I'm not convinced that casual players refusing to adopt bunnyhopping killed the competitive scene. My problem with bunnyhopping, and conc jumping, was that it made very little sense in the context of the game - and forced players to use classes in a way they were no longer intended. As a fairly hardcore TFC player - I experimented with all the strategies that appeared. But they actually made the game less fun. They forced a rigidity of thought which made the quite imaginative teamwork that I really loved from TFC redundant.

Nice post though.

Feel free to correct me. I was not by any means a hardcore TFC player during the time this was happening, and had to get most of my information second-hand. I'd love to hear your side of things. :)

It's pretty similar to the prevalent snaking problem in playing Mario Kart DS online. The offending player powerslides around the whole track, even on straightaways, allowing them to constantly be boosting. Players are divided on whether snaking equals cheating. But one thing is clear, if you race a player that snakes and you don't, you will lose.

Occasionally the player community decides that a certain change imbalances the game (Akira in Street Fighter) and restricts it.

I think you mean Akuma :)

Good read

Heh, fixed the Akira/Akuma flub - Akuma will be laughing like he normally does.

Matt - Yeah, I had heard about snaking before, but had never really drawn the parallel - cool.

Joel - Hah. Oops.

As much as I love speedrunning and physics glitches and the like, I think any new FPS coming out today would have a hard time arguing in favor of reimplementing the bunnyhop. Once you've mastered it, it's basically an overcomplicated "go faster" button, and pressing that button constantly takes focus away from the cool unique parts of TF's design - teamwork, other movement skills, the core move+aim FPS skill.

Here's hoping that TF2 develops both a casual and competitive community, and that the barrier between the two is semi-permeable and not on the basis of one's mastery of a particular exploit (albeit a time-honored and depth-enhancing one). Something tells me Valve won't screw this up given how central TF2 is to their multiplayer portfolio.

"Here's hoping that TF2 develops both a casual and competitive community."

Valve have gone to great lengths to ensure that's what happens. I'm going to love it!

TFC will never die. And while I expect to play the shit out of TF2, others who like the original mechanics better will probably play Fortress Forever, which is supposed to be TFC: Source.

http://www.fortress-forever.com/

James,

I kind of expected you to delve into the topic of whether or not such techniques are good for gameplay. I understand the impact this can have on a community, but do you think it cheapens TFC?

I'm on the side of Tim E., and I do think something like bunny hopping undermines the TFC experience. That said, I really loved using conc jumps as a Scout, but that was limited by the number of grenades you had, and it felt specific to that player type.

Sweet, sweet gray area.

Jared - Expect more delving in future columns - this one was a little more superficial.

As for the particular issue of bunny hopping in TFC, I think the idea of the "TFC experience" is pretty interesting. What is the TFC experience? Is it the way the game was when it was first released? Is it a special sweet spot hit somewhere during the player-run evolution of a game that creates a memorable experience? If so, what should a player do?

A game needs a competetive player base, no matter how minor, to continue existing. This means that players have to be testing the limits constantly, and expanding their strategic horizons. To a purely competetive player, no exploit can be ignored - unless it unfairly skews the game towards one player or another.

In TFC, bunny hopping was fair. It was striking, and it changed the game entirely, but it was fair. No individual player gained a specific advantage from the ability to bunny hop. However, if a strategy exists that is clearly dominant and does not imbalance the game in any drastic way, it must either be accepted by the community or patched out by the developers. No community can handle ignoring a dominant, fair strategy, because where do they go from there? Who is to say that one strategy dilutes the game experience while another does not? Suddenly, another dozen questions are raised: some people don't like conc jumping in their games, some people think this gun or that gun makes the game unfun. All the while, no one is bothering to try out new strategies (they'll ruin the experience!) so the game just sort of sits there.

When the community begins to restrict itself to doing things that retain this fleeting experience, it only slips further from their grasp. In that sense, I see little difference between bunny hopping and the TFC experience - it seems to me that they cannot be seperated. Assuming that the players are left to their own devices, it was an inevitable evolution of the game.

However, I think the developers should have stepped in and toned it down. I liked it, personally, but anything that divides the community that harshly can't be good for the game (and indeed, it isn't).

I think the TFC experience is what players make of it.
That said I agree with Tim E, exploits and conc-jumping created rigidity of thought and selfishness, especially when used by "powerplayers" whose only concern was making flag runs.
I couldn't see the fun in that way of playing it's exactly like grinding in Wow.
Maybe the problem was with the maps, maybe they should have found a way to implement maps with randomly arranged paths in order to keep the gameplay fresh.

