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So long as ET does not request elevation at launch, you're good as far as running elevated. Running elevated is when you get that special prompt from windows that the program wants some extra permissions: If you see one of these when you launch ET, that's a potential problem. Without elevation the ET mods are limited in the damage they can do, but they can still do damage. I advise that you only connect to trusted servers regardless of whether you run your ET elevated or not. ETLegacy will run the native mods too, so it has the same problem. Understand that the way ET handles mods is an inherent security risk no matter what. The best you can do is connect only to trusted servers and hope that they don't run anything crazy on your machine. This is not news (well, it shouldn't be) as ET has been like this all along. If you only play on servers you know and trust then I assume you aren't really bothered by this. This warning is more to clarify that there is risk involved in joining servers, especially ones you don't know. I only write this warning because I still see tutorials/instructions/advice instructing people to run their ET elevated, which is pretty ridiculous. I've been wrong before, so maybe you can help me clear this up. Show me where you think ET requires elevation: https://github.com/id-Software/Enemy-Territory If you cannot do this, can you give me a scenario where the alternatives I outlined above do not work? If you cannot do that either then what is the problem here? It sounds like we're in agreement except that you want to feel justified in repeating the "run it elevated" advice. I get it, it's a cheap solution that's really easy to express on a forum in a few words. But it's also pretty bad advice. Now when people need help here's a thread you can point people to that explains the situation so that they can make an informed decision. There's a good chance the typical community member won't understand much of this, so maybe your contribution could be to condense all of this information down into something that can be easily understood by the community. Can we agree that this might be better than downplaying security problems? The situation still sucks but giving your community the proper information before they make a choice sounds better to me. I'm not really a big part of this community, but this is something I noticed while passing by. You obviously don't have to take my advice. But consider that if I'm right you're doing your community a disservice by downplaying the issue. I think you should instead help me spread more accurate information. I want people to understand the risk of getting into a car just the same as I want them to understand the risk of connecting to ET servers. That doesn't stop us using cars, but I still think it's something good to know. It'd be really unfortunate if all this thread does is give bad actors some phishing ideas. I suspect this is already occurring in the et server list anyways.

I can't edit my original post, so I'll put the addendum here. This warning mostly applies to windows users. On linux the ET home directory defaults to the user's directory and thus ET never requires elevation and never has this problem. The purpose of this public service announcement is that I see the advice "just run it elevated" thrown around without any disclaimer. People typically run ET elevated because they installed it in the default location, which is "Program Files", and is also why the installer needs to run elevated. But when ET downloads mods from a server it needs to be able to write to the directory where it is installed (because that is where the ET home directory defaults on windows). When it cannot write to this directory you will get cryptic error messages pertaining to missing files (because, well, they're missing since it couldn't write them). "Program Files" is one of those directories that not just anyone is supposed to be writing to, so that is where the problem starts. You can choose to elevate ET to fix this problem, but just know that you're allowing ET to do a whole lot more than write to every directory. You may trust ET, but do you trust the server you're connecting to? You wouldn't allow random websites you visit to run arbitrary programs on your computer, would you? That's what you're doing when you connect to ET servers you've never seen before. Know the risk. Then choose whether you'd rather just run elevated. Telling people to run elevated is bad advice, and it's lazy. ET does not need to run elevated, it needs write permission when installing new content. When a mod requires elevation it's likely up to no good. ET does not have the same VM support of RTCW and other quake derivatives. I'm not clear on the details, but remember that ET was not a finished product when it was released. Since it's always running native, you should be very suspicious. Even when it runs without elevation it's allowed to execute all kinds of things that are impossible in the quake VM. The quake VM is like javascript in