time you need an entry pick: dropping a medic, a demoman, an heavy or even another sniper before a push or a defence is the reason you go sniper.

An advantage that you get offclassing sniper rather than playing it full time is that the enemy may not expect you to do so, and you may get easy shots on large sightlines. It would only last until you get spotted thought, usually after the first shot, and your opponents are likely to readjust their positions afterwards.

Keep in mind that, until you get a pick, your team is basically a man down during team fights. If you aren't getting shots in, consider offclassing to something else, bad days happens to everyone.

SPY
If any other class, more or less, was playable full time with no big consequences, spy is different. You can't just play spy full time and hope you are going to do well, for a series of reasons.

"Stfu u idiot your only a 6s elitist go die in a hole. I do gud as sphee let me do it"
Go ahead and prove me wrong, if you can. No way you are going to do good as spy full time, at least once you get to the higher ranks. Unless for some reasons you are the Ambassador God and can hit -102 every 2 seconds, at which point I'd rather play sniper to be honest.

There is a simple reason you aren't going to do well as full-time spy: you don't have time to get into position. And I mean, no matter how good you are, all the time you spend to get behind the enemy undetected is going to be time your team is fighting 5vs6. Basically would have happened the same if you didn't play at all.
Even when you'll manage to get a pick, you will be cleared out pretty soon, so 2+ killstreaks are forgettable. All you did was equalizing the numbers.

"But a med pick is worth more than a spy pick!"
True, but it is also true that a team aware of a full time spy isn't going to get backstabbed anytime soon. Spy are incredibly easy to counter once you know there is one, and a decent team won't get caught two times in a row with his pants down.
Vocal communication only makes things worse, since once you get spotted the entire enemy knows about your position. And remember, all this time your team has been fighting one man down.

Does this mean spy isn't useable at all? Not quite.
I only said that going full time spy isn't viable, but offclassing spy is a strong strategy. If a team doesn't know there is a spy around, getting a medic pick is perfectly manageable, especially if your team is willing to cause havok to ease your job.

You should offclass spy for the same reason you offclass sniper: getting an entry pick for a push or a defence, but the difference is that you are relying on the surprise effect to do so, whereas sniper only relies on basic FPS skills and some good sightline.
For this reason, I suggest going spy just once in a while, even only once or twice in a match, and only for one or two lives in a row. This way, you maximize your chances of getting a pick, and the enemy will still be totally paranoid, since they will never know if they should watch for a spy or not.

So yeah, sorry spy mains everywhere. It is not me, it is just the way the game works! I hope you can accept that. You'd be better off learning another class to play most of the time, and offclass spy when there is the chance and please, don't dislike this guide only because of this!.

Mid Fights

When people start getting into competitive, one of the most recurent things they heard of are those Mid Fights. But what are they? And why are they so much important?
Let's talk about what they are first.

To answer this question, I ask you another one: What do you, as a player, do right as the match starts? The usual answer is: "I +forward my way on the map until I meet enemies, then start shooting, of course!". To be honest you wouldn't be half wrong.

What happens is that both teams go to the mid point and start fighting to cap it. Enche, mid fights. The mid point (that we will simply refer to as "Mid") is, out of them all, the most important point to capture in order to win a round. There are many reason to that, and I will cover them in the next section. For now, just assume that having mid is a big deal. But what's the best way to win a mid fight? The answer is simple: there isn't. It is maybe the most fascinating aspect about mid fights, it is that every team will come up with their own strategy. But let's go with order.

In a mid fight, you can't play off your advantages, at least not in the first part of it. Each team spawns equal, so the best thing you can do is trying to get into a favoreable position. Like jumping on crates on process, or getting on viaduct's rocks. To accomplish this, you need to get to mid faster than the enemy, and execute what competitive players call "a rollout". This is especially true for soldiers and demomen, that need to do rocket and sticky jumps in order to get to mid faster. There are already tons of guide about that, I'll let you do the research.

Rolling out, thought, is where I see most people fail. And sorry if I underline this a bit too much, but this is something that really hurts me seeing. I am not talking about demomen and soldiers not being able to do the fast jumps to mid, I am talking about people not even trying to get to mid fast: they either take the longest route, take their time to change class, type something in chat, whine at their teammates for losing the last round... It is not what you should do!!!
Too many times I found myself alone on mid because apparently my medic decided to take the long route, or because the usual toxic player decided that his time was better spent typing the hell out of our medic for doing that. When the bell rings, you don't do any of this. You just hold your damn W key and get to mid as fast as you can!