Without bunnyhop and conc jumping, TFC would have died before 2000. Casual players are fine--they're one part of what a game needs to survive--but they are transient, and without bhop and concing the TFC competitive scene would have been so dominated by defense that it would be pointless to play.

Folks, if you never played run or shutdown2 in a clan (or Gather) environment, you never played TFC.

I have to say this article is PURE fallacy. It is quite clear that the author never played TFC prior to the 1.5 patch that was released in June of 2000. Let me just say that anyone who was around and active in the competitive community before that patch can plainly see that this article is absolute crap. Prior to the 1.5 patch, there was no bunny hopping. It's not that people lacked the skill to do it, it simply wasn't available as an option. The 1.5 patch significantly changed the mechanics of the game, and one of the critical points was bunny hopping. When the patch was released, the real competitive community quit the game almost in total. There were several tiers of clans at the time, and those on the top tear were utterly untouchable by any clans of a lesser tier. When the 1.5 patch was released, virtually all of the top two tiers of clans disbanded. Suddenly, clans that had been the whipping boys of second rate leagues rose to the top via bunny hopping. How can you possibly argue that bunny hopping requires more skill when clans that COULD NOT COMPETE prior to the bunny hopping exploit were suddenly "the most skilled clans in the world". Those of us that belonged to the top tier of competition almost unanimously signed petition after petition to valve begging them to fix our game, because suddenly all of our efforts at becoming good were rendered useless as HWguys moving at the speed of medics forced changes in ever concept of strategy and skill. I still maintain to this day that even with bunny hopping, no post 1.5 clan could ever touch the likes of Kindred and Insurrection, because their skill was at KILLING other players. The focus of skill in the game was based on how effectively you used your weapon, with the only movement exploits available being the weapon jumps (i.e. conc jumps, rocket/nade jumps, pipe jumps, etc), and ALL of these movement exploits had an immediate cost to the player executing them, usually in the form of damage taken by that player (with the exception of concing, which caused only the dizzy affect of the grenade and was thus the most valuable movement based skill to master). Bunny hopping allowed lesser players to move their fat asses across the map faster, thus REDUCING the amount of skill required by actual flag running classes because defenses were no where near as formidable with and increased rate of entry into the base by heavier classes. Granted, one had to master bunny hopping, but this could be done exclusively on a private server by oneself, whereas to master the use of weaponry required other players at all times. Anyone with the desire to do so could learn to bunny hop, but when it comes to pure out aim, you either have it or you don't. It made for a much greater discrepancy between the "casual" gamer and the elite gamer, but didn't cause the casual gamer to feel like he was being taken advantage of by exploits in the game engine. It was as obvious as day to anyone "this guy is owning my ass because he has deadly aim with his rockets" etc. I love this quote:

"At some point, the competitive players rediscovered a familiar exploit – bunny hopping – and the evolution of Team Fortress took a sudden leap."

Notice the 'at some point' part - yea...that point was the release of the 1.5 patch. Bunny Hopping wasn't rediscovered, it was introduced into TFC for the first time, and the massive fan base of TFC and 90%+ of the established and skilled community STOPPED PLAYING, thus making way for lesser clans to move to the top BY DEFAULT, not by a higher degree of skill. Also, 'bunny hopping – and the evolution of Team Fortress took a sudden leap.'- it certainly did. It took a quantum leap backward and never recovered. Most of the community at that point moved on to counterstrike, a game where their skill with the weaponry available in the game was still the fundamental deciding factor in how good a player or clan was. But you can rest assured that TFC after June of 2000 never saw the level of pure competition and skill that was present prior to the release of that patch. The very aspect that made the game appeal to those of us at the top of the evolutionary ladder was revoked with the introduction of the bunny hope. Valve even stated at the time that the purpose of the patch and the deliberate changes to the game mechanics was to make the game more appealing the the casual player. So to all of you who argue that bunny hopping somehow increased the learning curve or made the game harder to be competitive, I am sorry but you are seriously deluded. I only wish you could play in a match against the Kindred, even with bunny hopping set to 200% and watch your top post 1.5 clans get destroyed by real skill and talent. But like most of us who played at the top level pre 1.5, Kindred said fuck this game, the no0bs can have it. /end rant

Kindred quit from disgust out of that patch. When Striker (our Kaizen sniper) played his first match after patch, he got 200 kills from being an HWGuy alone during our first match. Before that he would get 70 kills as a sniper which was considered excellent as it was depowered since the quake TF.
We moved to everquest.