your browser: it's not allowed to run just anything, which is what makes it relatively safe to browse random websites. Not so in ET, as it doesn't use the quake VM. Know the risk! It's much easier for a server admin to tell you to fix the issue by running your ET elevated, which gives it permission to do everything. This is just being lazy. It's the simplest way to fix the problem, and besides, the server admin isn't going to install anything malicious as far as they know. But consider that you might bring up the ET server list and click on any server that looks good on a whim. Bad! Especially bad when running elevated! Or worse, they tell you that you must run ET elevated. This is incorrect! Here are your options: Run ET elevated. Not a good idea for reasons described above. Reinstall ET somewhere in your user directory where you have write permission. Your existing configs will be lost. Copy your current installation to somewhere in your user directory. Your existing configs will be preserved. Run ET with "+set fs_homepath C:\users\myuser\wolfet" or some appropriate directory where you have write permission. Run ETLegacy. ETLegacy defaults fs_homepath to the user directory, like how vanilla ET works on linux. This sidesteps the whole issue. Know the risk! Whether you run elevated or not, connecting to servers you don't know is pretty suspect in ET. I just wanted this to be documented, as I suspect many people don't understand the risk. This is also a place to point people to when they get permissions issues when installing new mods from servers. While it's much simpler to tell your users to "just run ET elevated", I ask you to reconsider or at least provide a disclaimer. Your server may not be malicious, but that's not necessarily true of the other servers. I inevitably get push back on this, so try these solutions out if you don't believe me. While we're at it, I can put together a server for you to join with your elevated ET and see how that goes. (if someone would just fix the installer to install to the user directory it'd solve this problem for new installs)

Running ET is a security risk. Running as admin is a bigger security risk. If you can help it, don't run ET as admin. Also, only connect to trusted servers. ET is a security risk because it downloads and runs any program from the server you're connecting to. Install ET somewhere your account has write permission, such as your user directory. ET needs to be able to write to its home directory, which is the installation directory for vanilla ET. Another option is to use ETLegacy, but that might lead to additional problems. Don't run as admin Don't connect to servers you don't trust Don't use the ET server list

It's helpful to look at ET in terms of resources. You start with a fixed amount of hit points (HP), ammunition, sprint, and charge, among other miscellaneous things like artillery/airstrike timeouts, fire rate, class limits, panzer, etc. These resources are renewed at regular intervals either through respawn or just the charge/sprint/HP (medic) bar recharging. Time is a resource. These resources are multiplied by the number of players, except some shared resources like airstrike timeout and class limits. So you get a double kill, and then another, and then you're down to pistols battling the fourth until you finally die. That's a pretty good run, right? That depends. If you didn't gib them and that fourth enemy full revives the other three, most of your work has been undone. They lost ammo, sprint, charge, and some time, but now they have strong positioning and a numbers advantage going into the next fight. You can be proud of your individual fragging ability, but really you lost since they're still close to full strength while your team has to wait for you to re-deploy. It's helpful to look at ET in terms of resources. You start with a fixed amount of hit points (HP), ammunition, sprint, and charge, among other miscellaneous things like artillery/airstrike timeouts, fire rate, class limits, panzer, etc. These resources are renewed at regular intervals either through respawn or just the charge/sprint/HP (medic) bar recharging. Time is a resource. These resources are multiplied by the number of players, except some shared resources like airstrike timeout and class limits. To better demonstrate the time example, an SMG (MP40 or Thompson) does 18 damage, 50 for a headshot (there's falloff with range), per bullet with a 30 bullet clip size before a reload is needed. A reload takes 2400ms, or 0.65*2400=1560ms with light weapons level 2. A weapon switch only takes 250ms. A pistol carries 8 shots, does 18 damage (50 for headshot), and a has a 1500ms, or 0.65*1500=975ms, reload time (akimbos have a base 1755ms reload time). With 100% accuracy you can deliver 30*50=1500 damage in one clip of an SMG over 150*30+100=4600ms (150ms per bullet, 100ms SMG delay). Add 8*50=400 damage for the pistol over a time of 250*8=2000ms for a total of 1900 damage over 4600+250+2000=6850ms (250ms for weapon switch) until you need a breather to reload. The enemy has 