Now, let's talk about what happens after you got to mid: you start fighting, hoping to get a first kill or massive damage on one or more players. You basically want to create your own man (or health) advantage. The way to do it is up to you, as long as your team is coordinated: you can run an heavy and slowly impose your presence, roll two soldier and go for a super aggressive bomb, wait for their bombers and counter them, run a sniper and rely on that entry frag. Anything, really, as long as it works for your team. There some things, thought, that you absolutely need to do:

You have to, more than in any other moment, have one or two players dedicated to play passive and protect the medic: if he dies, the enemy will just quickly clear the rest of your team, force you to last, and roll in with uber. By not protecting the medic, you just gave them a whole round.

If protecting the medic is important, not dying yourself is just as important: once you got to mid, you can let go W and focus on the killing: by just running into their whole team alone, you will just feed the enemy, by giving them a free kill, and damaging your whole team. It is the same concept that I already covered in the overextension paragraph, but to even a bigger extent

Another important thing is imposing your presence during the mid fight.
If you aren't actively fighting to get things accomplished, you may as well be dead.
More in detail, you shouldn't stay back, playing over-passive, and take spam damage without fighting, because this way you are just stealing heals from your teammates.
You shouldn't play sniper if you can't hit headshot, because you are just a dead spot on your team. You shouldn't even thinking about getting a sentry nest up. Usually it is not good to run spy either, because you spend too much time getting into position before actually contributing to the fight.

Either this, or you could just be Kaidus:
https://youtu.be/ZWT2fvOH4ZY

Why are Mid Fights that important?

Some of you guys may be wondering this exact question. Sure, now we know how to win them, but we don't know why we are putting so much effort into that. Can't we just ignore them?

Well, we can't, actually, because having Mid control leads to having a lot of advantages later in the round. Specifically, beside starting off with a point more, the team that has control over Mid will also get a "respawn advantage".
You likely already experienced that: 5cp spawns change location during a match. There is the main spawn (the first one) and two forward spawns. You get the first after capping mid, and the second after capping the fourth point.

Those act a bit different from the main one: there is no resupply cabinet and you can't open the doors from the outside, even if you just exited. You can still change classes and refill your hp by switching class two times. The only exception right now is on badlands, where the first forward spawn acts just like a standard one.

Spawn's position is not the only difference: the team who caps mid is considered by the game's engine "offence" and the other team "defence". To put that in other words, the offending team will respawn faster. This becomes even more true after capping fourth.

Better respawns aren't the only reason, thought: if you can successfully kill a large portion of the enemy team, they may not even be able to defend the fourth point, and will be forced to defend last. You heard it right! A single mid fight won you not one, but two points!
If you also manage to kill the medic during a mid fight, you almost won a round too! The enemy will likely find himself defending last without uber, and you can just roll in and win a whole round, if you play it good.

So, a single, good, mid fight can give you a round in a matter of minutes. This happens a lot, even to pro teams, you sure should try your best to win a mid fight!

Backcaps

One of the last sections is about backcaps, how ironic.

Anyway: most people seem to fear backcaps so much, that they don't even dare move from the last point until second has been capped. I have been matched with people who would rather leave 2 players on last than push out with their team. Sure, you won't get backcapped that way, but your team loses 2 of their 6 players on the frontlines.

Let's face it: backcaps are a big deal: no one likes losing a game after a well done defence. But there is a simple way to deal with them, that will make your life so much easier.
When pushing out of a point a point, you need your team to push from all the different directions at the same time. The reason you do this is to make sure that the enemy won't sneak a player behind, and will prevent that feared backcap.

Avoiding backcaps is really that simple: you just need to check all of the entries to a point, and make sure no one is there. Sure, sometimes it may be smarter to leave a player behind or to stickytrap the point, but most of the time you can get away with that.

Not only this strategy is good to prevent backcaps, but is also necessary in order not to get flanked. By simple watching all the entries to a point and doing nothing else, your team can't get flanked and taken by surprise at any moment. You should definately apply this to your everyday game: ask your teammates to check the flanks for you, or do it yourself, and your life will be much easier.