100+10*number_of_medics_on_team hit points (capped at 125), plus 15 more if they have battle sense level 3, plus 12% more hit points if they're a medic: 0 medics: 100 115 (battle sense 3) 1 medic: 110 123 (medic) 125 (battle sense 3) 140 (battle sense 3 and medic) 2 medics: 120 134 (medic) 135 (battle sense 3) 151 (battle sense 3 and medic) 3 medics: 125 140 (battle sense 3 or medic) 156 (battle sense 3 and medic) Players are forced into limbo at -75 HP and gibbed at -175 (aside: in Quake "gibbed" means the body explodes into pieces, like giblets. It's referring to the amount of overkill. In ET we still call it "gibbing" just by forcing them into limbo so that they cannot be revived, despite their corpse remains). In the best case it takes 4 shots (3 headshots, and one body or head shot) to kill a full HP medic, and at best 1 more to gib (4 head shots to down with 200 damage, and then either 1 more head shot or 2 more body shots to force into limbo). Without gibbing you can take down at most 30/4=7 full HP medics over about 5 seconds. So even if you're fighting against an aimbot there is a limit to its damage output! The worst thing you could do is give it time to reload. If each of those 7 opponents land at least one shot, that's 126 damage. If one of them lands a head shot, that's 158 damage and the aimbot is now dead and cannot affect the game until the next respawn. That's only one shot from each! But if funneled into the aimbot one at a time there is a better chance that fewer shots land since your chances to land a hit go down when taking damage. Another good way to peeve that aimbot is to insta-revive your teammate in front of you, using the revive shield as cover. They'll run out of ammo eventually. This case is pathological, but the principle remains. Superior teamwork tends to win out. Teamwork doesn't just mean giving out ammo and med packs, it means being in the right places at the right times and having an effect on the map. When you fight with superior numbers, and especially if you can coordinate focus fire, your enemy is removed at a faster rate and thus your team incurs less damage. The game dynamics shift as you add more players. Be effective and use your resources. Everyone understands that when there are AFK's in spawn or they are otherwise at a player deficit the game is much harder. You would say those AFK's have no effect on the game, so it's as if they're not even playing. But realize also that every time you don't contribute to a team fight you may as well be AFK. Being nearby isn't enough. If you stand behind your star player feeding them ammo and meds but never contribute any damage or take any damage, are you really that effective? If aimbots can get overwhelmed they your lone teammate certainly can as well. Take it upon yourself to not allow that. Every time your sprint bar, charge bar, and health bar is full (as a medic) you are losing the resources that you would otherwise have from regeneration because you didn't use them! This doesn't mean that you should always have your med packs out, but rather you should be mindful of the trade you're making. If you're tucked behind a corner supporting a teammate who's shooting but there isn't enough room for you to shoot alongside them, you should pay the cost of weapon switch to needle now instead of later where there's risk your medic gets gibbed (you weren't doing anything else anyways!). When there's a lull in the battle, pay the weapon switch cost now to resupply your team and allow them to reload rather than later, because chances are you weren't doing anything anyways. If you're not a medic but your medic teammate is being overwhelmed, jump in front of them to absorb the damage! Your medic can restore HP, you cannot. It's a better trade if you die instead so that the revive resource can be used. Be mindful of your respawn time, since it's basically a delivery of (almost) free resources at fixed intervals. The only time you should be doing nothing is when you're on defense and the entire offense is dead. This almost never happens in pub. Here is an assortment of things I've noticed people don't capitalize on: Be fast. You're racing against the enemy spawn time. You're racing the enemy to key nodes on the map. You're racing to have as much effect as you can before your respawn. Needle revive, whether with a TK or without, is much faster than individual packs. Save those for yourself. Build up med caches for your team during your down time. Don't hang around the spawn point waiting for a medic to heal you (why the hell didn't you killout to respawn in? You'd better have shit tons of ammo or a disguise to be worth my time) Sprint out of the spawn. Push teammates in front of you to create space for yourself and also get them to their destination faster. You're all flowing in the same direction. Never flow against your team. I always shoot these people as suspected of disguise, but really I would just TK them on principle. We all get shot and we all die. Just try to line that up with your re-spawn rather than slow down the rest of your team. You spawn with a shield. Once you attack you lose the shield. Don't stand in the vias blocking everyone's path. And no, it's not a good idea to set up your mortar right on your team's via. Don't place artillery on your team's vias. It's hard to imagine someone does this on purpose, so maybe the advice should be to learn and remember the important vias to an objective. That also sounds obvious, but nontheless it happens over and over. Realistically it's likely teammates who want enemy damage no matter how much it screws over their own team. Don't bleed your teammates! If they're playing wild and strafing in front of you, change tack and pull out the needle to salvage the situation. If you're a panzer or rnade it's probably better for you to lead the charge rather than blow up your team. Don't prime a grenade in the middle of a fight, especially if you're leading! Grenades are useful for lobbing over your teammates when you cannot directly participate in a fight. The same goes for rifle grenades, but it's perfectly fine to lead with rifle grenades. Shoot your rifle grenades up high over your teammates so that you don't hit them (jump if you have to). Hit the hard to reach places or otherwise common hiding places. Don't shoot a panzer from behind your team's push. Either lead the charge or try to get a different elevation so that you're shooting outside your team's plane of attack. Actually, if you're a panzer, just spawn kill the shit outta the other team. If you can put out even just one medic full then you've done your job. When your teammate is shooting but you cannot join, have the needle ready. After 30 bullets if they aren't taking much damage you're going to swap with them so that they can reload and in turn revive you when you need it while you take over shooting. When you kill an enemy and they have a medic teammate waiting in the wings, wait to gib until the medic attempts to revive. You can optionally try your hand at acing the medic, but it really goes south when you fail. This all depends on how much distance the medic needs to travel from behind their cover. Revive engineers when they die while building an objective. They get to continue building while being revived, guaranteeing the build. You have to kill the medic first or otherwise block the medic's revive to combat this. If you're going to killout then trip any nearby mines before doing so (or just let them kill you). Medics can defuse mines faster than engineers by tripping them from maximum distance and then healing up. If you have a medic nearby, just run over the mines and take a death to save time. The medic will revive. If they're already spotted then it's worthwhile just to grenade them. Dynamite and satchels can explode objectives from surprisingly far. Crouching reduces the amount of weapon spread. Burst firing helps too. Know timings. On hardcore shields last 4 seconds. Grenades take 4 seconds to explode. Artillery takes 5 seconds for the first shell, which is always accurate. Airstrikes take 5-6 seconds, or 6-7 seconds with signals level 3. The path is perpendicular (mostly) to the can's throw trajectory. Airstrikes and artillery have some randomness to their path and timings. The panzer takes a second to fire. (you might want to double check these numbers) Rifle grenades can be shot across the map. You can practice specific shots for specific objectives and spawn vias. When deployed on a steep slope, mortars can be shot horizontally like rifle grenades. It's more effective to snipe with high sensitivity so that you can undo the recoil quickly. If you like to play SMG, you can have two SMG's as a soldier. You can change your SMG to the type your enemy carries to help sustain your ammunition. Look to fill niches in a team. Choose a player class that your team needs but other don't want. By default just play medic. Give teammates space to move and back up -- don't crowd or block them while remaining close enough to revive them. You can read the situation by watching the bullet trails and their health drop to know when they're going to try to retreat or die. Anticipate team deaths to have the fastest possible revive. Especially for teammates who do not move much while shooting, you can start to revive as soon as they're below the threshold but are not yet dead. When alone, peek corners (not the ET lean thing) to limit incoming damage. When you have help, you can try going "broad" on a corner, where you over extend from cover to give your teammate room to shoot with you. Unfortunately some teammates leave you hanging, so try this with caution. Give space for your teammates to shoot with you. There's no reason you have to hog the whole doorway on frostbite next to the command post when the enemy very clearly has to come up a very confined choke point (the ladder). Two can DPS better than one. Your chances to get revived depends a lot on the proximity and safety of your nearby medics. Die in front of them or in front of choke points. Don't die in some corner where your medic has to turn their back to the enemy just to revive you. Cover