Last, but not least, remember that this is a game, it is supposed to be fun

This may seem a stupid sentence heard many times, but, please, take a few seconds to think about it.

I am not encouraging you to have anti-sportive attitude, because "it is just a game, I can do whatever I want". In fact, I believe the total opposite. I am not saying it is fair for you to grief or leave games, or to troll your teammates and not be a team player, far from that.

What I am trying to say is that, if you happen not to have fun while playing the game, just stop doing it.

If you are frustated because, even after hours of praticse a day, your aim doesn't improve, just take a break and come back a week later. It is incredible how the brain handles stress.
If getting to the next rank, and becoming better and better is now an obsession, just stop trying for a while. Play some pubs, choose unusual classes, relax and forget ego and skills.
If someone is being toxic, just mute him and proceed on ignoring. He may just have a bad day, no need to spend your time with him.
If you keep getting matched with bad players who keep making mistakes, stop flaming them, because you are likely making the same mistakes altogheter. It is easier to judge while being a spectator.
If your medic keeps on leading the charge, dies, drops the uber and never gives overheal, don't get mad at him, don't call him a noob or bad. Suggest him to switch class, and give him tips to improve. Maybe it won't be instant, but that medic is going to get better over time. Likely when he is on the enemy team, however.

In the end, just ensure you are having a good time, and that your team is having fun too. The ranks and the progression will come later.

Hope this helped

I wrote this guide with the best intentions, and I hope that if you got this far, you learned something too.

If you don't like or don't agree with something I said, don't flame me, but rather use some constructive criticism. It is always nice to hear a different opinion.
If you, instead, really enjoyed this guide, make sure to let me know too! It may take a second to write a comment or leave a like, but I assure you it is much more important than what most people think =D.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this helped.

Looking forward to Competitive Leagues?

After trying out matchmaking, you may want to start looking forward playing competitive leagues.

I know, the word "leagues" may sound scary to most, but actually, it isn't that big of a deal. There are divisions to cater all kind of players, from the least skilled to the most.

Just get a bunch of friends togheter, make a team and try it out: I assure you won't regret it.

Here there is a short video introduction to competitive 6s:
https://youtu.be/NMoAulrK5Is

You can find all the links and informations you need on http://playcomp.tf/.

Hope you enjoy your time on the competitive side of TF2!

Credits

Credits to:

Gius, that is me, for being the main writer and ideator of the guide.

Thanks to Mishael1, Thursday, Lazy Fingers and TheWizardKing for the main feedback, grammar checks and support. This guide would be a lot worse without these guys.

Special thanks to MorrisTF2 for letting me use his video content.

Thanks to all the people that helped me out getting into competitive and enjoying it. This guide surely wouldn't exists without them!

[Plague]

Good guide man,this should help new players a lot

[Gius]

;) I wish I was this good 9 months ago

[eldoccc]

Dude, this guide is sick

[CYVE]

i think thats a good idea but the viewmodel is down i must restart the game

[I'm Back Bois]

Nope they don't.....perfect for trollers to....

[umgebung]

if you abandon the match after the round starts, the points won't count then?

[Gius]

It may work.
Problem is: when you set a reward, some people will always try to cheat their way to it. Not always hacks, even creating smurf account with the only purpose of harvesting easy items can be count as cheat.

It should be a cheap, low reward. Something nice to have and get for your work, but not worth the hassle of cheating it. Like with random drops, there should be a chance to get an item, not too low and not too high, and a cap of items received. You don't want MM to become the new MvM, after all.

To be honest, I was also thinking of how nice it would be to havea medal each time you rank up. Then, I realized people would care more about the medal than the actual game, and would ruin MM just like rare item drops ruined MvM.

[dog]

@Gius Possibly only give chances for items to the winning teams so there is actual incentive to win rounds too?

[Gius]

Sorry for bad spelling, on mobile at the moment

[Gius]

Match longet than 2 rounds can be harmful, since rounds can basically last forever. If anything, thwy should add a time limit.
And you can easily queue more than once, short rounds are perfect for people looking for quick matches.

I agree on the individual performance, don't know how to feel about the reward at the end. It may be a nice addition, but on the other hand may encourage farmers to throw games and make them finish faster in order togain easy items.