your teammate's blind spots. If you see them covering one way, you should cover a different way. Likewise you can make assumptions about enemy positions based on your own team's coverage. Unless your team doesn't shoot enemies when they see them. Unfortunately this happens all the time, so use with caution. Don't be that person. When someone is crouched in front of you looking straight up, that's the universal sign for "stack on top of me to jump over this obstacle." Don't just stand there staring like an idiot. Now that I think about it, that's probably not the person you want to send in for special operations. Wait to capture flags until just before the re-spawn -- either yours or theirs. On sp_delivery when someone stacks up to the wall and is waiting outside to capture the flag, get ready to killout so that you spawn at the flag. It sucks when you get a successful capture but have no follow up from your team! Pointless! Goldrush is a real test to see how well the offense can play together. The offense likes to stop short of the objective at the bridge and in the alley rather than try to push into the defense spawn or control the courtyard, presumably because they don't like walking into meat grinders. You have 14 seconds to push into the courtyard and subsequently the bank. And since the defense spawns every 18 seconds, you want to control the courtyard so that you can suppress the defense as they exit their spawns through choke points. Know that when your teammate pushes in and you don't back him up, you've failed despite it isn't necessarily recorded in the stats. View full article

"What's your sensitivity?" you ask, after switching to spectator in an attempt to comprehend what just happened to you. "It's 1.0," I reply. Truly. And then I let you know where you can get my config. (2000 dpi if you're curious) But that won't help you. "What's your sensitivity?" you ask, after switching to spectator in an attempt to comprehend what just happened to you. "It's 1.0," I reply. Truly. And then I let you know where you can get my config. (2000 dpi if you're curious) But that won't help you. You aren't asking the right question. It becomes clear when I sit down at your computer and do roughly the same thing to people. So what the hell is going on. When I sit down I'm going to make a few tweaks: I get 76 or 125 stable FPS I max out maxpackets and rate (this gets technical and might be worth another post) I get as much player constrast as I can (this is subjective) I put on my preferred crosshair (cyan dot) (also subjective) I turn off mouse acceleration (subjective -- but is there anyone who actually prefers mouse accel?) I adjust the sensitivity until I can mostly track a non-sprinting target (practice on teammates running by) I also like mAus's advice on being able to comfortably do a 180 degree turn And that's it. There's no secret sensitivity, no special script. I need to be able to see my environment, my enemies, and my crosshair. Then I make it so that the crosshair overlaps the enemies. Simple, minus the 10 years of building up muscle memory to instinctively move the mouse. If you were in awe of a friend who could play piano, you wouldn't think it's the brand of piano that gives them that sound. While that does matter, you would recognize it's mostly to do with their ability to push the keys at the right times. It's a nuanced skill they've developed, likely through years of practice. When they tune it they need feedback to know how to adjust the strings. In order to frag I need to easily see the opponent and then put the cursor on them quickly (initial snap) and then smoothly track them until getting the kill. You're going to need "good enough" hardware to do this, which most people have by now. Get a laser mouse, a good (big) mousepad, a low-latency monitor, and that's about it. This may sound strange, but part of the hardware is making sure your body is able to interact with the game fluidly. You need to be able to see the screen, hear the sounds, move the mouse, and punch the keys both comfortably and accurately. You do not share my hardware configuration. I have long arms and fingers. I grip the mouse like a claw and move my entire arm for coarse aiming and use a combination of wrist and fingers for fine aiming (wrist movements for snapping and fingers for finer tracking). Also, my mouse happens to be outside my peripheral vision and is at a different elevation from my keyboard. The point is not to imitate this set up but rather to recognize that you need to dial your configuration into something comfortable for you. If you don't or can't interact with your hardware like this then my sensitivity setting is of no use to you. What you're really asking is how you can achieve the same effect. If you're serious about trying to do what I do (or anyone else) you would record and watch my games. Then record yourself playing and try to compare the two. Actually, you may not even need to see me playing: just record yourself and watch it as a critic. You'll likely be able to figure out on your own what you're doing wrong, then you can focus on correcting that. You need to have control of your body and mind (emotions). It's unacceptable to miss non-moving targets or flanks (and they had better be head-shots!). Figure out what's going wrong, because that's the equivalent of missing a layup in the ET world. Sometimes when I spectate a player I'm reminded of the head bobs of a toddler who hasn't developed motor control. Train, record, and be honest with yourself about your ability to put the crosshair on specific targets. Focus on doing it accurately first, then try to develop speed. Over-correcting squirrel aim isn't going to beat out slow methodical tortoise aim. Load up a local server in developer mode with hit boxes rendered to make sure you understand them, since hit boxes don't necessarily match the player models. I think you'll find that your damage numbers will go up just by practicing your stationary crouch aim, coupled with occupying strategic map locations. In a pub where there's chaos, a lot of opportunities open up to the point that it's just a question of whether you have the capability to capitalize on it. Your team fight will improve because you can casually pick off enemies from afar. You can deliver damage while not blocking your team. You can "peek" enemies around obstacles, where you line up the vision to see only 1 or 2 enemies in a pack of 3 or 4. You can gib critical players from afar. You will exhibit better control in general and have a larger impact on the game. But you can't do any of this if you can't aim. Speed matters, as you'll find opportunities leave just as fast as they arrive. "Are you saying I don't need to strafe to dodge bullets?" I'm saying that when you're ready, you won't need to. Strafing is still important in aiming. It gives you a nice linear trace path with the cursor, assuming your target is traveling over level terrain. It's also effective to try to match your enemy's strafe pattern in a duel. But if your first instinct is to strafe wild to avoid shots that are not even coming at you then something is wrong. You likely learned this against lower skill enemies who can't hit the backside of a barn or have no confidence in your own aiming ability. It's a whole different game when your enemy can actually aim. You better put them in limbo first before they do it to you. You want go from flailing your arms to throwing straight punches. Which is another great point: play against players better than you. But don't play against players that are so much better that it's overwhelming (the point here is to learn from your mistakes). You know that you don't get any better by fragging bots (well, it is useful for figuring out hit boxes and otherwise understanding how a 3-dink is supposed to go) -- so why do you think beating up on people worse than you will make you better? Especially starting out, when you get wrecked you're in a sense learning what doesn't work. Consider that everybody had to start at the bottom and there does seem to be a ceiling on skill level. That means you can catch up. View full article

Everybody knows that the higher the Kill/Death ratio (K/D) the better the player. Right? Everybody knows that the higher the Kill/Death ratio (K/D) the better the player. Right? Not exactly. A better measurement for killing power is overall damage and accuracy. Even this measure has problems, as there are a lot of pathological cases that can inflate stats. So let's remember the fundamentals to ground ourselves, as it often seems like a pub is just chaos. An objective is to be guarded or attacked. By default the offense loses, meaning it is the offense's responsibility to make a move whereas the defense can hang back and camp. If there were no weapons the game would be reduced to a race and some shit show of never-ending planting/defusing and likely a lot of pushing. With weapons you can now remove the enemy from the map to make way for the objective. Already from this we know that killing AFK's in spawn are not worth as much as killing enemies on the objective. The same applies to wasting resources attacking/defending anything that's not related to the objective. Players can be removed from the map, but they come back at regular intervals. This creates "waves" of enemies, where the wave is strongest at the respawn time and gradually weakens as the players flow out of the spawn. Kills on enemies just after their respawn are worth more than on enemies who are about to respawn. A kill on an enemy about to respawn is not worthless, as it still forces them back to a respawn point and removes their map pressure. If you know their respawn time you can purposely wait until after their respawn to kill them for maximum effect. Skilled players will "push out" when their respawn is approaching to deal damage to the next enemy wave before resetting. Remember, the kills themselves are only valuable insofar as they help you achieve the objective. If you don't gain an objective or map control, the kill is worthless. You don't necessarily have to kill an enemy. If they run away then your job is essentially done and you can shift your focus to better targets. Don't mindlessly chase people. Likewise you can always provide damage assistance even if you don't expect to get the kill. The extra damage makes the enemy less likely to land hits on your teammate, and also you have a more clear shot since you're likely not taking damage while shooting. Just as a kill on an enemy about to respawn is not worth much, a kill on an enemy who gets full revived is worth even less because they get to keep their map pressure. When a player is revived they get a shield, providing a barrier for the medic. Sometimes players will burn all of their ammo trying to get at the medic. Don't fall for this. There is a similar trick to proning inside gibs. With experience you can know the extents of the hitboxes. Until then, you're likely being tricked into a reload death. Not all players are equal. A kill on a low skill player is not worth the same as a kill on a high skill player. Unfortunately this leads to successful strategies like letting the low skill players charge in first and allow the high skill players to clean up. Unfortunately for the same reason it's not always to your advantage to spend resources on low skill players. It's especially frustrating when they bleed you when you don't comply. Weapon switch leaves a player vulnerable for a time, so a high skill might decide you are not worth the risk. Here are some tips: Die in a better spot. Don't lure your medic into a meat grinder. Die inside choke points that block enemy movements, like doorways. Be sure to crouch while fighting so that your medic can get in some shots. Crouch aiming might be too difficult for you. That's ok, you can still be useful, especially if you're a laggy son-of-a-b***. Do your death charge while maintaining presence of mind: wait until you have backup, don't block your backup's line of sight, move around so that the enemy have to use more resources to kill you, and try to take down medics. When requesting ammo or meds, don't stare at the person. You'll likely notice that they are focused on a choke point. You should instead also focus on that choke point while requesting resources so that at least someone is watching. When you shoot or get shot at it gives your teammates information about the map. This might be asking a lot, but don't bleed your high skill teammates. Instead, treat them as your cash cow. Feed them ammo and meds, revive them ASAP, and help shoot along side them without getting in their way. It's important to both help contribute damage and take some of the pressure off them by luring enemy attention. The best part is that when you die you'll notice that a high skill player has you revived in no time. So now you know the complications with reducing player quality down to a number. It's situational. If you think it's kills per death, would you say someone with 5:1 did better than 50:40? If it's damage, is someone who abuses artillery or panzer really that skilled? If it's accuracy is someone with 100% accuracy but only 30 shots skilled? How do revives factor into your model? None of these stats, as tracked by ET, are weighted by the enemy's quality. So don't worry about racking up deaths as long as you're getting work done on the objective. View full article

Game awareness is more than using headphones. In fact, I play with music in the background, making it less likely for me to hear your footsteps. Headphones are much more important when there are fewer total players. Hearing footsteps in a 1v1 is vital, hearing footsteps in a 10v10 is not as important. The more important point is map control. Game awareness is more than using headphones. In fact, I play with music in the background, making it less likely for me to hear your footsteps. Headphones are much more important when there are fewer total players. Hearing footsteps in a 1v1 is vital, hearing footsteps in a 10v10 is not as important. The more important point is map control. Whether you're trying to do the objective or just playing for frags, you want to maintain map control. The longer you can stay alive the more time you have to deliver damage. Even if you cannot get the frag, it's important to deliver damage so the enemy cannot run over the rest of your team so easily. It's very important that you not get aced by a surprise attack. The way you prevent surprise is "knowing" where the enemy is at. You can have a reasonable stochastic model of enemy positions as a function of the spawn times and average enemy travel speed. Sometimes these probabilities are certainties. If you know the enemy spawn time and you've been reading the obituaries and there's only one spawn point for the enemy, then there is a moment where you know their exact position. As time goes forward their position becomes less certain, assuming you are not directly observing them. You also know the limit of their maximum distance from the spawn, their wavefront, since you know their travel speed. For example, "Lotto" (lottery) refers to putting splash damage (can also refer to pre-firing) on the map, hoping to hit something. They don't know for certain that you will be there, only that it's probable. The "pro wait" guards against this: avoid being at the wavefront (maximum travel from spawn) as that is more likely to catch lotto damage. Every map is different, but in general ET maps are more closed or indoors (they're not like baserace), giving rise to particular "routes" or "vias" which are pathways from the spawn. If you're defending, you want to cover as many routes as possible without "leaking" enemies, which is letting them travel past you unchecked on their way to the objective. If you think of the map as a graph, the edges are the corridors and the nodes are the openings where more than one edge meets. Some nodes dominate the path from the attacker's spawn to the attacker's objective, meaning every pathway goes through the node. As the defense you want to position on these nodes, guaranteeing you don't leak enemies. However, most maps are designed to avoid having dominator nodes like this to give the attack other options. I'm going to make up the word "dominance degree" to describe this characteristic of a node: the probability that an enemy travels through this node. You want to hold nodes with a high degree of dominance, but it's worthless to hold it if enemies leak through other paths that can flank this node. This requires communication and coordination on defense. For example, if after the enemy respawn none of them come through your node, it's very likely that they took another path (although it's possible they are waiting). At this point you should either rotate to the other node to help that side of the defense or you can gain more of the map by pushing up to hold a high dominance node even closer to their spawn. Keep in mind that such a tight hold on the spawn only pays out if your other defense does not fail -- because if they do, you will have a slow response to the objective as you must cross the map (use a killout to mitigate this). When you have a tight hold on their spawn it very often coerces the enemy to take alternative routes. After stopping their push on your route, look to push into their other likely routes for a flank and then reset (killout). Look around at what fraction of your team is on your route to make a reasonable guess as to whether the other node is sufficiently guarded. Keep in mind that if the attack is coordinated they can create a numbers advantage for themselves when your team is split like this. As defense you're largely just fighting for these nodes (yes, you're basically camping). When you control these nodes, the enemy cannot get behind you, forcing the attack to muscle through choke points. If they do get behind you, you have to retreat or "dig" them out. Ignoring them just invites a flank. If you're attacking, this is a valuable thing to do for your team to make the defense split their attention (or just take the flank kills if they ignore you). Doling out unchecked damage is always a plus for your team. To recap why map control is important: - You don't want to take unchecked damage (you do want to deliver unchecked damage) - You want to land the first hit in a duel. The more likely you are to have your crosshair on the enemy when rounding a corner the more likely you'll win the fight. - You don't want to be outnumbered. Assuming a relatively small skill gap, you're going to lose a 2v1 gun fight. You can be happy about going 1:1, so long as there's no enemy medic to mitigate your kill. - You want to force your enemy through choke points. This is basically the same as the previous point about being outnumbered. Choke points force your enemy into a 1v1 (ideally many to one if your team is helping) despite they're in a pack. Sometimes they even deliver team damage trying to get at you, thwarting their own push. Don't be this person. Likewise, don't let your teammates fight solo against multiple enemies. The side with the higher damage throughput is likely to win -- increase your team's throughput by increasing its damage bandwidth. View full article

I don't think ETL will shutdown from missing assets, it just annoyingly floods the console with warnings. See https://github.com/etlegacy/etlegacy/blob/master/src/client/snd_codec.c#L229. Are you sure it's closing as soon as that sound is requested (as soon as you capture the flag)? I can't reproduce it and I don't see any failure paths leading to a shutdown.

I didn't realize it was deleting files too. This seems to be the commit: https://github.com/etlegacy/etlegacy/commit/94f64119bf3115d8d300ca99025592703dd5df68

Diagnosing issues like this can be tricky on slow pace communications. I think that line about the missing sound file is a red herring, as I get a number of warnings about missing assets. You can check further back in the log for similar errors/warnings to confirm. Test with 2.75 to try to narrow the problem to see if it's a regression introduced in 2.76.

One of the easiest things you can do for performance is switch to the ETL client. You may end up with other problems, however. https://www.etlegacy.com/